10/04/99 

Vèvè Clark's article, "Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marasa Consciousness" clarifies what I have been sensing as a kind of binarized argument/discussion surrounding concepts of the Diaspora, the impossibility of "Return," and the politically-inflected essentialisms sprung from the Harlem Renaissance. Granted, as Clark notes,

[T]he new letters movements provided an epistemological break away from the predominance of Euro-American influences on black texts. Unlike any other epoch of African-American expression, new letters shared a common ideology: writing regional, ethnic, and peasant experiences into existence. Their very articulation signified protest directed against cultural repression on the one hand and racial self-hatred on the other. (40)

But the question of whose "regional, ethnic, and peasant experiences" obviously problematizes the work of the new letters movement-a polemic that finds itself enacted through the conflicting definitions of and uses for (D/d)iaspora, the term, the location, the concept, the literacy, the voices, and the verb.

Clark locates its original usage in the new letters movements as a "construct, the African diaspora, referring to the phenomenon and history of African-American displacement in the New World" (41). The (admittedly convenient) connection between the rise of the New Negro, Indigenist, and Négritude movements and the origins of the unifying concept of diaspora frames critiques of the concept and the literature of the period in largely contentious ways. For if, as Clark asserts, "Critics return repeatedly to [the new letters movements of the 20s and 30s] as if to embrace a heralded center, familiar and stable" (40) those critics are also literally enacting a "Return" to a diaspora essentialized as unified and familial. The critique of this particular concept, simultaneously voiced in terms of the "romantic and colonial imaginations" (Carby 80) through which new letters writers approach their subject matter, the social, economic, and political agendas that accompany their narratives, and the idea that "a" or "the" Diaspora does not exist, or cannot be represented, or is not (as in Condé's Hérémakhonon) "home" at all, and is rather fragmented and isolating, is a inquiry that can take place on several fronts. Clark's critique of the initial conceptualization of Return begins (like Hazel V. Carby's) within the literary sphere-for by critiquing the literature, one syllogistically critiques the concept of diaspora, just as a critic like Brent Hayes Edwards, attempting to trace and query the genealogy of diaspora, consequently implicates the literature that engendered it. It is this conflation of the literature and the diasporic imagination that adds yet another layer of interpretive contention to the theoretical struggle, and prevents the solution from emerging as a product of the diaspora binarism.

For if diaspora was created as an embodied binarism, one might initially suppose that the bifocal nature of its existence, the similarities unifying "Blackness" and the cultural differences that diversify it, should be sufficient to embrace both critiques: the new letters movements' assertion in the unification of difference, and recent attempts to acknowledge the difference in unification. Given the very nature of the term, the "di" in diaspora if you will, there should be room for both polemics, one argues. Clark's position, that diaspora embodies the master/slave dialectic, and that a "new" paradigm, a marasa consciousness, should invite us "to imagine beyond the binary. [revealing] that the tension between oppositions leads to another form of creativity-to interaction or deconstruction as it were," (43-44) advocates a way out of the contention. But marasa consciousness is but another theoretical model-an Aristotelian approach to what has become, through the mutual implications of "literature" and "theory," the "old" guard and the "new," and the pluralistic denotative and connotative shades of a phrase like "diaspora," a Bacchic set of problems.

This particular conundrum is addressed quite pointedly in Barbara Christian's "The Race for Theory," an assault on what she broadly denounces as the oppressive, Western, "manifest destiny" quality of academic literary philosophy. Awed by the power of a privileged few who have popularized a form of literary theory characterized by esoteric linguistic jargon, coldly scientific dissections of processed "text," "the mechanical analyses of language, graphs, algebraic equations, [and] gross generalizations about culture," (125) Christian notes that many scholars find themselves forced to participate in a discourse that though popular and prevailing, nevertheless shifts attention back toward the very hegemonic cultural and literary codifications it presumes to denounce. For, as it has been articulated, such a process infuses those revolutionary readings with a philosophic detachment that eclipses the appreciation or elucidation of the sensual or creative aspects of a work, resulting in a critical technique that cannot enlighten texts whose cultural influences do not subscribe to or foster such cerebral analysis. Christian's particular frame of reference leads her to examine the literatures of people of color as they figure into the "New Criticism" movement, and her conclusions that they, in fact, do not:

For people of color have always theorized-but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed forms seem more to our liking. (124)

What then, Christian asks, is a theorist of "marginal" literatures to do with the structuralist and post-structuralist discourses permutating themselves in academe? What is to become of the literatures themselves, when there is no response to them?

The pursuit of totalizing theories and paradigmatic generalizations, she writes, is a controlling mechanism emerging just when "marginal" literatures have begun to attain a foothold in the Western canon; they are efforts to classify and suppress diversity through theories of literary relativity and the equalizing of all text as text. That such theories are mounted by a privileged, powerful few underscores the elitism of the vision; that these techniques and intentions have been appropriated by Feminist and Black Arts critics illustrates the degree to which their true purpose, as Christian discerns it, has been concealed. But again, she acquiesces, power is indeed power, and any effort to articulate one's points from a powerful position-at least as this act is engaged in contemporary theoretical discourse-necessitates the pursuit of that power on its own terms, and without the alteration of the power structure itself. As Christian understands this process, "The nature of our context today is such that an approach which desires power singlemindedly must of necessity become like that which it wishes to destroy. Rather than wanting to change the whole model, many of us want to be at the center" (130). Given such circumstances and the necessity to subvert such power from the ground up (so to speak), Christian advocates a return to the neglected literature-contemporary and antecedent-and an assertion of its literary and theoretical diversity and subjectivity.

Obviously, even a model of marasa consciousness is still a model for Christian, still an effort to institutionalize a particular way of articulating something as strategically elusive as "diaspora." For it seems to me that the more a word is given up to a plurality of meanings, the more use it has in an articulation of diversified consciousness. Brent Hayes Edwards's genealogy similarly employs an etymological approach to the term, and rather than allowing it to remain ambiguous on its own, suggests that it retain some of its diversity as a verb, connected to myriad theoretical behaviors. Both approaches, in Christian's terms, "want to be at the center" of a hierarchical theoretical construction rather than envisioning a more egalitarian possibility for change. While Christian's own "solution" is vague and somewhat elusive, it is strategically so, and voices what is, to me, the only response to the "diaspora" binarism that Clark articulates and she, Carby, and Edwards take turns interrogating. If new letters literature creates a diasporic construct that stresses unification and essentialism over difference, and modern criticism wants diaspora to invoke difference, the solution is not a definitive definition of the term, or its situation as a new part of speech, but rather an influx of myriad definitions, representations, readings, and voices whose positions broaden and diversify the term, the concept, the literacy, the phenomenon, and allow it to embody its own pluralities.

Carby, Hazel V. "The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston." New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God. Ed. Michael Awkward. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 70-93.

Christian, Barbara T. "The Race to Theory." Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. Eds. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. New York: Longman, 1994. 123-131.

Clark, Vèvè. "Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marasa Consciousness." Comparative American Identities. Ed. Hortense J. Spillers. New York: Routledge, 1991. 40-61.