The pieces in the second section, “The Politics of Citizenship/The Performance of Politics,” suggest reconsiderations of notions of affinity and belonging, not in terms of home and nation but in terms of political alliance. Unexpectedly, conceptions of motherhood become important in several of the pieces, the majority of which reflect the voices of noted political thinkers, writers, and artists in the U.S. and West Africa. This volume was produced during the academic year 2008-2009, in an historic election cycle that potentially ushers in a new phase of U.S. politics but certainly tapped long standing pressure points regarding race and culture in the U.S., even as popular commentary seemed to forget that race and gender have long been primal to conceptions of citizenship and nativity.
The contest in the presidential primaries of the Democratic Party between the first viable female candidate and the most successful African-American presidential candidate in history at times threatened to reduce American political options to a choice between “race” and “gender.” Given that commentary on the election (falsely) pitted race against gender in ways not discussed so widely since the conflicts over white women’s suffrage and black male suffrage after abolition, we were compelled to offer some analysis of this political moment, even though it is yet early to appreciate the many ways this contest and Obama himself might impact conceptions of race and diaspora. The election of the first African-American president in the United States raised several questions about the politics of race and the nature of diaspora. The Barnard Center for Research on Women was fortunate to host two leading black feminists during the election year; this section leads with lectures by Lani Guinier and Angela Davis that address U.S. politics, along with an essay by Tavia Nyong’o on Obama himself.
The Davis and Guinier lectures insist that one always remains vigilant for the power of narrative to occlude concerns of class, sexuality, and gender, as well as the histories and experiences of women in the diaspora. Drawing from her mother’s question, “Who designed the game?” at a family gathering, Lani Guinier’s lecture “Race, Gender and Votes,” given on the Barnard campus in March 2008 in the midst of the presidential primary season, argues for a reconceptualization of power that would reorganize electoral politics. She highlights how performance in Theater of the Oppressed in Brazil and the Montgomery Bus Boycott allowed activists to motivate and set the agenda for designated political leaders. However, she also points out that narratives of leadership mislead and efface collective action, arguing, for example, that popular narratives of Martin Luther King, Jr., as leader of the Civil Rights Movement, and Rosa Parks, whose famous refusal to sit in the back of the bus sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, “miss the important role that women activists played in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Like the Latin American feminist activists in Keisha-Khan Perry’s essay (Section III), who continually place themselves in relation to anti racist, anti-sexist activism throughout the diaspora, Guinier argues strongly for global connections between social movements, as well as a horizontal conceptualization of power between leaders and members/masses.
In his reading of Obama’s autobiography, Dreams of My Father, Tavia Nyong’o offers to think through what it means to understand Obama as our first “post-colonial” president. Using a psychoanalytic framework, Nyong’o interrogates the roles of family both in Obama’s performance of black male subjectivity and in American notions of citizenship and nation. Nyong’o notes that “Obama’s text seeks to interpret the non-relation between symbolic fathers who order American discourse of race and inheritance, and his imaginary father, the fatherly Imago, whose absence from his American (and Indonesian) upbringing indexes instead a mythic, exteriorized, Kenyan concern.” Nyong’o, however, dwells more on the paradox that “the parent Obama consistently seeks to understand is his mother”; using Hortense J. Spiller’s landmark “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” and Harriet Jacob’s Our Nig, he queries where the white mother fits into “the cut and augmented hermeneutic circle of blackness.” This question of the white woman’s role is unexpectedly foundational in a discussion of the African diaspora. Critic Michelle Wright highlights the prominent use of white women to represent the nation in coming-to-black-consciousness anecdotes by Cesaire, Dubois, Fanon, and Senghor; such narratives of personal encounter feature a rejection by white women and girls as “emblematic of the Black man’s position in the West” (127). Nyong’o’s reading suggests how the Obama narrative upends this script, offering instead key moments of acceptance (and creation) of African otherness by white women; he also notes the problematic erasure of black women in this narrative.
Angela Davis’s lecture, “Abolition, Democracy and Global Politics,” given the week before the general election, both captures the excitement of possibility in an Obama win and warns that consideration of gendered/raced issues (such as prison policy and civil rights for transgendered people) are likely to be buried under the focus on the “triumph” of the election. She argues that we should claim Obama’s candidacy as a “victory of masses of people,” and she stirringly evokes Dubois’s calling the moment of emancipation “the coming of the Lord” to characterize the emotion that would accompany Obama’s election. Nonetheless, Davis reminds listeners that the focus on Obama’s importance in American history occludes the social movements and individual black women whose political activities laid the foundation for an Obama win. Both Fannie Lou Hamer and Shirley Chisholm entered electoral politics insisting on the inseparability of class, race, gender, and citizenship concerns. Davis contends that the obscuring of these issues during Obama’s campaign merely amplified popular misapprehensions of citizenship and belonging: there was “little or no public discourse on some of the most important issues affecting us. . . . When issues of race emerge, they produce a sense of chaos, of tumbling into a black hole of history from which we will never emerge.” Similarly, fetishizing “Civil Rights as producing freedom,” with Obama as the movement’s apotheosis, rests on a “troubled” notion of citizenship that considers some (undocumented immigrants, ex-felons, and many racialized communities and sexual minorities) as beyond the reach of citizenship.
