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ALH Online Review, Series XIX 1 Vanessa K. Valdés, Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017), 190 pp. Review by Laura E. Helton, University of Delaware “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” This imperative, which appeared in Alain Locke’s celebrated 1925 collection The New Negro, is the most famous statement of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the intellectual and bibliophile who built collections documenting the African diaspora in the early twentieth century. Schomburg’s appearance in Locke’s quintessential companion to the New Negro Renaissance—and the familiarity of his name emblazoned on the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research division of the New York Public Library—have made Schomburg a familiar, if underexamined, fixture in accounts of Black Gotham. Less often has he appeared in narratives of Puerto Rican New York, in spite of his San Juan roots and his lifelong commitment to writing about Latinx subjects. In recent years, however, there has been a surge of scholarship on Schomburg in both African American and Puerto Rican studies, an uptick that reflects the archival turn in the humanities as well as the growth of Afro-Latinx studies as a field. Vanessa K. Valdés’s compact biography, Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, encapsulates the trajectories of these two fields. Born in San Juan in 1874, Schomburg spent some of his childhood in the Virgin Islands with the family of his mother, a free black woman who had migrated to Puerto Rico from St. Croix. In 1891, Schomburg sailed to New York City, where he joined the expatriate struggle for Cuban and Puerto Rican independence from Spain. In many accounts of his life, the US’s annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898 marked a turning point for Schomburg. He began calling himself Arthur rather than Arturo and increasingly affiliated with African American organizations, especially those devoted to historical study. An autodidact who was fascinated by the history of African-descended people in the Americas and Europe, Schomburg spent his lunch hours scouring the antiquarian book stalls of Lower Manhattan, where he worked as a mail clerk at a Wall Street firm. He shared his finds with colleagues in the American Negro Academy and the Negro Society for Historical Research and through short writings for publications like The Crisis and Opportunity. In 1926, when the New York Urban League brokered the sale of Schomburg’s private library to the New York Public Library, his books, manuscripts, and prints became the nucleus of the Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints at the 135th Street Branch Library—now the Schomburg Center. Schomburg’s geographic and intellectual migrations across the Spanish- and English- speaking Black Atlantic have intrigued historians. In his 1995 essay, “To Turn as on a 2 ALH Online Review, Series XIX Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” Earl Lewis nodded to Schomburg as emblematic of a black identity forged through transatlantic crossings and difference. That same fluidity, however, has also made Schomburg an enigma. Was he shaped more by his years in Puerto Rico or his family ties to St. Croix? Why did he seem to turn away from his Puerto Rican and Cuban affiliates and find refuge in African American organizations? Why was he so often at odds with the black intelligentsia in the US? Why did he write in English rather than Spanish? Such questions have given rise to debates about which field—African American, Puerto Rican, or West Indian studies—has a central claim on his life and work. Indeed, as Valdés notes, some scholarship on Schomburg seems to “demonstrate an untenable apprehension when addressing him,” seeking to either defend or cast doubt on his authenticity as a Puerto Rican subject (7). Valdés’s study—the second full-length study of Schomburg after Elinor des Verney Sinnette’s 1989 biography—seeks both to resolve and to move away from such debates. Under the banner of Afro-Latinx studies, Valdés weaves together recent work on Schomburg by Lisa Sánchez-González, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Adalaine Holton, and Jossiana Arroyo to argue that Schomburg brought to his work as a “Race Man” an enduring commitment to afrolatinidad. Valdés refutes claims that Schomburg’s “decision to live and thrive within English-speaking black communities” erased his identity as Puerto Rican, but she does not abandon the narrative of Schomburg as a champion of “American Negro” history (12). Instead, she reminds readers that for Schomburg, “American Negro” was always an expansive subjectivity. She uses Schomburg’s biography simultaneously to understand Latinx subjectivity as inherently entwined with blackness and, in turn, to center Spanish-speaking subjects in studies of the African diaspora. Scholars familiar with Schomburg will find few new archival revelations in Diasporic Blackness, but they will see his biography cast in a new light that foregrounds his Puerto Rican identity not just in the 1890s, but