Image
Painting of a white swan and a black swan touching beaks
Book Chapter
Peer Review
Frottage: Introduction
Image
Figure drawing of a Black torso on a white background
Book Title
Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora
Book Author(s)
Keguro Macharia
Press and Year
NYU Press, 2019
ISBN
9781479865017
Place of Publication

New York

Number of Pages

207

I first read Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) in the late 1980s, in my parents’ Nairobi home. It left me with a haunting image of slavery that has guided me to this book. Following his capture, Kunta Kinte is locked in a slave hold, chained together with other men: “he very slowly and carefully explored his shackled right wrist and ankle with his left hand. . . . He pulled lightly on the chain; it seemed to be connected to the left ankle and wrist of the man he had fought with. On Kunta’s left, chained to him by the ankles, lay some other man, someone who kept up a steady moaning, and they were all so close that their shoulders, arms, and legs touched if any of them moved even a little.”[1] I was arrested by this image. At the time, though, I could not name what intrigued and terrified me about this enforced proximity, this monstrous intimacy.[2]

The image gains in intensity as the narrative continues. During a brutal storm, bodies rub against each other and against the ship: “each movement up and down, or from side to side, sent the chained men’s naked shoulders, elbows, and buttocks—already festered and bleeding— grinding down even harder against the rough boards beneath them, grating away still more of the soft infected skin until the muscles underneath began rubbing against the boards.”[3] Skin, self, body is worn away through “grinding” and “grating,” as bodies are fed into slavery’s maw. Haley’s metaphors combine images from food and sex cultures, gesturing to the roles enslaved Africans would play within food and sex economies as producers and products. Ironically, these images of food and sex—now so central to how we imagine care and pleasure—register the obscene labor of how humans are transformed into objects. The body-abrading taking place in the hold through a process of sustained rubbing accompanies the commodification taking place through ship ledgers that record weight and monetary value instead of names, religious affiliations, geohistorical origins, or philosophical orientations. In fact, several kinds of rubbing are taking place: bodies against each other; bodies against the ship; writing implements against ledgers; and the rubbing in the slave holds against the writing in the ledgers. I use the term frottage to figure these violent rubbings and to foreground the bodily histories and sensations that subtend the arguments I pursue.

Although I take the slave hold as my point of departure, I dare not linger there.

One can depart from the slave ship in many ways, so let me describe the argument that Frottage pursues. Within black diaspora studies, scholars have insisted that while slavery was intended to dehumanize captured Africans, it did not succeed. Thus, much scholarship and creative writing has been devoted to proving that the enslaved were human, primarily by foregrounding their kinship ties: they nurtured, they loved, they reproduced.[4] A powerful, if less followed, line of thinking has pursued the problem of how slavery produced “thinghood.” Describing the effects of enslavement, Cedric Robinson writes, “African workers had been transmuted by the perverse canons of mercantile capitalism into property.”[5] Based on her examination of ship ledgers, Hortense Spillers writes, “Expecting to find direct and amplified reference to African women during the opening years of the [slave] Trade, the observer is disappointed time and again that this cultural subject is concealed beneath the mighty debris of the itemized account, between the lines of the massive logs of commercial enterprise.”[6] Those ledgers do not record names; instead, they document the process of turning humans into commodities. In a more recent assessment of ledgers from slave ships, Katherine McKittrick finds,

Breathless, archival numerical evidence puts pressure on our present system of knowledge by affirming the knowable (black objecthood) and disguising the untold (black human being). The slave’s status as object-commodity, or purely economic cargo, reveals that a black archival presence not only enumerates the dead and dying, but also acts as an origin story. This is where we begin, this is where historic blackness comes from: the list, the breathless numbers, the absolutely economic, the mathematics of the unliving.[7]

I approach the problem of blackness and queerness from this “historic blackness.” This origin story removes the enslaved from the domain of the human as that figure was theorized during modernity. Taking “thinghood” as a point of departure to elaborate black diaspora histories grapples with the difficulty of how to think about those considered not-quite-human and, at times, unhuman.[8] I focus on the speculative ways that black diaspora thinkers and artists imagined they could create usable histories and livable lives: Frantz Fanon formally and conceptually disrupts European philosophy and psychoanalysis to locate the black person that these disciplines cannot imagine; René Maran uses the resources of the ethnographic novel to create a temporal rapprochement between colonial Central Africa and an Africa before the ravages of the Middle Passage; Jomo Kenyatta uses myth and fabulation to usurp the authority of colonial anthropology to describe Kikuyu lives; and Claude McKay demonstrates in poetry and prose how Jamaicans innovated intimate practices of world-making, producing spaces where queer radicals might belong. As I shift across geohistories, I do not tell a single story—such a story is impossible. Instead, I map the innovative ways black thinkers and artists have created possibilities for black being and belonging, and I argue that the intimate, especially the sexual, is central to how these figures imagined and theorized black being and belonging.

The four figures I engage—Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay—wrote as colonial subjects in the first half of the twentieth century. As many of these figures entered the academy through postcolonial studies, their work and subjectivity is often treated as anticolonial and postcolonial, geared toward forms of freedom incarnated in the independent nation-state. As necessary as these approaches have been, they have tended to lose the specificity of what colonial subjects might have desired, the forms of livability they imagined and invented that pursue freedom, but not by privileging the nation-state. Simultaneously, focusing on these figures as anticolonial and postcolonial also risks losing how their status as colonial subjects emerges from and is part of the “afterlife of slavery”: “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.”[9] It is within these conditions that these figures wrote, producing varied models for how black life could be imagined and invented as free.

This book begins from the premise that the black diaspora poses a historical and conceptual challenge to dominant histories and theories of sexuality in queer studies, which have tended to privilege white Euro-American experiences. I depart from the more familiar Euro-American genealogy of queer studies offered by scholars in fields as diverse as the classics (David Halperin), religion (John Bosworth), philosophy (Michel Foucault), history (Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey), and literary studies (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick). Starting from the black diaspora requires rethinking not only the historical and theoretical utility of identity categories such as gay, lesbian, and bisexual, but also, arguably, more foundational categories such as normative and non-normative, human and nonhuman. While I complicate queer theory’s conceptual and historical assumptions, this project is not an extended “writing back” to a predominantly white queer studies: writing back recenters white queer studies as the point of departure.[10] Instead, I start with the slave ship, the place that will produce most forcefully and consistently what Toni Morrison describes as an “Africanist presence”: the denotative and connotative languages and figures through which blackness is apprehended within modernity.[11]

Theorizing Frottage

I use frottage, a relation of proximity, to figure the black diaspora, for doing so unsettles the heteronormative tropes through which the black diaspora has been imagined and idealized. Frottage captures the aesthetic (as a term of artistic practice) and the libidinal (as a term of sex practice), and so gestures to the creative ways the sexual can be used to imagine and create worlds. The artist Max Ernst is formally credited with the process of inventing frottage, which consists of laying paper over a surface (a floor or desk, say), and using charcoal or pencil to rub over the paper to reveal the traces history has left on that surface. Frottage does not provide a complete narrative or even signal where the researcher should look; at best, its traces demonstrate that someone or something has passed through a space and left some kind of evidence. Within the African and Afro-diasporic archives I explore, the figure of the homosexual appears rarely and often as a fragment—as scattered sentences in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and as a single sentence in Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya. I linger at these fragments to pursue a broader reparative goal: to find “sustenance” where it has often been deemed absent or scarce.[12] The evidence frottage provides creates the grounds for speculation, and takes seriously the work speculation does in enlarging our apprehension of the world and our possibilities for being in the world.[13] Moreover, I wanted a term that keeps the body seeking sexual pleasure in view. Frottage feels less freighted than terms like fucking and sucking and fisting, terms that, as they have circulated within queer studies, have become identified as gay male sex practices, even when, as with fisting, they have the power to disrupt gendered and sexed positions. Finally, I wanted an awkward term, one that hinted at strangers rubbing themselves against others in public spaces, at the ways the public pursuit of pleasure can often be uncomfortable and coercive. I do not think black and queer play well together. I think they often inhabit the same spaces, and even the same bodies, in uncomfortable ways, and I want to foreground their ongoing rubbing, leading, at times, to pleasure, and, at other times, to irritation, and even possibly to pain.

