Kinship Across the Black Atlantic

Front matter

WRITING DIASPORIC RELATIONS

GIGI ADAIR

Postcolonialism across the Disciplines

Contents

Acknowledgements Vil Introduction: Diasporic kinship across the black Atlantic 1 Part I: Rewriting anthropology

1 Postcolonial sabotage and ethnographic recovery in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother 35

2 Destabilizing structuralism in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale 59

Index

Acknowledgements wish to thank Cordula Lemke, who understood what this project was about

before I did, and who believed in it in the moments when | did not. Andrew James Johnston’s incisive comments prevented some wrong turns, Jennifer Wawrzinek suggested new directions, and Russell West-Pavlov’s advice was always spot on. A seminar with Jane Bennett and Katrin Pahl was enormously inspiring and influential. During the (lengthy) finishing stages of the book the support of Martin Liithe and his invitation to collaborate with Robert Reid-Pharr, Hermann Bennett, Tavia Nyong’o, Gary Wilder and others on new African Atlantic diasporas helped to refine my existing analysis and generate new readings. I am grateful for the early and formative encouragement of Linnell Secomb, and for the later support and advice of Anja Schwarz, Lars Eckstein and Dirk Wiemann. In its early stages, this project was developed and written at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the Freie Universitat Berlin, supported by a fellowship from the German Research Foundation, and in recent years I have had the pleasure of working at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Potsdam.

I am very grateful to Joscelyn Gardner for her permission to use an image of her artwork on the cover. Her series of lithographs entitled Creole Portraits III: “bringing down the flowers...”, which can be seen at www.joscelyngardner.org, depicts African braided hairstyles combined with instruments of the colonial abuse of reproduction and kinship—slave collars used to punish enslaved women accused of aborting pregnancies—and one means of their resistance: Caribbean plants used or identified as abortifacients in the eighteenth century. It thereby resonates deeply with the themes of kinship, postcolonialism and (post)slavery in the black Atlantic in this book.

My love and thanks go to my chosen family in Berlin, who were there for me when I needed them, and let me ignore them for lengthy stretches when I was writing. P. saw it through from beginning to end, and kept me on an even keel.

vii

In memory of Roozi Araghi and Nick Salzberg, two diasporic queers gone too soon.

Introduction: Diasporic kinship across the black Atlantic his book is about kinship in contemporary fiction from around the black

Atlantic, and about the means these literary texts find to write diasporic kinship. The six novels considered here all explicitly engage with the meanings, experiences and practices of kinship in the context of multiple black Atlantic diasporas and in the wake of slavery and colonialism. Their interrogation and rewriting of discourses of intimate bonds imagines diasporic belonging, cultural production, and ethical relationality anew. The interest in interrogating and rethinking kinship in these novels, although not necessarily new in black Atlantic fiction, broadly coincides with a surge in queer writing from the Caribbean in the 1990s.' Such fiction thus prefigures the ‘conjunctural moment’ of black/queer/diaspora proclaimed by some US-American scholars in the early twenty-first century.” In my readings of these texts, I seek to generate a dialogue between the literary narrations of kinship and their reshaping of diaspora, on the one hand, and recent work by cultural theorists in diaspora studies and kinship studies on the other hand, and thus to suggest some ways in which scholars in the various fields that I draw on in this book might benefit from an engagement with each other’s work, and with the literary texts in which both diverse cultural concepts and practices of kinship and the consequences of attempts to naturalize and valorize particular forms of kinship are explored. I focus on three key ways in which the novels wrestle

1 An uptick in queer writing from the early 1990s can be clearly observed across the anglophone Caribbean; Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel similarly identifies a focus on ‘alternative intimacies’ in Spanish Caribbean texts from the 1990s onwards; see her ‘Mas alla de la homonormatividad: intimidades alternativas en el Caribe hispano’, Revista Iberoamericana 74.225 (2008), pp. 1039-57.

