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Black Body

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Migrating the

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Migrating the
Black Body

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The African Diaspora
and Visual Culture

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Edited by Leigh R aiford and

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Heike R aphael-Hernandez
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University of Washington Press


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Seattle and London


Copyright 2017 by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Composed in Unica Pro
212019181754321

Frontispiece: JohnJennings, Dark Places, 2014, poster commissioned for the Migrating

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the Black Body symposium, VW Foundation, Hannover, Germany, September 2014.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

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any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,

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or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.

University of Washington Press

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www.washington.edu/uwpress

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Cataloging information is on file with the Library of Congress.
ISBN (hardcover) 978-0-295-99956-2

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ISBN (paperback) 978-0-295-99957-9
ISBN (ebook) 978-0-295-99958-6
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The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for
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Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.481984.
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Contents

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Acknowledgments ix

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Introduction
Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-Hernandez 3

Part 1. Making Blackness Serve


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1. Containing BodiesEnscandalizing Enslavement:
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Stasis and Movement at the Juncture of Slave-Ship
Images and Texts
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Carsten Junker 13

2. Russian Blackamoors:
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From Grand-Manner Portraiture to Alphabet in Pictures


Irina Novikova 30
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3. Migrating Images of the Black Body Politic


and the Sovereign State: Haiti in the 1850s
Karen N. Salt 52
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4. Playing the White Knight: Badin, Chess,


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and Black Self-Fashioning in Eighteenth-Century Sweden


Joachim stlund 71
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5. Making Blackness Serve China:


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The Image of Afro-Asia in Chinese Political Posters


Robeson Taj Frazier 92
Part 2. Dreaming Diasporas

6. The Glamorous One-Two Punch: Visualizing Celebrity, Masculinity,


and Boxer Alfonso Teofilo Brown in Early Twentieth-Century Paris
Lyneise Williams  116

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7. The Here and Now of Eslanda Robesons African Journey
Leigh Raiford 134

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8. Black and Cuba: An Interview with Filmmaker Robin J. Hayes
Robin J. Hayes and Julia Roth 153

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9. Return to Which Roots? Interracial Documemoirs by Macky Alston,

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Eliaichi Kimaro, and Mo Asumang
Cedric Essi 170

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10. Dreaming Diasporas
Cheryl Finley185
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Part 3. Differently Black
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11. Differently Black: The Fourth Great Migration and Black Catholic
Saints in Ramin Bahranis Goodbye Solo and Jim Sheridans In America
Charles I. Nero 207
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12. Coloured in South Africa: An Interview with Filmmaker Kiersten


Dunbar Chace and Photojournalist Rushay Booysen
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Sonja Georgi and Pia Wiegmink 221

13. When Home Meets Diaspora at the Door of No Return: Cinematic


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Encounters in Sankofa and Little Senegal


Heike Raphael-Hernandez 236
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14. Of Plastic Ducks and Cockle Pickers: African Atlantic Artists and
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Critiques of Bonded Labor across Chronologies


Alan Rice 253
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15. At Home, Online: Affective Exchange and the Diasporic Body in


Ghanaian Internet Video
Reginold A. Royston 266
Part 4. Afrofabulation

16. Habeas Ficta: Fictive Ethnicity,


Affecting Representations, and Slaves on Screen
Tavia Nyongo 287

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17. The Black Body as Photographic Image:
Video Light in Postcolonial Jamaica

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Krista Thompson 306

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18. The Not-Yet Justice League: Fantasy, Redress, and Transatlantic
Black History on the Comic Book Page

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Darieck Scott 329

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List of Contributors 349

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Index 359

Plates follow page 70


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Acknowledgments

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This collection took shape in a four-day symposium marked by intellectual

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rigor and generosity, by risk-taking and community building. We would
like to thank the Volkswagen Foundation for this opportunity that pro-