As a conceptual strategy, frottage lingers on a critical and historical desire to name the black diaspora as a singular formation, the desire of that definite article “the.” I do not dismiss this desire. Instead, I use frottage to foreground this intense longing for intimacy. By foregrounding desire and longing, I depart from genealogical models that anchor that definite article within a logic of kinship, whether that be biogenetic or fictive kinship. More precisely, I explore how blackness emerges and what it comes to mean without anchoring it to a genealogical tree. Instead of searching for kinship, I privilege conceptual and affective proximity: the rubbing produced by and as blackness, which assembles into one frame multiple histories and geographies. I consider the black diaspora as affective and bodily proximity. Where Earl Lewis has theorized “overlapping diasporas,” I argue that pressing and rubbing rather than overlapping might offer a richer, queerer account of how diaspora functions as intimacy.[14]

Finally, though not exhaustively, I use frottage to suggest diaspora as a multiplicity of sense-apprehensions, including recognition, disorientation, compassion, pity, disgust, condescension, lust, titillation, arousal, and exhaustion. I want to approximate as much as possible the range of bodily sensations produced by the insistent touching that is diaspora. I find especially useful Sianne Ngai’s discussion of “irritation” as a “non-cathartic . . . ongoingness.”[15] It might be that the enforced proximity produced by the category of blackness rubs up against the desire for intimacy expressed in the definite article “the,” producing irritation as the black diaspora’s dominant affect. Irritation, a term that captures an emotional and corporeal response, is a helpful term for thinking about the contested nature of blackness as a shared feature of Africa and Afro-diaspora. For the history of blackness as a shared category is marked by disagreement, disavowal, and ambivalence, from those who distinguish themselves as “African, not black,” to those who police blackness as a product of Atlantic slavery and thus unavailable to other populations, to those who claim a nativist distinction between U.S. southern descendants and Afro-Caribbean and African descendants. Yet the visual logic of blackness, which is modernity’s legacy, does not care for such fine distinctions. In using frottage, I highlight the affective conflicts and practices of difference that suture the black diaspora.

I arrived at frottage through a series of conceptual and historical impasses—as part of theorizing the term, I narrate those impasses. When I started this project in 2005, my keyword was “kinship.” It was central to African studies, primarily in anthropology, but also in the other two disciplines that dominate African studies—political science and history. It was also central to the broad field of black diaspora studies, whether one followed the Herskovitz line of African survivals or embraced the Frazier model where Africans in the New World invented new ways of being.[16] In scholarship by Carol Stack, novels by Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, and poetry by Ntozake Shange and Audre Lorde, fictive kinship—kinship that does not rely on a blood relationship—became as important as blood kinship. Gay and lesbian studies affirmed the importance of kinship: Kath Weston’s Families We Choose (1991) powerfully demonstrated how gays and lesbians created and innovated within kinship structures, changing the meaning of kinship. Yet, kinship remained vulnerable to queer critiques of heteronormativity (a “sense of rightness,” as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner describe), the dominance of the couple form, and the foundational place of the child (and reproduction) as the heart of kinship.[17] Kinship seemed too important a concept to jettison, but I could not figure out how to write about it. I remain convinced that kinship refuses forms of intimate innovation, but I do not know how to stage that argument.

From kinship, I moved on to “deracination,” a term that captures the violence of the Middle Passage and figures queering as a violent ejection from the social. Deracination spoke not just to black and queer pasts—some of them black, some of them queer, some of them black and queer—but to black and queer presents as well, capturing the violence of gentrification elaborated by Samuel Delany and Christina Hanhardt, the ravages of exile and immigration discussed by Eithne Luibhéid and Chandan Reddy, and the quotidian moments of exclusion captured by “No Fats, No Femmes, No Blacks, No Asians” on hook-up apps.[18] Deracination, a word that captures being uprooted and losing place and being, described the unmaking work of the Middle Passage: how the enslaved were ejected from the status of human through commodification and punishment. Deracination remains central to this book, but I needed a term that spoke more directly to intra-racial concerns. I fear that deracination focuses on the strategies through which white supremacy produces blackness, and I did not want to write that book: a black queer studies that constantly imagines itself as a response to a white queer studies is debilitating.

Frottage tries to grasp the quotidian experiences of intra-racial experience, the frictions and irritations and translations and mistranslations, the moments when blackness coalesces through pleasure and play and also by resistance to antiblackness. More than simply proximity, it is the active and dynamic ways blackness is produced and contested and celebrated and lamented as a shared object. It is bodies rubbing against and along bodies. Histories rubbing along and against histories. It is the shared moments of black joy and black mourning. It is what is known on Twitter as #diasporawars, when Afro-Europeans and Afro-Caribbeans and Afro-Americans and Africans gather, often angrily, to work through difference. At such moments, little is taken for granted. Except we know that the difficult work of working through difference is necessary for our survival and our pleasure. Taking nothing for granted, we explore and create new ways to imagine and be with each other.

The Genealogical Imperative

Frottage thinks alongside and beyond the dominant frame in black diaspora cultures and studies: the structure of blood descent that I describe as a genealogical imperative. Alexander Crummell’s famous 1888 statement, “a race is a family,” has had a vibrant, ongoing life in black diasporic cultural and intellectual production.[19] Although this genealogical imperative can be traced across multiple black diasporic geohistories, in what follows I turn to African American histories to illustrate how it has functioned as a scholarly and aesthetic injunction.

Following the publication of the Moynihan Report (1965) in the United States, which blamed slavery for destroying black families and creating a “tangle of pathology,” scholars mounted a sustained campaign to refute those claims. Influential studies including Carol Stack’s All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (1974), Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and in Freedom, 1750–1925 (1974), Richard Price and Sidney Mintz’s The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (1976), and John Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1979) emphasized the enduring strength and longevity of heterosexual kinship bonds, in slavery and in freedom.

Here, let me tread carefully: these studies did not reify the black family in any singular way. Many criticized Moynihan for seeing black community relations through the lens of a white nuclear family. For instance, drawing on Stack, Mintz and Price write, “One of the problems with traditional studies of the black family. . . was a tendency to reify the concept of ‘family’ itself. . .  [I]n Afro-America, the ‘household’ unit need by no means correspond to ‘the family,’ however defined.”[20] They follow this correction by focusing on the historical role of kinship during slavery, asking, “What, if anything, might have constituted a set of broadly shared ideas brought from Africa in the realm of kinship?”[21] Their speculative answer is instructive for understanding the role of kinship in black studies:

Tentatively and provisionally, we would suggest that there might have been certain widespread fundamental ideas and assumptions about kinship in West and Central Africa. Among these, we might single out the sheer importance of kinship in structuring interpersonal relations and in defining an individual’s place in society; the emphasis on unilineal descent, and the importance to each individual of the resulting lines of kinsmen, living and dead, stretching backward and forward through time, or, on a more abstract level, the use of land as a means of defining both time and descent, with ancestors venerated locally, and with history and genealogy both being particularized in specific pieces of ground. The aggregate of newly arrived slaves, though they had been torn from their own local kinship networks, would have continued to view kinship as the normal idiom of social relations. Faced with an absence of real kinsmen, they nevertheless modeled their new social ties upon those of kinship.[22]

This rich passage describes how kinship and genealogy subtend racial alliances: “kinship” provides a “shared” vocabulary that mitigates geohistorical differences. “Shared ideas” of kinship and genealogy enable intra-racial collectivity by “defining an individual’s place in society.” Kinship provides social legibility and structures social relations, allowing individuals to be recognizable through their real and imagined relationships to others. But while the change from “family” to “kinship” critiques and displaces the nuclear family and the couple form as privileged models, the reliance on genealogical models to generate social and cultural legibility privileges reproductive heteronormativity.

