Trafficking in pain: genealogies of witnessing slavery in Francesco Bartolozzi and concluding with Lalla Essaydi

Abstract

This paper examines the ways that slave bodies have been rendered visible in visual representation. I argue that African diasporic slave bodies are firmly located in a history of viewing imbued with a sentimental erotics of pain. Through a careful examination of the engravings by Francesco Bartolozi that accompany John Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, I argue that even abolitionist images of slaves traffic in pain, exploiting the wounded captive body through a sexualized identification that reinscribes black subjugation. I suggest that contemporary African diasporic artists such as Lalla Essaydi can navigate this genealogy of viewing by strategically moving through hurtful images in order to resituate and recite them. Such a re-citation as Essaydi accomplishes in her painting Duty Free allows for an ethical viewership that does not simply ignore or repress a painful legacy of visual representation but that rethinks it in the name of redress.     

Genealogies of horror: three stories of slave-women,motherhood, and murder in the Americas

ABSTRACT

This article examines three cases of infanticide committed by slave women in the Americas – Margaret Garner (1856) of Ohio, Ignácia (1868) of Paraná, Brazil, and Justina (1878) of Rio de Janeiro. The article argues that each woman sought to dislodge their own as well as their children's place in what I term slavery's ‘genealogy of horror’, making the act of killing their children into an expression of black female agency, love, and insurgence against slavery. The cases of Justina and Ignácia's, I argue, provide a counternarrative to the myth of Brazil's genteel and harmonious slavery, propagated throughout the nineteenth century, by exposing the violence and desperation in which slave women and their progeny lived. In the second half of the article, I examine how cases of infanticide were depicted and used in the nineteenth-century abolitionist poetry of Brazilian poet Castro Alves and noted African American writer Frances Harper.     

‘Cultures of healing’: spirituality,interdependence and resistance in the African diaspora

ABSTRACT

Concepts of healing and spirituality have remained crucial to generating agency and empowerment for both black women and black men, especially in their diasporic displacement from Africa to the US. Healing has been consistently deployed to fight against the systemic racism and sexism that has pervaded and continues to persist in the lives of African diasporic subjects. Placing the discussion of healing within the current debates about interdependence and spirituality, the paper traces the notion back to its African roots and enslavement times, and attempts to delineate a genealogy of healing up to the present that grounds interdependence and interconnectedness within an ‘ethics of resistance’.     

‘I wanted a Communist philosophy,but I wanted us to have a chance to organize our people’: the diasporic radicalism of Queen Mother Audley Moore and the origins of black power

Abstract

This article charts the extraordinary life and legacy of ‘Queen Mother’ Audley Moore (1898–1997). She was one of the most revered figures in twentieth-century black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Communism. A life-long Garveyite and a leading personality in the World War II-era Harlem Communist Party, she understood black women across the diaspora as the vanguard in struggles for self-determination. She broke from the Communist Party in 1950, reinventing herself into an ardent black nationalist. Creatively formulating an idiosyncratic politics combining Garveyism, Marxism, Third Worldism, and feminism, she was central in forging 1960s-era Black Power and the modern reparations movement. Recovering her life reveals the underappreciated importance of black women in building radical, diasporic movements, the legacy of Garveyism and Communism in framing Black Power, and the contours in twentieth-century black radicalism, black internationalism, and black women's activism.     

Afrovision: rehearsing diasporic Africanism in a Tel-Aviv nightclub

ABSTRACT

During the second half of the 1990s, an extended number of illegal African labor migrants arrived at Israel. Whereas associational life among them was based almost exclusively on their national and tribal social clubs, the Afrovision nightclub was a unique grassroots initiative that crossed these boundaries. Based on studies of festive rituals, and more specifically of the role of music and dance in processes of identity formation among migrants' communities, I show how and why Afrovision enabled African immigrants in Israel to come together and experience a sense of diasporic Africanism as a sort of shared identity beyond the salient sub-divisions within their community. Although this experience was partly a reaction to, or implementation of, common perceptions in Israeli society that view African people as of one fiber, the practical significance of the pan-Africanist option offered by Afrovision in the everyday lives of foreign residents far exceeded purely symbolic aspects.     