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vided us with the chance to develop our ideas in person in the beautiful
surroundings of the castle of Herrenhausen in Hannover, Germany; we
are especially grateful to Cornelia Soetbeer and Margot Jckel. A number
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of symposium participants, whose written work is not represented here,
were wonderful interlocutors: Thank you, Tina Campt, Nana Adusei-Poku,
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Courtney Baker, Erica James, Tobe Levin, Alanna Lockward, Amna Malik,
Sylvester Ogbechie, Ilka Saal, Sema Kara, and Cathy Covell Waegner. A
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special thanks goes to John Jennings for his magnificent poster design.
As the symposium became book, we were fortunate to work with
Larin McLaughlin, Whitney Johnson, Jacqueline Volin, Caroline Knapp,
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and the attentive and highly professional staff at the University of Wash-
ington Press. We are grateful as well to the anonymous reviewers for their
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thoughtful readings and general enthusiasm for the volume.


We have had truly supportive home teams at our respective uni-
versity departments that have ushered this project through all its many
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stages. Catrin Gersdorf, Eva Hedrich, and Karin Kernahan at the University
of Wrzburg, Germany deserve a special thank you here. This volume
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would not have made it to the finish line without the yeomans labor of
our marvelous student assistants, Asia Mott of UC-Berkeley and Molina
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Klingler at the University of Wrzburg (hopefully, one day you two will
meet in person).
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Our families had to endure many Skype sessions at odd hours and
family activity times with us showing up late. Yet, their lively participa-
tion in their own ways in the making of the symposium and the book has
enriched our work, and our affectionate thanks go to Michael, Maya,
Maceo, Don, Markus, Jakob, and Jonathan.

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From the start, this project has valued the work of the collective and
collaborative in producing as well as articulating a diasporic intellectual
formation, and worked to recognize the African Diaspora across differ-
enceof academic discipline, of geo-historical identity, and of visual cul-
tural media. Our final thanks go to the authors in this volume who have

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made this a dream journeyjoyous fellow travelers all.

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Black Body

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Migrating the

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Introduction
Leigh R aiford and
Heike R aphael-Hernandez

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In Against Race, Paul Gilroy asks, What forms of belonging have been
nurtured by visual cultures?1 Gilroys work in particular has been enor-

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mously influential as a model which understands diaspora as a set of

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transnational connections rooted in conceptualizations of common
racialized experiences and routed through a set of cultural and political

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resources black people draw upon in their struggles against various and
divergent forms of oppression. Diaspora then is an imagined community
that must be forged, constantly made and remade; diaspora not as a priori
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essence but diaspora as labor and practice. Through such practices,
Jacqueline Nassy Brown observes, differently located blacks transcend
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national boundaries, creating a mutually accessible, translatable, and
inspirational political culture that invite[s] universal participation.2 The
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essays in this collection take up these concerns about the making of the
African Diaspora and ask: How have visual forms enacted such a mutually
accessible, translatable, and inspirational political culture? In what ways
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have visual forms functioned as a diasporic resourceas raw material,


as oreamong, between, and within transnational black communities?
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The collection brings together an international group of scholars


and artists to explore the production of blackness and the black body
through visual culture in the historical as well as contemporary African
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Diaspora. We ask: How have visual mediafrom painting to photogra-


phy, from global independent cinema to Hollywood movies, from posters
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and broadsides to digital media, from site-specific installations to graphic


novelsshaped diasporic imaginings of the individual and collective self?
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We are interested in the multiple constellations formed by our key terms:


migration and movement; the black body; and visual culture. The essays
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range in their interest in how black bodies and black images travel; how
blackness itself has been and still is forged and remade through diasporic
visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past; and
how visual technologies themselves structure ways of seeing African Dia-
sporic subjects and subjectivity.

