XXX 054-083 771311-Craft

The Quilt Towards a twenty-first-century black feminist ethnography renée alexander craft, meida mcneal, mshaï s. mwangola, and queen meccasia e. zabriskie

meida: intellectual tradition celebrating the diversity and unity of a community of scholars.2 ‘The word macomère is widely used in the Caribbean to mean “my child’s god mother”, “my best friend and close woman confidante”, “my meida: bridesmaid or another female member of a Part of a larger project created by a four-person wedding party of which I was a bridesmaid”, collective called ‘The Quilt’, this article reflects, “godmother of the child to whom I am also on a different scale, a similar vision. It is a godmother”, “the woman, by virtue of the depth conversation between scholar/artists, exploring of her friendship, who has rights and privileges what it means to be African/black, over my child and whom I see as surrogate mother.”’ female/feminist cultural workers at this (Helen Pyne Timothy) moment in time. Over the course of our 1 See Helen Pyne fieldwork and homework, we each experienced Timothy, ‘About the mshaï: moments where our ‘profane’, leaky, curvy, Name’ (1998), tracing the socio-cultural, linguistic In 1998, the Association of Caribbean Women mother/sister/daughter/macomère bodies, and intellectual Writers and Scholars (ACWWS) launched the bound up in the polities of our national and genealogies of MaComère (macumé, makumeh, inaugural issue of the journal MaComère, ethnoracial identities, unsettled the ‘sacred’ macoomé, macomeh) and devoted to scholarly studies and creative works spaces of our field sites and academies, often in other linguistic/ by and about Caribbean women. Each of the first unintentional and unexpected ways. Across our geographical variants. four issues began with a reminder of the experiences in the field as African/black women 2 For other seminal examples of written and importance of self-naming and self- immersed in ethnographic communities that we embodied black feminist articulation.1 MaComère then presented an are either original members of or provisional collaborative models such as that of the eclectic, stimulating quilt of creative fiction, inductees, we find we are dealing with similar Combahee River academic papers and book reviews; struggles and concerns. We compare our Collective, see edited volumes produced by conversations with and tributes to significant collected stories of variegated blackness noting Barbara Smith (1983); literary and scholarly figures; and information their differences and continuities. We process Stanlie James and Abena Busia (1993); Carole on new publications from the Caribbean. the value of blackness in cultural practice Boyce-Davies and ‘Molara Women and their lives, experiences and ways of examining the labour these stories perform on Ogundipe-Leslie (1995); Carole Boyce-Davies being were centred in the process of knowledge- the ground embedded within the cultural (1994); Beverly Guy- production, dissemination, and consumption. contexts in which they live. Using the tools of Sheftall (1995); Irma McLaurin (2001) and the Reading the journal, one had the sense of respect, laughter, play, reflexivity, and flexibility performance work of participating in a rich conversation that we interpret and make meaning of stories. We Urban Bush Women . it means to belong to a particular gendered official training in academia and the

54 Performance Research 12(3), pp.54–83 © Taylor & Francis Ltd 2007 DOI: 10.1080/13528160701771311 T h e Q u i l t

• When Africa Met Asia by Tammy H. Hampton; a quilt inspired by the artistry of Phyllis Stevens.

home-knowledges we have learned by growing matrix of race, gender, nationality, location and up and living African/black and female.3 class affect understandings and expectations of 3 Caribbean novelist and what it means to be ethnographers in the field cultural critic George Lamming (2004) mecca: and how this is manifest in our experiences and conceives Caribbean Serendipity brought us together, but we have work. We explore our epistemological language ‘as a field of power relations’, noting since developed a commitment to articulating a frameworks, acknowledging the legacy we have distinctions between the common space from which to follow our inherited, while claiming the right and ways in which ‘official King’s English’ and separate research interests. Blending responsibility to articulate who we are and what ‘vernacular’ or ‘home’ performance theories, black feminist theories, we are committed to in the journey towards a languages are used to assert different kinds of cultural theories and performance-centred collective vision. agency dependent on methodologies with critical ethnography, we set social context. out in this essay to begin to imagine the mshaï: contours of what we are naming a twenty-first- Like ACWWS, our intellectual work has been century African/black (black/African) feminist closely tied in with our living. As Patricia Hill ethnographic theory and praxis. We use our Collins argues, everyday actions, experiences, field sites in Panamá, Trinidad, Kenya and the lives and ideas are critical to the process of United States of America to analyse how the theorizing for black feminist scholars (2000:

55 methods exercise (Conquergood 1991: 179, Reed- . l a t e t f a r C Danahay 1997: 9). We locate our subjective positions as critical ethnographers in relation to our field and academic communities to build an intellectual scaffolding for the work we do. The differences distinguishing our individual research interests, projects, sites and selves do not erase the consonances that convince us of the possibility and profitability of finding common ground with which to begin to explore Frantz Fanon’s call to identify a [collective] generational mission (Fanon 1963: 166).4 We embark on this process engaging the technologies of our present moment, which facilitate more collaborative and performative processes (despite static, glitches, program incompatibilities and time differences) to extend the patterns our mentors so carefully have sewn while preparing our own legacy for those who will come after us. These digital technologies extend our abilities of reach across space to recover, create and maintain productive kin, kith, collegial and coalition relationships. 4 We draw here from viii). We can, literally, find ourselves in We intend this ‘Quilt’ as a means to begin Houston Baker’s macomère relationships that are ‘so firmly addressing the theoretical and practical definition of a generational shift as ‘an gendered and honou[r] the importance of commitments of a twenty-first-century black ideologically motivated friendship in relation to the important rituals of feminist ethnography. Divided into four movement overseen by young or newly emergent marriage, birth and (implied) death’ (Timothy ‘frames’, the first lays out the genesis of our intellectuals who are 1998: i). collaborative relationship. The second uses dedicated to refuting the examples from our individual research to work of their intellectual In the midst of labouring together through predecessors and to classes, exams, discussions and multiple analyse theories and major terms/concepts that establishing a new presentations of our work – all the joys and underpin our collective project. Cognisant that framework of intellectual inquiry’. However, we travail of graduate school and beyond – we also definitions can be used to exclude, marginalize, question if a generational share bride/smaid, co/mother, confidant, authenticate and disempower, we offer these shift must ‘refute’ the work of predecessors and sistah/friend, colleague relationships which terms/concepts not as absolutes but as suggest rather that a have become central to our theorizing. reference points on a broader map. Self-naming shift could be a re- positioning reflecting a is critical to our project. African/black women particular context (2000: renée: have all too often been imagined, defined, 179). Fanon’s position on generational mission Stitching Dwight Conquergood’s definition of labelled and packaged in ways that are at odds seems more applicable – critical ethnography as ‘committed to unveiling with who we are and understand ourselves to be. respecting the work done by previous generations, the political stakes that anchor cultural While the second frame approaches our we seek to build on it by practices – research and scholarly practices no gendered experiences through race, ethnicity understanding and meeting the historical less than the everyday’ – with Deborah Reed- and national linkages, the third reverses the challenges of our own Danahay’s definition of autoethnography as flow by analysing our relationship to with the possibilities that this moment offers us ‘self-narrative that places the self within a social feminism/ist and marking some of the mundane (1963: 166). context,’ this performative quilt is a critical ways our gender impacts our experiences in the