‘Saving the Congo’: transnational social fields and politics of home in the Congolese diaspora

Abstract

This paper explores the diasporic ‘politics of home’ of Congolese migrants in Europe, in particular in the UK, and to a lesser extent in Belgium. We focus on the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the diasporic political sphere by examining the role of first generation activists, religious groups, as well as youth and women's organisations. Within the transnational political field, first generation leaders are in a dominant position and the involvement of other groups, such as women and young people is marginalised by their control of the diasporic ‘rules of the game’ in the Bourdieusan sense. However, the increasing involvement of Congolese women in the field of women's rights advocacy has opened up new paths of political action which can, in certain occasions, lead to transnational forms of engagement. Similarly, second generation Congolese activists are constructing a space of autonomous engagement, relying heavily on the Internet and especially on social media, some attempting to link up with wider social movements. The paper provides an understanding of the social and political construction of these different fields of diasporic engagement as well as their intersectional and dialogical relations.     

Building Support for the Asad Regime: The Syrian Diaspora in Argentina and Brazil and the Syrian Uprising

ABSTRACT

Brazil and Argentina are hosts to two of the largest populations of Syrian descent in Latin America. While Syrian immigrants and their descendants have usually defined their identities based on broad Arab nationalistic references, creating and affiliating themselves to Syrian-Lebanese and/or Arab institutions, the ongoing civil war in Syria has triggered an unprecedented mobilization around specifically Syrian issues. Most diasporic organizations have shown an unconditional support for the Ba?thist regime. This article aims at understanding the political mobilization of the Syrian diaspora in Argentina and Brazil, as well as unveiling how Bashar al-Asad's government has tried to build on their support.     

Contested Statelessness in Sabah,Malaysia: Irregularity and the Politics of Recognition

ABSTRACT

UNHCR's current #IBelong campaign presents stateless people as uniquely excluded, emphasizing the need for legal solutions to their situation. Such approaches to statelessness sidestep both the complexities of lived experience and the wider politics of state recognition. In response, this article utilizes ethnographic data from Sabah, Malaysia, and theorizations of the gray areas between citizenship and statelessness to argue for the fundamental connection between statelessness and irregularity. Such a connection is central to understanding both the everyday lives of potentially stateless people and Sabah's public discourse on statelessness as a mirage obscuring the problems of “illegals” and “street children.”     

Science-women: arcane knowledge and African spirituality in independent African-American cinema of the 1990s

ABSTRACT

This article explores the significant role played by arcane knowledge and expressions of African spirituality in the iconography of powerful black women in three films directed by independent African-American filmmakers in the 1990s: Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993, USA), Mother of the River (Zeinabu irene Davis, 1995, USA), and Eve’s Bayou (Kasi Lemmons, 1997, USA). My discussion draws on the orature and legendary tales of West African-based cosmologies in the African diasporas of the Americas and the concept (and practice) of ‘conjure’ in African–American cultures. It argues that heroic black women characters possessing extraordinary or supernatural powers not only predate the current vogue of cinematic superheroism, but that the iconography of such ‘science-women’ is embedded in culturally specific, African-rooted cosmological, epistemological and spiritual contexts. I argue that the feminine power celebrated in the films by the independent African-American filmmakers discussed here draw on legendary and historical accounts of women in African diasporic oral, literary and spiritual traditions for their cinematic storytelling to construct an affirmative and paradigmatic model of black female heroism based on empowering African spiritual beliefs and arcane knowledge.     

The Chinese Nationalists and the Great Rear Area : Wartime Szechwan*

Abstract

Kang Youwei’s successive visits to Canada from 1899 initiated a reformist movement among the worldwide Chinese diaspora for over a decade. But his Canadian experience has long been neglected, and the overseas Chinese movement has often been downplayed as an extension or even regression from the abortive 1898 Reform. The rise and fall of the movement have been ascribed respectively to Kang’s reformist mobilization for monarchist patriotism and to the political challenge of the anti-Qing revolutionaries. This article, however, argues that Kang’s diasporic experience, especially his interactions with the Chinese in Canada, greatly radicalized and expanded his reforms. His new program for reform of both China and the Chinese diaspora enabled his movement to spread from Canada to the global arena. This movement also began to decline from Canada around 1909 because of Kang’s clashes with leaders of Canadian Chinatowns. Nonetheless, it caused unprecedented politicization and integration of overseas Chinese.     

