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Black Body
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Migrating the
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Migrating the
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The African Diaspora
and Visual Culture
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Edited by Leigh R aiford and
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Heike R aphael-Hernandez
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Frontispiece: JohnJennings, Dark Places, 2014, poster commissioned for the Migrating
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the Black Body symposium, VW Foundation, Hannover, Germany, September 2014.
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any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,
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or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.
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www.washington.edu/uwpress
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Cataloging information is on file with the Library of Congress.
ISBN (hardcover) 978-0-295-99956-2
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ISBN (paperback) 978-0-295-99957-9
ISBN (ebook) 978-0-295-99958-6
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The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for
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Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.481984.
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Contents
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Acknowledgments ix
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Introduction
Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-Hernandez 3
Carsten Junker 13
2. Russian Blackamoors:
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7. The Here and Now of Eslanda Robesons African Journey
Leigh Raiford 134
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8. Black and Cuba: An Interview with Filmmaker Robin J. Hayes
Robin J. Hayes and Julia Roth 153
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9. Return to Which Roots? Interracial Documemoirs by Macky Alston,
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Eliaichi Kimaro, and Mo Asumang
Cedric Essi 170
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10. Dreaming Diasporas
Cheryl Finley185
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Part 3. Differently Black
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11. Differently Black: The Fourth Great Migration and Black Catholic
Saints in Ramin Bahranis Goodbye Solo and Jim Sheridans In America
Charles I. Nero 207
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14. Of Plastic Ducks and Cockle Pickers: African Atlantic Artists and
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17. The Black Body as Photographic Image:
Video Light in Postcolonial Jamaica
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Krista Thompson 306
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18. The Not-Yet Justice League: Fantasy, Redress, and Transatlantic
Black History on the Comic Book Page
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Darieck Scott 329
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List of Contributors 349
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Index 359
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This collection took shape in a four-day symposium marked by intellectual
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rigor and generosity, by risk-taking and community building. We would
like to thank the Volkswagen Foundation for this opportunity that pro-
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vided us with the chance to develop our ideas in person in the beautiful
surroundings of the castle of Herrenhausen in Hannover, Germany; we
are especially grateful to Cornelia Soetbeer and Margot Jckel. A number
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of symposium participants, whose written work is not represented here,
were wonderful interlocutors: Thank you, Tina Campt, Nana Adusei-Poku,
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Courtney Baker, Erica James, Tobe Levin, Alanna Lockward, Amna Malik,
Sylvester Ogbechie, Ilka Saal, Sema Kara, and Cathy Covell Waegner. A
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special thanks goes to John Jennings for his magnificent poster design.
As the symposium became book, we were fortunate to work with
Larin McLaughlin, Whitney Johnson, Jacqueline Volin, Caroline Knapp,
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and the attentive and highly professional staff at the University of Wash-
ington Press. We are grateful as well to the anonymous reviewers for their
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stages. Catrin Gersdorf, Eva Hedrich, and Karin Kernahan at the University
of Wrzburg, Germany deserve a special thank you here. This volume
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would not have made it to the finish line without the yeomans labor of
our marvelous student assistants, Asia Mott of UC-Berkeley and Molina
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Klingler at the University of Wrzburg (hopefully, one day you two will
meet in person).
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Our families had to endure many Skype sessions at odd hours and
family activity times with us showing up late. Yet, their lively participa-
tion in their own ways in the making of the symposium and the book has
enriched our work, and our affectionate thanks go to Michael, Maya,
Maceo, Don, Markus, Jakob, and Jonathan.
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From the start, this project has valued the work of the collective and
collaborative in producing as well as articulating a diasporic intellectual
formation, and worked to recognize the African Diaspora across differ-
enceof academic discipline, of geo-historical identity, and of visual cul-
tural media. Our final thanks go to the authors in this volume who have
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made this a dream journeyjoyous fellow travelers all.