2 Jafari S. Allen, ‘Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18.2—3 (2012), pp. 211-48.

with contemporary black Atlantic diasporic kinship: interrogating colonial— anthropological texts and discourses, exploring the limits of postcolonial historiography, and experimenting with literary—textual representations of queer diasporic relationality.

The understanding of diaspora which emerges from these texts suggests that black Atlantic diasporas, and the cultures and forms of subjectivity which they generate, cannot be fully understood without a critical analysis of kinship like the one I pursue here. These novels show that diaspora is fundamentally about a displacement from national norms of kinship and relationality, and thus a displacement from national—and colonial—norms of the ‘human’, and that diaspora therefore necessitates a rewriting of the presumed connections between kinship and culture. This is particularly acute in black Atlantic diasporas, which are strongly marked not only by this diasporic displacement from national kinship, but also by the violent destruction of kinship and culture which resulted from the Middle Passage and colonial slavery, and by ongoing racism linked to kinship in the afterlife of slavery. Diaspora studies, therefore, remains deficient not only when it fails to consider gender and sexuality—a long-standing accusation, now often remedied in more recent work—but also when it ignores kinship. The field of queer diaspora studies that has emerged in response to this lack since the 1990s has often focused on examples other than New World black diasporas, thereby neglecting the field which may best illustrate its insights. This book therefore follows and amplifies the call for queer studies to be part of and contribute to—because it is uniquely capable of—a critique of race, nationalism and colonialism.? Similarly, while scholars in critical kinship studies offer crucial new ways for thinking about kinship as a technology of both colonialism and anticolonial resistance, and for analysing the relationship between discourses and kinship and claims of humanity, culture and civilization, these ideas have not yet been linked to studies of diaspora in general and the black Atlantic in particular, where they offer rich resources for thinking about culture and subjectivity.

In this introduction, | first offer a detailed overview of the developments of recent decades in the two key interdisciplinary fields—first diaspora studies, followed by critical kinship studies—that most contribute to this book. The work from these fields that I take and adapt for this study of diasporic kinship combines impulses, theories and concerns from postcolonial studies and queer studies in particular; for scholars in both fields, I suggest, there are rich possibilities to be found in interweaving their insights, concepts and methods. I then use these resources to pursue a double-pronged analysis of black diasporic kinship, in which kinship may function both and simultaneously as a technology of colonial or neocolonial rule and exploitation and a practice of collective resistance and subjective transformation. This analysis seeks to

3 David L. Eng with Judith Halberstam and José Esteban Mufioz, ‘Introduction: What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?’ Social Text 23.3—4 (2005), pp. 1-17.

understand the meaning and experience of black Atlantic kinship, which is also revealed as doubled: normative Euro-American kinship is understood both as an unattainable ideal which promises recognition and full personhood and as an oppressive and undesirable, constraining institution, while various forms of queered and diasporic kinship hold out the utopian possibility of becoming and living otherwise, but also threaten illegitimacy and illegibility.

It is worth recalling that, as diaspora studies emerged in the early 1990s, some prominent scholars doubted whether New World black communities qualified as diasporas at all. In his influential definition of the term in 1991, William Safran remains undecided as to whether black populations in the New World constitute a diaspora or not.* Their imagining of the homeland ‘can no longer be precisely focused’, he suggests; that is, black diasporas are not clearly national.” Perhaps more damning in his eyes is his assessment of New World black cultures, which are either ‘low prestige and impede social mobility’ or involve ‘artificial grafts lacking a convincing connection with black experience’. For Safran, ‘artificial grafts’ devalue black cultures and dilute their status as properly diasporic; the botanic metaphor suggests a lack of normative bodily integrity and hints at non-normative—because asexual— reproduction rather than a ‘natural’ diaspora guaranteed by naturalized and compulsory heterosexual kinship and patriarchy.