across his life. Valdés attends to each period of Schomburg’s life to show that “in all of the circles in which he traveled, Schomburg remained Afro-Latino,” even when he was most closely associated with institutions that seemed “homogeneously African American” (4, 24). For those less familiar with Schomburg, Valdés’s portrait will suggest new directions for black intellectual history, Afro-Latinx subjectivity, and the connections between a black radical tradition and anticolonial struggles in the Spanish-speaking Americas. Each chapter is structured as a collective portrait, focusing as much on the people and organizations around Schomburg as on the man himself. ALH Online Review, Series XIX 3 The book aims to provide a full view of the contexts shaping Schomburg’s commitment to “diasporic blackness.” The first chapter, “Patria y Libertad,” sketches the landscape of race and revolution in post-1868 Puerto Rico and Cuba and provides brief biographies of the figures who shaped Schomburg’s development as a thinker, including the revolutionary leaders Ramón Emeterio Betances and Lola Rodríguez de Tió, the educators José Julián Acosta and Salvador Brau, as well as Schomburg’s contemporaries in New York, Rafael Serra y Montalvo and José Marti. Valdés argues that these figures were touchstones for Schomburg throughout his life, even after his turn from “Arturo” to “Arthur.” As Valdés notes in the second chapter, “The Diasporic Race Man as Institution Builder,” Schomburg continually reminded his colleagues in African American organizations that they were connected to black subjects beyond the Anglophone Americas. For example, while groups like the Prince Hall Freemasons and the Negro Society for Historical Research helped him ascend the social ladder within New York’s black communities, Schomburg, in turn, challenged the narrow definitions of blackness that sometimes prevailed in these organizations. Similarly, in her third chapter, “Afro-Latinx Chronicles,” Valdés surveys selected writings by Schomburg to show how he adapted a Latin American modernist form—the crónica—to bring to the attention of English-speaking black readers “a wider definition of ‘black Americans’” (79). By moving beyond “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” Schomburg’s widely cited contribution to The New Negro, Valdés adds to recent scholarship that has expanded the boundaries of the New Negro Renaissance beyond, before, and after 1920s New York. In her fourth chapter, “‘Witness for the Future: Schomburg and his Archives,” Valdés continues that line of thinking. Here she examines the collections Schomburg built not only in Harlem but also at Fisk University, where he constructed a “Negro Collection” that rivalled its New York counterpart. Rarely are Schomburg’s Nashville and New York collections discussed in tandem, and Valdés’s study makes clear that his work at Fisk merits greater attention. Drawing on scholarship of the archival turn, which has theorized collections as mechanisms of state and colonial power, Valdés positions Schomburg as the maker of both archive and counterarchive. On the one hand, he believed in archival power, and saw his collection as legitimating black history in intellectual terms narrowly defined by Euro-American institutions. On the other hand, Valdés argues, “Schomburg’s collections reveal a democratic impulse,” open to counterpublic refashioning in ways that defied Schomburg’s own organizing logics (25). In her final chapter, “‘Furtive As He Looks,’” Valdés herself refashions Schomburg’s archive. In the small number of surviving photographs of Schomburg, Valdés notes that he is often turned away from or seems uncomfortable before the camera. “Schomburg’s portraits are not chiefly characterized by his panache or elegance; rather, they are typified 4 ALH Online Review, Series XIX by an element of discomfort,” she writes (115). While such poses were likely common in portrait photography, Valdés uses Schomburg’s seeming photographic self- consciousness to return to the theme of the opening chapter: the apprehension scholars have felt about categorizing Schomburg. Like his biography, which fits comfortably in no single scholarly framework, these portraits defy categorization. Valdés chooses to see such illegibility as a “deliberative act,” a power Schomburg enacted over his visual legacy that, like his writings and organizational work, “challenged his contemporaries to broaden their notions of blackness so that it could conceivably include him” (131, 134). The approach in this final chapter mimics the project of Valdés’s book as a whole, which sees his biographical enigmas as productive rather than puzzling. The collections Schomburg built were intended to show without doubt that “peoples of African descent were worthy of intellectual analysis,” and, because his collections were international, there “was inherently an emphasis on the complexity of the black experience” (137). Thus, he laid theoretical as well as material groundwork for understanding Afro-Latinx subjectivity specifically and diaspora more broadly.

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