and political project of black solidarity. Black women performers such as Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker, as the most visible signs and stars of said call, are not easily incorporated into the production of intellectual responses that we locate as the work of the black diaspora—anthologies, print culture, and even reprinted literature.
In a more contemporary moment, developments in US black feminist theory around women’s performances4 came at a time when a new subfield, that of diaspora studies, had also been emerging out of African American and postcolonial studies.5 Locke’s gauntlet, his gesture toward the cosmopolitan makeup of Harlem as location and symbol, is one that galvanizes the three major categories of time—the past (“the first concentration in history”), the present (“Negro life is seizing”), and the future (Harlem “promises to be” the center of New Negro citizenship). His challenge to this “new” field, then, is a mark of the complicated temporal territory that emerging critical discourse must occupy. Looking not just across the present cultural world but to its history and potential, Locke’s challenge has been taken up by critics such as Brent Edwards, who challenges this gendered omission in suggesting that “a nascent feminism” and feminist intellectual project was at the center of black internationalism’s discursive and practical formation. Edwards’s suggestion of a systemic approach to diaspora through feminist thought is one that potentially considers the gendered “practice” of diaspora criticism beyond mere representation of women. I come again to Harlem, and to Bessie Smith, as a possible model for the kind of day and night work that black diaspora studies can account for and model through a feminism that is in fact embedded in a set of practices not fully recognized as intellectual work.
Returning to Bessie Smith’s significance to the intellectual projects of Ellison and Kay, where can we locate her work in the context of diaspora’s intellectual routes? While black women entertainers such as Josephine Baker have been taken up as signs and even subjects of twenties and thirties black cosmopolitanism, they are rarely considered authors, or founders in the vein of Césaire or Senghor or Du Bois, of intellectual and political discourse.6 As Shane Vogel argues in his analysis of the political and intellectual significance of the space of early Harlem nightclubs, even at the time, many African American intellectuals “saw the Negro Vogue, with its tendency toward black sensuousness, exhibitionism, primitivism, and sensationalism, as a distraction from, or worse, an impediment to their vision of the renaissance” (2009, 3). Though contemporary critics may not explicitly mimic this middle-class value system of respectability, the continuing intellectual gap points not just to the difficulties of translating gender, class, and genre into the textual analysis that critics work from but also to our static conception of “conscious” political thought and black intellectualism as a whole.
While, as aesthetic practices, cultural performances (and performers such as Smith) have been represented on the field of diaspora, they are often only references, subjects or songs that do the direct work of traveling but not the more substantial critical work of defining diaspora (as opposed to, as well, novel and narrative formations of diaspora of the time such as in Claude McKay’s work). In theorizing the blues, it is key to consider how we think of intellectual traveling as distinct from generic and performative traveling (touring) as “work.” Like the attempt to render Harlem as the portable essence suggested by Kay’s jar, the romanticization of blues traveling becomes reified, located in Harlem but exportable in conceptual work. Kay strategically uses this affective register of “the embodied practices of black performance and spectatorship” to imagine not an essence but a series of excessive connections that constitute diaspora through the specter of incommensurable difference (Vogel 2009, 6).
Written in 1997 as part of what was called the “Q series” of queer biographies of prominent cultural figures, Kay’s profile engages those romantic and celebratory modes mentioned earlier in its construction of Smith as an icon.7 But Kay’s text does not start in Harlem, nor anywhere near a “center” of black culture. Formally, it begins with a poem from Kay’s sequence on Smith in 1993’s Other Lovers, “The Red Graveyard.” The poem begins and ends with a four-line, standard blues refrain on Bessie Smith’s haunting transatlantic cultural presence. But this frame, like Harlem, contains a surprisingly memoirish center. The substance of the five contained stanzas is the narrator’s personal experience of the blues, of listening to Bessie Smith. At its center lies a stanza ruminating not on Smith’s voice but on Kay’s mother’s Scottish lilt. The description is comprehensive, another catalogue like Locke’s, and the longest stanza of the poem:
My mother’s voice. What was it like?
A flat stone for skitting. An old rock.
Long long grass. Asphalt. Wind. Hail.
Cotton. Linen. Salt. Treacle.
I think it was a peach.
I heard it down to the ribbed stone. (1997, 7)
Is this the voice of the blues? we are forced to ask. The description introduces a recognition of radical difference contained within familiar structure. The sharp, consonant texture of each distinct word for the mother’s voice pushes against the lolling resonance of the speaker’s own action in engaging in Bessie Smith’s black image: “I pick up the record cover. And now. This is slow motion. / My hand swoops, glides, swoops again” (8). Before we learn from the narrative that Kay is the queer, black, adopted daughter of white, Scottish parents in nineteen-sixties Scotland, before we necessarily imbue this scene with biographical authority, Kay introduces us to the difficulties of reading diaspora, not the least of which are the operations of memory, desire, culture, familiarity, and genealogy and their relationship(s) to the construction, recognition, and maintenance of racial identity.8
Structurally, the book also troubles easy organization. The book’s cover promises biography, yet we are confronted by autobiography, as well as fictional prose, editorial commentary, and nonlinear organization. And Kay’s formal and conceptual gestures toward an alternate model of black transnationalism extend to the realm of reception, as well. Bessie Smith begins not with a story of black tradition, a link through the black community to the individual or a cultural heritage indigenous to nation or region. Instead, Kay begins her profile of black American blues performer Bessie Smith with her own anomalous location (1997, 9). Her genealogy itself disrupts any stable conception of a black public sphere; here, there is no urban black community from which to draw culture. Instead, the “house of the blues” turns out to be both nationally and racially “outside” such a conception (9). Not “the most likely place to be introduced to the blues,” Kay’s location forces her to foreground her difference in a very specific, localized world, where contact with black culture is always already mediated by a white context—the home of her white, Scottish parents (9). As an un-“likely place” for the exchange of black music, Kay’s textual home recognizes racially and geographically surprising encounters as meaningful and productive to black subjectivity, even and especially for subjects found at the margins of the Black Atlantic.
Taking up the position of blues figures as icons and/or heroes through the medium of transnationalism links back to the romantic narrative of blues traveling, one that matches the “romance” of corresponding diasporas without a call to authenticity.9 What Kay does differently is to spin that seduction outward, toward surprising sites of identification: “I did not think that Bessie Smith only belonged to African Americans or that Nelson Mandela belonged to South Africans. I could not think like that because I knew then of no black Scottish heroes that I could claim for my own. I reached out and claimed Bessie” (1997, 15). Bessie Smith does a kind of iconic diaspora traveling which Kay does not perform physically, instead constructing a mobile identification that is self-consciously nonessentialist even in its romantic call to agency.10 This call, too, imagines links beyond the literal travel of bodies and bodies of text, linking political, cultural, and intellectual capital to an imaginative diaspora constructed through idiosyncratic experiences of race, nationality, sexuality, and gender. Kay’s bringing of Bessie Smith into