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Introduction
Leigh R aiford and
Heike R aphael-Hernandez
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In Against Race, Paul Gilroy asks, What forms of belonging have been
nurtured by visual cultures?1 Gilroys work in particular has been enor-
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mously influential as a model which understands diaspora as a set of
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transnational connections rooted in conceptualizations of common
racialized experiences and routed through a set of cultural and political
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resources black people draw upon in their struggles against various and
divergent forms of oppression. Diaspora then is an imagined community
that must be forged, constantly made and remade; diaspora not as a priori
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essence but diaspora as labor and practice. Through such practices,
Jacqueline Nassy Brown observes, differently located blacks transcend
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national boundaries, creating a mutually accessible, translatable, and
inspirational political culture that invite[s] universal participation.2 The
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essays in this collection take up these concerns about the making of the
African Diaspora and ask: How have visual forms enacted such a mutually
accessible, translatable, and inspirational political culture? In what ways
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range in their interest in how black bodies and black images travel; how
blackness itself has been and still is forged and remade through diasporic
visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past; and
how visual technologies themselves structure ways of seeing African Dia-
sporic subjects and subjectivity.
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The collection was inspired by the excellent African Diaspora studies
and visual culture studies scholarship of the last two decades. In offering
the essays of this collection now, we work at the intersection of African
Diaspora studies and visual culture studies, interdisciplinary scholarly
fields which have only recently begun to be in conversation. African Dias-
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pora studies offers a theoretical framework that enables a mode of study-
ing and conceptualizing black people globally, a means of interrogating
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the condition of movement, migration, and exile of black peoples forged by
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racial capitalism, New World slavery, imperialism, and colonialism. Within
this rubric, African Diaspora studies also considers the process by which
black peoples understand themselves as linked, imagined through cul-
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ture, cultural production, and political movements. While historians and
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social scientists have attended to the former, cultural anthropologists,
literary scholars, ethnomusicologists, and art historians have made vital
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contributions to the study of culture of/and the African Diaspora.
Elaboration of African Diaspora frameworks in the realm of cultural
production has largely focused on literary, aural/musical forms and, more
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recently, performance. We can think here of the archive from which Brent
Hayes Edwards draws in his work The Practice of Diaspora: Literature,
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Transnationalism, which gathers a wide variety of written texts: fiction,
poetry, journalism, criticism, position papers, circulars, manifestoes,
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tion that black Liverpudlians drew upon African American soul music and
fashion as the diasporic resources through which they articulated their
own identities and identification with the African Diaspora.3
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museum and gallery, traditional art history can be limited in its ability to
discuss power and politics outside the museum space or to consider how
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those cultural practitioners not labeled/ordained artists produce racial
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meaning and contribute to such discussions. This has especially been
the case with art historys treatment of African diasporic art and artists,
which have been largely confined to the margins of the discipline. Visual
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culture studies alongside art histories that have focused on marginalized
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subjects have together expanded the boundaries of traditional art his-
tory, enabling us to consider low or popular cultural forms, like movies,
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television, and the Internet, and significantly, as scholar Sarah Blackwood
has explained, to move the production of meaning away from the soli-
tary artist toward an understanding of the meaning-making collaboration
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between producer, viewer, and object.6
First waves of scholarship exploring black peoples and visual cul-
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ture have recovered histories in which cultural productions served as
instruments of domination.7 More recent scholarship has uncovered
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the fields of African Diaspora studies and visual culture studies together
in productive dialogue. It is also our hope to fill gaps in each of these fields
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Introduction 5
much to be examined in the old routes of the transatlantic slave trade
and European colonization of Africa and the Western Hemisphere whose
legacies remain far-reaching. We feel there remains important work to
be done in revisiting the visual regimes of slavery and the slave trade in
order to better understand the manifestations of these pasts in the many
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reenactments/re-memories in contemporary culture and politics. We also
consider new routes, the new immigration waves caused by neoliberal
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globalization, migrations that have grown stronger and more urgent since
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the 1990s. We claim that contemporary discourses about globalization
must reckon with the historical palimpsest of colonialism and New World
slavery, new forms of African Diaspora at once colliding and colluding
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with old models.
