The Negritude Renaissance

The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism

by Brent Hayes Edwards

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 397 pages

Whenever I type diaspora on my computer, my word processing program, from a certain well-known company in Seattle, tries to persuade me that the word really deserves a capital D. I do not know whether the program pays tribute to global Jewish culture, Pan-African civilization, or some other capital-D Diaspora, but I am glad I still have the option to "misspell" the word. Throughout The Practice of Diaspora, Brent Hayes Edwards scrupulously resists the urge, human or mechanical, to capitalize diaspora, and this small gesture seems truly fitting, for among the book's many important contributions is a reminder that the idea of a unified, global, Pan-African, capital-D Diaspora is an invention of late twentieth-century idealists. For much of the early twentieth century, whether in pre-Negritude Paris or in renaissance Harlem, black intellectuals took up multiple banners of internationalism--sometimes to underscore homegrown racism, sometimes to resist the dehumanizing effects of colonial oppression, sometimes for seemingly apolitical purposes--and diaspora (with or without the capital D) never entered the discussion. Edwards, noting the "diversity of black takes on diaspora" (12), demands greater awareness of the term's slippery generalization and a commitment to the hard facts of its many varieties in practice:

    The use of the term diaspora ... implies neither that it offers the
    comfort of abstraction, an easy recourse to origins, nor that it
    provides a foolproof anti-essentialism: instead, it forces us to
    articulate discourses of cultural and political linkage only through
    and across difference in full view of the risks of that
    endeavor. (13)

It is one thing to offer such a note of theoretical caution; it is another thing actually to live up to the idea's promise. The Practice of Diaspora fully lives up to its promise in its many lively, provocative, and painstakingly researched analyses of important black shapers of culture from the first half of the twentieth century. (I hesitate to say "writers" or "intellectuals" because some of the figures Edwards brings up--"Bricktop" [Ada Smith] or Josephine Baker, for example--do not fit comfortably into these categories.) Even when I find myself disagreeing with Edwards--I think he undervalues the specifically nationalist dimension of Harlem Renaissance cultural discourse, for example--I cannot help but admire the transcontinental reach of his archival research, the sharp focus on international acquaintances that scholars mention only in passing (if at all), and the utterly clever explication of tactical or accidental translingual figures of speech. Because The Practice of Diaspora heeds its own advice, because it foregrounds difference at the expense of developing an overarching theory of diaspora, Edwards does not always do justice to the significance of its more lasting contributions. In the final sentence, for instance, Edwards sheepishly offers that "[b]lack internationalism ... is less like a sturdy edifice or a definitive program than like the uncertain harmony of a new song" (318). As refreshing as jazz-inspired indirection may be for the reader, the sentiment poses no small stumbling block for the reviewer; all the same, I will propose three ways in which the book might reshape our understanding of twentieth-century literature.

First, The Practice of Diaspora places its sharp focus squarely on the international contours of the movement typically called the Harlem Renaissance. (In fact, to signal his discomfort with the phrase, Edwards sets off Harlem Renaissance with quotation marks throughout the text. Before Langston Hughes rechristened it the Harlem Renaissance in The Big Sea [1940], most black intellectuals called it the Negro Renaissance.) There is really nothing new here--critics have complained for so long that the Harlem Renaissance was really a national and international movement that there's no one left to complain to--but Edwards has pushed the transnational historical connections and their cultural implications further than anyone before him. His work on transnational and translingual publishing efforts, centered on (but hardly limited to) Francophone cultural journals, is a groundbreaking achievement, on a par with Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson's work on early twentieth-century African American periodicals. Thanks to the Johnsons, no discussion of the Harlem Renaissance is complete without a consideration of Crisis, Fire!!, Messenger, and Opportunity; thanks to Edwards, the same is now true (one hopes) of Le Cri des Negres, La Depeche africaine, and La Revue de monde noir.

Second, The Practice of Diaspora suggests the importance to Harlem Renaissance studies (and to twentieth-century literary studies more broadly) of Rene Maran, the Martiniquan writer who won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1921; George Padmore, the Trinidadian labor organizer and communist (and subsequently anticommunist) intellectual; and Tiemoko Garan Kouyate, the Sudanese editor and anticolonial activist. These names will be familiar to students of the Negritude movement if not to students of literary modernism, and thanks to Edwards, they appear natural alongside such Harlem Renaissance staples as W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and Claude McKay (all of whom receive ample attention in The Practice of Diaspora). Less familiar but perhaps most important in Edwards's reconfiguration of the literary historical landscape is Paulette Nardal. Born in Martinique in 1896, Nardal learned English in the British West Indies and took a graduate degree at the Sorbonne. After writing for the Parisian journal La Depeche africaine, she cofounded, with Haitian dentist Leo Sajous, La Revue de monde noir, a bilingual (French-English) journal that helped launch what would become the Negritude movement. Weaving together publishing history, a detailed study of Paris salon life, and a keen sense of what is forbidden from literary historical view, Edwards makes a strong case that "Nardal became the most important connection between the 'Harlem Renaissance' writers and the Francophone university students who would become the core of the Negritude movement" (119), and therefore that she represents an important and previously underestimated nexus in twentieth-century cultural history.