For a text that charts “the generic dislocation of a stable black subject” (3) as the starting point to proposing an aesthetics that might “order the story” of a diverse transnational feminist identity and experience, Samantha Pinto’s Difficult Diasporas is a brave exploration of the representation of Black women through “various registers of identity” (4) toward configuring a system of knowledge, however radical, around difference. Through this radical effort, Pinto challenges the reference of the term Diaspora merely to identifiable geographical sites and the politics of mobility, and expands it to imply, inter alia, an “aesthetics of identity” (9) emerging from the study of how underrepresented Black women writers, critically engaging with one another across difference, lay claim to agency, territory, and recognition worthy of academic relevance for research and teaching. The word difficult included in the title of the book attests to the rigorous process the author must have gone through to bring together the varied selection of texts into what she describes as “the first comparative study of black women writers across the Black Atlantic to demonstrate the crucial role of literary aesthetics in defining the relationship between race, gender, and diaspora” (5). The same titular word also hints at the difficulty the reader would encounter as they sift through the heavy terminology and theories of gender and cultural studies, global and postcolonial studies, and migration and diaspora studies all combined in this innovative reworking of our conceptualization, past, present, or future, of diaspora feminism. The book, therefore, lends itself to slow, close, and careful reading as its interdisciplinary nature, which makes it a gold mine to scholarship in literary studies, feminism, critical studies, and a range of other fields, demands an intense engagement with its arguments and reasoning.
In her selection of primary texts for the core of her analysis, Pinto remains true to her agenda to reformulate diaspora for more conceptual breadth and, as such, her source material comprises “largely neglected” texts that are “formally experimental” in nature and challenge traditional ways of reading through their “innovations of language, genre, and form” (10). She also draws “liberally” from a wealth of scholarship ranging from “poststructuralist, deconstructionist, performance, and postcolonial theory as well as feminist, … transnational, ethnic, and diaspora studies across regional and national traditions” (11) to support her methodology.
After her compelling introduction, Pinto’s first chapter focuses on Jackie Kay’s Bessie Smith (1997), presenting it “as a model” that “lays the historical and intellectual groundwork for locating gender and sexuality within critical formulations of diaspora studies” (19). The chapter foregrounds the ways in which Kay’s text conflates and defies traditional categorization in terms of genre (biography, autobiography, fictional prose, editorial commentary), structure (nonlinear organization), and even character(s) or identity (Smith, Kay, Kay’s mother) (25). These avant-garde tropes are further problematized racially, culturally, historically, geographically, and in terms of sexuality, so that Kay, an England-based biracial Scottish writer, “bleeds genres, blending history into myth, authenticity into self-conscious construction, pattern into innovation, imagination into tradition,” blurring the lines between “the universal and the particular, difference and detail” (34). This first text, with its multiple frames of reference, is “representative and exceptional” (35) in demonstrating how, through rereading other Black women writers, we may “recognize that diaspora is more radical, and more tenacious, than we ever thought it could be” (43).
This challenge for a radical reading of diaspora texts sets the tone for subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 pushes the boundaries of critical textual analysis to the limits of linguistic civility as it examines Elizabeth Alexander’s The Venus Hottentot (1990) and Deborah Richard’s Last One Out (2003) through the metaphor of the “bottom.” In this reading, Pinto connects “the ‘unseemly’ bodies of black women’s representative and performative histories” (45) to an analysis of “diaspora as [a] bottom” (46) that “need not be read as irrelevant, negative, or something to get beyond/over but … as a critical space to inhabit” (49). Once we are able to work through the expansive implications of commodification ascribed to this metaphor of the black female body, it becomes obvious how Pinto challenges the exploitation of “the black body as a referent both hypervisible and inscrutable at the same time, in the way that it is constantly misread as a cultural text” (66) in the visual economy of race and sexuality. In chapter 3, Pinto juxtaposes Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro (1969) with Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1977) in a sustained discourse about the cultural work that Black women’s bodies do in tracing “alternate routes of diaspora history” (79). With similar plots and tropes—the psychological deterioration of geographically displaced young Black women—both plays depict the traumatic weight of fragmentation and indeterminacy upon the Black female body (as diaspora) that embodies varied experiences of history, power, and insurgency. Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938) and Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994) are the next pair of texts examined in chapter 4. In this pair, Pinto emphazises the dynamics of history and power (to possess) from a careful analysis of Hurston’s text and how it informs/influences Brodber’s Louisiana as “a semiotics of ‘celebrity’ in which recognition is … the medium of modernity’s power—and, in this case, a galvanizing force or helpful magnet for diverse diaspora experience” (123). In the light of this assertion, Pinto demonstrates how the paired texts contend with the “absence of women from discourses of diasporic modernity” (143). The diversity of diasporic experience forms the focus of chapter 5. Here, Pinto combines short stories by Zoë Wicomb, Bessie Head, and Pauline Melville in an exploration of transnational embodiments of diaspora as a “revision of realism” (145) aimed at “adequately” representing “racial and gendered violence that characterize much … scholarship and knowledge production around the black diaspora” (147). Chapter 6 expands on the discourse of transnational diaspora representations by exploring how M. NourbeSe Philip and Harryette Mullen articulate these through their poetics. Pinto examines how, in their articulations, these female poets use language in ways that are no longer easily recognizable to construct histories and realities that are disrupted, interrupted, or mangled. These expressive contortions, however, captured within book-length collections, have a way of constituting “a border [that] orders disorder” for diaspora feminism (179). In their avant-garde forms of expression, therefore, these poets perform a political act of affirming “black women’s bodies” (196) as “the gendered corporeal politic” that remains at the “center of aesthetic and political inquiry into the diaspora” (197).
To conclude, Pinto, in her coda, emphasizes the significance of her extensive project, which is to promote the idea of “opening up our scholarship … [and] our textual choices in the classroom” to include “critical reading practices around gender, race, and diaspora” (202). Because she makes compelling arguments throughout Difficult Diasporas for this sort of practice, her claim bears legitimacy in the strong potential that her project offers for cross- and interdisciplinary endeavors in teaching and scholarship. This could, however, be helped along by an effort to use more engaging language and less theoretical jargon, which could make Difficult Diasporas more appealing and reader friendly for students across levels and disciplines. For scholars in a range of diverse fields, nonetheless, Difficult Diasporas will doubtless offer a wealth of knowledge for scholarship related to immigration and diaspora studies, cultural and race theories, postcolonial and empire studies, history and literature, and anthropology.