56 field as well as the academy. We conclude by witnessing England beat Trinidad and Ghana rehearsing some of the key tenants we deem beat the Czech Republic in World Cup soccer on critical for a twenty-first-century black feminist the television screens of local pubs, re-crafting ethnography. conference papers, shopping, sight-seeing, negotiating the transport system, eating at geneses Indian, Caribbean, Lebanese and Afghani meida: restaurants, dancing in a mostly white crowd as Chicago house-music legend Frankie Knuckles ‘I would start with the following assertion that the challenge of any discourse identifying itself re-mixed Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream as black feminist is not necessarily or most speech’ to a house-beat. It was all surreal. Then, immediately to vindicate itself as theory. Its a moment of normative rupture: a call for papers challenge is to resist the theory/practice for this journal issue. Our London experiences, dichotomy, which is too broad, abbreviated and particularly the generous responses of compromised by hedging definitions to capture participants at our PSi panel, as well as what the range and diversity of contemporary critical became the first performative iteration of this practices, including the range and diversity of the contributions of black women to that project as ‘The Quilt’ at the National

T h e Q u i l t • (facing page) Whit(e)man discourse. A far more valuable and necessary Communication Association conference in San Road. (bottom) Wedding project would proceed from the commonplace Antonio, Texas, were crucial in shaping the picture by Nicole Castor. assumption that no consideration of any direction, process and product of this paper. • (top) PSi London. intellectual project is complete without an (centre) Restaurant in understanding of the process of that project’s Brixton. (bottom) mshaï: Bookstore in Brixton. formation.’ (Deborah E. McDowell) ‘Let me tell you a story. For all I have is story.... The story depends on every one of us to come mshaï: into being. It needs us all . . . needs our remembering, understanding, and creating what ‘This is a world in which I move uninvited, we have heard together to keep us coming into profane on sacred land, neither me nor mine, but being.’ me nonetheless. The story began long ago . . . it (Trinh T. Minh-ha) is old. Older than my body, my mother’s, my grandmother’s. As old as my me, Old Spontaneous Me, the world.’ renée: (Trinh T. Minh-ha) Version 2 Evanston, Illinois, November 2005. As an meida: initiative of the Institute of Diaspora Studies, Version 1 led by Michael Hanchard, we co-convened the London, July 2006. We made a collective trans- first Northwestern University Black Diaspora Atlantic crossing to explore black subjectivites Performance symposium. The groundwork for at Performance Studies international (PSi) #12, this article grew out of the rich where we presented papers on a joint panel on discussions/debates we had in crafting the the politics of nation, culture and identity in symposium proposal, creating its panels and Afro-diasporic performance. Conflicted experiencing its presentations. The symposium descendants of the painful encounter of British created a forum for several emerging scholars imperialism with Africa, we unexpectedly found who use the lens of performance to explore the ourselves seeking out the familiar in the urban African/black diasporic experience to present spaces of ‘black’ London. work and receive feedback from each other and So there we were: attending to international senior scholars in the field. This essay reflects performance-centred research at the conference, the epistemological foundations of that

57 gathering as well as its commitment to sharing Patricia Parker, Wahneema Lubiano, Chikwenya . l a t e t f a r C contextualized field experiences grounded in Okonjo Ogunyemi . . . our mothers, theory. grandmothers, aunts, sisters and our sister- friends are paradigms of this invested critical mshaï: cultural citizenship. ‘The story began long ago . . . For years we have mshaï: been passing it on, so that our daughters and grand daughters may continue to pass it on. So it ‘We memorise, recognise and name [our] sources, may become larger than its own proper measure, not to validate [our] voice through the voice of an larger than its own in-significance. The story authority . . . but to evoke [them] and sing never really begins nor ends, even though there [recognising that] in this chain and continuum is a beginning and an end to every story, just as [we are] but one link.’ there is a beginning and an end to every teller.’ (Trinh T. Minh-ha) (Trinh T. Minh-ha) mshaï: ‘The Quilt’ is indebted to D. Soyini Madison’s mecca: tripartite black feminist approach to Version 3 ethnographic research and documentation as Many places throughout time. This version well as her activist approach to scholarship. reaches back to the generations of intellectual 5 A key structural feature Further, she has served as the unofficial of this style of mentors, teachers and peers who have brought ‘traveling midwife’ of this paper and symbolic collaboration rests on its us to this present moment. Although we have ability to make use of midwife of this project by chairing conference multiple technologies of not physically met many of them, they have panels in London and San Antonio. We are also communication in order taught us, by living example, how to forge bonds to build a more fully indebted to Sandra Richards, who endured embodied experience. of trust, reciprocity, deep listening and having all of us, although – thankfully for her – While writing solely in obligation. It is the story of several intellectual cyberspace might create not at the same time, in her Black Feminist a loss of intimacy and traditions all weaving into what we are Theories class and who has been invaluable in presence, our process articulating here as a twenty-first-century black supporting, productively critiquing and urging often entailed a combination of feminist ethnography. Their influence teaches this project forward. These ‘sista-doctas’, communication modes to us how to connect more fully with our melding black feminist theories and fend off distance and a ethnographic communities by being as astute to sense of collaborative performance ethnography, represent the many alienation. For example, our interconnection and interdependence under whose voices make the timbre of our own richer, we often wrote in global systems of production and consumption cyberspace while talking as we speak in words that are formed by what on the phone, giving as we are to local specificities and uniqueness. they first gave to us (Jones 1997: 51–67). immediate feedback on Fannie Lou Hamer, Zora Neale Hurston, Carole developing ideas. As well, our moments of physical Boyce Davies, Micere Githae Mugo, Toni meida: gathering, at several Morrison, Sylvia Wynter, Amina Mama, Alice Besides our use of conference calls, email potluck dinners, at conferences and group Walker, Audre Lorde, Nkiru Nzegwu, Sweet exchanges and occasional face-to-face sessions, talk events, including Honey in the Rock, Awa Thiam, Dionne Brand, a large bulk of this piece emerged in the world of Performance Studies 5 international, the Urban Bush Women, bell hooks, Beryl cyberspace. With their ability to link National Communication McBurnie, Pearl Primus, Tracy Vaughn, Ama Ata transnational and diasporic citizens in Association and the Center for Comparative Aidoo, Katherine Dunham, Deborah Thomas, disparate physical locations, Web tools – word Interdisciplinary Studies Lisa Aubrey, Ayesha Imam, Ntozake Shange, processors, blogs, interactive websites – are at Northwestern University, acted as Djanet Sears, Fatou Sow, Jennifer Brody, redefining how twenty-first-century scholars reinforcements to make Muthoni Likimani, Yvonne Daniel, Zenebeworke imagine and perform collaborations. In this collaboration both a mediated and embodied Tadesse, Celeste Watkins, Mary Pattillo, Ava digital environment, we were able to upload our endeavour. Vinesett, Takiyiwaa Manuh, Darlene Clark Hine, words and images, often working and