Yet if diasporic kinship is always denaturalized by its dislocation from national norms, then the ‘artificial grafts’ of black diasporic cultures, or of black diasporic families, ways of being, and forms of personhood, do not disqualify them as true diasporas but rather emphasize the centrality of black Atlantic diasporas to modernity, including and especially western modernity. Following C. L. R. James’s claim that black studies ‘is the history of Western Civilization’, | suggest that an analysis of black diasporic kinship can tell us something about what it means to be a recognizable human subject, to have a place in a personal and shared history, to be a member of a political society, and a subject in relations with the world and other others, and can suggest ways of rethinking such relations and categories in less exclusive ways.”

4 William Safran, ‘Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return’, Diaspora 1.1 (1991), pp. 83-99.

5 Safran, ‘Diasporas in Modern Societies’, p. 90.

6 Safran, ‘Diasporas in Modern Societies’, p. 90.

7 C. L. R. James, ‘Black Studies and the Contemporary Student’ [1969], in Anna Grimshaw (ed.), The C. L. R. James Reader (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), p. 397. In the same vein but more recently, Tiffany Patterson and Robin Kelley have argued that the same processes which shaped African diaspora also transformed western culture, and Paul Gilroy insists that the study of black Atlantic diasporas can, among other things, enable ‘a new perspective on British culture as a whole’. See Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World’, African Studies

Of course, Safran’s definition of diaspora has been challenged by numerous scholars, and not only for his discounting of black diasporas. James Clifford’s focus on lateral connections rather than the homeland-hostland binary, and his suggestion that a ‘shared, ongoing history of displacement, suffering, adaptation, or resistance may be as important as the projection of a specific origin’ are particularly relevant to black diasporas.® Most influential of all has been the work of Paul Gilroy, who insists that black diaspora should be understood as a tool of contemporary and historical cultural critique, and the black Atlantic as a unit of analysis which enables an understanding of the transnational consciousness of anti-slavery movements, for example, or the way in which the black cosmopolitan writers’ understandings of race, self and sociality were formed by experiences of exile and displacement, just as it enables an understanding of the exchanges between Caribbean, African-American and black British cultures in the contemporary moment.? Furthermore, Gilroy suggests that diasporas are characterized by their reconstruction and reworking of tradition and memory and an affective mode of ambivalence rather than nostalgia or unambiguous loss.’ This work shifts diaspora studies away from accounts which solely consider diasporic subjects’ attachment to their ‘homeland’ to consider the subjective transformation and complex cultural interactions which take place in the wake of mass migrations. Gilroy’s desire to move ‘beyond the binary opposition between national and diasporic perspectives’! is also taken up by Avtar Brah’s concept of ‘diaspora space’, which she defines as a conceptual category [...] ‘inhabited’ not only by those who have migrated and their descendants but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous. In other words, the concept of diaspora space (as opposed to that of diaspora) includes the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’.”

This makes clear that the effects of diaspora do not only affect those subjects with a history of migration, but rather all subjects in diasporic spaces—that left behind when some people migrate, and that created by

Review 43.1 (2000), pp 11—45; Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Routledge, 1987), p. 156, emphasis in original.

8 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 250.

9 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

10 Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black; Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000).

11 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 29.

12 Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 181.

both new arrivals and existing residents in the new homeland. This spatialized approach makes a focus on diasporic purity or ethnic absolutism less likely, and Brah’s suggestion that diaspora should be understood as a process, characterized more by a ‘homing desire’ than a ‘desire for a “homeland” enables an analysis of how the attachment to or memory of a ‘homeland’ and distinctive diasporic subjectivities are created by social and cultural practices, and are subject to renegotiation and constant redefinition.”

