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Jazz-Shaped Bodies: Mapping City Space, Time, and Sound in Black Transnational Literature

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Jazz-Shaped Bodies: Mapping City Space, Time, and Sound in Black Transnational Literature Jazz-Shaped Bodies: Mapping City Space, Time, and Sound in Black Transnational Literature Emma Cleary A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Staffordshire University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy NOVEMBER 2014 You think the words inside our heads are a part of us? Like the phantom limb, ghost bone, or breath chiasmus? And what’s what, when the whole language is versus us? DJ, speak with your hands; address us. — Wayde Compton, “Wow and Flutter” ii Abstract “Jazz-Shaped Bodies” addresses representations of the city in black transnational literature, with a focus on sonic schemas and mapping. Drawing on cultural geography, posthumanist thought, and the discourse of diaspora, the thesis examines the extent to which the urban landscape is figured as a panoptic structure in twentieth and twenty-first century diasporic texts, and how the mimetic function of artistic performance challenges this structure. Through comparative analysis of works emerging from and/or invested with sites in American, Canadian, and Caribbean landscapes, the study develops accretively and is structured thematically, tracing how selected texts: map the socio-spatial dialectic through visual and sonic schemas; develop the metaphorical use of the phonograph in the folding of space and time; revive ancestral memory and renew an engagement with the landscape; negotiate and transcend shifting national, cultural, and geographical borderlines and boundaries that seek to encode and enclose black subjectivity. The project focuses on literary works such as James Baldwin’s intimate cartographies of New York in Another Country (1962), Earl Lovelace’s carnivalising of city space in The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979), Toni Morrison’s creative blending of the sounds of black music in Jazz (1992), and the postbody poetics of Wayde Compton’s Performance Bond (2004), among other texts that enact crossings of, or otherwise pierce, binaries and borderlines, innovating portals for alternative interpellation and subverting racially hegemonic visual regimes concretised in the architecture of the city. An examination of the specificity of the cityscape against the wider arc of transnationalism establishes how African American, Afro- iii Caribbean, and Black Canadian texts share and exchange touchstones such as jazz, kinesis, liminality, and hauntedness, while remaining sensitive to the distinct socio- historical contexts and intensities at each locus, underscoring the significance of rendition — of body, space, time, and sound — to black transnational writing. iv Acknowledgements Over the course of this project I have received the generous encouragement and advice of several of the writers whose works I joyfully delve into here. Thank you to Earl Lovelace for indulging my questions and for his marvellous reading over dinner, and to Ken Seigneurie for making it happen. My thanks to David Leeming for taking an interest in my work and sharing his stories of James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney with me in a sun-filled Montpellier courtyard, and to George Elliott Clarke, for the gift of his time and schooling in Canadian history in a snowed-in February Toronto. I would like to thank Wayde Compton for the pleasure it was to meet him and for serendipitously publishing The Outer Harbour in autumn. For his welcome to the UBC campus, kind advice, and introducing me to the work of Clarke and Compton, I thank Kevin McNeilly, and for our meetings on Granville Island, Vanessa Richards. I also wish to express my gratitude to Eva Darias-Beautell, Courtney Thorsson, and Alan Rice for their helpful suggestions and for sharing their inspired work with me so open-heartedly. My research proposal won a studentship at Staffordshire University, without which I would not have been able to complete this work; I thank my colleagues in the English and Philosophy departments where I found a temporary home. To my supervision team: David Webb, Douglas Field, and Lisa Mansell, all of whom guided me towards new ways of thinking and reading, thank you. I am forever grateful to my parents, Ann and Lawrence, for their constant love, humour, and support. And at last, to my husband, Shane Moore — for going into battle with space and time with me, and for all you deserve, my love. v Contents Abstract iii – iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 – 25 Chapter Summaries 26 – 29 Chapter One 30 – 86 “Here Be Dragons”: The Tyranny of the Cityscape in James Baldwin’s Intimate Cartographies Chapter Two 87 – 147 Ghosts in the Phonograph: Turntables, Time Machines, and the Postbody Poetic in African American and Black Canadian