Mintz and Price reveal how the standard queer critique of the heteronormative couple cannot account for black diasporic and African modes of creating normativity. Take, for instance, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s field-defining “Sex in Public,” which positions queerness against “the heterosexual couple,” imagined as “the privileged example of sexual culture.”[23] That queerness challenges and disrupts coupled heterosexuality is now taken as common sense within queer studies, in a way that attending to other geohistories must complicate. Consider, for instance, this description of African family structures from philosopher Nkiru Nzegwu:

[Family Matters] deals with different forms of family relationships, notably consanguineal, nuclear, mixtures of the two, polygamous, matrilineal, patrilineal, dual-descent, matrifocal, patrifocal, patriarchal, and matriarchal. A consanguineal family construes the family as composed of kin, while the nuclear treats the family as composed of a man and his wife and children. Polygamous families are made up of a male or female husband with multiple wives. A matrilineal family traces descent through the mother, while a patrilineal one traces descent through the father, and a dual-descent family traces descent through both the mother and the father. Matrifocality describes a family that is based or focused on the mother, whereas a patrifocal family is centered on the father. A patriarchal family is one in which the father has the dominant power in the family, and a matriarchal family is one which in the mother has the dominant power in the family.[24]

Even though Nzegwu uses “family relationships” as opposed to Berlant and Warner’s “sexual culture,” anthropological traditions instruct us that such family relationships indicate allowable and taboo sexual proximities. Focusing on the heterosexual couple misses how African and Afro-diasporic intimate structures and traditions generate their own forms of normativity and queerness. If, instead, we focus on the multiple ways heteronormativity functions within a broadly conceived genealogical imperative, we might ask with Elizabeth Povinelli, “Why does the recognition of peoples’ worth, of their human and civil rights, always seem to be hanging on the more or less fragile branches of a family tree? Why must we be held by these limbs?”[25] Learning from Povinelli, we can question the genealogical imperative in Afro-diasporic and African scholarship.

It is, perhaps, easier to acknowledge how the genealogical imperative has shaped scholarship in anthropology and history, fields marked by their interests in kinship and community, on the one hand, and change over time, on the other. But the genealogical imperative has also guided aesthetic criticism, and a particularly fine example can be found in Houston Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. In a telling passage, Baker weds Afro-diasporic scholarship to the genealogical imperative:

The family signature is always a renewing renaissancism that ensures generation, generations, the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery. What I have said is that the family must explore its own geographies. . .  Renaissancism’s contemporary fate is our responsibility, demanding a hard and ofttimes painful journey back to ancestral wisdom in order to achieve a traditional (family) goal. That goal is the discovery of our successful voices as the always already blues script . . . in which a new world’s future will be sounded.[26]

Baker’s intricately constructed prose allows no separation between the aesthetic and the biological, the artistic and the historical, the culturally productive and the biologically reproductive. The repeated “renaissancism” formally enacts his injunction to re-create and procreate, especially as renaissance refers to rebirth. To write with the “family signature” is to produce and reproduce, to affirm, always, the hetero-temporalities that connect the ancestors to the future. The task of Afro-diasporic scholarship, then, if one follows Baker, is always genealogical. In fact, Baker’s italicized “must” demonstrates what I’m calling an imperative, and, more broadly, becomes a mode of aesthetic evaluation. Truly valuable aesthetic work must follow and value the genealogical imperative.

Lest this focus on the family be understood as an exclusively African American affair, scholarship in the broader range of the black diaspora similarly understands experience through hetero-kinship tropes. For instance, introducing a major anthology of black diaspora scholarship, Isidore Okpewho acknowledges the impossibility of encompassing black diasporic diversity. But this diversity is subsequently managed through hetero-kinship tropes, as the black diaspora is marked by its relationship to “the mother continent” and those scattered are re-collected as “sons and daughters.”[27] These are small, and, arguably, casual moments in Okpewho’s argument, but this very casualness demonstrates the ease with which hetero-kinship is taken for granted as an operational principle of black diaspora scholarship.[28] I draw attention to them because of how they manage black diasporic geohistorical diversity under the rubric of hetero-kinship figured as genealogical descent. While African and Afro-diasporic scholars might not all agree on racialization, politics, religion, ethnicity, economics, or culture, hetero-kinship is consistently reinforced as a capacious category that manages all difference. It is precisely the casual, unremarked way that hetero-kinship tropes lubricate difference that interests me.

The term “diaspora” combines two terms, dia (across) and sperein (scatter), and invokes the labor of spores as they spread to germinate. Although scholars have focused on diaspora as dispersal, the often unnamed critical hope is that such scattering results in communities: what Brent Hayes Edwards has termed the “futures of diaspora” takes place on the grounds of hetero-genealogy.[29] However, I argue that another black diaspora is possible. Frottage tracks the uneven traces of dispersal and scattering associated with diaspora, attempting to arrest the heteronormative inevitability that would conflate dispersal with hetero-futurity. The geohistorical range of my archive—Fanon’s Martinique and France, Maran’s Central Africa, Kenyatta’s Kenya and England, and McKay’s Jamaica—attempts to disrupt the inevitability of hetero-insemination by multiplying dispersion. Moreover, I hope that this geohistorical range will arrest a genealogical impulse that often takes root when one geohistorical location is made the center. Simultaneously, in juxtaposing these geohistories and the various genres that represent them—McKay’s poetry and fiction, Kenyatta’s ethnography, Maran’s ethnographic fiction, and Fanon’s philosophy—I figure the black diaspora as proximity and rubbing rather than descent. These authors and works often speak past, over, and through each other, producing not a unified or unifying chorus, but dissonant voices that, every so often, come together in their shared quests for freedom. Here is the black diaspora not as kinship, but as dissonant, freedom-seeking intimacy.

The remainder of this introduction outlines key concepts that recur throughout the book and that help to suture its disparate geographies and genres: the relationship between the genealogical imperative and the ethnographic imagination, which I track through the foundational black diasporic thinker Edward Wilmot Blyden; and the relationship between hybridity and thinghood as they circulate within black diaspora theorizations of race and sexuality.

The Genealogical Imperative and the Ethnographic Imagination

In 1908, Liberian intellectual Edward Wilmot Blyden published African Life and Customs, a collection of articles that had first appeared in the Sierra Leone Weekly News. It was issued “with the desire, if possible, of unfolding the African, who has received unmixed European culture, to himself, through a study of the customs of his fathers, and also of assisting the European political overlord, ruling in Africa, to arrive at a proper appreciation of conditions.”[30] African Life and Customs attempted to counter the deracinating effects of modernity by providing Afro-diasporic populations, those who had “received unmixed European culture,” with a manual of how to be African. In its simplest form, African Life and Customs belongs to the body of antiracist discourse produced by black diasporic activists and intellectuals through the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. It shares similar aims with Frederick Douglass’s multiple narratives, Frances Harper’s novels, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, and Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound. Disparate though these works might be, they all attempt to prove the black person’s humanity and capacity for civilization. In autobiographies, sermons, manifestoes, polemics, essays, and novels, Afro-diasporic activists in the nineteenth century contested racist depictions of black people as primitive and hypersexual. These works take on new life in the twentieth century, when they forge bonds among African and Afro-diasporic populations. Their focus ceases to be primarily interracial and becomes intra-racial and international—in a word, diasporic.[31] I examine African Life and Customs as a foundational work that weds the genealogical imperative to what I will describe as the ethnographic imagination, a wedding that animates black diasporic cultural and scholarly production throughout the twentieth century.

