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The
Practice of Diaspora
Literature, Translation, and the
Rise of Black Internationalism
By Brent Hayes Edwards
A pathbreaking work of
scholarship that will reshape our understanding of the Harlem
Renaissance, The Practice of Diaspora revisits black
transnational culture in the 1920s and 1930s, paying particular
attention to links between intellectuals in New York and their
Francophone counterparts in Paris. Brent Edwards suggests that
diaspora is less a historical condition than a set of practices:
the claims, correspondences, and collaborations through which
black intellectuals pursue a variety of international alliances.
Edwards elucidates the workings of diaspora by tracking
the wealth of black transnational print culture between the
world wars, exploring the connections and exchanges among New
York-based publications (such as Opportunity, The
Negro World, and The Crisis) and newspapers in Paris
(such as Les Continents, La Voix des Nègres, and L'Etudiant
noir).
In reading a remarkably diverse archive--the works of
writers and editors from Langston Hughes, René Maran, and
Claude McKay to Paulette Nardal, Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois,
George Padmore, and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté--The Practice of
Diaspora takes account of the highly divergent ways of
imagining race beyond the barriers of nation and language. In
doing so, it reveals the importance of translation, arguing that
the politics of diaspora are legible above all in efforts at
negotiating difference among populations of African descent
throughout the world.--Publisher
There are any number of quite impressive
issues and approaches in Brent Edwards's The Practice of
Diaspora. Seemingly familiar, apparently over-played,
categories are archivally reworked — or
else finely spun out — into webs
of instructive relationship. A good and timely work, as much for
its particulars on (post-) coloniality and writing
"race" as for Edwards's légitime defense of
diaspora. The conceptual and socio-historical fluency with which
this work re-positions Paris and its noirs is especially
welcome. Recall of this sort has been somewhat overdue.
—Lemuel A. Johnson, Professor of English at
the University of Michigan
This is a magnificent study. The Practice
of Diaspora's contribution to scholarship is made in at
least four areas: African-American studies (generally speaking),
African-American literary studies, modernism, and literary
theory. The combination of its theoretical adeptness, its rigor,
and its depth of scholarship is quite remarkable. I don't recall
having seen this mixture of theory, textual interpretation,
cultural history, intellectual history, and diaspora scholarship
before.
Edwards's study is quite ambitious but I
think he more than delivers on those ambitions. I think its
importance does not rest simply in the depth of its scholarship
or the mixed mode of its argumentation, but in how much it will
encourage others to return to these areas with a rigor that does
not depend upon a demonstration of "discursive
mastery" in particular areas but upon cross-area
attentiveness.—Wahneema Lubiano, Professor of Literature
at Duke University
The Practice of Diaspora is nothing
short of a masterpiece. By looking at the way black life,
thought, struggles and quite literally, words, are translated
across the black Francophone and Anglophone worlds, Edwards
reveals how Paris became a locus for the development of black
modernism and internationalism during the crucial interwar
years. Rather than search for some essential unity,
he explores difference, creative tensions, misapprehensions and
misunderstandings between key black intellectuals. The result is
a spectacular interdisciplinary study that will profoundly
change the way we think about the African diaspora.—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom
Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002)
A remarkably precise feat of scholarship
which illuminates the exchanges between the Harlem Renaissance
and the Negritude movement, achieves a transnational, mapping
between Harlem and Paris, the Caribbean and Africa, and suggests
a new vision of diasporic modernism.—Michel Fabre, author of From Harlem to
Paris (1993).
The Practice of Diaspora is so deeply
rooted in the specifics of history, biography, and astute
textual analysis that it amounts to nothing less than a new
understanding of that old term "African Diaspora."
Because of Brent Edwards' imaginative research, subtle
questioning, and acute powers of synthesis, this book succeeds
from start to finish. It is beautifully written, consistently
entertaining, and compelling as both an argument and a scholarly
narrative.—Arnold Rampersad, author of The Art and
Imagination of W.E.B. DuBois (1976); The Life of Langston
Hughes (1986, 1988); and (co-authored with Arthur Ashe) Jackie
Robinson: A Biography (1997).
In detailed, meticulously researched, fresh
and surprising accounts of various crucial points of contact and
of difference among black intellectuals from the United States,
the Caribbean, and Africa in Europe, Brent Edwards offers a new
understanding of their linguistic, cultural, and political
boundary crossings, as these intellectuals developed contending
models of black internationalism in the interwar period, often
in response to each other.
Any reader interested in the intellectual and
political issues represented and discussed by René Maran, Alain
Locke, Jessie Fauset, the Nardal sisters, Claude McKay, W. E. B.
Du Bois, George Padmore, or Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, anyone
concerned about the semantics of racial terms, the debates in
francophone and anglophone journals, about the significance of
Nancy Cunard's Negro: An Anthology, or about diasporic
writing will find this book indispensable. The Practice of
Diaspora makes a major contribution to the much-needed
internationalization of American Studies.—Werner Sollors, author of Neither Black
Nor White Yet Both
An exciting, innovative and extremely
important study of black internationalism between the two World
Wars of the Twentieth Century. Brent Edwards is a fine literary
critic and historian as alert to the tensions and anxieties of
difference and distance as to the yearnings for affiliation and
solidarity. The Practice of Diaspora is a stunning
excavation of the transnational sites and circuits of modern
black culture.—Hazel Carby, author of Race Men
Brent Edwards's wide-ranging Practice of
Diaspora really does just that. From the vantage point of
Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, he looks across to Harlem and
surveys black internationalist thought from the Caribbean,
Africa, and the United States. This utterly fascinating book
traces the circuits of intellectuals engaged in a truly
diasporic struggle for the Race. Edwards's care with issues of
gender and translation are particularly welcome.—Nell Irvin
Painter, author of Southern
History Across the Color Line and Sojourner Truth, A Life, A
Symbol.
