Diasporas and crossings
edited by Shukri Bana
On February 12, President Jim Davis announced the consolidation of seven academic departments into two academic departments. The Department of Social and Cultural Analysis will be created from the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, Department of American Studies, Department of Mexican American and Latina/Latino Studies, and Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The Department of European and Eurasian Studies will be a second department, formed from the Department of French and Italian, Department of Germanic Studies, and Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies. Each consolidated department bears a particular history, borne from student activism and protest.
An optimist might see this as a call for crossing: an attempt at organizing people whose self-understanding is based, perhaps, in a shared Otherness. That optimism, however, would be woefully ahistorical, recklessly abandoning regard for each department’s material histories, literary traditions, theoretical contributions, and methodological interventions. The consolidation of ethnic studies departments is precisely what the authors reviewed in this section write against: difference reduced to nothing or difference reduced to everything. Keguro Macharia’s exquisite Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora offers language for the diasporas theorized in the texts reviewed in this issue: “Histories rubbing along and against histories.” Can we sit in the discomfort produced when we hold violent histories against each other and create intimacies out of those frictions?
These texts, in conversation, push us toward an understanding of diaspora as not principally concerned with borders or ethnicity; rather, they envision a diaspora of disobedience. Instead of models of diaspora located in neat identification, the texts boldly ask: how can we think about diaspora as solidarity-through-difference, a refusal to be a single being? What does such solidarity look like: one that does not attempt to consolidate all differences, but, instead, seeks coalitions that accommodate difference?
Some reviews question what ‘the arts’ have to do with diasporic politics. Kevin Gibbs reviews The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora, edited by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, a volume that celebrates the breadth of writing by Vietnamese writers of the diaspora. Gibbs shows the critical interventions of this text, which features thirty-seven writers: first, that art has a necessarily political function; second, a consideration of how ethnicity is affective—identity and identification provide grounds for radical solidarity. Gibbs writes that identification can be “a choice rather than a stricture, one that provides an opportunity for solidarity and coalition-building.”
How can these coalitions inform how we read multiethnic writing? Halley Roberts’ review of Francisco E. Robles’s Coalition Literature: Aesthetics on the Move in Midcentury US Multiethnic Writing offers a methodology for reading multiethnic writing as an aesthetic form that grew out of the Popular Front movement. Robles cautions against a “touristic reading” of multiethnic literature, focusing instead on how to resituate the “I” of lived experience into a “we” of unified difference. Drawing from documentary and ethnographic history to the Sanitation Strikes of the 1960s, Roberts concludes that Robles writes towards aesthetics that include “processes by which writers and activists enact a speaking with coalitional ethos that lives and moves through encounter and process.”
We move disobediently to another history of English cartographies and counter-cartographic interventions in Nina Gary’s review of Asa Simon Mittman’s Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England. Mittman analyzes the mappamundi, whichcharacterize Jewish people through Christian fantasies: the monstrous races made legible through England’s race-making efforts. Gary highlights a critical intervention from Mittman, who argues that anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism survived and even thrived in a post-Jewish England. This nationalistic project was facilitated by the effort of the English to “define what and who is English, and, crucially, who is not.” Mittman’s cartographic readings reflect a world predicated on the imagining of a world that excludes the Jewish. In Gary’s review, we see what happens when instead of coalition, race-making and difference becomes the bedrock upon which violence is enacted.
These critiques of cartography move us towards a different kind of crossing: that of genre. Tushar Srivastava’s review of Syed Akbar Hyder’s Qurratulain Hyder on the Move: Crossing the Frontiers of Gender, Language, and Nation situates the prolific Indian writer Qurratulain Hyder in a long genealogy of writers in the Perso-Urdu tradition. Srivastava’s review shows how Qurratulain Hyder is too capacious to be reduced: in her writing, in her philosophy of ethnicity, and her travels. She is not a “hyper-human figure, and rather works with her own limitations, historicizing the author as a product of time capable of crossing boundaries with her literary prowess.” Her writing and life are irreducible, while still rooted in the possibilities inherent to her literary and historical traditions.
In writing towards diasporas and crossings that critique race-making practices, move across genres, and theorize solidarity, these reviews push us towards a politics of coalition, not consolidation.