Blyden was, arguably, the preeminent black diaspora scholar of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was born in 1832, in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, then part of the Danish West Indies. Denied admission to colleges in the United States to study theology because of his race, he immigrated to Liberia, where he completed high school and was later ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1858. An autodidact, he learned to read and write Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, and a few African indigenous languages. He first rose to international prominence in the 1860s, when he traveled through the United States to recruit immigrants to Liberia, a practice that he continued for the following thirty years. Over the course of a lengthy career, he served as a professor of classics at Liberia College (1862–71), secretary of state (1864–66), Liberia’s first ambassador to Britain (1877–78), president of Liberia College (1880–84), and ran for president of Liberia in 1885. In addition to numerous articles published in venues such as Methodist Quarterly Review, Fraser’s Magazine, the American Missionary, and Sierra Leone Times, he also published books, including Liberia’s Offering (1862), From West Africa to Palestine (1873), and Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1887). He died in Liberia in 1912.[32]

I begin with Blyden because I read his African Life and Customs as a methodological forerunner to Afro-diasporic cultural and intellectual production over the twentieth century. He provides a method for Afro-diasporic populations to reconnect with their past: they can “study” the “customs” of their “fathers.” Blyden’s emphasis on “study” and “customs” embeds him, broadly, within ethnographic practices, and, more specifically, within an ethnographic imagination that will be taken up by writers across the black diaspora including Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. The phrase “ethnographic imagination” is capacious, and I use it to denote the array of fantasies, desires, and imaginations that subtend ethnographic projects in their various instantiations as armchair anthropology, fieldwork-based research, and literary and cultural production; the desire to record fading modes of living (Toomer and Hurston), to imagine past histories of living (Senghor and Nwapa), to describe emergent modes of living (McKay, Hughes), and the impulse to locate collectivity forming and collectivity fracturing within the register of the intimate (the home, the family, the community, the village). Indeed, a guiding premise for this book is that the ethnographic imagination subtends black diaspora cultural production and political imagination throughout the twentieth century.

African Life and Customs consists of fifteen short chapters that can be divided, broadly, into meditations on social, economic, and political organization. Following a short introductory chapter that surveys the existing scholarship on Africa, Blyden devotes the following four chapters (2–5) to the African family; the next five (6–10) to what he terms “industrialism,” or more broadly economic structures; the next two (11–12) to political organization, or the treatment of “criminals”; and the final three (13–15) to religion. By presenting a picture of what anthropologists will later theorize as a functional society, Blyden attempts to rehabilitate the negative image of Africa in colonial accounts. In the same spirit as Crummell’s statement that race is “like a family,” Blyden imagines that the functional society he describes should provide a paradigm for global black collectivity.

For Blyden, this rehabilitation takes place, most urgently, on the level of the intimate. He describes “the family” as the foundation of African society:

The facts in this African life which we shall endeavour to point out are the following:—

1st. The Family, which in Africa, as everywhere else, is the basic unit of society. Every male and female marries at the proper age. Every woman is required and expects to perform her part of the function of motherhood—to do her share in continuing the human race.[33]

He amplifies this point:

The foundation of the African Family is plural marriage and, contrary to the general opinion, this marriage rests upon the will of the woman, and this will operates to protect from abuse the functional work of the sex, and to provide that all women shall share normally in this work with a view to healthy posterity and an unfailing supply of population.

It is less a matter of sentiment, of feeling, of emotion, than of duty, of patriotism. Compulsory spinsterhood is unknown under the African system. That is a creation of the West. Its existence here is abnormal, anticlimactic, and considered a monstrosity. . . and is destined, wherever it seems to exist in practice, to disappear as an unscientific interference of good meaning foreign philanthropists with the natural conditions of the country.[34]

Blyden’s discussion is predicated on an implicit contrast between Africa and the West, one marked by the two italicized terms: “normally” and “That.” African women participate “normally” in “the functional work of the sex.” Through this “normally” Blyden critiques colonial works that claimed African women pursued nonfunctional types of sex. As a native of the West Indies and a devoted anglophile, Blyden would, no doubt, have been aware of Edward Long’s claim that African women were as “libidinous and shameless as monkies and baboons,” and their “hot temperament” gave “probability to the charge of their admitting these animals frequently to their embrace.”[35] Against these charges of wayward libidos, Blyden describes African women as privileging “motherhood” above all else, thus tying gendered and racial normativity to hetero-reproduction. Even though Blyden discusses hetero-reproduction as a “duty,” he emphasizes that women choose to fulfill this duty: “marriage rests upon the will of the woman.”[36] Women may not be able to choose whether or not they will marry—that is a duty—but, in Blyden’s account, they can choose who they will marry, and thus make duty less onerous. And since all women participate in this duty to marry and reproduce, no single woman feels unduly burdened. Blyden’s emphasis on women also recognizes that African women had borne a disproportionate share of racist representation as visible embodiments of, contradictorily, lack and excess, hyper- and hypotrophied bodies. As with other black diasporic writers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Blyden offers alternative frames through which to consider African women’s practices.

More than simply a defense of African life, African Life and Customs critiques European modernity for its failures, which manifest at the level of intimate life. Echoing the alarmist rhetoric that erupted because of white women’s emergence into full participation in urban modernity—as single, unmarried, engaged in sex work—Blyden excoriates the West’s failures, while arguing, “Under the African marriage system . . . [t]here are no ‘women of the under world,’ no ‘slaves of the abyss.’ Every woman is above ground protected and sheltered.”[37] “African marriage system” describes an ahistorical ideal by this point in history. By 1908, urbanized women in Africa engaged in trade and sex work, redefining their social and economic landscapes. Blyden’s implicit contrast, then, is not only between a decadent West and an innocent Africa, but also between a pre-urban and an urbanizing Africa. He rails against the deracinating effects of urban modernity that threatened an Africanness he defined as hetero-reproductive.

In Blyden’s estimation, Christian-advocated monogamy was a failed system; African polygamy solved real problems. He writes, “[W]e are told by English periodicals that there are a little over five millions of unmarried women in Great Britain and the number is increasing. It is stated also that in the City of London alone there are 80,000 professional outcasts.”[38] A slippery logic of innuendo coats these statements: unmarried women have limited options; urban spaces present themselves as places with many options; unmarried women choose to go to urban spaces to pursue options; on arriving there, they change from being “unmarried women” to “professional outcasts.” Urbanization creates professional outcasts. “Professional outcasts” elides sex workers and career women, marking both as intimate failures. In contrast, Blyden claims that Africa has no such problems: “We are quite sure that there are not so many unmarried women in the whole of Africa between the Atlantic and the Red Sea and from the Cape to the Mediterranean.”[39] These expansive geographies suture Africa as a space held together by shared intimate practices.

Yet, African intimate practices are not simply natural; they are actively cultivated. Blyden argues they arise from centuries of experimentation. Africa “solved the marriage question for herself thousands of years ago. It has needed no revision and no amendment, because founded upon the law of Nature and not upon the dictum of any ecclesiastical hierarchy.”[40] While the “law of Nature” provides a foundation, it must also be complemented by a pedagogy of intimacy: “[T]here is among Africans a regular process of education for male and female, for a period of at least three years, to prepare them for the [intimate] life they are to follow, and the [marriage] system under which they are to live.”[41] If Afro-diasporic populations fail at intimacy, as so many Euro-American observers suggested from at least the eighteenth century, then that failure results from the deracination of diaspora, and indicates nothing inherent about African nature. In fact, complaints about black people’s hypersexuality in the archives of colonial modernity register European, not African, failing. Blyden’s claim about intimate pedagogy also rebukes the civilizing mission’s pretension to instruct Africans in domestic and intimate matters. Such education, he insists, leads to African degeneration. At each point, Blyden emphasizes that Africans train themselves to be appropriately gendered and socialized; that their lives are structured by adhering to prolonged periods of training; that this training is learned from nature and the natural world, and is not a foreign imposition; and that if any observers want to know anything about Africans, then they should observe intimate life and intimate practices above all else.