Desilencing diasporic memory/ies in knowledge production on Highlife

Abstract

The paper draws on ethnographic and historical research on the formation of Highlife in a ‘trilocal’ setting: Ghana, Nigeria and England in the 1950s and 1960s, the time when Highlife evolved as one of the most popular forms of modern music of (anglophone) West Africa in the twentieth century. It tackles the issue of how the formation of Highlife-music and culture was (transnationally) related to the formation of an African Diaspora in the colonial centre London in the post-World War II decades, how West African cultural formation in the diaspora affected Highlife as a popular and transnational culture, particularly evident in the so far neglected ‘diasporic memory/ies’ on Highlife. The approach seeks to emphasise the critical role of travelling music/ians from West Africa and the Caribbean to London and back in the formation of both, African diasporic and transnational identities as well as African popular music, in that important phase of its history. In the final part of this paper I am reflecting upon methodological issues related to my study on Highlife, focussing mainly on the relationship of living memory, archive and qualitative research.     

Autobiographical representations of the Rwanda genocide and black diasporic identities in Africa

Abstract

This article uses the example of the Rwandan genocide to deconstruct notions of African diaspora based on margin to centre and pull and push factors. Representing patterns of African migrations and diasporas through the autobiographical mode reveals multiple genocides that took place not only in Rwanda but in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Umutesi's novel, Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (2004) complicates our standard understanding of what is known of genocide in Africa, forcing us to revise our notions of diaspora because the autobiographical narrative highlights differences within a single refugee diaspora. Umutesi's personal account of the links between genocide and diaspora in the Great Lakes Region interrogates the very authority that is accorded individual subjectivities in autobiographical works of Africa. The contingent nature of African politics, particularly, within the unnatural context of genocide renders African identities transient and perpetually diasporic.     

All Paths Lead to Rain: Explaining why Watershed Development in India Does Not Alleviate the Experience of Water Scarcity

Abstract

Watershed development (WSD) projects in India are key to meeting a range of human development goals in rain-fed agrarian landscapes. However, outcomes are often observed to be partial and short-lived. We offer a novel perspective on the reasons. Our analysis shows that the dominant ‘water narratives’ of WSD policy and practice and the lived experience of local people contribute to a naturalisation of water scarcity, resulting in widespread views that WSD is primarily a means for increasing irrigation water supply. We show how this over-simplifies the complex problem of agricultural water use and perversely contributes to a continuing experience of water scarcity rather than its resolution.     

An Alternative Internationalism: The Main Lines and Legacies of Polish Sovietology,Promethean Orientalism and the Soviet ‘Southern Borderlands’, 1926–1939

Abstract

‘Prometheism’ was an interwar movement of borderland nationalists from the former Russian Empire who envisioned the division of the Soviet Union into independent nation-states. This article argues that ideological affinities and diasporic connections made the Promethean cause an attractive ‘alternative internationalism’ to the Soviet system for exiled thinkers hailing from the so-called ‘southern borderlands’ of Crimea, the Caucasus, the Volga region and Central Asia. In the 1930s, Prometheism drew intellectuals from these regions to Poland, where the movement’s thinkers formulated ambitious visions of Eurasian liberation from Soviet power.     

African-Caribbean women, (post)? Diaspora,and the meaning of home

ABSTRACT

Drawing on bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Carole Boyce-Davies, this paper develops an ethical framework to provide a gendered analysis of relative power inside and outside the home. In doing so, it considers the ways in which our view of home as African-Caribbean women, impacts our understanding of '(post) diaspora' (Dunn, Leith, and Suzanne Scafe. 2019. “African-Caribbean Women: Migration, Diaspora, Post-Diaspora.” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 13: 1–16) in the UK. Insofar as home is central to the idea of diaspora, I suggest that home must be conceptualised as an interdependent 'adult's' home rather than a dependent 'child's' home. On this reading, in the context of global power relations, I caution that while offering a useful and necessary point of departure from diaspora, the use of 'post' could be deployed to undermine an unapologetically intersectional black politics. As such, I claim the (Post) Diaspora Network's methodology, rather than the term itself, best demonstrates the liberatory intent and importance of a (post) diaspora subjectivity.     

