Difficult Diasporas. Samantha Pinto
official, and transnational histories.1 This chapter argues that this material and narrative bottom has come to embody the range of possibilities for black women as cultural figures and producers, even as it accents the necessary limits of that range of representation; as one of the few visible woman “heroes” of the postcolonial struggle, Nanny’s historic success points to the presence of multiple diasporic failures to consider black women as political agents, particularly apart from their spectacularized bodies and sexuality. Like Jackie Kay’s recasting of Bessie Smith—the heir apparent to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom2—Honor Ford-Smith represents Nanny’s body as both hopelessly in the “past” and constantly signaling toward “a future / I could not vision” (1996, 15). The “bottom” stands, then, as a familiar place for the discourse of and on black women’s representation. But as populated as it is, it remains an isolating and even exceptional experience to reference, beyond “nearer description,” in Jamaican constable-turned-travel-writer Herbert Thomas’s 1890 words.
This double signification of physical bottoms acts as the sign of both success and excess for black women’s cultural significance, the vehicle by which black women as icons are made visible and rendered fantastic and tragic simultaneously in the lineage of Western representation. In what Difficult Diasporas attempts to theorize, lament for the loss of “real,” and hence “ideal,” models for uplift and respectability across the black diaspora are telling, if limited, scripts to entertain the function of black women’s sexuality in popular historical discourse. Starting at the “bottom” can do more than account for exploitation or its converse celebration—of bodies or of the capital gains and losses that the bottom may mark. The previous chapter explored queer and feminist displacements of diaspora genealogies of location through mixed generic form. This chapter explores the complex relationship between the longing for nonexploitative historical visibility of black women’s bodies and the poetics of diaspora representation—and critical reception of that representation—that codes race and gender into their corporeal presences. These competing but interrelated desires demand, in the work of contemporary poets Elizabeth Alexander and Deborah Richards, the invention of aesthetic practices that can account for both impulses. Their work employs a poetics of the body, strategies of reference which explore the “bottom” as a rich if dangerous terrain for remembering black women’s public cultural histories, whether it is in a repurposed modernist tradition of interior monologue in the voice of Saartjie Baartman, a.k.a. the Venus Hottentot, or in a series of long poems using the nonnarrative structure of tables, text boxes, and quotations as references to black cinema star Dorothy Dandridge.
Through an innovative poetics of representation, and of referencing the “unseemly” bodies of black women’s representative and performative histories, Alexander’s and Richards’s texts disrupt the epistemological practices that have grounded mainstream critical discourse about black culture and history in the latter half of the twentieth century. The bottom, as both the flesh (the material locus of nineteenth-century racial and gendered difference)3 and taboo (the reference itself unspeakable or outside recognizable social limits and cultural imagination), acts as the most compelling organizing cite for Alexander and Richards to negotiate the form and the content of black women’s cultural (dis)appearances from both official and unofficial memory. In the breadth of their work, they reference bottoms to signify both range and limitation, the examples of the exceptions to the “rules” of racialized and gendered representation across the transhistorical diaspora. Poetic form, with its currency in signifying interiority and moving away from sites of narrative history, allows them to navigate this difficult territory without merely falling into the teleology of the bottom.
This chapter uses the metaphor of the bottom to reference three levels of critical engagement: first, the emphasis on black women’s bodies and sexuality as the central site of their subject formation in Western modernity; second, the narrative of black experience which takes as its poles exploitation and respectability, or exploitation and resistance, as the clear and opposing options for reading these public histories; and third, the critical discourse which relegates certain black women writers, particularly those deemed “formally innovative” within a postmodern framework, to the margins of visibility and, as such, the margins of “authentic” black culture. In Alexander’s and Richards’s differently accessible poetics, one of modernist legibility and one of radical literacy, the two writers engage the “bottoms” of the Black Atlantic, its uneven historical borders and interdisciplinary methodologies, not to mention its complex geographic routes. Referencing the persistent global circulation of these bottom-dwelling contexts offers, in the work of these contemporary authors, new critical and aesthetic practices of reading race and gender in a genealogy of cosmopolitan desire and discourse.
To make the metaphor more direct, this chapter considers diaspora as bottom—as that visceral plane of traumatized flesh and as the lyric category that threatens to contain too much meaning, from too many sources. Like Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Nanny’s mythic weapon of colonial resistance, diaspora always acts as a distinct site and moving target, circulating outside of its purportedly “fixed” historical trajectory, even of assumptions about the very history of black women’s bottoms, usually traced back solely to the display of the Venus Hottentot. Alexander and Richards attempt to perform this tricky genealogy, one that both is documentable and exceeds the archival frame, in their own version of “difficult diasporas.” Following on Ian Baucom’s suggestion of a politics of cosmopolitan “interestedness” that exposes and charts the myth of reciprocity, their poetic practices attempt “to recover . . . the negative, the singular, the exceptional, or the evident not as a sort of lost foundation but as something that emerges on the far side, and in consequence of, the dialectical operation, a relational poetics, or the act of setting to work” (2005, 232, 229).
As Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo argues about the fraught terrain of black cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, “people of African descent’s approaches to public self-representation were born, in significant part, of the Atlantic power structure’s attempts to deny them access to cosmopolitan subjectivity,” which she defines as “the definition of oneself through the world beyond ones own origins” (2005, 10, 9). Kwame Anthony Appiah further defines cosmopolitanism as “the idea that we have obligations to others” with whom we share no direct familial or national ties as well as the respectful acknowledgment of our particular difference from those same “others” (2007, xv). Far from fearing the too-capacious object of a burgeoning diaspora studies, Alexander’s and Richards’s poetry recasts these challenges and tensions in iconic, isolated figures, figuring a critical “loneliness” and lone-ness as both myth and method. This aesthetic unevenness pushes the incommensurability between origin and the physical and emotional impossibility of locating any pure original source. Alexander and Richards reflect on this constant tension through a cosmopolitan poetics, exhibiting the vast variety and incompleteness that shadows diaspora and its critical narratives of gender.
Alexander’s and Richards’s (and Ford-Smith’s) critiques of the burdens of representation shift against the growing order of their forms or, as Meta Jones so aptly terms it in referencing Alexander’s poetics, against both poets’ practices of “syntactical restraint” (2011, 108). This poetic form mirrors the “narrative restraint” that Saidiya Hartman both performs and calls for in taking up subjected black bodies—in particular the body of the Venus Hottentot—as the subject of history (2008, 12). Such a tactic again invites the move to “a discourse on black alterity. . . . This discourse of ‘other blackness’ (rather than ‘black otherness’) has recently begun to move into a larger discussion of multiplicity and dissonance—the flip side of unity or homogeneity—of African American cultures and identities” (Mullen 2012, 68). What Harryette Mullen marks as poetic “dissonance”—the musical emission of hybridity or hybrid bodies of text—is the ordered, conscious, purposeful, and yet disordered body that Alexander’s and Richards’s cosmopolitan poetics come to represent—as breaks with what had been subsumed under the rubric of the “real,” what has limited the genealogical lines available to construct black identity in the face of divergences and differences such as location, education, class status, sexuality, or other “somatic presence[s] of alterity” floating in the world of blackness that they map (H. Young 2006, 16).
The strategy