58 commenting on each other’s work have spent hours reckoning with perspectival simultaneously, if not seamlessly. The Web nuances of these terms. As in the field, our tool’s ability to manage multiple written voices moments of discord have often been just as has, in some ways, made the messy process of generative, if not more so, than our moments of shaping, navigating and honing one collective agreement. offering from four wilful voices more possible and pleasurable. Indeed, at times, the act of mshaï: writing together has felt like collage play and As we have worked on articulating definitions, artistic co-scripting. representing perspectives, ordering priorities and sometimes, the most sensitive of all, editing renée: each others’ words, we have also learned the arts As our words mingle in cyberspace, our voices of tactful negotiation, graceful capitulation and connect over long-distance conference calls communal living. Sometimes, unable to agree, made possible by the digital telecommunica- we have worked with accommodating diversity; tions revolution, which forced phone companies at other times we have found alternatives that to create flat-rate local and long-distance have surprised all of us. T h e Q u i l t cellular and home calling plans. We swap digital photos on-line like our mothers swapped mecca: Polaroids. Yet, just as this process bridges As we speak across our different disciplines, geographic distances between us, it has also ethnographic sights, nationalities, ages, etc., we produced moments of irreducible difference do so not as a means of erasing the experience among us. which have produced our particular positionalities but as a method of engaging in mshaï: our own coalition politics.6 More than simply 6 It is important to me As we reflect on the possibilities of working stating the multiplicity of black women’s that I acknowledge the mentorship that Renée, together in collegial partnerships that experiences, our coalition politics places them Meida and Mshaï have transcend boundaries, we have found our in dialogue in order to understand the nuanced given me throughout my graduate school career. process reflecting the inherent challenges of ways that black women are erased, are silenced Their work, both doing so. We represent diverse intellectual and/or fall into ‘the gap’ (Scott 1992; Crenshaw academic and artistic, continues to inform and traditions; we come from two disciplinary 1995). The paradigm of the quilt allows us to inspire me. We would like homes; we work in four countries; and we carry accomplish this while keeping in mind the to thank Tera Eva Agyepong, Nana Akua different national passports. Each brings her meta-narratives and internal logics that Anyidoho, Nicole Castor, own sets of investments to the table, similarly connect us to one another.7 In this regard, we Selina Greene, Janaka Bowman Lewis and strengths, weaknesses and schedules that have draw on the black/African women’s tradition of Oronike Odeleye for their no respect for the timetables we set ourselves. quilting to offer this multivocal, polyrhythmic, feedback on earlier We have learned to accept each other, with our improvisational narrative as evidence of our versions of this article. 7 We would like to thank different body rhythms, varied work patterns experience as a space for redress and Tracy Vaughn for sharing and diverse methodologies. reconciliation, as a symbol of hope, possibility her knowledge about the African American and transformation, and as a code for ourselves quilting tradition. renée: and others (Barkley Brown 1989; Davis 1998). This process has demanded that we actively work as critical ethnographers and black feminists as we engage the terms and tools we use. We have all come to un-know and re-know terms and locations we thought we knew (black, African, diaspora, blackness, feminism/ist). We

59 black/african: african/black worlds These terms of naming mark both our . l a t e t f a r C membership within and our distance from the ethnographic communities with which we work. mshaï: To tell ethnographic stories honestly and ‘What is Africa to me?’ ethically, we must address the multifaceted (Countee Cullen) aspects of our own experiences, explicating what we mean when we name ourselves ‘black’ mecca: and/or ‘African’. Who do these names attach us ‘How Africa is represented in global politics, and to and distance us from? These terms are international political and cultural economy, strategic indicators. determines how Black people the world over are treated.’ mecca: (Lisa Aubrey) In the case of African/black worlds, the relationships between memory, power, agency renée: and cultural performance resound out to create ‘The African Continent/African Diaspora transnational disjunctures, linkages and question . . . will not be resolved by the familiarities. Sometimes these sites and universalization of the black experience . . . experiences bounce irreducibly against each Rather it will be better and more meaningfully other, while in other moments they find comfort addressed through a serious commitment to in collective experiences of identification. Thus, forging intellectual, [socio-political] and cultural the work we do as scholars (and as members of linkages and constructing economic bridges that are grounded in the recognition and appreciation African/black worlds) not only connects us to of the commonality of origin and the divergences specific sites and communities of African-ness/ wrought by historical imperative.’ blackness but also calls us to imagine and seek (Obioma Nnaemeka) out the transnational and diasporic connections crossing our work and the communities we meida: invest in regardless of the ultimate The concept of diaspora in relation to Africa has unpredictability of tracking people, cultural undergone radical definitional shifts. It is material and ideologies that cross borders defined as: 1) a historical narrative and process (Vertovec 1999; de Certeau 1984). of dispersal, loss, trauma and violence, 2) a historical narrative tracing migrations across renée: the globe, 3) an evolution of pan-Africanist, post- We dispel the notion of a ‘trouble-free’ colonial and decolonization discourses (early- transnationalism, (Conradson and Latham and mid-twentieth-century anti-colonial 2005: 227) acknowledging that blackness and Independence movements); and 4) a rooted African-ness often meet on an ‘asymmetrical epistemological identity that many of us avow field of power relations’ (Pratt 1992: 7). We are (i.e., ‘I am a diasporic, transnational person’). always negotiating and redefining what we Across these shifts in the use of diaspora as mean – and what’s at stake – when we invoke process, product, space and identity, the tropes notions of community, solidarity and kinship of ‘African-ness’ and ‘blackness’ have been within and across these worlds. How do we under constant negotiation, not solely on address hegemonies of value between different theoretical terrain but in actual embodied valences of blackness? practice. Like diaspora, ‘blackness’ and ‘African- ness’ emerge as differing epistemological orientations and ontological political projects.

60 mshaï: past experiences through memory to achieve When we began this project over the summer of desired ends’ (Aubrey 2005; Robinson 1994: 1). 2005 with the simple agenda of bringing In this light, the aforementioned panel together a group of peers to deliberate on became larger than its respective parts. ‘Performing the Black Diaspora’, we had no idea Collectively, these examinations, crossing the of the scope of the intellectual adventure on Caribbean, U.S., and Africa, reflect models of which we were embarking. Two years later, we African/black community negotiation on a find that in exploring what Joseph E. Harris global scale within a transnational diasporic calls ‘the global dimensions of the African frame. The Haitian revolution is a historical and diaspora’ (1992), we have begun to re-define and symbolic phenomenon that continues to re-articulate our own intellectual and artistic reverberate powerful discourses of identities, affiliations, priorities and decolonization, freedom and social justice, commitments. standing not just for itself but also signifying connections to African/black liberation meida: struggles everywhere (Black Power, 1960s and At our 2005 Black Diaspora Performance 1970s anti-colonial Independence movements, T h e Q u i l t symposium, Lisa Aubrey, Professor of Political Civil Rights, etc.). Washington’s U Street Science at Ohio University, served as a neighbourhood exemplifies the infinitely respondent on a panel entitled ‘Diaspora and expanding nuances and valences of African- Citizenship: Redefining Affiliations and ness/blackness that, once brought together, can Allegiances’, which included research often ignite in clashes over civic rights and presentations considering African/black belonging and/or create incredible experiences constituted across local, regional demonstrations of pan-African/pan-black and transnational grounds. Tanya Shields community and consciousness. Examining the explored the contemporary significance of the class and power dimensions of Afro-Trinidadian Haitian Revolution; Mohammed Mohammed folk and postmodern dance leads to the examined community tensions over urban space possibility of considering macro issues between Ethiopians / Ethiopian Americans on embedded in African/black cultural practices. one hand and African Americans on the other in Attaching cultural performance to class and Washington D.C.’s U Street neighbourhood; and I economic difference highlights difficulties in interrogated class and intra-ethnic tensions achieving democratic and equal representation within Afro-Trinidadian folk and postmodern and debates over what cultural criteria define dance practice. Seeking out continuities ‘authentically’ African/black cultural practices between the presentations linked not directly by between the myriad class orientations content but rather by meta-themes – defining representing these communities (underclass, cadences of blackness and/or African-ness, lower working class, middle class and the cultural authenticity, citizenship and the elite). politics of belonging – Aubrey enlisted Pearl Robinson’s term the ‘culture of politics’ to mshaï: summarize the panel’s potential social and Like the panel, the work of ‘The Quilt’ political labour beyond academic encompasses both the terms African continent documentation and analysis. Using performance and its diaspora(s). We use the ‘African/black’ and cultural practice as modes of agency and (black/African) in this project conscious that sites to negotiate blackness/ there are black communities (such as in the African-ness, she noted, ‘The culture of politics Pacific region or from/in Asia) who do not . . . empowers communities to reuse and replay identify in any way with Africa as their