Tenacious diasporic homelessness in Moroccan Dutch writing: A. Benali's ‘May the Sun Shine Tomorrow’ and H. Bouazza's ‘The Crossing’ as a case of study

The highly estimated reception of Abdelkader Benali's debut Wedding by the Sea and Hafid Bouazza's Abdullah's Feet in the mid-1990s is the hyped celebration of multiculturality by the Dutch establishment. Because of attributed to stories' apparent embedment in the native background (Moroccan exotic village), the writers were hailed as successful models for the Dutch multicultural society that was based on the policy of integration (while retaining one's own cultural identity). This paper argues that those exotic proses are imbedded in the culture of routes rather than the rhetoric of roots which is centered on otherness and ethnicisation. The narrative structure of the debuts is undergirded by a discursive disruption of the centripetal moves toward unified autochthonous belonging. It is suggestive of the precariousness of the migrants' homes and their sense of origins. More importantly, A. Benali's ‘May the Sun Shine Tomorrow’ and H. Bouazza's ‘The Crossing’ are produced in a different context dominated by the New Right nationalist demand for sameness and critique of the pluralist discourse of correctness. Nevertheless, it is contended here that in displaying a persistent accent on migratory experience and full incorporation of foreigners in society as equals rather than identical, the short stories maintain the obstinate immersion of the writers in the poetics of homelessness. As such, Bouazza and Benali are claimed to enunciate a diasporic transnational position which resists social exclusion and sees dialogic cosmopolitanism as an adequate home for identities that are constantly on the process of emerging.     

Four women,for women: Caribbean diaspora artists reimag(in)ing the fine art canon

ABSTRACT

This article examines changing representations of women of colour within the realm of the visual arts and considers the aesthetic qualities, historical significance and cultural impacts of a diverse body of image-making spanning several centuries. The research focuses on selected works from the portfolios of the following four, early to midcareer artists of Caribbean heritage, whose nuanced depictions of black and brown womanhood in the twenty-first century have achieved international acclaim: American interdisciplinary artist Aisha Tandiwe Bell; American collagist Andrea Chung; French figurative painter Elizabeth Colomba; Danish photographer, video artist and performance installationist Jeannette Ehlers. The complex diasporic identities and imagery reflected in the oeuvres of these four contemporary artists are contrasted with fine art from earlier eras. The compositional, technical and social modalities of a number of notable works are assessed to determine why some have become celebrated images within the international canon and others have been deemed problematic.     

Affective economies: Eastleigh's metalogistics,urban anxieties and the mapping of diasporic city life

Abstract

In this essay, we trace the national and religious anxieties that emerge with the influx of Somali refugees and capital investments into the Nairobi suburb of Eastleigh. More specifically, we look at how the ambiguity of Somali identity [citizen/refugee] in Kenya renders ineffective the state's attempt to police the circulation of the ‘Somali body’ and capital and how this becomes part of a quest for certitude that manifests itself in security discourse on the ‘Somali threat’ on one hand and a national/religious discourse on authentic Kenyanness. Through a reading of affective and moral economies, we illustrate how ‘Somali driven development’ and presence in Eastleigh, rather than act a source of national and religious anxieties can be seen as an opportunity to re-negotiate and re-evaluate both national and urban senses of community.     

Speaking to Posterity: Shame,Humiliation, and the Creation of Chiang Kai-shek's Nanjing Era Legacy

Abstract

This article analyzes how Chiang Kai-shek and his secretaries formulated and reformulated Chiang's use of shame and humiliation (chi) to legitimate his actions to posterity using as case studies three moments in the Nanjing era: the Ji'nan and Mukden Incidents; and the New Life Movement. It argues that the presence of an external threat facilitated Chiang's use of chi to pursue his political agenda whereas internal threats (and lack of external ones) hindered it. Because Chiang faced both types of threats, his use of chi often appeared contradictory as he sought to consolidate power and to frame the discourse on national avengement. The resulting public face he and his secretaries projected to posterity suggests an important response to divided sovereignty and external aggression (and hence a particular formulation of the national identity), and reveals the limits and possibilities of shaping a leader's political legacy based on that response.