For Blyden, one cannot claim an authentic African or Afro-diasporic identity without practicing appropriate heterosexual intimacies. Indeed, one cannot be recognized as legibly African or Afro-diasporic without embedding oneself within a heterosexual matrix. Far from being idiosyncratic, this yoking of married, reproductive heterosexuality to legibility is central to contemporary African philosophy. Kenyan-born ethnophilosopher John Mbiti codified the relationship between the genealogical imperative and social legibility in Introduction to African Religion, first published in 1975. “Marriage,” Mbiti writes, “fulfills the obligation, the duty and the custom that every normal person should get married and bear children. . . . Failure to get married is like committing a crime against traditional beliefs and practices.” Marriage, adds Mbiti, provides “completeness”: “Marriage is the one experience without which a person is not considered to be complete, ‘perfect’, and truly a man or a woman. It makes a person really ‘somebody’. It is part of the definition of who a person is according to African views about man. Without marriage, a person is only a human being minus.”[42] Marriage confers proper gender, and proper gender confers full humanity. As Mbiti’s argument proceeds, he raises the stakes: not only does heterosexual marriage satisfy “duty” and “custom” and “tradition,” in which case those who claim to be modern can safely disavow marriage; but it also certifies one as “truly a man or a woman,” as a “human.” Mbiti’s argument welds the genealogical imperative to gendered and human legibility, the grounds from which one can be recognized as human. Along similar lines, Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu, drawing on Akan culture, writes,

Being married with children well raised is part of the necessary conditions for personhood in the normative sense. A non-marrying, non-procreative person, however normal otherwise—not to talk of a Casanova equivalent—can permanently forget any prospect of this type of recognition in traditional Akan society. The only conceivable exceptions will be ones based on the noblest of alternative life commitments.[43]

Personhood, Nigerian philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti writes, “is the sort of thing which has to be achieved, the sort of thing at which individuals could fail.”[44] Marriage and reproduction are essential processes in achieving personhood. I offer this very brief survey of contemporary African philosophy to indicate the central role intimate relations play in African philosophies of personhood. At the same time, some of the most influential African philosophers of personhood either live and work in North America or Europe and publish primarily in North America and Europe.[45] Consequently, their works are more properly framed as African and Afro-diasporic. From Blyden through Mbiti, Wiredu, and Menkiti, African and Afro-diasporic scholars have wedded a genealogical imperative to an ethnographic imagination, producing black legibility—personhood—through this wedding.

Hybridity

Contesting a model that frames legibility through hetero-kinship, recent black diaspora scholarship has argued for more capacious models of blackness. Rinaldo Walcott provocatively argues, “[T]he diaspora by its very nature, its circumstances, is queer,” adding, “the territories and perambulations of diaspora circuits, identifications, and desires are queer in their making and their expressions.”[46] However, accepting the proposition that diaspora “is” queer risks glossing over multiple, conflicting histories of intimate discipline and dissent. How, exactly, does queering happen in the black diaspora? As I have already argued, the genealogical imperative in black diasporic scholarship arrests the deracinating, queer act of dissemination in the term “diaspora,” which refers to scattering or sowing, by foregrounding insemination and fertilization as the inevitable end-point. Restoring the queer potential of diaspora requires making visible the normalizing, genealogical imperatives in current scholarship on the diaspora. To understand the stakes of disrupting diaspora’s genealogical imperative, this section examines the concept of hybridity, which has become central to contemporary black diaspora studies. Hybridity is most often used to contest notions of racial and ethnic purity and, in a more extended conceptual vein, to contest all ideas of purity that police human and cultural diversity. Yet, I worry that the good the term does in fighting against violent exclusions depends on unexamined notions of gender and sexuality. I trace a brief genealogy of the term’s migration from black British studies to the United States, to highlight a moment of what Brent Edwards might describe as the problem of translation across geohistories.[47] In tracing this history, I demonstrate the tenacious hold of the genealogical imperative on black diaspora scholarship, a hold that, I will argue, attempts to manage geohistorical disruption by privileging intimate normativity.

Within literary and cultural studies, the most prominent model of the black diaspora stems from the black British school of thinkers, which includes Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer, Hazel Carby, and Paul Gilroy. These scholars sought to challenge the too-easy suture between race and nation that imagined Britain as a white nation. Against models of racial and ethnic purity, these thinkers embraced the possibilities of post-identitarian models of affiliation. The migration of these scholars and their thinking to the U.S. academy, and their encounters with African American studies, broadened their critiques of ethno-racial essentialisms. Thus, Carby’s contribution to the 1985 special issue of Critical Inquiry, “Race, Writing, and Difference,” shifted the terrain of black feminist critique from nation to empire, embedding a genealogy of black feminist theorizing within a history of colonialism.[48] Her Reconstructing Womanhood (1987) critiqued a U.S. black feminism that rooted itself in the South. Invoking a diasporic critique, she urged black feminists to look beyond a race-nation suture grounded in southern rurality, and encouraged them to consider the varieties of blackness produced in urban spaces by practices of migration and immigration.

The urban promiscuities enabled by migration and immigration, through histories of slavery and colonialism, and in the postcolonial and postslavery moment in Britain, subtended Hall’s theorization of blackness and diaspora. In “New Ethnicities,” Hall emphasizes that in Britain, “the term ‘black’ was coined” to describe a “common experience of racism and marginalization” and to “provide the organizing category of a new politics of resistance, among groups and communities with, in fact, very different histories, traditions, and ethnic identities.”[49] Its emergence as a category of organization was “rooted in the politics of anti-racism and the post-war black experience in Britain.”[50] Framed as a strategy of affiliation rather than as evidence of filiation, that is, as a political category rather than a genealogical one based on blood descent and phenotype, “black” could enable a politics that recognized the weight assumed by blackness under colonial modernity as a master signifier of negation. Embracing “black” as a category also recognized, and contested, the color hierarchies across Africa and Afro-diaspora that distinguished between “colored” and “black,” promising social mobility to those who rejected blackness. As Hall emphasizes, “black” was used to “build forms of solidarity and identification which make common struggle and resistance possible but without suppressing the real heterogeneity of interests and identities.”[51] At a crucial moment in “New Ethnicities,” Hall points to the queer implications of his work: “a great deal of black politics . . . has been predicated on the assumption that the categories of gender and sexuality would stay the same and remain fixed and secured.”[52] This brief moment further anchors Hall’s emphasis that “black” is not a hetero-reproductive category of sameness, but a strategic coalition of diverse interests.

This framework of blackness as spatially constructed through postwar immigration and politically framed as an antiracist strategy of coalition grounds Hall’s concept of diaspora. Toward the end of “New Ethnicities,” Hall describes “the black experience as a diaspora experience,” turning toward languages of cultural mixing: “the process of unsettling, recombination, hybridization, and ‘cut-and-mix’—in short the process of cultural diaspora-ization.”[53] Metaphors of rupture and deracination (“unsettling”) sit uneasily alongside those of biogenetic manipulation (“recombination,” “hybridization”), as these, cumulatively, are routed through musical styles of “cut-and-mix.” In moving among these metaphors drawn from spatiality, biogenetics, and musical technology, Hall figures hybridity as endlessly manipulable at multiple levels, from the social and the cultural, to the biological and the psychic, to the mechanical and the technological. It is precisely because hybridity functions at so many levels that it can be a useful concept.