61 homeland, just as there are also African mshaï: . l a t e t f a r C communities that are not black. How do the diverse experiences of the contemporary continent and diaspora compare renée: and contrast with those of the historical Part of the project of a twenty-first-century diaspora and continent? How can these black feminist ethnography is to develop an similarities and differences be negotiated to awareness for modalities of blackness within help in the project Cheryl Johnson-Odim discourses of Africa, modalities of Africa within proposes – of creating a sense of shared black discourses of blackness, and all of the community out of what is often perceived, for messiness in-between. better or worse, as shared identity?

mecca: mshaï: Cognizant of the influence of historical, As black women ethnographers, we are both political and social forces in shaping the diverse agents of change and complicit actors within contexts of African/black local, national, our current world system. Thus, as much as we regional and global experiences, we find understand our work as a community-building ourselves asking the following questions: enterprise and critical intervention, we also understand our obligation also to look inward. How do we make sense of our own ambivalences mecca: to particular national identities but also admit What is added when we engage discourses on our attachments and our access to particular the African/black world and the historical privileges of civic participation (i.e. some relationships between its different parts in passports allow more mobility than others)? multiple languages – Swahili, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, Mandarin Chinese, English, meida: Yoruba, Gullah, Creole, Portuguese, Wolof, From relatively empowered spaces, how do we Russian or any other – currently in use? deal with issues of authority, allegiance, privilege, ownership and preservation across renée: the African/black world? What is our place and If, as Lisa Aubrey urged during the symposium, responsibility in the negotiation of intra- we centre Africa in our spatial understanding of diaspora, diaspora/continent and intra- its diaspora(s), what would it mean to look East, continental politics? We are each loaded with North and South as well as West, to think of the personal prisms and baggage through which we Indian and Pacific Oceans and the experience and make sense of blackness, Mediterranean and Red Seas as well as the gender, class and power – how do we carry these Atlantic Ocean, in our search for diverse ideologies into the field? What transgressions experiences of what it means to be African/ do these preconceived perspectives bring on in black and ‘scattered abroad’ on a permanent the field? And how do we redress them? basis? mshaï: mecca: What responsibilit(ies) do we have towards In what ways can historical and present other scholars who work in the same spaces or examples of transnational migrations and on the same issues and whose different partnerships within the continent, between identities create a different set of diaspora and continent, and within the challenges/possibilities for them? How do we diaspora, deepen Africa/black world research? address imbalances in access to resources, in

62 the different privileges national, gender and meida: other identities bring or take away as we work in Performance and cultural practice serve as particular field and academic communities? useful tools in the project of revaluing How do we nurture each other – and allow blackness and African-ness, particularly for this ourselves to be nurtured – while ensuring we do twenty-first century moment in which DuBois’s not become complicit in complicating the work problem of the colour line and Fanon’s thesis of others? that black folks’ ‘self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation’ remain resonating meida: dilemmas of experience across the How do we address the multiple, and perhaps African/black world (1967: 17). We are sometimes clashing interpretations of Africa as constantly battling the sustaining logic of a a site with shifting meaning and value Western hegemonic narrative that creates dependent on one’s location as continental blackness as an ‘archetype of the underclass’ African, Afro-Caribbean, African American, (Amkpa 2006). Or as Wahneema Lubiano European Black (or countless other derivations)? succinctly states, ‘Poverty and crime . . . wear a Is naming self/project ‘African’ a discussion ‘. . . black face – not in reality, but in the public T h e Q u i l t about origins and continuity? Is naming self/ imagination’ (1997: vii). project ‘Black’ a platform to connote shared struggles and experiences as ‘black folk’ mshaï: globally? Is the term ‘blackness’ less about a It was in Australia – a country that often slips temporal and spatial origin/centre and more out of global discourses of blackness – that I about exposing often unequal conditions and began to learn this experientially. In Australia, qualities of lived ‘black’ experience? blackness is associated, first and foremost, not with those who identify with Africa in descent renée: but with those who claim Australia as origin. How do discourses of blackness on the Discourses on blackness primarily engage the continent compare and contrast with those in indigenous Aboriginal experience; in contrast,

the diaspora? Likewise, how do discourses of black/Africa-ness reads exotic and alien – 8 The Yorta Yorta nation’s African-ness in the diaspora compare and ‘unAustralian’. ancestral lands are located in parts of contrast with those on the continent? In 1999–2000 through my association with an northern Victoria and arts-community group for African-descended southern New South blackness youth, I was invited to join a theatrical Wales. At the time, they were pursuing a native production ‘The Torch’, an exploration of land title claim, one of mshaï: Australian identity that focused on historical the first Aboriginal communities in and socio-cultural relationships between ‘The individual must filter the external through mainland Australia to do indigenous and various sectors of immigrant so after the native Title the mediation of what he/she is socialized to Act was passed, allowing experience with reference to his/her culture- Australia. As a member of the devising team, I Aboriginal communities specific identity as “good” or “bad.” Fanon makes became familiar with official government to claim back Crown land and waters. In 2002, the evident that the middle-class educated black is reports such as the one by the 1991 Royal High Court of Australia socialized to experience his/our own Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, upheld a decision determining that the physiognomic being, as well as his/our African often referred to in the public sphere as the cultures of origin, as “bad,” as archetypically ‘tide of history’ had ‘Black Deaths in Custody inquiry’. In trips to washed away, and thereby Evil, in Aimé Césaire terms, as “le part maudite,” extinguished, their from which one must separate oneself if one is to Yorta Yorta ancestral land and interactions with native title rights. For 8 be fully human to “feel good” in the terms of our members of that indigenous nation, I began to more about the Yorta Yorta and their claim, see present ethno-class of the human.’ understand for the first time universal Wayne Atkinson (2001) (Sylvia Wynter) blackness as a global historical narrative with and Andrea James (2003).

