Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic

ISBN: 9780814770092 出版年：2013 页码：283 Pinto New York University Press

As scholars and teachers, we often shy away from texts even though we feel deep down they are doing something important; important to our work, to our students, and to our sense of the world and ourselves. In Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic, Samantha Pinto shows how we might approach some of these texts as readers and literary critics and, ultimately, why we need to risk teaching them. In glossing both the object and the objects of her book, Pinto writes, “The texts studied in this book recognize the value in bending and mixing genre as essential in critiquing the constraints on black women’s subjectivity across the academy and the diaspora” (5). Pinto’s work, like the array of texts she studies, is located at “the pinnacle of intersectional difficulty” (177). The succinct introduction lays out the difficulties of this position and the need for the interdisciplinary approach in the following chapters. In many ways, Jackie Kay’s Bessie Smith (1997) is an ideal work to begin the book, as it sits uneasily between biography, autobiography, and fiction; it focuses on Smith, who enacts diaspora in her art, and it is written by a Scottish bi-racial woman raised by white parents now living in England. In Chapter One, Pinto uses Kay’s Bessie Smith to examine “how critical work on the black diaspora has frequently separated out popular cultural and performative work from selfconsciously intellectual and political labor” (19). The multiplicities of form, content, and identities in Bessie Smith set the stage for the form-challenging works to come. Chapter Two reads Elizabeth Alexander’s The Venus Hottentot (1990) and Deborah Richards’s Last One Out (2003) in a discussion of the difficulties—or impossibilities—of representing black women’s bodies. Alongside the poetry collections, Pinto analyzes work on Nanny (of the Maroons) and Sarah Baartman. The play on the word bottom throughout the chapter is a bit overdone, but it does highlight the potential of the bottom—both corporeal and spatial—as a site for renegotiation of black women’s representation. Continuing the generic pairing