Difficult Diasporas. Samantha Pinto
Alexander, as compared to many of the authors discussed in Difficult Diasporas, is not a radically formally innovative poet. She is, however, a part of “recent black poetry that has been enabled by theoretical discourse and avant-garde practices” (Mullen 2012, 69). So while her bodies of text are on the borders of the recognizable (“accessible”), these boundaries are nonetheless stretched with a range of challenging “incorporations” that we might identify as the “intertwining of abstraction and representational modalities, . . . impressing the sheer impossibility of making such monumental histories of suffering intelligible much less legible” (Miranda and Spencer 2009, 923). Sitting on the cusp of what Elisabeth Frost refers to as “hybrid avant-garde poetics” (2003, xxvii), Alexander can be framed not just in terms of what she works out in specific reference or debts but also her formal strategies. “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” finds itself at the axis of redress, or what Saidiya Hartman identifies as a practice of “counterinvesting in the body as a site of possibility” (1997, 51). The poem’s cosmopolitan redress explores “the import of the performative, . . . the articulation of needs and desires that radically call into question the order of power and its production of ‘cultural intelligibility’ or ‘legible bodies’” (ibid., 56). Thus, Alexander is comfortable with the assertion “that the question was never ‘either/or’: either form or content, either black or avant-garde,” as well as being even more directly and playfully committed to challenging the discrete literacies that are assigned “as part and parcel of ‘identity,’ . . . pigeonholed by particular expectations for form and content” (Schultz 2001).
Poetic genealogy, as such, marks Alexander’s practices as innovative within a frame of recognizability: postmodernism with social memory, ludic performances of political reference. Alexander uses strategic reference, or the logic of naming, to cast a wide net in terms of what gets assigned meaning in her work, via references in poetry. Alexander’s texts join the ranks of those which are “fostering both cultural and formal hybridity to demonstrate the ‘mongrel’ nature of contemporary culture and avant-gardism itself, . . . seek[ing] a diverse lineage of its own” (Frost 2003, 138). The logic of naming, of invoking the proper (and improper) objects of diasporic black cultures, does the complex work of genealogy in that it attempts to syncretize multiple and various “lines” of black cultures through the nexus of Baartman’s legacy. Such a task is necessary to revaluing the curriculum—in the sense of an epistemological program—of Black Atlantic public culture and aesthetics.
Elizabeth Alexander’s wide sense and command of history opens up this theory of genealogical interrogation; Michel Foucault poses genealogy as a practice of history which, like Alexander’s work, depends on abundance of reference material:
Genealogy, consequently, requires patience and knowledge of details and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material. Its “cyclopean monuments” are constructed from “discreet and apparently insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method”; they cannot be the product of “large and well-meaning errors.” In short, genealogy demands relentless erudition. Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for “origins.” (1977, 140)
Foucault’s “relentless erudition” seems gracefully taken up in Alexander’s own poetic practice, which examines the remainders and underpinnings of other historical methodologies, in particular those which produce “large errors.” Her work on the representations of disparate cultural spheres collected in her texts similarly neither seeks blind progress narratives nor works backward to locate any authentic source of black aesthetic and/or culture. Instead, her genealogies are spatial in terms of relationships to history and audience, thinking broadly about who and where constitutes blackness, and the surprising relations of race and cultural expression.
Alexander’s work on Baartman embodies, then, what critic Angela Davis classifies as the three spheres of revision to black subjectivity and culture postslavery in the United States: travel, sexuality, and education (1998, 4). Such a revision comes in the form of “collective” culture for Davis and for Alexander. Alexander, speaking of her play Diva Studies in Callaloo, performs her knowledge of the politics of audience:
I think certainly the person who would really get everything in the play is going to be someone who is more or less like me in that they would have an education that is not just a school education but an eclectic education that knows a lot about and revels in black culture and black so-called high culture as well as black vernacular culture, both of those working in an amalgam. So I think that’s who is going to pick up the most from the play. (Alexander, in Phillip 1996, 501)
Instead of lamenting the narrowness of who can “pick up” the quick and multiple references of her work, Alexander seems to have a spatial sense of readership, one which is about capacity but not totality. Reference is not meant to alienate but to spread, to educate, but not in a formal or patronizingly instructive way. Instead, Alexander takes herself as an example of a visible, nonsilent subject, assuming the existence and audience of other black cosmopolitan women who could be imagined readers of her work without denying its class-selective breadth.
“The Venus Hottentot (1825),” the opening and eponymous poem of Alexander’s first collection (1990), is similarly invested in this lineage of reference, which is of and for, though not limited to, a cosmopolitan construction of diaspora feminism. The first thing one notices, before the poem itself, is the book’s original cover. If the reader does not “know” the referent, does not know who “Venus Hottentot” is historically, the cover offers the reproduction of a painting of a light-skinned black woman, dressed in modern-day black with an abstract formal quality (i.e., the body is not quite “realistically” drawn or proportioned).5 The back cover tells us that the painting is actually from the collection of Alexander’s parents themselves, and its artist, Charles Alston, was a well-known African American artist during the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts movement. The back blurb, too, asserts that her work “contributes something new to African-American poetry,” self-consciously situating the book as both part of a recognizable cultural genealogy and an “innovation.” Like the Venus Hottentot, the text becomes both exception and example.
If the reader does know the referent to the title’s historical figure, the cover becomes even more dissonant, as the Venus Hottentot is usually characterized as an extreme body in the nineteenth century, one characterized by “what they [European audiences and scientific experts] regarded as unusual aspects of her physiognomy—her genitalia and buttocks, . . . [which] became the central image of the black female in Europe through the nineteenth century. . . . The black female embodies the notion of uncontrolled sexuality” (Hammonds 1997, 172). In locating the Venus Hottentot as ur-figure in the French national-continental literary imaginary, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting points to the construction of the Hottentot as the “master text on black female sexuality” in the post-Enlightenment West (1999, 17), while Sander Gilman’s analysis is echoed in Hammonds’s statement, emphasizing how the construction of black sexuality defined white women’s sexuality as well (2010, 79). Bernth Lindfors (1996) outlines the historical construction of Baartman as a deeply gendered and racialized icon through the Victorian British press’s emphasis on caricature and visual difference. The racially indeterminate, abstract woman with tiny folded hands, light skin, and all black clothes on the cover of Alexander’s book reads as a counter to the nineteenth-century visions of Baartman’s sexuality, including the represented body on the publicity poster circa 1814.6 She is the “silent” partner, the middle-class black woman to Hottentot’s primitivist caricature of black women’s sexuality but also to contemporary narratives of reclaimed authenticity that celebrate the audacious presence of the bottom (Hobson 2005, 2). As Nicholas Hudson (2008) points out, the visual economies of race in its modern forms that Baartman embodied were created concurrently with ideals of visual aesthetics themselves in the Victorian era. It is this merging, the high art contemporary black portrait under/in the name of an exploited racial icon from the nineteenth-century black diaspora, which Alexander employs to hybridize and expand the tonal range of race and sexuality—of “human difference,” as scholar Janell Hobson terms the turn from racial-sexual