63 practical implications that have nothing to do reversed. The ‘United States’ masks a vast socio- . l a t e t f a r C with a particular geographical space, a national cultural landscape of porous but separate micro- GDP or the availability of resources. Australia nations. I am from a southern ‘nation’ by the sea taught me that while deficiency is not a where people generally eat slower, story-talk synonym for black, to be black often means to be longer, drink sweet ice tea and call carbonated pushed to the margins of society. drinks ‘soda’ rather than ‘pop’. When friends of At the same time, I continued my work with my age group in Chicago recollect seminal the youth group. One day, I was informed by the moments from their young adulthood, the project manager that a couple of the parents backdrop is usually house music, whereas my were uncomfortable with the name that we had theme tracks are most often hip-hop. We connect agreed on for the group: ‘Young, Gifted and through our parents’ music, the vinyl soul, funk Black’. The problem was in the ‘Black’. These and R&B albums they played before we were old adults initially expressed misgivings that the enough to buy our own and to which many of us name was misleading as ‘people would think it have returned as thirty-somethings. When was a group for Aboriginal youth’. I explained friends in Portobelo share their coming-of-age that the name was taken from a speech by stories, they are often to the beat of salsa Lorraine Hansberry and provided the text for romántica, reggaton, reggae and Congo. We first their perusal as well as a CD with Nina Simone’s connected at the place where Panamánian DJs tribute to Hansberry celebrating the ‘million mix hip-hop with reggae. Having danced salsa boys and girls who are young, gifted and black’ and meringue for over ten years now, I dance scattered globally. One parent became even them with the same freedom as I dance the other more insistent; she did not want her child two. So, before my tongue learned Spanish or my associated with a ‘Black’ identity that consciousness grasped Congo, my dancing body referenced African American culture, which she was finding ‘home’ in Portobelo (Alexander: 19). viewed as problematic. Another worried that the identity ‘Black’ performed a kind of militancy mecca: that he was not too comfortable with. Ultimately, During the second weekend at the Ronald K. the group held on to its name; the young African Brown / Evidence workshop, we went out to eat Australians I was working with were even more at a restaurant downtown. We were a large party dismissive of their parents’ concerns than I was. of about ten people, all of whom were of colour But I, a child of the independence era who grew except two white women. After the hostess up in a country and a time where my blackness informed us that their only big table would not was unproblematically taken for granted, who be available for another forty-five minutes to had sung innumerable times that black, in the one hour, we asked if they would break up the Kenyan flag, represented ‘the colour of African party so that we could be seated. We were told might’ and was ‘proof that [I] belonged to the that they could not fulfill our request because land’, acquired a new understanding of the they had other customers, and the hostess complexity of meaning in relation to blackness. proceeded to sit the white couple that entered the restaurant after us. We looked at one renée: another in disbelief at what was happening and I became a foreigner twice in 2000, first in my asked to speak to the manager. When we finally tongue and then in my body. From my earliest spoke, he was very short with us. When it visit to the small Afro-Latin town of Portobelo, seemed like our complaints were not registering Panamá, my body felt at home even though my with him, I threatened to report the restaurant tongue did not. When I relocated to Chicago from to the Better Business Bureau for Durham, North Carolina, the challenge was discrimination. When I did this, the manager’s

64 entire disposition changed, and he tried to get regulating effects it had on my body. Often, I us to sit down and eat in the restaurant. We took was issued warnings by word of mouth not only his information but refused to stay. What are to be cautious of the ‘Hill’ but also to be aware of the ironies of having a collective experience of the potential danger in Laventille’s neighboring the same types of discrimination that fuel Ron villages: ‘Pray your car never stalls on the Brown’s work? Outside we joked that we should highway near the Beetham.’ / ‘Watch yourself have sent the two white women among us inside taking Lady Young Road into town. There’s a to ask for the table. I know this was our way of stretch they like to rob people on.’ / ‘If you’re not trying to diffuse a painful experience. from Laventille, you can’t go up there alone. You have to know someone.’ My research boundaries renée: were being policed and my body disciplined into Just as my phenotype, dress, dance vocabulary perceiving Laventille as no-access territory. In and music preferences aligned me with local truth, I never made it deep up the ‘Hill’, but even contexts of blackness in Portobelo, my status as my encounters with adjacent villages – a thirty-something, single woman with no Barataria, Morvant, Belmont, even parts of San children living abroad linked me with a nexus of Juan – were stamped with traveller-beware T h e Q u i l t ‘outsider-ness’. It connected me with the two utterances. In subtle ways, the pathology younger white female U.S. Peace Corps workers inscribed upon Laventille leaked out onto the as well as the two female Corporación Española areas touching its geography. workers with whom I shared living space. We all On another occasion, I was invited to sit in on had the privilege of passports and visas, which a Best Village rehearsal at Success Laventille afforded us travel and affiliations with Composite School, located just off the Eastern governmental agencies at home that had Main Road. As I was travelling in daylight and financed it. ‘Gringo’ was a floating signifier that not heading too far up the hill, my husband, my blackness sometimes deflected and that my though still anxious, backed off. Part of his privilege at being able to travel under a U.S. relenting, I believe, was on account of another passport and study in Portobelo sometimes friend doing research in Trinidad accompanying absorbed. At home, I was black American; in me. What I remember most about that day is not Panamá, I was American black. the actual rehearsal, but rather an encounter with a man who worked at the school. During a meida: rehearsal break we went to his office, and he Unlike the other dance companies I work with, handed us several pamphlets to browse. They who are mostly middle-class in orientation, were newsletters produced by Laventille Malick Folk Performers is predominantly residents, detailing various community comprised of lower-moderate-working-class development imperatives from after-school and Afro-Trinidadians. My then-husband, a local, adult learning programs to environmental would often argue with me about travelling on sanitation projects and cultural arts maxi-taxis to Malick Folk Performing endeavours. His urgency to show us another Company’s rehearsals in Barataria, telling me side of Laventille, one that is largely absent with concern, ‘Trinidad has changed. What you from most media and public discourse used to do you can’t do again. A woman representations, stands as the defining moment travelling late by herself is a dangerous thing.’ of that fieldwork memory. To ease his dis-ease, we made arrangements for In the same vein, Malick Folk Performing a pick-up on most occasions. Company uses Afro-Trinidadian folk forms as In this way, I became acutely aware of the tools of uplift and cultural education. Unlike Laventille neighbourhood through the self- broad institutions of national and municipal

65 government, education and commerce, these share, we find support, strength, inspiration and . l a t e t f a r C community systems of productive citizenship do guidance to answer Lorde’s challenge to do the their work at a smaller scale, focusing on work we are called to (1984: 41–2). everyday activities that transform civic consciousness. Through folk drumming, dancing, theatre and choral singing, Malick insider/outsider strives to empower Trinidad’s lower-working- class black community countering the mecca: circumscribing pathology that names Laventille ‘I experience Black belonging on American soil and similar environs as ‘deliberately cho[osing] as a space of flux and ambiguity constituting the path of dependence rather than self-help and multiple identities; however, this belonging entrepreneurship’ (Ryan et al. 1997: vii). They remains a discursive and material association are a significant instance of local civic efforts to with specific bodies based on historical, social re-humanize and revitalize Trinidad’s black and political arrangements that are regulated through law, culture and the everyday.’ under and working class through the practice of (D. Soyini Madison) folk performance. In such a way, they generate new archetypes of blackness and new symbols of hope (McNeil: 109–12). meida: My first memories are of my grandmother’s renée: house, the corner of Spaulding and Jackson on Chicago’s Westside. I remember the ‘Fifth City’ ‘Blackness, like performance, often defies movement, a social reform rhetoric and practice categorization.’ (E. Patrick Johnson) actualized by the African American residents of the neighbourhood. I went to Fifth City pre- school, ran the block with other neighbourhood mshaï: children to the ‘penny candy’ store jangling Blackness/African-ness serves as cultural loose change begged from our elders, and I currency that gets defined/articulated/ learned to love and respect the black sculpture performed in a plethora of ways, by both those of an ‘Iron Man’ that stood in the centre of the who identify as African/black and those who neighbourhood’s shopping centre. It was a seek to embrace or be embraced by it. As black testament to the strength and resiliency of feminist ethnographers mentored by women ‘black community’ in a post-Civil Rights era still warriors who have fought against hegemonic ripe and anxious with activist promise. Now the narratives, we follow Audre Lorde in ‘Iron Man’ is gone. The shopping centre has transforming silence into language and action – been boarded up, a standing reminder and articulating, validating, affirming, performing signifier of unfulfilled revolution. and supporting diversity even as we cerebrate I shift spaces to the opposite side of town, communality. Our stories are ultimately about Chicago’s Northside. My nuclear family moved hope, even when they record pain, confusion, away from Grandma and cousins, aunts, uncles sorrow, disillusionment or exclusion. As we and the rest of the extended kin. I grew up in the acknowledge, document and reflect on our multicultural landscape of Rogers Park. I experiences and those of the communities we learned to acquire a taste for Mexican, Indian work in and with, we are reminded of the work and Caribbean cuisine. I learned to engage that still remains to be done. As we quilt them others who did not look or sound like me. I into multi-faceted conversations reflecting the learned the foundations of a black feminist messy and complex diversity of the identities we ethnography from a white inner-city teacher