When taken up in the United States, Hall’s invocation of hybridity assumes a biohistorical life as a way to think about the afterlife of slavery’s one-drop rule. As Tavia Nyong’o has argued, “hybridity” became a fetish that challenged U.S. racial logics by emphasizing that racial purity was a fiction.[54] Hybridity was assumed to solve the problem of race and racism because it insisted that race was a fiction that could not withstand close historical and biological scrutiny. Within the U.S. academy, hybridity loses the complex interaction among the spatial, the biogenetic, and the technological, and is restricted to the biogenetic: the black British turn to culture, envisioned as a way beyond the biohistorical, is reembedded within the biohistorical in the U.S. academy. The haunting of hetero-reproduction within black British thinking on hybridity assumes a more fleshly configuration as that thought is taken up in the United States.

This cultural and biohistorical problematic finds its apogee in Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. I turn to Gilroy’s book because since its publication in 1993, it has become foundational to theorizations of blackness, whether these are located at the scale of the nation, the region, or the transnational. More explicitly than any of the other black British contingent, Gilroy stages his work as an encounter between black British (or “black European”) and U.S. models of racialization; The Black Atlantic attempts to metonymize black British experiences of immigration to consider transnational racialization. Gilroy argues that intellectual, cultural, and social forms of hybridity can unsettle exclusionary and dangerous forms of ethnonationalism. Positioning himself as against frames that align race with culture and privilege the nation as the site of racialized expression, he urges, instead, “the theorization of creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity,” terms that name “the processes of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse and avoid capture by its agents.”[55] These terms, however, are “rather unsatisfactory”: as biogenetic metaphors of mixing, they risk reproducing a “racial essentialism” grounded in heteropatriarchal norms.[56] Gilroy attempts to manage this risk by turning to music as a metaphor for how black Atlantic interactions can transcend the race-culture suture, on the one hand, and heteropatriarchal norms, on the other.

Gilroy’s turn to music follows a metaleptic logic: black expressive culture, he argues, does not confirm a pregiven black identity but actively constitutes and contests ideas of blackness. Black cultural expression becomes the grounds for a new anti-essentialist black ontology: “The syncretic complexity of black expressive cultures alone supplies powerful reasons for resisting the idea that an untouched, pristine Africanity resides inside these forms, working a powerful magic of alterity in order to trigger repeatedly the perception of absolute identity.”[57] In privileging music, Gilroy seems to be about as far away from biology as possible, and certainly nowhere near the realm of the genealogical imperative. Music, however, as he admits, can also be used to ground racial authenticity. Forms such as the spirituals, folk songs, the blues, ska, reggae, and rap can be adduced as expressing blackness. He notes, for instance, that Zora Neale Hurston distinguished between the inauthentic spirituals performed by the Fisk University Singers and real spirituals.[58] Against this policing of black expression, Gilroy privileges “the globalisation of vernacular forms.”[59] As forms travel and are adapted across multiple spaces—think of U.S. jazz forms being adapted by Nigerian highlife musicians, for instance—music no longer suggests an easily locatable origin, but is, instead, a site of endless remixing and reinvention.[60]

As compelling as I find Gilroy’s use of music to reframe black collectivity, I find myself stuck at the banal fact of embodiment: quotidian practices of crossing the street, crossing international borders, the collection of census and biometric data, the multiple ways that black embodiment is sedimented in everyday life, within and across nations.[61] Cultural forms can travel and be remixed in ways that bodies cannot. Here, I’m not simply insisting on the stubborn “stuff ” of embodiment, but also on the powerful labor of ideology. After all, the historical fact of racial mixing and blending does little to mitigate the ideological labor of racial policing.[62]

Moreover, I remain unconvinced that critiques of racial logics of collectivity necessarily address intimate arrangements of collectivity. One can be against race while defending the salvific power of reproductive heterosexuality. Indeed, hybridity promises to complicate the problem of race, but risks privileging reproductive heteronormativity. Collectivity, in this instance, is forged on the grounds of what Audre Lorde terms “heterocetera”: an embedding within real and fictive hetero-kinship lineages.[63] Connectedness is not simply an abstraction or metaphor, but an affirmation of shared intimate values. Hybridity and connection turn on the genealogical tree.

“Thinghood”

Yet the branching of a family tree is not the only way to envision diaspora, and I turn to theorists of thinghood to suggest a posthybridity model for envisioning the black diaspora and framing black diasporic queerness. Hortense Spillers’s classic “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” offers another genealogy for the queerness of the black diaspora. Spillers theorizes the Middle Passage as a subject-obliterating, thing-making project. In doing so, she takes on the challenge of contemplating what Aimé Césaire termed “thingification.”[64] This urge to humanize enslaved Africans, she contends, is motivated by our inability to imagine the thing-making project of slavery, which is “unimaginable from this distance”; but to insist on the enslaved African’s humanity risks avoiding the problem of the slave as commodity. How might a queer diaspora that begins from thing-making function?

Spillers provides a tantalizing glimpse of this (im)possibility:

[The New World] order, with its sequence written in blood, represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile. First of all, their New World, diasporic flight marked a theft of the body—a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire. Under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific. But this body, at least from the point of view of the captive community, focuses a private and particular space, at which point of convergence, biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes join. This profound intimacy of interlocking detail, is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses: 1) the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; 2) at the same time—in stunning contradiction—the captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor; 3) in this absence from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of “otherness”; 4) as a category of “otherness,” the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general “powerlessness,” resonating through various centers of human and social meaning.[65]

In positing the severing “of the body” from “active desire” Spillers strips away a foundation of mainstream queer studies: the role of desire, whether that be same-sex desire or desire for gender or desire for fetish-sex or aimless, polymorphous desire. It is not that one’s desire is criminalized or pathologized; desire itself becomes impossible in the brutal transition of thing-making.

What did it mean for enslaved Africans to “lose . . . gender difference”? Building on Spillers, C. Riley Snorton has recently argued that “captive flesh figures a critical genealogy for modern transness, as chattel persons gave rise to an understanding of gender as mutable, and as an amendable form of being.”[66] As compelling as I find Snorton’s claim, I worry about how “modern” works in this passage. What precedes the modern in this account? To be more specific, what happens to the understandings of embodiment and sociality practiced by enslaved Africans? Are they the “immutable” transformed by and into the “modern”? In The Invention of Women, Nigerian scholar Oyèrónkẹ ́ Oyěwùmí critiqued the “age-old somatocentricity in Western thought,” arguing that it could not be applied to Yorùbá society.[67] She explains,

I came to realize that the fundamental category “woman”—which is foundational in Western gender discourses—simply did not exist in Yorùbáland prior to its sustained contact with the West. There was no such preexisting group characterized by shared interests, desires, or social position. The cultural logic of Western social categories is based on an ideology of biological determinism: the conception that biology provides the rationale for the organization of the social world. Thus, this cultural logic is actually a “bio-logic.” Social categories like “woman” are based on body-type and are elaborated in relation to and in opposition to another category: man; the presence or absence of certain organs determine social position.[68]

Oyěwùmí is critiquing the entire framework that subtends the constructionist critique of essentialism: the claim that gender is socially constructed carries little force for African communities that already understood gender as ritually conferred. What understandings and practices of gender did enslaved Africans have? Might focusing on gender rather than kinship, as Mintz and Price do, be more useful for those of us looking for queer and trans genealogies? One crude way to track these genealogies would be through carefully reading histories of the major ethnic groups of enslaved Africans, but I worry that such a method, moving through at least four hundred years across diverse groups, risks losing the dynamic ways gender is understood and practiced. Simply, a lot changes over centuries.