Gilroy’s work in particular has proved immensely productive over the past twenty-five years, which is not to say that it has not also been criticized for its shortcomings and omissions, in particular its centring of the US and African-American culture and its neglect of Africa.'* Of more relevance to this study, however, are the critiques of Gilroy (and of Clifford) which point to a persistent neglect of gender and sexuality in their work." While Clifford acknowledges this problem, suggesting that more must be done to account for the different experiences of differently gendered people within diaspora, rather than continuing to privilege masculine-identified diasporic experience, this work is left for others to do. This neglect of how gender and sexuality are implicated in various kinds of non-national belonging is rendered even more problematic in light of the fact that women’s bodies have often been understood as the bearers and reproducers of national culture.'® Michelle Wright castigates Gilroy and others for paying lip-service to the need for greater attention to gendered dynamics and women’s experiences in diaspora studies while continuing to ignore female figures.” This is typical, Wright suggests, of a dominant discourse operating in African diaspora studies catalysed by ‘the idea of authenticity’: ‘essential blackness’, or the status of the most authentic, is only accorded to heterosexual male black subjects." In Becoming Black, Wright again takes aim at Gilroy’s neglect of gender and

13 Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, p. 193. See also Brian Keith Axel, ‘The Diasporic Imaginary’, Public Culture 14.2 (2002), pp. 411-28; Brian Keith Axel, ‘The Context of Diaspora’, Cultural Anthropology 19.1 (2004), pp. 26-60.

14 An overview of key responses to and criticisms of Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic is offered in Lucy Evans, ‘The Black Atlantic: Exploring Gilroy’s Legacy’, Atlantic Studies 6.2 (2009), pp. 255-68.

15 An early critique of Gilroy in this vein is Robert F. Reid-Pharr, ‘Engendering the Black Atlantic’, Found Object 4 (1994), pp. 11-16.

16 Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 376-91. A start on such a theorization of women’s writing in diaspora is offered by Sneja Gunew, ‘Resident Aliens: Diasporic Women’s Writing’, Contemporary Women’s Writing 3.1 (2009), pp. 28—46.

17 Michelle W. Wright, ‘Can! Call You Black? The Limits ofAuthenticHeteronormativity in African Diasporic Discourse’, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 6:1 (2013), pp. 3-16; see also T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, ‘Erasures and the Practice of Diaspora Feminism’, Small Axe 17 (2005), pp. 129-33.

18 Wright, ‘Can I Call You Black?’ p. 5.

sexuality and instead offers an alternative means of defining black diasporic subjectivity, pointing to ‘a twentieth-century intellectual tradition of African diasporic counterdiscourses of Black subjectivity that [...] understands Black subjectivity as that which must be negotiated between the abstract and the real, or, in theoretical terms, between the ideal and the material’. From this, she develops a dialogic rather than dialectic theory of diasporic subjectivity that offers an alternative narrative of black New World cultures, with three key insights:

that the Black male subject cannot be the sole possessor of agency because he alone cannot create other subjects; that all subjectivities are therefore ‘intersubjective’ in that they come into being through other subjects, not apart from them; that because all subjects are intersubjective, subjectivity cannot be produced dialectically, as thetical and antithetical relations do not exist’.”°

According to Fatima El-Tayeb, it is such ‘intersubjective’ or ‘dialogic’ forms of diasporic identity that have been adopted by black Europeans.*' The concept of diaspora, for El-Tayeb—as elaborated particularly in African diasporic discourses—brings together ‘the experience of a population that is born into one nation, but never is fully part of it’ with the ‘transnational ties of that same population’.” She suggests that the ‘disidentificatory potential’ of diaspora is particularly to be found in black diasporic cultural forms which explore ‘the limits of blackness’.”* El-Tayeb’s insistence on the relational aspect of diaspora is shared with Jacqueline Nassy Brown, who suggests that ‘diaspora should be understood not as an existential condition of displacement and dislocation but as a kind of relation, one between and among counter/parts’.”4

The effects of the lack of an adequate gender theory in Gilroy’s work are also to be found in his theorization of the relationship between diaspora, family and kinship. He argues that, while national discourses traditionally understand the heterosexual family as the building block of the nation, and consider the primary purpose of family and women to be the production of male citizen-soldiers, diaspora challenges these radically gendered notions of citizenship and national belonging by ‘valorizing sub- and supranational