66 who was also my mother: Quiet observation. mecca: Time-intensive engagement. Deep listening. I began dancing West African dance when I was Forging trust. Always seek community and eight years old. My mother put my older sister coalition. and me into a class at MindBuilders Creative On Chicago’s Northside, I also learned lessons Arts Center in Bronx, New York. My mother was about the ebb and flow of development, not just introduced to African Dance when she was 14 as a physical happening but also as a psycho- years old through her Summer Youth job in the social process. Rogers Park is a testament to the Bronx. She described this moment to me as a tussle of social change. Since my youth, many of spiritual awakening and wanted us to the poor have been moved out to make way for experience the same sense of belonging she had gentrification. And living next door to your when she danced. While I was growing up, neighbor does not mean you will be fast friends African Dance was always about reclaiming a or even cognizant acquaintances. In one breath, particular heritage and history, and it continues I admit my city is a segregated one. In another, I to serve that function. I have come to see it as witness exceptions to the rule. part of a project that sought to create Though I did not know it, I packed these connections to Africa and the African/black T h e Q u i l t lessons with me when I made my journeys to diaspora through embodied practice. It Trinidad. It was there that I began to learn how celebrates the cultural and physical beauty of to embody the persona of an official blackness, as well as articulates a history of ‘ethnographer’. Fieldwork requires active role- struggle and resistance. From my life experience playing, chameleon-like character. I was always I have been able to better understand the being read differently. By appearance I was a political, social, cultural and psychological shifting signifier: ‘White lady! Ey Reds! Ey imperatives behind maintaining and creating Spanish! Cocopyal’. By occupation I was such connections through blackness, the way multiple too: Mother-American–Researcher– that ‘for many black people in the United States, Trini by association (married to a Trinidadian embracing this belonging, however it is and married to the culture). And these ways of articulated or whatever the level of its being perceived and being known were consistency, becomes a matter of saving one’s contingent passes or denials to cultural access. life and one’s sanity. This kind of belonging falls With so many researchers now coming here to beyond intellectual or philosophical pondering; do their research, I often felt I was being tested. it is psychological and physical protection’ What was my right to seek the knowledge and (Madison 2005a: 541). This physical and codes of this place? What was my right to ask psychological protection is what my mother these questions? Local citizens challenged my wanted to equip my sister and me with when she audacity to enter their country-nation-culture enrolled us in our first West African Dance and to ask to know their precious stories even as class. When I first encountered Ron Brown’s they shared them with me. And they were right. work, as an undergraduate student at Duke Fieldwork and ethnography are gifts of University, I was immediately drawn to this reciprocity, not imperial entitlements. aspect of his work. My project has been about exploring the possibilities for transformation renée: and community-building in Ron Brown’s dance, ‘The spaces within the research domain through as well as in the specific dance workshop within which indigenous research can operate are small which I studied. Through dialogue and spaces on a shifting ground.’ interaction in the field, I have been able to (Linda Tuhiwai Smith) realise the silence produced by my own positionality.

67 mshaï: understand through layers of static. Even in my . l a t e t f a r C How are ‘investments’ assigned to the dreams, the language forming in my mouth was black/African female ethnographer based on a taffy my tongue and teeth pulled and re-pulled appearance, gender, races, language, country of to make pliant. By most evenings, my head hurt origin, history, and/or class? How do these with the strain of trying to understand and be investments impact our presence(s) and understood in this second cultural and verbal projects? How do the frames of ‘insider’ and language. I was a foreigner, fo-reig-ner. Now, ‘outsider’ shift within this matrix of African- that’s another taffy word. ness, blackness, gender, nationality and class? How does this matrix affect the ways we claim mecca ethnographic authority and what we recognize With our interlocutors Aisha, one of the other as our responsibilities to the communities with dancers, used the style of my locks to place me which we work? inside what she called the ‘Atlanta Lock Crew,’ a group of about five women all of whom had thin, renée: groomed locks. Only one of the dancers in this Fieldwork did me as actively as I did it. There group actually lived in Atlanta, so this were days when I was not quite sure who I was, designation was not about actual differences in let alone what I was supposed to be doing. I ate region of origin. Instead, it was a rhetorical different foods; my body changed; my mouth device, which employed the language of class filled with a second language; the container I and regional location to articulate a boundary carried my project in sprung a dozen leaks, around respectable self-presentation Aisha spilled all over the floor and caused some new perceived at the workshop. Even as an knowing to sprout there. imaginary boundary, it was one she worried a mis-step could have placed her outside of. mecca: During our interview she revealed to me that During the dance workshop, the degree to which because of her preoccupation with this I was an insider and/or outsider shifted boundary she spent the first weekend doing her depending on the interaction, illustrating, as hair. She stated that she did not want to be ‘the Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues, that there are representative of the black ruffians’. ‘multiple ways of being both an insider and I was unaware of this boundary during my 9 During the question- outsider’ (1999: 137). Moreover, these were not fieldwork at the dance camp. All of the black and-answer portion of static, bounded identities; instead, they were women participating in the workshop who did her presentation at the Northwestern University continually changing configurations that not come with Evidence as apprentices or Sociology Department developed interactions at the workshop (Naples interns had natural hair. In fact, there were so Ethnography workshop on Wednesday, 14 2003). Most of us were strangers to each other, many black women with natural hair at the February 2007, Celeste so we were engaged in a constant process of workshop that we often had exchanges about Watkins talked about the narratives that form forming and re-forming bonds and connections. the positives of natural hair and shared hair- around you in the field. grooming techniques. When Aisha mentioned it She was referring the impressions that renée: during our interview, I was a bit surprised. respondents had of her In the early days of my field research, I felt like a Our interlocutors form their own and the way that she would have to change her smiling bobble-head riding backward on a interpretations of us in the field. Some show us self-presentation in dashboard. Like the dash-toy, I witnessed my to ourselves in ways that take us off guard. different environments. The title of her paper was surroundings a blink or two out of sync with Others grant us access and legitimacy in the ‘Am I My Sister’s Keeper? real time. My Spanish proficiency was a distant field.9 With regards to interactions between Racially Representative Bureaucracies in the frequency on a radio dial. Sometimes, it tuned black women, I think that it also illustrates Post-Welfare Reform Era’. in perfectly. Other times, I strained to another way in which boundaries around ‘good’