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The collection was inspired by the excellent African Diaspora studies
and visual culture studies scholarship of the last two decades. In offering
the essays of this collection now, we work at the intersection of African
Diaspora studies and visual culture studies, interdisciplinary scholarly
fields which have only recently begun to be in conversation. African Dias-

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pora studies offers a theoretical framework that enables a mode of study-
ing and conceptualizing black people globally, a means of interrogating

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the condition of movement, migration, and exile of black peoples forged by

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racial capitalism, New World slavery, imperialism, and colonialism. Within
this rubric, African Diaspora studies also considers the process by which
black peoples understand themselves as linked, imagined through cul-

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ture, cultural production, and political movements. While historians and

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social scientists have attended to the former, cultural anthropologists,
literary scholars, ethnomusicologists, and art historians have made vital

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contributions to the study of culture of/and the African Diaspora.
Elaboration of African Diaspora frameworks in the realm of cultural
production has largely focused on literary, aural/musical forms and, more
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recently, performance. We can think here of the archive from which Brent
Hayes Edwards draws in his work The Practice of Diaspora: Literature,
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Transnationalism, which gathers a wide variety of written texts: fiction,
poetry, journalism, criticism, position papers, circulars, manifestoes,
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anthologies, correspondence, surveillance reports; of Paul Gilroys atten-


tion to black musical forms, the jewels brought from bondage, as among
the more unique elements constitutive of Black Atlantic political culture,
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as demonstrated in the foundational The Black Atlantic: Modernity and


Double Consciousness; or even of Jacqueline Nassy Browns observa-
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tion that black Liverpudlians drew upon African American soul music and
fashion as the diasporic resources through which they articulated their
own identities and identification with the African Diaspora.3
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Scholarly consideration of visual forms, whether fine art, film, or pho-


tography, has lagged behind studies of other cultural forms as a mode
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of joining up or linking the African Diaspora. Yet, as Caribbean studies


scholar Michelle Stephens reminds us, discourses of diaspora [. . .] mobi-
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lize imaginings of the self that operate on an affective and sentimental


level.4 Visual cultures capacity to build or envision community across
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geographical location, its capacity to engage its viewers on both critical


and expressive or emotional registers, would seem well suited to just this
sort of mobilization. The collection proposes to explore how visual forms
shape diasporic imaginings of the individual and collective self, to trace
the relationship between visual affect and transnational effect.5

4 LEIGH RAIFORD AND HEIKE RAPHAEL-HERNANDEZ


Art history has led the way in thinking about the African Diaspora and
the visual, as reflected by the number of art historians we have asked to
participate here. Art history offers us the tools of close textual analysis
and the history and theory of aesthetics. However, with its focus on indi-
vidual artists and movements, fine arts/forms, and the elite spaces of the

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museum and gallery, traditional art history can be limited in its ability to
discuss power and politics outside the museum space or to consider how

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those cultural practitioners not labeled/ordained artists produce racial

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meaning and contribute to such discussions. This has especially been
the case with art historys treatment of African diasporic art and artists,
which have been largely confined to the margins of the discipline. Visual

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culture studies alongside art histories that have focused on marginalized

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subjects have together expanded the boundaries of traditional art his-
tory, enabling us to consider low or popular cultural forms, like movies,

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television, and the Internet, and significantly, as scholar Sarah Blackwood
has explained, to move the production of meaning away from the soli-
tary artist toward an understanding of the meaning-making collaboration
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between producer, viewer, and object.6
First waves of scholarship exploring black peoples and visual cul-
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ture have recovered histories in which cultural productions served as
instruments of domination.7 More recent scholarship has uncovered
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not only how African diasporic peoples were themselves producers of


visual images but also how such cultural forms can foster mutuality and
interconnection among marginalized subjects. Here we point to founda-
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tional work by Deborah Willis, Shawn Michelle Smith, Kobena Mercer,


Tina Campt, and Krista Thompson.8 Our contributors address both these
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aspects together; Migrating the Black Body is interested in the interplay


between black bodies as visual objects and subjects; as visual specters
and spectacles and visual spectators; as objects of visual culture and as
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visual producers in a transnational context.