19 Michelle M. Wright, Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 3.

20 Wright, Becoming Black, p. 22.

21 Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

22 El-Tayeb, European Others, p. 54.

23 El-Tayeb, European Others, p. 60.

24 Jacqueline Nassy Brown, ‘Black Europe and the African Diaspora: A Discourse on Location’, in Darlene Clark Hine, Tricia Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds.), Black Europe and the African Diaspora (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p. 202.

kinship’, enabling ‘anti-essentialist accounts of identity-formation’, and generating a shift away from ‘primordial identities’ towards those based on ‘contingency, indeterminacy, and conflict’, creating a ‘chaotic’ rather than linear model of generation and reproduction.” Yet Gilroy’s attempt to attend to the ‘changing same’ of diaspora—its iteration without reification, continuity without essence—and to imagine a non-patrilineal concept of diaspora and identify non-heteronormative identity and cultural formations within existing diasporas is hampered by the ongoing biological and patrilineal notion of diaspora which persists, despite his disavowals, in his work.”¢ On this basis, Stefan Helmreich argues that Gilroy’s early work on diaspora attempts yet fails to undo the patriarchal logics of kinship.” For Helmreich, the problem begins with etymology: ‘diaspora’, derived from the Greek dtaonopa, ‘dispersion’, suggests ‘scattered seeds’-—or sperm—and thus diaspora ‘refers us to a system of kinship reckoned through men and suggests the questions of legitimacy in paternity that patriarchy generates’.* The etymological baggage of the term need not render it useless, of course; however, Helmreich suggests that the heteropatriarchal traces of the word render Gilroy’s focus on largely male experiences and male African-American subjects especially problematic. As a result, Gilroy’s black Atlantic is a unit of study which ‘relies implicitly on an appeal to historical ties of kinship’, ruled by an ‘arborescent image of the “family tree” in which the roots of the family tree and the roots of diaspora both suggest ‘ancestral seeds from which genealogies sprout in particular soils’, creating—despite Gilroy’s efforts to the contrary—a ‘kinship-based model of diaspora’.?°

Gilroy responds to Helmreich and other similar critics in Against Race, but I suggest that he again fails to solve this problem. First, he argues that the etymological roots of diaspora need not lead to patrilineal connotations. Instead, the ‘seeds’ of diaspora could just as easily be thought of as ‘spores’, as vectors of asexual reproduction, and that this might liberate diaspora from the ‘quagmire of androcentrism’.*° Next, Gilroy writes that the contamination of the term ‘diaspora’ by the ‘toxins of male domination’ is no greater than that of any other current or emergent critical or heuristic concept, and it is a matter for contemporary theorizations to define diaspora in terms of ‘descent via the rhizomorphic principal’ rather than the male line.*' Gilroy’s use of Deleuzian terminology in these passages nonetheless fails to annul the ‘arborescent image of the family tree’ identified by Helmreich, not least

27 Stefan Helmreich, ‘Kinship, Nation and Paul Gilroy’s Concept of Diaspora’, Diaspora 2.2 (1992), pp. 243-49.

28 Helmreich, ‘Kinship, Nation and Paul Gilroy’s Concept of Diaspora’, p. 245.

29 Helmreich, ‘Kinship, Nation and Paul Gilroy’s Concept of Diaspora’, pp. 246-47.

30 Gilroy, Against Race, pp. 126-27.

because Gilroy himself is unable to think diaspora without invoking metaphors of sown seeds and various modes of biological sexual reproduction: several pages earlier, for example, he writes that the concept of diaspora ‘might offer seeds capable of bearing fruit’.** It is not sufficient for Gilroy to claim that diaspora could be understood in rhizomorphic terms: his own work, from its metaphors of seeds and fruits, to its almost exclusively male ‘lineage’ of black Atlantic cosmopolitans, demonstrates that the genealogical ‘roots’ of diaspora run deep and its androcentric bias is difficult to displace. By justifying the heteropatriarchal associations of diaspora on the relativizing basis that the concept is ‘[no] more deeply contaminated’ than other critical terms, Gilroy foregoes the chance to fully investigate the ways in which diaspora, including his own use of the concept, is gendered and (hetero)sexualized, without which the routes of diaspora remain too entangled in the roots of the diasporic family tree.¥