68 and ‘bad hair’ are being articulated in this immigration officer to stamp my passport, to present moment when it has become more of the that people I am interacting with at any given norm to see black women with natural hair. moment. I remain the same person inside, but doing the work that I do in the body that I have meida: has meant something different to the communities I have lived and worked with in ‘In Ghana, West Africa, the words “white girl Kenya, Australia and the U.S.A. upstairs” disrupted my reality of belonging (that I’ve always known) to its very core. I represented something else to him. At that moment, it was mecca: representation that eclipsed any notion of ‘Insider research has to be as ethical and belonging.’ respectful, as reflexive and critical as outsider (D. Soyini Madison) research. It also needs to be humble. It needs to be humble because the researcher belongs to the renée: community as a member with a different set of During the first few months of my field roles and relationships, status and position.’ research, I used routine to re-inscribe my sense (Linda Tuhiwai Smith)

T h e Q u i l t of home and to reestablish my sense of order. Several times a day, I criss-crossed the small renée: town of Portobelo in lock-step with my self- My routine, which served me well as a frantic imposed schedule. Monday, Wednesday and young scholar living and working with equally Friday mornings, I took additional Spanish frenzied peers, did more to mark my U.S. classes with Maestro Andes, a retired local ‘outsider’ identity, than my tongue did. How Spanish grammar and composition teacher. does the black female ethnographer trained in Tuesdays and Thursdays, I agreed to facilitate a the States make herself a spectacle? By being Spanish/English intercambio (interchange) more present to the work than to the class for friends who worked as Congo visual community; by focusing more on the project artists. I tried to write/journal/lunch between than the process. When I finally allowed myself noon and 2 p.m. each weekday and tried to do at to ‘live’ in Portobelo, to sit on the stoop with least three interviews per week. It was other women, to laugh and story-talk across my ridiculous. small yard while hanging laundry, to hop in a car with friends and go just for the sake of mshaï: going, to form bonds of kinship based on my On the continent, I am often assumed to speak status as neighbour, friend and macomère, for the Diaspora; in Diaspora, I find myself, Portobelo and I became more knowable to each unwittingly, representing an entire continent – another. most of which I have never visited. My life has taught me that race and gender mean different meida: things in different contexts; the heterogeneity I navigate between memberships: I am still a of the black female experience continues to child of my local environments – Chicago’s surprise me as I see it reflected on my body Westside and Northside communities. I am now through different lenses. Having lived in learning a new role as a mother of a three-year Diaspora, while I do not claim to be of Diaspora, old boy, an emergent civic member to humanity I understand how difference as well as who will know his Trinidadian heritage as much similarity characterizes black spaces. I know as his African American and American ones. that I am ‘black’ differently depending on a host And, I am a citizen of the black diaspora, of variables, from the nationality of the last learning that blackness is manifold in its

69 variations and that I am obligated to document renée: . l a t e t f a r C these experiences as such. Always, the precious We focus here on performance ethnography’s ideas of community, solidarity and coalition are potential to open a space for dialogues around on my mind. And ethnography is the quiet race, gender, ethnicity, class and nation, which revolution I commit to in practice. may unveil the ideological investments of the ethnographer no less than those of the performance ethnography communities with which she or he works. According to Conquergood, dialogic renée: performance ‘bring self and Other together so In London, at the 2006 Performance Studies that they can question, debate and challenge international conference, my co-authors and I one another’ (1985: 9). As a mode of critical relished riding the Tube. With child-like glee, we analysis, it serves as both an engaged practice anticipated the recorded female voice warning, to increase understandings across various ‘Mind the Gap’ as the train doors yawned in boundaries of ‘otherness’ as well as a method of sync. The caution meant that one should be meta-analysis (Madison 2005b: 167–8; Johnson careful of the space between the more stable 2003: 8). platform and the moving cultural conduit that imbues it with meaning. From my first visit to mshaï: Portobelo, Panamá, in 2000, performance Considering performance ethnography’s utility ethnography as a mode of critical ethnographic within the process of moving towards a twenty- research has served as that type of productive first-century black feminist ethnography, we warning in the dangerous hollows between what ask: How might blending Dwight Conquergood’s the community says, what I hear, and vice versa. triple ‘c’ approach to performance studies with Through its reliance on dialogism, performance the core tenants of black feminist ideology serve 10 In his article ethnography serves as a steady reminder of the critical ethnographic research?10 How might ‘Performance Studies gap and a method to traverse it. It calls us to staging one’s research in the field or academy Interventions and Radical Research’, engage its presence not as a wound to be healed create new opportunities for dialogues and Conquergood articulates or hole to be filled but rather a critical contour deeper analysis? How might critical attention to Performance Studies as creativity (artistry), of discontinuity between the researcher and the misunderstandings and missteps, ‘the gap’, communication communities within which she works. reveal taken-for-granted assumptions that we (analysis), and citizenship (activism) bring to bear on the communities with which we (2002: 152). mecca: work and/or that the community brings to bear ‘I learned many things about research in my own on us? community through those women. I never really did justice to them in the report I eventually mecca: wrote as an assignment; I never quite knew how, never possessed the skills or confidence at the ‘It is almost useless to collect material to lie time to encapsulate the intricacies of the upon the shelves of scientific societies. . . . The researcher/researched relations or my own Negro material is eminently suited to drama and journey as a beginning researcher. But I music. In fact, it is drama and music, and the remember learning more about research and world and America in particular needs what this about being a researcher from that small project material holds.’ than I did from any research course, any lecture (Zora Neale Hurston) or any book.’ (Linda Tuhiwai Smith) meida: Writing alone is not enough to display the complexity of blackness as lived experience. We

70 understand the body as a vested site of cultural enslavers. (Jiménez 2000; Smith 47–8; negotiation. Cultural practices are an enacted Alexander 95) politics of citizenship. What people ‘do’ connects them to specific communities of meida: belonging. Therefore, simply to write is to The ethnographic narratives we document are ignore other modes of communication through interventions on both local and global scales. which bodies make meaning. In our moment, They are parables of importance, reflections for embodied performance, aural and oral the local communities who made them in the communication, video and image first place as well as lessons for a global documentation and cyberspace must all be audience to bear witness to. acknowledged as critical spaces both to search for ethnographic content as well as to communicate our own ethnographic renée: analyses. On 12 July 2003, I directed the last performance ethnographic project of my extended research mshaï: year in Portobelo. Entitled ‘El Museo Congo’