Black consciousness in Paris and Harlem
between the wars
Paris has long fascinated
Brent Hayes Edwards, associate professor of English. He lived
there for more than a year before beginning graduate study at
Columbia University, and much of his academic research has
focused on the black intellectuals and artists from around the
world who were drawn to the City of Lights in the 1920s and
1930s. His new book, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature,
Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard
University Press, 2003), is a comparative study of the
relationships between writers, artists and intellectuals
associated with the Harlem Renaissance in the United States and
their African and Caribbean counterparts in Paris.
The Paris arts and
intellectual scene after World War I was particularly rich,
Edwards says, because of the influx of large numbers of
French-speaking blacks from such countries as Martinique,
Senegal and Madagascar. Many of these blacks, who were colonial
subjects of France, had been conscripted to serve in the French
workforce or military during the war and then remained in Paris
afterward. African-Americans also spent time in the city,
creating a dialogue on ways of writing about black art and
life.
Woven into The Practice
of Diaspora is a discussion of the rise of black
internationalism after the war. “It was an incredibly exciting
moment in world politics,” Edwards says. “With the Russian
Revolution and the forming of the League of Nations, Africans
and African-Americans began to think that people could come
together at a level beyond the nation-state in order to protect
human rights and civil liberties on a global scale.”
The book makes particularly
good use of the full range of black periodicals produced during
this era in both English and French to explore cultural
perspectives across national and linguistic borders, and to
discuss the role of translation in mediating ideas among various
black communities.Edwards’
next project will focus on the relationship between jazz and
poetry. “I’m interested in how poets imitate or emulate jazz
and how a number of jazz musicians, such as Louis Armstrong and
Duke Ellington, wrote poetry.” He is currently teaching an
undergraduate seminar on jazz and poetry, and a graduate seminar
on black internationalism.—Amy Vames
Rutgers
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The
Practice of Diaspora
Literature, Translation, and the
Rise of Black Internationalism
By Brent Hayes Edwards
| 1 |
Variations on a Preface |
16 |
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Translating the Word Nègre |
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The Frame of Blackness |
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Race and the Modern Anthology |
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Border Work |
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A Blues Note |
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| 2 |
On Reciprocity: René Maran and Alain Locke |
69 |
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Véritable Roman Nègre |
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A "Black Magic" of the Preface |
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Paris, Heart of the Negro Race |
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Encounter on the Rhine |
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The Practice of Diaspora |
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| 3 |
Feminism and L'Internationalisme Noir:
Paulette Nardal |
119 |
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Gender in Black Paris |
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Feminism and La Dépêche Africaine |
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Salons and Cercles d'Amis |
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Black Magic |
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Begin the Beguine |
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| 4 |
Vagabond Internationalism: Claude McKay's Banjo |
187 |
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Légitime Défense: Translating Banjo |
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Vagabond Internationalism |
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Diaspora and the "Passable Word" |
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The Boys in the Band |
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Black Radicalism and the Politics of Form |
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| 5 |
Inventing the Black International: George Padmore
and Tiemoko Garan Kouyate |
241 |
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The Negro Worker |
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Black Collaboration, Black Deviation |
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Black Marxism in Translation |
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Toward a Francophone Internationalism |
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International African |
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Coda: The Last Anthology |
306 |
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Notes 321 |
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Acknowledgments 387 |
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Index 391 |
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Publication Date 10 July 2003 / Harvard
University Press / Cloth $55 / Paper $24.95 / 397 pages
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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What This Cruel War Was Over
Soldiers Slavery and the Civil
War
By Chandra Manning
For this impressively researched
Civil War social history, Georgetown
assistant history professor Manning
visited more than two dozen states
to comb though archives and
libraries for primary source
material, mostly diaries and letters
of men who fought on both sides in
the Civil War, along with more than
100 regimental newspapers. The
result is an engagingly written,
convincingly argued social history
with a point—that those who did the
fighting in the Union and
Confederate armies "plainly
identified slavery as the root of
the Civil War." Manning backs up her
contention with hundreds of
first-person testimonies written at
the time, rather than
often-unreliable after-the-fact
memoirs. While most Civil War
narratives lean heavily on officers,
Easterners and men who fought in
Virginia, Manning casts a much
broader net. She includes
immigrants, African-Americans and
western fighters, in order, she
says, "to approximate cross sections
of the actual Union and Confederate
ranks." Based on the author's
dissertation, the book is free of
academese and appeals to a general
audience, though Manning's harsh
condemnation of white Southerners'
feelings about slavery and her
unstinting praise of Union soldiers'
"commitment to emancipation" take a
step beyond scholarly objectivity.—Publishers
Weekly |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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