However, the collection is distinguished not only by its work to bring
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the fields of African Diaspora studies and visual culture studies together
in productive dialogue. It is also our hope to fill gaps in each of these fields
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by exploring previously unattended routes of diaspora and forced migra-


tions stretching across space, place, and time, as well as considering pre-
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viously understudied visual cultural forms. We take our title, Migrating


the Black Body, as a way to consider a long and unfinished process of
African migrations and the ongoing movements of black peoples globally.
Paul Gilroys concept of roots and routes remains generative. Diasporic
subjects plant new roots in each encounter. We recognize that there is still

Introduction 5
much to be examined in the old routes of the transatlantic slave trade
and European colonization of Africa and the Western Hemisphere whose
legacies remain far-reaching. We feel there remains important work to
be done in revisiting the visual regimes of slavery and the slave trade in
order to better understand the manifestations of these pasts in the many

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reenactments/re-memories in contemporary culture and politics. We also
consider new routes, the new immigration waves caused by neoliberal

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globalization, migrations that have grown stronger and more urgent since

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the 1990s. We claim that contemporary discourses about globalization
must reckon with the historical palimpsest of colonialism and New World
slavery, new forms of African Diaspora at once colliding and colluding

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with old models.

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Equally important, Migrating the Black Body aims to address lacunae
in the study of race in visual culture studies. We recognize the necessity

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of considering the visual cultures of the African Diaspora before the late
twentieth century, where the bulk of scholarship has focused so far. Thus,
several essays examine visual culture and the African Diaspora between
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the eighteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. Additionally, we
take this opportunity to examine the articulation of African Diasporic iden-
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tity in understudied yet compelling visual forms like comic books and pro-
paganda posters, as well as in emergent visual forms like online digital
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media including YouTube. Placing these everyday but academically over-


looked media alongside visual culture studies more common objects
(i.e., film, photography, and fine art), we hope these essays will occasion
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a far-reaching and enriching discourse for further research.


Hoping that the essays contributed would enact these transnational
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conversations and convergences, we assembled an international group of


scholars and artists who hail from the United States, Germany, the United
Kingdom, the Bahamas, Sweden, Latvia, and South Africa. With gener-
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ous support from the Volkswagen Foundation, we were able to convene


a four-day symposium in Hannover, Germany, in September 2014 during
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which we workshopped papers, exchanged ideas, and performed our


own work of articulating diaspora. Four major themes emerged from the
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essays and our conversations at the Hannover symposium and serve to


organize this volume.
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Part 1, Making Blackness Serve, explores the ways that images of


the black body have been mobilized as vehicles for imperial power. The
essays in this section variously take up familiar sites and struggles of Afri-
can diasporic discoursethe Middle Passage, Haitias well as lesser
known and understudied locales and histories, including Russia, Sweden,

6 LEIGH RAIFORD AND HEIKE RAPHAEL-HERNANDEZ


and China. Taken together, we offer a picture of how blackness and the
black body have been fundamental tools to imagine modernity, from the
seventeenth century to the twentieth, and in geographies where African-
descended peoples were the majority, the minority, or even barely regis-
tered on a census.

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If part 1 considers how the black body as image has been forced to
move and made to serve as commodity, as subject, as visual represen-

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tation, part 2, Dreaming Diaspora, examines how black bodies moved

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themselves in efforts to remake the self and in so doing reimagined dias-
pora. When black people travel by choice, what visions of the individual
and collective black body emerge? In these essays we encounter both dia-

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sporic longing, that is the desire for connectivity across the black world,

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as well as diasporic unevenness, what Tina Campt and Deborah Thomas
have elsewhere called the uneven circulation of specific cultural logics

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that are privileged by particular routings of global capital and that pro-
duce important contests over the meanings of blackness, race, Africa,
and diasporic belonging itself.9 While Campt is particularly focused on
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the gendered logics that enable some (usually men) to travel and disable
others (usually women), we are interested here in the paradoxes of black
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mobility: inequitable positionalities via nationality, and economy, produc-
ing movement that is at once freedom and restriction.
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Part 3, Differently Black, addresses the often rather uneasy dis-


course about the African Diaspora with regard to new diasporas of the
twenty-first century. How do we understand a mobility that seemingly has
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been voluntarily chosen by its travelersand the actual challenges of the