Literature and Orature Chapter Three 148 – 204 Crossing the Water: Portals, Islands, and Kinesis in the Black Atlantic Soundscape Chapter Four 205 – 263 Gap in the Map: Writing the Razed Cities and Porous Borders of Africadia and Black Pacific Canada Conclusions 264 – 282 Notes 283 – 288 Bibliography 289 – 309 vi Introduction This is people taller than cathedrals; this is people more beautiful than avenues with trees. — Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can’t Dance Two decades have passed since Paul Gilroy re-conceptualised the black diaspora within a new model of abstraction, The Black Atlantic (1993), employing the image of ‘ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organising symbol’ (4). With the motif of ships voyaging across the Atlantic, Gilroy launches an oceanic framework by which to understand the African diaspora as an intercultural and transnational formation, a ‘historical nexus of contemporary black identities’ (Chude-Sokei 740). His chronotope of sailing ships roots/routes black culture in/through the experience of Crossing the Water, emphasising the spatial, temporal, and ontological ruptures this entailed (Gilroy 222), and positions the ocean as liminal space between Africa and diasporic sites in the Western hemisphere. Critical interest in Black Atlantic studies is vast, yet there is often a distinct privileging of American geographies within this theoretical paradigm. Areas such as the Caribbean and Canada remain on the periphery of critical debates, and a Eurocentric emphasis pervades literary discourse, concentrating attention on, for example, dialogues between New York and Paris, such as in Brent Hayes Edwards’ influential The Practice of Diaspora (2003). This project applies a transnational framework which addresses these imbalances to an analysis of the conceptual city Emma Cleary | 2 in diasporic literature, explicating connections between depictions of cities across American, Canadian, and Caribbean urban landscapes. Subsequent works have built upon, and in some cases interrogated, the continued relevance of Gilroy’s chronotope, facilitating a renewed engagement with the paradigm from contemporary perspectives. Edwards is critical of the Black Atlantic paradigm because, he argues, it is organised around a ‘principle of continuity’ (Practice 12) which ‘continually draws Gilroy back into the quagmire of origins’ (“Uses” 63). Edwards’ black transnationalism focuses on diaspora connectedness across temporal and spatial fissures, points of separation, ‘a constitutive décalage in the very weave of the culture’ (13). The French here points to a discrepancy in time or in space, which Edwards integrates into a discourse of diaspora that ‘points to difference’ (12). Edwards’ model of décalage acknowledges unevenness, a ‘different kind of interface… the kernel of that which cannot be transferred or exchanged… [that] ‘refuse[s] to pass over when one crosses the water’ (14), like the untranslatable sense in the designation itself. George Elliott Clarke identifies a ‘gap in the map’ (81) of Gilroy’s oceanic framework, arguing in Odysseys Home (2002) that the ‘Black Atlantic is really a vast Bermuda Triangle into which Canada — read as British North America or Nouvelle France or even as an American satellite — vanishes’ (9). Clarke makes clear Canada’s status as a ‘site of New World, African enslavement, immigration, emigration, anti-racist struggle, and cultural imagination’, and contests the ‘blunt irrelevance of Canada’ that dominates black-oriented scholarship (8). However, other Black Canadian critics harness Gilroy’s configuration; in Black Like Who? (1997), Rinaldo Walcott points to Gilroy’s ‘assertion that other travels need to be Introduction: Jazz-Shaped Bodies | 3 mapped and charted’, allowing for a recuperation of the Black Atlantic paradigm for Black Canadian scholarship (32). In fact, Walcott implies a graduation from the confines of the configuration, stating that ‘a simple notion of inclusion… is no longer necessary, sufficient nor required — black Canadas exist and will continue to do so’ (31). Walcott echoes Edwards’ diasporic discourse, focusing on ‘the spaces or gaps through which our current thinking on diaspora might receive continued invigoration if a detour is taken through Canada’ (31). Chapter two of the study enacts this detour, tracing sound waves and resonances that vibrate along the “sounding line” that ‘migrate[s], drift[s], and echo[es]’ across the North American landscape, from Alabama to Vancouver and beyond (Compton, Bluesprint 14; Smyth 390). British Columbian writer Wayde Compton addresses the ‘conceptual bounds of the African diaspora’, foregrounding ‘oblique’, marginal expressions of blackness free from local expectations and the identity politics implicated in a national black consciousness (After 13). In After Canaan (2010), Compton develops an ‘assertive Afroperipheralism’
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