A key issue for the study of gender in the African diaspora is the privileging of the male subject of diaspora: so too, as Paul Zeleza observes, “there is an analytic tendency to privilege understanding of African diaspora as defined through the Anglophone Atlantic, American African diaspora” (36). To counter such tendencies, we chose to highlight contrasting perspectives from two of West Africa’s most prominent writers and artists, Ama Ata Aidoo and Werewere Liking. In her interview with Nafeesah Allen, author Ama Aidoo declines to rehash the old controversies between “Western Feminism” and “Third World Feminism” but reiterates that Western models cannot be simply mapped onto Africa: “Well, I’m too tired to speak to that controversy, because it’s something that I’m interested in, that I’ve been confronted with, but it takes too much to explain. I don’t believe in Western Feminism in Africa. It’s like saying, what’s the difference between African Christians and Western Christians, there is no difference.” Nevertheless, Aidoo identifies strongly as a feminist and insists that feminism must not rely on maternalism: “I believe, as a feminist, that motherhood is important, very important. But that a woman’s worth, a woman’s life, can still be valid, productive, interesting outside of motherhood. What I don’t believe is that if a woman doesn’t have children then it’s like she might as well not have been born. That’s mad. I repudiate it completely.” As Aidoo observes, Europeans transported a large proportion of enslaved people from slave sites along the so-called Gold Coast, and, as a result, Ghana retains particular importance for the African diaspora. Even still, Aidoo pointedly rejects as “patronizing” the conception of Africa as “homeland” and insists on the specificity of her location within “the State of Ghana”: “If you ask where home is I can point to a specific area in south central Ghana where I was born and where I spent my formative years.”
In contrast to Aidoo, artist/author Werewere Liking, in her interview with Christine Cynn, centers motherhood as the source of female authority and rejects what she describes as a certain Western protest feminism of the late 1960s and 70s. As Liking states, African women as mothers and creators play a central role in imparting counterhistories and educating African youth about the history and culture of the continent. Through her wide-ranging aesthetic productions and Ki-Yi village, the pan-African cultural center that she co-founded in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, she seeks to enable and enact such revisionings of Africa. Her definition of “Pan-African,” a term that she notes Africans living in the diaspora formulated at the turn of the twentieth century, encompasses both Africa and its diasporas in a reciprocal relation that traverses national borders. However, as she insists, pan-Africanism “does not negate cultural specificities. Indeed, Pan-Africanism relies on these specificities to enrich itself. Therefore, for me, to be Pan-African means to take a wider view.” Liking draws attention to an underanalyzed aspect of the diaspora, extensive intra-African migration, in this case to Côte d’Ivoire. She dismisses as “temporary,” and “epiphenomenon” the ethno-nationalism articulated as “Ivoirite” that emerged after the death of president Felix Houpouet-Boigny in 1993 and that she considers a legacy of colonialism and neocolonialism.
Makini Boothe’s “A Reunion of ‘Sisters’: Personal Reflections on Diaspora and Women in Activist Discourse,” provides a seldom seen perspective: that of a young U.S. black American woman who strongly identifies as a diasporic subject. As she comes to term with her experiences attending an NGO-sponsored training institute for young, mostly women, activists across the African diaspora—and with her own status as an outsider living within and benefiting from citizenship in a powerful nation—she assesses the unforeseen limits of organizing around the terms “diaspora” and “woman.” Addressing the collision of theory and activism, she finds that “diaspora” has “an ambiguous definition in activist discourse”: the working idea of African diaspora arising from both the conference and institutions such as the African Union and the World Bank carries different assumptions, relationships, and responsibilities than definitions she learned and accepted as an African-American shaped by a Middle Passage framework. From the Institute emerged an independent diaspora activist network, Sauti Yeti (Our Voices). With unprecedented access to new technologies that help keep these women working together across the globe, they face ongoing questions: How do we collaborate transnationally around local needs/efforts? How do we make diasporic differences and disagreement a source of strength?