The development of theories of queer diaspora in response to the ongoing failure of prominent scholars to sufficiently challenge the heteronormative and genealogical logic of diaspora in their work has been one of the great gains of the field in recent years. (A similar dynamic can be observed in migration studies, which has long ignored how sexuality influences migration, in turn motivating some new work which seeks to understand how movement affects sexuality and how ideas about sexuality, including sexual propriety and sexual alterity, affect concepts of migration.)** The field of queer diaspora studies, most associated with the work of Gayatri Gopinath and David Eng, provides conceptual tools for such analysis and emphasizes the centrality of sexuality to liberal modernity. Since approximately the late 1990s, this has been a project which has challenged both the whiteness of queer studies and the heteronormativity of diaspora studies, seeking to make ‘questions of sexuality, racialisation, colonialism, migration, and globalisation central to both a queer and a diaspora studies project’.* It is also a utopian project: queer diasporas imagine other ways of being in the world; they imagine— and demand—alternative futures.** In order to counter the ‘heteronormative reproductive logic’ of concepts of diaspora and enable a more effective reconceptualization of home and challenge to myths of purity and origins,’

34 Cindy Patton and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler (eds.), Queer Diasporas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú Jr. (eds.), Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Eithne Luibhéid, ‘Queer/Migration: An Unruly Body of Scholarship’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14.2—3 (2008), pp. 169-90.

35 Gayatri Gopinath, ‘Foreword: Queer Diasporic Interventions’, Textual Practice 25.4 (2011), pp. 635-36.

36 Gopinath, ‘Foreword: Queer Diasporic Interventions’.

37 Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 10, see also pp. 5-6.

Gopinath advocates a turn to ‘queer diaspora’, which means not the identification of queer diasporic subjects or subcultures, but rather the application of a ‘queer diasporic frame of analysis’ to diasporas in general in order to focus on the ways in which diasporic displacement generates non-heteronormative and, crucially, non-national subjectivities and sexualities.” Queering the concept of diaspora provides a way to recover not only queer sexual desires, but all ‘those desires, practices, and subjectivities that are rendered impossible and unimaginable within conventional diasporic and nationalist imaginaries’.*° Similarly, Eng argues that a reconceptualization of diaspora as queer diaspora would enable political and cultural interventions to contest traditional family and kinship structures and to reorganize communities—both national and transnational— based not on origin, filiation, and genetics but on destination, affiliation, and the assumption of a common set of social practices or political commitments’.*? Thus, queer diaspora not only demands a place for queer subjects as part of national and diasporic memory and ‘refuses to position queer subjects as alien, inauthentic, and perennially outside the confines of these entities’,*' it also considers how diasporic experiences and formations interrupt national heteronormativity regardless of sexuality. An analysis of queer diasporas also serves to illustrate the role of sexuality in liberalism, including its role in discourses of development, Enlightenment, civilization and primitiveness, and self-determination.” It thus has an important role to play in the project, delineated by Lisa Lowe, of understanding how ‘modern liberalism defined the “human” and universalized its attributes to European man, [as] it simultaneously differentiated populations in the colonies as less than human’ and how ‘the social inequalities of our time are a legacy of these processes.” This approach provides a more effective counterweight to national and diasporic discourses of both pure origins and pure cultural and genealogical reproduction guaranteed by normative heterosexuality than approaches, like Gilroy’s, which shy away from questions of gender and sexuality.