Part of my concern is that African and Afro-diasporic scholars of sex and gender rarely consider African gendering frameworks prior to colonialism as conceptually rich ways of thinking through embodiment and sociality.[69] Rituals that transition toddlers to children and those children to older children and those older children to young adults and those young adults to older adults, and so on, are more than premodern, ethnohistorical curiosities. Instead, they register how geohistorical change impresses itself on social relations and practices. Knowing, for instance, that one ethnic group adopted a form of gendering from another—the Kikuyu, for example adopted ritual circumcision from the Maasai, to mark the transition from sexually inactive older child to sexually available young adult—tells us something significant about how ideas of embodiment and gender change as different African groups encounter and interact with each other. If we take African gendering practices as theoretically significant, what might become possible in thinking through African and Afro-diasporic queer and trans politics? While the geohistorical scope of my archive does not permit a full reckoning with these provocations, I mention them here to indicate the need for conceptual conversations between African and Afro-diasporic scholars engaged in tracking queer and trans genealogies.

If we consider the loss of African gendering practices and the social legibility they conferred, then Spillers’s argument about the ungendering work of slave ship ledgers provides different possibilities for trans and queer genealogies and theories. Enslaved Africans who had lost social legibility—the rituals and practices and communities that recognized social, economic, cultural, and embodied status—were forced to forge new forms of legibility. Omise’eke Tinsley writes, “[C]aptive African women created erotic bonds with other women in the sex-segregated holds, and captive African men created bonds with other men. In so doing, they resisted the commodification of their bought and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for their co-occupants on these ships.”[70] I want to believe this account of erotic resistance, but I am arrested by the image with which this introduction starts, of bodies grating against each other and the hold of the ship, of the various sensations of attrition and pleasure, and of how bodies and forms of social legibility—including gender— were unmade and remade. What kind of social legibilities were forged as those across different age groups and ritual status engaged each other? To amend Spillers’s question, what forms of difference were lost and what forms of difference emerged through the frottage of the hold? And how might “thinghood” name not simply how the slave ledgers produced enslaved Africans, but also how enslaved Africans experienced themselves, as they tried to process lost social legibilities while trying to create new ones?

But the story becomes even more complicated, for the same process that produces the slave as “thing” simultaneously inflects the slave’s thingness with “sensuality.” Although Spillers elaborates a four-stage process that seems to proceed in a linear fashion, it might be more useful to understand this step-making as a strategic fiction that attempts to render partial, recursive, fractured, and synchronous stages: the “captive body” is at once as densely saturated with the power to elicit “sensuality” as it is excluded by its thingness from gaining agency through that sensuality. If, as a thought experiment, one takes Spillers’s sequence in a linear fashion, then one ends up with a move from a “captive body,” severed from its “active desire,” which acts as a “thing,” and through that process of thingification, becomes a “captive sexuality.” Sexuality, therefore, would not name the place of subjectification, as it has in queer studies. Instead, it would name theft and commodification, thing-making and gender-undifferentiation. The queerness of the black diaspora, then, would stem from an effort to describe this figuration, which is unaccounted for in sexology’s archives: the thing “severed” from its “active desire.”

Within colonial modernity, blackness figures as perverse sexuality, as its potential and realization. What Spillers marks as “captured sexualities” hints at the taxonomic logic that drives sexology’s will to know and ability to organize itself. If, as Foucault demonstrates, sexology is a strategy for cataloguing and managing sexual, that is, human, difference, its formal strategy can be aligned with, if not derived from, the slave catalogues that recorded color, weight, and size, not merely managing human cargo, but actively transforming humans into commodities. It is precisely the “captured sexualities” of the “thing” of “blackness” that haunts sexology, as its necessary underside, as its Africanist presence. Yet, the thinghood of blackness also renders it difficult to apprehend within a genealogy that takes sexuality as subjectifying. Here, I am marking a deep cleavage between black diaspora studies and queer studies: sexuality represents a vexed meeting ground, the place where a blackness haunted by thinghood encounters a nonblackness haunted by subjectification. We are not on shared ground.

Frottage will name this encounter between queer studies and black diaspora studies, this persistent meeting, this lingering over, this site of stimulation and frustration. But I will swerve from the too-familiar site of the interracial to focus on the intra-racial, swerve to complicate the intimacy suggested by the definite article of “the” black diaspora. Against genealogical models that invoke the definite article to claim fictive kinship grounded in a hetero-reproductive imagination, I explore the possibility of using frottage as an uneven relationship of proximity, a persistent, recurring meeting of bodies in space, an attempt to forge aesthetics and culture and politics and history from the shared “capture” of blackness.

Movement

Frottage does not focus on works primarily concerned with explicitly homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, or transgender figures. Instead, as I shift across multiple geohistories and genres, I consider a range of practices that queer different figures: the process of thingification in slave histories; the loss of erotic diversity in colonial spaces; ethno-nationalist discourses in Kenyan ethnography; and labor and punishment in Jamaican histories. Tracking the black diaspora as dispersal and dissonant intimacy, Frottage moves from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), written in France, and drawing from residence in Martinique and Algeria; to René Maran’s ethnographic novel Batouala (1921), written and set in Central Africa and published in France; to Jomo Kenyatta’s ethnography Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (1938), set in Kenya and written in London; and finally to Claude McKay’s Jamaica represented in the poetry collection Constab Ballads (1911), written in Jamaica and published in London, and the novel Banana Bottom (1933), written in Morocco and published in the United States. This a-chronological movement pushes against the linear, genealogical logics followed by mainstream black diaspora work. I juxtapose texts traditionally considered diasporic—Maran’s and Fanon’s—with those considered too local to be diasporic—McKay’s and Kenyatta’s—to expand diaspora’s geohistories.

Each figure I consider is foundational in some way, anchoring an intervention into a field or discipline, asking what happens to that field or discipline when it must consider black being. I start with Fanon because his work poses the question of black being so persistently, especially for those of us who work at the seams of black studies, black diaspora studies, African studies, and postcolonial studies. I follow his antimethod, to the extent that an antimethod can be followed, to find resources to imagine the queer and trans figures he could not imagine. From Fanon, I move to Maran to track how Afro-diaspora and Africa can imagine and encounter each other on the grounds of the erotic, grounds that Fanon did not know how to imagine. The last two chapters, on Kenyatta and McKay, are more densely historical, demonstrating how colonial figures imagined freedom, and how the intimate and the erotic were central to those imaginations. Instead of pursuing explicitly queer or trans figures, each chapter mines the resources of the erotic to imagine freedom.

In the decades that bracket this book, from 1900 to 1960, representations of and debates about black diasporic intimacy intensified within national and transnational contexts. The literary sites of such representations include Pauline Hopkins’s incestuous romance Of One Blood (1903); Casely Hayford’s pan-African romance Ethiopia Unbound (1911); the lesbian poetries of Angelina Weld Grimké and Gladys Casely-Hayford; the queer poetics of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Richard Bruce Nugent; the vagabond erotics of Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929); the radical feminisms of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929); the ethnographic romance of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); the queer Négritude of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1947) juxtaposed against the heteronormative erotics of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s poetry; the charged interracial antagonisms of Mayotte Capécia’s Je Suis Martiniquaise (1948); the infanticidal imagination of Amos Tutuola’s Palm Wine Drinkard (1952); and the immigrant promiscuities of Samuel Selvon’s Lonely Londoners (1956). I mark these sites to indicate the scope and richness of this temporal period, and to suggest possibilities for further scholarship. I can do no better than to paraphrase Cedric Robinson: it is not my purpose to exhaust this subject, only to suggest that it is there.[71]

I invite you to imagine with me.


 

Notes

[1] Haley, Roots, 150.

[2] See Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies.

[3] Haley, Roots, 179.

[4] For recent examples, see Foster, Love and Marriage and Hunter, Bound in Wedlock.

[5] Robinson, Black Marxism, 113.

[6] Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 69.

[7] McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” 16–17.

[8] See Weheliye, Habeas Viscus.