Fourth Great Migration occurring in the twenty-first century? The essays
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in this part ask necessary questions about misunderstandings, and some-


times about appropriations, but also illuminate new forms of solidarity
occurring between a vast variety of old and new African Diasporas. By
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focusing on the globalizing notion of the African Diaspora, which has its
roots in Western colonial history, they bridge history with the present for
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a variety of encounters.
Art reception discourses have often wrestled with the question
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whether art is able to inspire individual recipients of art toward personal


agency. And if empowerment through art is possible, how do expressions
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of art craft identities that are at once rooted in the real of specific
places, times, and circumstances, yet also routed through fantasy and
surreal imagination that unlock from those real temporalities. The Ger-
man Marxist philosopher Ernst Blochs concept of the not-yet is help-
ful here. Bloch argues that art that depicts the not-yet by providing its

Introduction 7
recipients with glimpses of the not-yet-become is able to inspire people
to turn their dreams into revolutionary forward dreaming, thus creating
revolutionary willingness and personal agency. Basing his theory on the
dialectical interaction between the subjective and the objective factor
in human history, Bloch argues that an individual is capable not just of

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dreaming about the future, but also of getting actively and individually
involved in social change through the inspiration of art. His theory has

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often also been called the philosophy from below or the philosophy for

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grassroots movements.10
The essays in part 4 pick up the idea of the not-yet as inspiration for
the art recipient in his or her specific locality. In Tavia Nyongos essay,

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Habeas Ficta: Fictive Ethnicity, Affecting Representations, and Slaves

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on Screen, Nyongo introduces the practice of afrofabulation, in which
black subjects [draw] out from the past a myth whose performative

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power was larger than its historical truth or falsity. Drawing on Jose
Muozs concept of disidentification, Nyongo alerts us to the ways that
black subjects attempt to transform cultural logic from within and point
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towards a different modality of existence. Thus the essays in this sec-
tion each suggest spaces beyond simple binaries of resistance and sub-
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mission, refuse to either reify or demonize the past, and at once trouble,
complicate, and embrace mnemonic practices that imagine alternative
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futures and futures past.


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Notes

1 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line
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(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 155.


2 Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Diaspora and Desire: Gendering Black America in
Black Liverpool, in Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural
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Production of Blackness, eds. Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas


(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 75.
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3 For further details, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Lit-
erature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity
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and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993);


Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering
of Diasporic Space, Cultural Anthropology 13, no. 3 (1998): 291325.
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4 Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of


Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 19141962 (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006), 15.
5 Maurice O. Wallace, Moving Images: Transnational Circuits of Race and
Photography, roundtable comments, American Studies Association Annual
Meeting, Oakland, CA, October 12, 2006.

8 LEIGH RAIFORD AND HEIKE RAPHAEL-HERNANDEZ


6 Sarah Blackwood, Seeing Black, American Quarterly 65, no. 4 (December
2013): 928.
7 See, for example, the excellent series The Image of the Black in Western Art,
eds. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; also, Jan Nederveen Pieterses
White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).

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8 See Tina M. Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African
Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Tina M.
Campt, The Crowded Space of Diaspora: Intercultural Address and the Ten-

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sions of Diasporic Relation, Radical History Review 83 (Spring 2002): 94113;

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Kobena Mercer, ed., Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers: Annotating Arts Histo-
ries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Kobena Mercer, Diaspora Aesthetics
and Visual Culture, in Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Perfor-
mance and Popular Culture, eds. Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Kennell Jackson (Ann

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Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Kobena Mercer, Diaspora Culture

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and the Dialogic Imagination, in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in
Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994); Shawn Michelle Smith,
Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race and Visual Culture

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(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Krista Thompson, A Sidelong
Glance: The Practice of African Diaspora Art History in the United States, Art
Journal 70, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 631; Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black
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Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2002).
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9 Tina M. Campt and Deborah A. Thomas, Editorial: Gendering Diaspora:
Transnational Feminism, Diaspora and its Hegemonies, Feminist Review 90
(2008): xx.
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10 For more, see Heike Raphael-Hernandez, The Construction of a Concrete


Utopian Aesthetic: Concrete Utopian Thoughts in Ernst Blochs The Principle
of Hope, in The Utopian Aesthetics of Three African American Women (Toni
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Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Julie Dash): The Principle of Hope (Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellen Press, 2008): 1332.
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Introduction 9

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