formulations of diaspora studies. This chapter traces how critical work on the black diaspora has frequently separated out popular cultural and performative work from self-consciously intellectual and political labor. Bessie Smith, I argue, repositions the integral and interruptive presence of black women’s popular performances within the genealogy of diaspora studies as an intellectual project. Kay’s text takes on the specific role of difference—sexual, gendered, geographic, and racial—within Smith’s work as a critique of totalizing narratives of blackness. In doing so, the text relocates the center of Black Atlantic discourse away from the metropolitan and toward a private genealogy of reception, one that finds that desire, race, and identification are much more slippery to define across the vast temporal and spatial variety of the black diaspora. As Katherine McKittrick argues in Demonic Grounds, looking at the nexus of race and geography can “make visible social lives which are often displaced, rendered ungeographic” (2006, x). Pushing this politics of location further, I argue that Kay’s text imagines a methodology for diaspora that traces the circulation of black cultural commodities, rather than the literal travel by black subjects, as a way to incorporate into the field a sustained engagement with difference. The violations of time, space, and subjectivity that Kay’s text foregrounds shift how we keep track of the critical locations of the Black Atlantic as a bounded historical moment with a legible intellectual past. Instead, Kay’s work challenges us to perform feminist revisions of diaspora and its critical futures through her geographic, historical, gendered, and queered interruptions of the recognizable routes of the black diaspora. This chapter suggests that these expansive modes of discursive circulation that characterize the black diaspora can also be innovative circuits for critically reading black women’s aesthetic performances and the feminist desires that connect and ground them to intellectual practice.
Night and Day
It was in New York, February, 1923. Bessie and Jack were staying in Jack’s mother’s house on 132nd Street between Fifth and Lenox Avenues. Above 132nd Street was a Harlem full of black people.
—Jackie Kay, Bessie Smith
In a text that travels incessantly—from Chattanooga to Mississippi, from Philadelphia to Glasgow, from the US North to the South, from the nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-nineties, from autobiography to biographical fiction—Jackie Kay’s profile Bessie Smith spends very little time in or on Harlem. As the historical center of contemporary African American and black diaspora critical studies, and as the black aesthetic benchmark of the twentieth century, Harlem is more often than not the center of inquiry into the relationship between black literary expression and the diasporic circulation of blackness. It is, at the very least, the cultural and ideological ground where there is “sense that certain venues are more authentic than others” from which other critical territories radiate (Procter 2003, 2).
Harlem is also a resurgent area of critical interest in the past twenty years for diaspora theory, a site of renegotiating the nationalist flow of African American studies after Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking The Black Atlantic.1 The brief moments in Bessie Smith spent in this hub of black culture in the nineteen-twenties are usually related to the recording industry, as in the epigraph to this section, where Bessie is staying in Harlem to cut a record. No exception is the “jar of Harlem night air,” an item on a lengthy, three-page list imagined by Kay to populate a mythic trunk of Bessie-related materials compiled by her family and friends that “disappeared” in the nineteen-fifties, long after Smith’s death—an inventory that will figure heavily in my later analysis of the politics of diaspora circulation. The two very differently located references occupy familiar ideological spaces in theories of Harlem’s influence: Harlem as the practical and capital center of black artistic production and Harlem as the locale of the black imagination, the generative force of black diasporic performances across the twentieth century and in the critical discourse of African American studies.2 The “jar,” as opposed to the weight of Smith and Ellison’s “jug,” is a moment of textual whimsy and license on Kay’s part. “A Harlem full of black people” is a concrete, historical mark, a location “full of” racial significance and signification. While the latter has obvious implications for this chapter’s concern with the consequences of gender and class in the way we conceive of the “space” of the black diaspora, this section also takes up Harlem’s more ethereal strains that circulate with a difference in Kay’s work, as well as the way we, as critics, imagine the possibilities and portability of black diasporic connections beyond social realism or romantic fetishization.
Claiming a center for black artistic production has practical and symbolic import for Harlem Renaissance intellectuals of the nineteen-twenties. Harlem in a jar, then, is a distillation that both carries and contains the ideological and aesthetic freight of “The New Negro,” Alain Locke’s foundational Harlem Renaissance essay:
Here in Manhattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. . . . So what began in terms of segregation becomes more and more, as its elements mix and react, the laboratory of a great race-welding. . . . In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is—or promises at least to be—a race capital. ([1925] 1992, 7)
Here, Locke is doing the intellectual work of making Harlem a racial symbol, “full of” blackness of a particular kind. Trying to contain Harlem is difficult business, with rhetorical strategies that claim exceptionality and representativeness at the same time. Harlem as a site is an “instance,” a “first” of potentially many, or later, a “promise” of the future. As example or model, Locke’s Harlem wants to be accessible, a representative of pending communities and “New Negro” subjects around the world—a race capital, not the only one. But it is also exceptional—the “largest,” the experimental site of New Negro formation, the laboratory. As both template and a break from the mold, Locke’s work to rhetorically produce and locate Harlem as “race capital” also hails a certain elemental population as representative group. He relies on the word “man” four times in his exhaustive catalogue of Harlem’s new migrant population. It is certainly not new to point out the masculine-humanist subject that sits at the center of discursive production of the Harlem Renaissance, nor the practical reverberations of who literally can move through the “race capital” with ease in the nineteen-twenties. An extension of the masculinized citizen of this emerging Harlem is the site of Harlem itself, its ideological capital or currency that travels, taking on this gendered property.
My concern with the gendering of intellectual space here is partially because the energy of nineteen-twenties Harlem, the night air in a jar referenced in Kay’s imagined catalogue, is distinctly about a different set of aesthetic and popular practices—the “nightlife” of Harlem, its clubs and balls and scenes. This “night work” of Harlem is its romantic currency, more what we think of as the substance of Kay’s jar and Smith’s lyrics and as opposed to the “day work” of intellectually drawing on what is kept in that jar. In other words, Locke’s “Harlem” is the critical work that certifies intellectual and historical significance. But what circulates most prominently as the popular “idea” of Harlem, its source rather than its ideological product or theory, is its nighttime identity, its jazz, blues, and sexualized culture.
As the center through which the black diaspora is thought or constructed (even if it is to decenter), the day work of intellectual and literary production and the night work of performance are also sold as separately gendered spheres; the famous founding fathers of early black thought are, overwhelmingly, “fathers,” including Locke, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Senghor, whereas essayist and author Jessie Fauset is considered a “midwife” and Zora Neale Hurston an exuberant outlier.3