[9] Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 6.

[10] I take this language of “writing back” and my critique of it from postcolonial studies. I am especially grateful to James Hodapp, whose dissertation critiquing the “writing back” paradigm in African studies helped to shape my thinking.

[11] Morrison, Playing in the Dark.

[12] Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 150–51.

[13] On speculation as a critical method, see Kazanjian, “Scenes of Speculation.” 

[14] Lewis, “To Turn as on a Pivot.”

[15] Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 6, 7.

[16] See Herskovitz, “The Negro in the New World” and Frazier, “The Negro Slave Family.”

[17] Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 548.

[18] See Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue; Hanhardt, Safe Space; Luibhéid, Entry Denied; and Reddy, Freedom with Violence.

[19] Crummell, “The Race-Problem in America,” 167, emphasis in original.

[20] Mintz and Price, Birth of African-American Culture, 65.

[21] Mintz and Price, Birth of African-American Culture, 66.

[22] Mintz and Price, Birth of African-American Culture, 66, emphasis in original.

[23] Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 548.

[24] Nzegwu, Family Matters, 5.

[25] Povinelli, “Notes on Gridlock,” 215.

[26] Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 106, emphasis in original.

[27] Okpewho, “Introduction,” The New African Diaspora, xi, xiv.

[28] I thank Sangeeta Ray for this formulation.

[29] Edwards, “Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora.” 

[30] Blyden, African Life and Customs, n.p. 

[31] A vibrant, broadly conceived newspaper culture existed in the nineteenth century: black people across Africa and Afro-diaspora were reading and responding to each other primarily through newspapers. But I would argue that it is only in the twentieth century, as different groups assemble in Paris and London and Accra and Kampala and Dar es Salaam, that we truly see richly representative exchanges.

[32] I take this account from Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden

[33] Blyden, African Life and Customs, 10.

[34] Blyden, African Life and Customs, 11, emphasis in original.

[35] Long, History of Jamaica, 3: 383.

[36] Duty has a strong presence in contemporary African philosophy. For instance, Nigerian philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti writes, “African societies tend to be organized around the requirements of duty while Western societies tend to be organized around the postulation of individual rights” (“Person and Community,” 182). 

[37] Blyden, African Life and Customs, 24. On urban women in European modernity, see Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight and Showalter, Sexual Anarchy.

[38] Blyden, African Life and Customs, 24–25. 

[39] Blyden, African Life and Customs, 25. 

[40] Blyden, African Life and Customs, 21. 

[41] Blyden, African Life and Customs, 13, emphasis in original. 

[42] Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion, 110. 

[43] Wiredu, “The Moral Foundations of an African Culture,” 205. 

[44] Menkiti, “On the Normative Conception of a Person,” 326. 

[45] For instance, Menkiti was born in Nigeria, completed his BA (Pomona) through PhD (Harvard) in the United States, and, until his retirement, was on faculty at Wellesley College. Born in Ghana, Kwasi Wiredu was educated in Ghana (University of Ghana, Legon) and England (Oxford), taught at the University of Ghana for twenty-three years, and then from 1987, taught at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Perhaps the most famous African philosophers in the United States, Valentin Mudimbe and Kwame Appiah, are associated with Duke and Princeton, respectively. Among African women philosophers, Nkiru Nzegwu is at SUNY Binghamton and Oyèrónkẹ ́ Oyěwùmí is at SUNY Stony Brook. 

[46] Walcott, “Outside in Black Studies,” 97. 

[47] See Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora

[48] See Carby, “‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era.’” 

[49] Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 441. 

[50] Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 441. 

[51] Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 444. 

[52] Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 445. 

[53] Hall, New Ethnicities,” 447. 

[54] See Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz. 

[55] Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 2. 

[56] Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 2, 99, 85, 194. 

[57] Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 101. 

[58] Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 91–92. 

[59] Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 101. 

[60] For examples of this influence, see Jaji, Africa in Stereo and Ntarangwi, East African Hip Hop. 

[61] See Browne, Dark Matters

[62] For a powerful argument on this, see Nunes, Cannibal Democracy

[63] Lorde, Sister Outsider, 22. 

[64] Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 42. 

[65] Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67, emphasis in original. 

[66] Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 57. 

[67] Oyěwùmí, Invention of Women, ix. 

[68] Oyěwùmí, Invention of Women, ix–x. 

[69] For an extraordinary exception, see Musangi, “Homing with My Mother.” 

[70] Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic,” 192, emphasis in original. 

[71] Robinson ends his preface to the second edition of Black Marxisim: “In short, as a scholar, it was never my intention to exhaust the subject, only to suggest that it was there” (xxxii). 

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Colloquy

Black and Brown Intimacies Across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean

European exploitation desires the black slave, the Chinese coolie, and the Indian laborer for the same ends and the same purposes.”

W. E. B. Du Bois “The Clash of Color: Indians and American Negroes.” The Aryan Path 1936 (2005).

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The rights of a coolie in California, in Peru, in Jamaica, in Trinidad, and on board the vessels bearing them to these countries are scarcely more guarded than were those of the Negro slaves brought to our shores a century ago.”

Frederick Douglass, “Cheap Labor.” Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 4, Reconstruction and After, ed. Philip Foner (New York: International, 1955).

From pre-colonial Indian Ocean trade relations to postcolonial formations such as the Non-Aligned movement, from intimacies forged through the related colonial displacements of enslavement and indenture to contemporary mercantile migrations as part of neoliberal globalized orders, Africa and Asia have never been far apart. In their relation, multiple global narratives unfold. Reading Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia alongside each other reveals polycentric and multivalent histories.

Through an engagement with histories of colonialism, enslavement, indenture, and mercantile migration, shared movements and imaginations of decolonization, this colloquy examines how studying Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean alongside each other brings to the fore understandings and grapplings with race and ethnicity that are not always commensurate with or addressed by Euro-US frameworks. Through the work of scholars and artists who engage with Afro-Asian relations through political, religious, performance, linguistic, culinary and other forms, the colloquy draws our attention to the specificities of region, to structuring hierarchies of ethnic, linguistic, and caste affiliations, and invites us to engage with more granular histories of cross-ethnic and cross-racial relation, filled with the messy collision of connections and antagonisms, frictions and solidarities.  

Caribbean studies and Atlantic and Indian Ocean studies have developed nuanced and complex frameworks to study the dense racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural encounters and mixing in locations across the Francophone, Anglophone, and Dutch Caribbean as well as along the Swahili coast, and islands such as Mauritius, Madagascar, Zanzibar, and Réunion, among many others. Given disciplinary boundaries and silos, it is unfortunately rare for these frameworks to be studied together, so we might appreciate the rich encounters between a range of creole cultures without flattening continents and regions or only considering nation-state histories and trajectories.

In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe recommends we focus on “the convergence of asymmetries rather than the imperatives of identity,” and, in an essay titled, “History Hesitant,” she calls for “retir[ing] the convention of comparison” to think differently “about the important asymmetries of contact, encounter, convergence, and solidarity.” Édouard Glissant sees collisions between cultures as productive of Relation, where in the multiplicity and diversity of beings in Relation, “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.” Our colloquy attends to histories of inter-ethnic and -racial conflict, and political and economic dominance and marginalization, which alert us to the fractious realities of these relations, and equally to political, artistic and other collaborations that attest to coalitional solidarity and sensuous intimacies.

By engaging with work that demonstrates historical depth, theoretical rigor, aesthetic experimentation, and radical political imaginations, this colloquy showcases studies of cross-racial intimacies, conceived as complex entanglements of the many affects generated by proximity. Transoceanic Black and Brown intimacy is under-researched and under-represented in scholarship on race and ethnicity. Our colloquy features work firmly grounded and invested in the people, ecologies, and histories that oceanic routes brought into contact, and the enduring legacies of those encounters.

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