On 14 December 2007, on what would have been VèVè A. Clark's sixty-third birthday, hundreds of people gathered for her memorial service at UC Berkeley. In the week leading up to the celebration, people from all over the country, including friends, family, colleagues, and students, contributed memories celebrating her life. Poems and testimonies chronicled emotions ranging from triumphant to despairing, yet all affirmed the ase, or energy, she so graciously shared with those around her. As I recall the whirl of activities, one particular element of preparing the program stands out: the accents on proper names and the musical and dance selections had to be properly placed. Drafts were edited, printed, and corrected in order to ensure accuracy. In an Anglophone context, this preoccupation may seem trivial. Yet as her colleagues and former students, we knew that Clark's insistence upon precision was critical to her entire scholarly enterprise; the visual effect of a bodily gesture in a staged or ritual context or the pinpointing of the exact timing of a historical event had tremendous meaning and importance to her. Her precision was a formative aspect of her conceptualization of diaspora literacy, a hallmark of a research methodology and teaching pedagogy grounded in multilingualism, historical contextualization, and respect for the specificity of other cultures. This attention to detail endowed her work as an interdisciplinary scholar of the literature and performance traditions of the African diaspora in the Americas with nuance and complexity.

Central to an understanding of Clark's professional and personal commitments is her concept of informed indigeneity.Footnote ¹ In her influential article “Developing Diaspora Literacy,” reprinted in part in this issue, Clark suggested that acquiring this perspective was “more than a purely intellectual exercise.” Rather, it was a skill that demanded “a knowledge of historical social, cultural, and political development generated by lived and textual experience.”Footnote ² It was a theory and a praxis. Linguistic competence, what she termed an “intimacy with more than one language,” was an essential component of training that also demanded familiarity with context. Much as Clark studied how knowledge had been disseminated across generations through various societal rituals of labor, worship, and celebration, she taught her proximate generations how to read and, equally important, how to listen, see, and participate in the traditions they studied. Diaspora literacy, then, is not simply the ability to access printed materials but also the capacity to understand them, to make informed analyses based on textual, oral, and aural repositories of knowledge acquired through years of study and travel.

Equally important to the skills necessary to attain such literacy are the ways that informed indigeneity could resolve recurring contradictions within the study of the African diaspora. These contradictions are embodied in debates concerning linguistic variance versus cultural unity, the tension between participant versus observer orientations, or the dialectic between the individual scholar and collectively produced art forms. On a textual level, the stakes present in such an approach are evident in Clark's discussion of the artistic creativity embodied in the global 1920s Black Arts movements. She wrote, “New letters works became communal property to be read and revised across national boundaries. . . . [The movement] shared a common ideology: writing regional, ethnic, and peasant experiences into existence.”Footnote ³ The reference to how textual products became “communal property to be read and revised across national boundaries” captures her belief that the cultural production of Afro-America at its best belonged to and engaged productively with community audiences that defied colonial legacies of neglect and balkanization. It was precisely in the moments of sharing, reworking, and resurrecting the practices of communities that had hitherto been marginalized or isolated from one another that the possibility of growth occurred, for participants and readers/spectators alike. This growth was often as political as it was personal.

An emphasis on informed indigeneity was particularly evident in Clark's work on Haitian popular theatre. Her dissertation, completed in the UC Berkeley department of French, was the culmination of years of fieldwork into how work societies (the laboring groups known as coumbites), religious societies (in the Vodou religion), and carnival groups inspired a renaissance of literary works and staged spectacles that not only referenced “the peasants” abstractly but spoke in their language, Créole, and expressed a worldview derived from their familial, religious, and festive traditions.Footnote ⁴ This reorientation was no small accomplishment, given that Haitian elite society had for centuries valued its French culture while denigrating the beliefs of its majority black rural underclass. Clark's study was likewise pioneering because very few people in the field of theatre studies paid much attention to the production of artists emerging from the Caribbean who wrote and performed in either European languages or in their native Créole idioms. Of course there were notable exceptions. Clark found her intellectual forebears among both ethnologists and performers, including figures such as Melville J. Herskovits, Jean Price-Mars, Maya Deren, and Katherine Dunham. The latter two, both of whom understood the value of performance, especially dance, to community cohesion and empowerment, were especially influential in Clark's development as a scholar.

Clark served as Miss Dunham's archivist for more than twenty years, and their work together is perhaps one of Clark's most enduring legacies. Both women's boundless confidence in black creativity and their formidable prickliness about precision—the placement of accents or the exact posture required in a particular choreography—in part explain their very close relationship. Recent work has persuasively demonstrated how the practice of archiving entails more than the act of collecting or organizing sources. Rather, its importance and power lies in mobilizing them into models that explain how ideas and practices should fit together.Footnote ⁵ Informed indigeneity had an archival dimension, and both Clark and Dunham recognized the importance of constructing narratives that preserved and creatively engaged traditions that were vibrant in some extended American contexts, moribund in others. It bears reiterating that the sources that both drew upon were not solely written ones. They also archived movement, made use of oral stories, musical sound, and what Clark termed “visual anthropology.”Footnote ⁶ These methods are evident in the voluminous audio interviews Clark conducted over the course of decades with Haitian stagehands and Dunham Company members, and the reel-to-reel films and videotapes she recorded when working throughout the Caribbean and closer to home. The ideas she mobilized out of these sources ranged in nature from the theoretical to the more practical concerns of supporting institutions (the Dunham Summer Institute in New York or the Haitian Studies Association) and structures (curricular committees and student forums) that would keep these ideas in circulation. As a scholar, Clark's theorization of a research-to-performance methodology in the study of Afro-American dance theatre, one that encompassed moving diachronically from performance to research given that “American audiences have not been trained to see black dance historically,” epitomizes the value of gathering and recording information from a variety of sources over time.Footnote ⁷ More specifically, Clark developed a concept she called “performing the memory of difference” to explain the value of studying transformation and adaptation in black performance traditions. This transformation occurred in how performances in their “original” contexts always varied, how they morphed into something different onstage, during the backstage discussions that determined their continued viability, and through audience interactions, both lay and scholarly, that determined how a given tradition would come to be understood and valued.

In 2009, the prerequisites and rewards of diaspora literacy might seem self-evident. This is in part because over the course of her scholarly life, many of Clark's interventions became core elements of the many subfields that constitute African diaspora studies. Also, as some traditional fields of study have moved toward interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary fields have likewise proliferated. For much of Clark's career, however, her office was full of undergraduate and graduate students from comparative literature, romance languages, anthropology, theatre, and other departments hungry for information documenting the links that existed in the interstices of disparate disciplines; she provided a nurturing “fix” that supported many future scholars through the academy. Her bookshelves alone provided their own sense of an alternative canon, a shifting landscape of old and new texts displayed front cover outward in a visual presentation of new possibilities. Ultimately, while Clark was content that boundary-crossing paradigms had become accepted as critical frameworks, she was also disturbed by the trend toward the random juxtaposition of materials for juxtaposition's sake, a selective picking and choosing that deemphasized historical context in the study of Afro-American literary and performance traditions. Put in another way, she was saddened by the limitations that kept scholars at the level of intrigued voyeurs as opposed to committed fellow voyageurs. Clark arrived at her rigorous standards for diaspora literacy honestly: fluent in three languages; conversant in two more; trained as a literary scholar, ethnologist, and dancer; at home in Haiti, Sénégal, New York, and Berkeley. Those of us who follow in her footsteps would do well to remember that diaspora literacy is “more than a purely intellectual exercise.”