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Equally important, Migrating the Black Body aims to address lacunae
in the study of race in visual culture studies. We recognize the necessity
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of considering the visual cultures of the African Diaspora before the late
twentieth century, where the bulk of scholarship has focused so far. Thus,
several essays examine visual culture and the African Diaspora between
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the eighteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. Additionally, we
take this opportunity to examine the articulation of African Diasporic iden-
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tity in understudied yet compelling visual forms like comic books and pro-
paganda posters, as well as in emergent visual forms like online digital
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If part 1 considers how the black body as image has been forced to
move and made to serve as commodity, as subject, as visual represen-
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tation, part 2, Dreaming Diaspora, examines how black bodies moved
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themselves in efforts to remake the self and in so doing reimagined dias-
pora. When black people travel by choice, what visions of the individual
and collective black body emerge? In these essays we encounter both dia-
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sporic longing, that is the desire for connectivity across the black world,
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as well as diasporic unevenness, what Tina Campt and Deborah Thomas
have elsewhere called the uneven circulation of specific cultural logics
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that are privileged by particular routings of global capital and that pro-
duce important contests over the meanings of blackness, race, Africa,
and diasporic belonging itself.9 While Campt is particularly focused on
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the gendered logics that enable some (usually men) to travel and disable
others (usually women), we are interested here in the paradoxes of black
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mobility: inequitable positionalities via nationality, and economy, produc-
ing movement that is at once freedom and restriction.
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focusing on the globalizing notion of the African Diaspora, which has its
roots in Western colonial history, they bridge history with the present for
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a variety of encounters.
Art reception discourses have often wrestled with the question
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of art craft identities that are at once rooted in the real of specific
places, times, and circumstances, yet also routed through fantasy and
surreal imagination that unlock from those real temporalities. The Ger-
man Marxist philosopher Ernst Blochs concept of the not-yet is help-
ful here. Bloch argues that art that depicts the not-yet by providing its
Introduction 7
recipients with glimpses of the not-yet-become is able to inspire people
to turn their dreams into revolutionary forward dreaming, thus creating
revolutionary willingness and personal agency. Basing his theory on the
dialectical interaction between the subjective and the objective factor
in human history, Bloch argues that an individual is capable not just of
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dreaming about the future, but also of getting actively and individually
involved in social change through the inspiration of art. His theory has
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often also been called the philosophy from below or the philosophy for
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grassroots movements.10
The essays in part 4 pick up the idea of the not-yet as inspiration for
the art recipient in his or her specific locality. In Tavia Nyongos essay,
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Habeas Ficta: Fictive Ethnicity, Affecting Representations, and Slaves
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on Screen, Nyongo introduces the practice of afrofabulation, in which
black subjects [draw] out from the past a myth whose performative
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power was larger than its historical truth or falsity. Drawing on Jose
Muozs concept of disidentification, Nyongo alerts us to the ways that
black subjects attempt to transform cultural logic from within and point
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towards a different modality of existence. Thus the essays in this sec-
tion each suggest spaces beyond simple binaries of resistance and sub-
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mission, refuse to either reify or demonize the past, and at once trouble,
complicate, and embrace mnemonic practices that imagine alternative
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Notes
1 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line
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3 For further details, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Lit-
erature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity
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8 See Tina M. Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African
Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Tina M.
Campt, The Crowded Space of Diaspora: Intercultural Address and the Ten-
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sions of Diasporic Relation, Radical History Review 83 (Spring 2002): 94113;
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Kobena Mercer, ed., Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers: Annotating Arts Histo-
ries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Kobena Mercer, Diaspora Aesthetics
and Visual Culture, in Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Perfor-
mance and Popular Culture, eds. Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Kennell Jackson (Ann
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Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Kobena Mercer, Diaspora Culture
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and the Dialogic Imagination, in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in
Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994); Shawn Michelle Smith,
Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race and Visual Culture
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(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Krista Thompson, A Sidelong
Glance: The Practice of African Diaspora Art History in the United States, Art
Journal 70, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 631; Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black
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Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2002).
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9 Tina M. Campt and Deborah A. Thomas, Editorial: Gendering Diaspora:
Transnational Feminism, Diaspora and its Hegemonies, Feminist Review 90
(2008): xx.
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Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Julie Dash): The Principle of Hope (Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellen Press, 2008): 1332.
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Introduction 9