My readings of the black Atlantic novels in this book suggest that the heteronormativity enshrined in many theories of diaspora is particularly misplaced because diaspora necessarily queers configurations of family and

38 Gayatri Gopinath, ‘Bollywood Spectacles: Queer Diasporic Critique in the Aftermath of 9/11’, Social Text 23.3—4 (2005), p. 158.

39 Gopinath, Impossible Desires, p. 11.

40 David L. Eng, “Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas’, Social Text 21.3 (2003), p. 4.

41 Gopinath, Impossible Desires, p. 15.

42 David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); David L. Eng, ‘Queering the Black Atlantic, Queering the Brown Atlantic’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17.1 (2011), p. 195.

43 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 6, 3.

kinship.*4 That this has long been a feature of black Atlantic writing and other cultural forms is confirmed by Nadia Ellis’s study of mid-twentieth-century works, which identifies a ‘structural queerness of black global modes of belonging over particular sexual or erotic practices’. That structural queerness is both a displacement of the national and a particular orientation to temporality and futurity: both in the works studied by Ellis, and in those which I analyse in this book, black diaspora is characterized by a desire to be and relate otherwise, which Ellis calls a ‘queer elsewhere’.** I too identify a ‘desire to belong and a desire to flee from community” in black Atlantic novels from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, where it manifests in a struggle with the double-bind of kinship discourse: an awareness of the privileges accorded to normative kinship forms, and nonetheless a diasporic longing to find alternative ways of being in the world.

The inherent displacement of diasporic subjectivities from normative national lives which this project explores in detail highlights the potential connections and affinities between such an understanding of diasporic and black Atlantic studies and other fields of study, including queer of colour critique in the USA and some Latino/a studies. In the US, the field of queer of colour critique continues to build on Roderick Ferguson’s insight that estrangements from ‘respectability, domesticity, heterosexuality, normativity, nationality, universality, and progress’ are ‘the general estrangements of African American culture’ (which in turn recalls Cathy Cohen’s similar insistence on the commonalities of some racialized and queer subjects).* Ricardo Ortiz equates the position of Cuban exiles with that of queer subjects in relation to both Cuba and the USA, both gendered and heteronormative states, and he suggests that some diasporic cultural forms offer ‘an alternative (perhaps even a queer) form of continuation and contiguation toward any (future) community’, despite the ‘ferociously heterosexual presumption|s]’ about acceptable, or even possible modes of cultural reproduction that also dominate in exilic Cuban cultures.” Alicia Arrizon argues that the concept of mestizaje, as it has been redefined by Latina feminist thinkers over the past

44 For a similar reading of two other black Atlantic novels, see Meg Wesling, ‘Neocolonialism, Queer Kinship, and Diaspora: Contesting the Romance of the Family in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night and Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory’, Textual Practice 25.4 (2011), pp. 649-70.

45 Nadia Ellis, Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 5.

46 Ellis, Territories of the Soul.

47 Ellis, Territories of the Soul, p. 6.

48 Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 2; Cathy J. Cohen, ‘Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (1997), pp. 437-65.

49 Ricardo L. Ortiz, Cultural Erotics in Cuban America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 13.

several decades, ‘suggests diasporic interventions, hybrid epistemologies, and the borderization of space and time’.” These similarities suggest ample common grounds between scholars in these fields and thus potential for fruitful comparisons between regions and languages; although these fields are also sometimes criticized by scholars of black diasporas for denying and depoliticizing blackness, or for devaluing blackness as uninteresting and not cosmopolitan enough.*! The work of scholars of the black Atlantic, however, is crucial to current work on queer globalization, migration and diaspora.” In bringing together and keeping balanced the terms black/queer/diaspora, as Allen suggests, it is therefore valuable to keep in sight the black/queer/ diasporic Atlantic—not because black diasporic connections and cultural exchange are limited to the Atlantic region, but because the black Atlantic as a unit of study is still a valuable and vital framework thanks to its decentring of the nation in understanding modernity, and—if properly adapted—it still has much to add to understandings of the queerness of all diasporas.