Archives from the Black Diaspora

Archives from the Black Diaspora:A Roundtable Discussion Melanie Chambliss (bio), Brent Hayes Edwards (bio), and Alexsandra Mitchell (bio) Alexsandra Mitchell: Paul Gilroy's 1993 The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness provided a context for understanding Black culture beyond the frame of the nation-state that proved to be groundbreaking for a generation of scholars working on African diasporic culture that included Kim Butler, Michael Gomez, and the late Juan Flores. Brent, I'd like to start by asking you to speak about your first book, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, which might be described as part of this diasporic "turn." Yet The Practice of Diaspora is just as much a book that opened up a way of thinking about Black culture through the archive. How do those two concerns go together? Could we even say that we need to think them together—that theorizing diaspora in fact requires an archival perspective? Brent Hayes Edwards: It's not going too far to say that Gilroy's book opened up space in the academy for an entire generation of us. It was still resonating years later when I finished graduate school at the end of that decade: When I started teaching at Rutgers, I was a faculty fellow in the "Black Atlantic" seminar founded by my colleagues Deborah Gray White and Mia Bay at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, which was a multiyear interdisciplinary seminar that supported the work of internal and external faculty fellows and graduate students. It's astonishing to look back and see how many of the people who shared work in that seminar have published key scholarship in the ongoing scholarly conversation around African diasporic culture, history, and politics. Of course, part of the way one responds to formative work is to extend it, push back at it, critique it. So, The Black Atlantic was enabling for many of us precisely because of its limits, its blind spots. As capacious as the framework seemed, the case studies in the book seemed strikingly narrow and Anglophone. Some of us wondered why, in the end, the book paid so little attention to the African continent itself. Even as we wielded the rubric of the "Black Atlantic" to make claims on space and resources in the academy, some of us wondered whether that oceanic frame might not be too narrow, too singular, to capture the complex dynamics of Black cultural flows beyond the nation-state. If Gilroy's book might be said to emphasize a persistent strain of worldliness in African American culture and thought (Edward Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, the Fisk Jubilee Singers), I was interested in thinking diaspora comparatively, as something produced or practiced in the ways Black intellectuals from different places collaborated and corresponded with each other. I realized that the only way to do it was to assemble a kind of archive: a compendium of sources that had to be brought together, that weren't readily at hand. If diaspora was a practice, I realized, it was something that was happening largely in places that were "lower" and more ephemeral than books. It was happening in what Walter Benjamin calls the "spindles and joints" of print culture: in newspaper articles, in editorials, in anthologies, in pamphlets, in letters ("One-Way Street" 444). To see it, I had to reconstruct the archive of the ways these kinds of publications were in contact with each other, through commentary, reprinting, translation—the ways these sorts of [End Page 19] minor nodes of print culture were crucial in making blackness understood as something that went beyond nation and language. I was particularly interested in connections among African American intellectuals and artists of the early twentieth century and their Francophone peers and counterparts from the French Caribbean and French West Africa. I suppose I thought about it as building an archive because the main place I had to go to track these connections was the French national archives. Ironically, the best place to find early Francophone literature isn't the Bibliothèque Nationale. It wasn't considered important enough to collect. Instead, you have to go

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