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The Negritude Renaissance
Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2006 by Michael Soto
Third, The Practice of Diaspora, in the compelling examples of Nardal and many others, demonstrates that diaspora is best understood as a diverse and often conflicted network of loosely or strongly affiliated discursive practices. It is in this sense that jazz-inspired circumlocutions (rather than heavy-handed cultural theories) ring truest. In a lucid discussion of a well-known Hughes poem, Edwards rhetorically asks:
Does "Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret" imagine that [music audience]
collectivity in any broader sense? Does it represent anything that
might approach Jane Nardal's [Paulette's sister] internationalisme
noir? To ask such a question, of course, is to suggest a complex
articulation of the disparate instances of formalist strategies (at
a wide variety of points in transnational print culture) to frame
blackness as an object of knowledge beyond the nation-state. (67)
What seems at first like a rhetorically tentative approach ("to suggest," "complex articulation," "disparate instances," "wide variety of points") to a dubious epistemological proposition ("blackness as an object of knowledge") emerges in the end as the only sensible, the only true way to account for an unstable and still-emergent mountain of evidence. Edwards is fittingly suggestive about black internationalism, a category so obviously beyond the scope of antiessentialist dogma and so obviously deserving of substance rather than abstraction. The Practice of Diaspora allows us to take up important and precarious questions--Might the Harlem Renaissance be considered a form of postcolonial intervention? How does the machinery of print capitalism respond to revolutionary cultural movements? Under what conditions does race trump gender (and vice versa) in cultural and intellectual history?--on the best possible footing.
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