T h e Q u i l t (The Congo Museum), this performance- ‘So on money I had borrowed, I put on a show at ethnographic project succeeded in the end the John Golden Theater on January 10, 1932, and because several of my collaborators and I tried out my theory.’ (Zora Neale Hurston) slipped into the gap. In the breach of our misstep, the crisis it opened up and the various renée: modes of communitas that followed, I learned For the past seven years, I have been engaged in how generative the gap can be. a critical ethnographic study of an Afro-Latin community located in the small, predominantly mshaï: Roman Catholic town of Portobelo on the Gloria Naylor begins her novel Mama Day with Atlantic/Caribbean coast of the Republic of the cautionary story of an ardent researcher Panamá, its performance practice known as who goes back home on extensive field work ‘Congo’, and its practitioners who call ‘from one of those fancy colleges mainside, themselves by the same name. Focused on the dragging his notebooks and tape recorder . . . politics of black-identity Panamá, I analyze the rattl[ing] on about “ethnography”, “unique Congo tradition and its shifting position within speech patterns”, “cultural preservation” and twentieth-century discourses of blackness. whatever else he seemed to be getting so much The Congos of Panamá are cultural pleasure about out of’ (1993: 7). When his descendants of the Cimarrones, runaway research is finally published, no one in the enslaved Africans who fought for and won their community has any regard for the work, which freedom during the Spanish colonial period.11 may have plenty to say to others but has nothing 11 Cimarrones assisted The Congos of Portobelo, like other Congo to offer them. As far as the community is English privateers like Francis Drake and pirates communities along the Caribbean coast of concerned, the researcher – despite being one of like Henry Morgan to Panamá, use ritual performance to celebrate and their own – didn’t know what to ask, whom to successfully sabotage Spanish colonial trade share their history, traditions and cultural ask it of, or how to go about asking. ‘Pity [he] practices in Panama and practices. Such performances generally occur couldn’t listen,’ Naylor tells us, ‘or he woulda left to secure their own freedom. during carnival season (Congo season), which here with quite a story’ (1993: 10). begins on 20 January and concludes on Ash Again and again I find myself wondering: Am I Wednesday. The performances cast the asking the right questions? Am I going about blacks/Congos against the devil/Brutal that in the right way? Am I speaking to the right

71 people – especially those who are often ignored Entitled ‘Volaré’ (I’ll fly away), her piece was a . l a t e t f a r C or forgotten? healing ritual and altar space created in the And – most difficult of all – am I truly holding area in the back the fort where enslaved listening? people are believed to have been held. When we learned of the theft, we were unsure if it was in response to a perceived act of brujería meida: (witchcraft) or whether it was meanness, Tending ethnographic relationships is a process mischievous thievery, thievery for necessity or combining care, play, flexibility, the ability to something more random. Regardless, we were observe and listen and a desire to be good to all deeply hurt. The Congo artists were even those who have been good to us. I find myself more concerned because they did not want this charged with an obligation to represent a multi- to be the memory Pamela would pack with her dimensional visceral telling of these precious later that day to take back the States. As we lives and their practices of committed waited for the rain to subside on the morning of citizenship. The stories they have been willing the exhibition, we worked frantically to rebuild 12 The local artists were to share with me are significant documents of Pamela’s piece. Because we wanted a better Virgilio ‘Yaneca’ Esquina, cultural labour and cultural power, and they Virgilio ‘Tito’ Esquina, ending for our story than the one the hurricane Reynaldo Esquina, must be handled with care. Gustavo Esquina de la and vandalism were offering us, we all decided Espada, Ariel Jiménez, to sacrifice elements of our individual pieces to Jose ‘Moraito’ Angulo, Manuel ‘Tatu’ Golden, renée: ensure her project’s success. Her project became Jeronimo Chiari, Hector Staged in the ruins of San Jeronimo, a Spanish ours too. By day’s end, it was the most powerful Jiménez and Danilo Barrera. National and colonial fort in the heart of Portobelo, ‘El Museo piece of our collaborative project, not only international artists Congo’ was a collaborative art installation- because of its artistic value but also because it included: Jenny Arribu, a visual artist from the performance created by seventeen local, pulled us out of the slump and worry that the United States who national and international artist/scholars weather had created and gave us even more initiated a children’s art invested in the Congo tradition.12 A month in incentive to rise above it. class in Portobelo; Carla Escoffery, a Panameña the planning, ‘El Museo Congo’ sought to As I was trying to locate materials to help visual artist studying in analyze what it means to be a contemporary Pamela rebuild her installation and the United States who assisted with Jenny’s Congo practitioner/artist and/or brainstorming with Estaban and Alejo to re- class; Pamela Sunstrum, co-performative witness. imagine ours, Carmelita, a women from Spain a visiting Botswanan artist from the University Unfortunately, we could not have chosen a and an employee of El Grupo Española (The of North Carolina at more inopportune date for our project. Our ‘El Spanish Corporation) pulled me aside and Chapel Hill; Michelle Lanier, an independent Museo Congo’ took place just hours after chastised me for ‘allowing’ Alejo to ‘damage’ the artist from the United Hurricane Claudette entered the coast as a fort.13 With my nerves strained, I pulled away States; and me. Panamanian strong tropical storm flooding some chambers from her without a word, shared her concern photographers Sandra of the fort, creating a muddy mess in others, and with my collaborators and asked what Eleta and Gustavo Esquina shared their art providing us all with what a friend would later alternatives we might imagine. Now, Alejo was practices by helping to call ‘a good test of character’. By the 2 p.m. furious. ’Dañe el fuerte??!’ (Damage the fort??!), document the event. opening, the weather had not yet allowed us to he wondered out loud. ’Su nuestro hacer con lo 13 Carmelita, Estaban, Alejo and El Grupo complete our set up. As the sky had emptied and que queremos! (It’s ours to do with what we Española/The Spanish the ground had overflowed, we were crushed to want!). Group are pseudonyms. learn that someone had stolen the candles and destroyed the feathers, Pamela Sunstrum had meida: installed for her project. This type of beginning As I write, James Clifford’s notions of partial makes it easy to lose one’s bearings and slip into truths and ethnographic fictions become real to dark hollow places. me in a new salient way (Clifford and Marcus

72 1986). Continually, I find myself drawn to El Grupo Española, which had recently stories that inspire me. Each story I approach established a presence in Portobelo, I with fear, hesitation and overwhelming awe. represented a selfish U.S. agent more interested And, in each story I find moments of laughter, in completing her own project than protecting renewed excitement and connection as I revisit the Spanish cultural heritage in the region. field journals, collected images, audio and From my perspective, a foreign white woman videotapes and transcribed conversations. was asking me, a foreign black woman, to tell a Words take on a new power. local black man what he could and could not do in his own hometown. Alejo asked why he should renée: revere something that was used against his The hurricane caused us to relocate to a ancestors and why he should have to attend to different chamber of the fort. Between the the concerns of an extranjero (stranger) from tropical storm, having to reorganize spaces, and Spain. That was the gap. As we tumbled, we the theft of Pamela’s materials, I was not coalesced around different feelings of rage and thinking about the preservation of the remains entitlement. The Congo artists felt the fort was of the four-hundred-year-old fort when Alejo theirs to use; the Spanish Grupo felt it was T h e Q u i l t located nails and began hanging our materials theirs to protect and I, the black female critical in the new space. I had seen banners and ethnographer, the performative co-witness and decorations nailed to its walls on numerous agent, had taken a side earlier in the day in my occasions, so the thought did not strike me as choices and in my silences. Carmelita and I both abnormal. In his anger over Carmelita’s had been attracted to Portobelo around issues of comment, Alejo reminded me that the Spanish cultural history, presentation and analysis. She Group had not complained when artists from had come for the town’s Spanish colonial Panamá City had put the same kinds of nails in legacies; I had come because of its black the fort during an event they co-sponsored diaspora ones. The nails in the fort did not several months prior. At that, he continued cause the fissures; they simply aggravated hanging our piece, and I went to put out other them. The same ‘culture of politics’ the Congos fires. enact each carnival season, which tells the story of the Congo/Blacks’ victory over the meida: Devil/Brutal enslavers, still reverberates in How do we – as scholars who are cultural Portobelo. With a chuckle and a sigh, our workers – complicate debates about ownership, hostess remarked, ‘It’s the Cimarrones and the tradition, innovation and authority by tracking Spanish all over again.’ I could learn more from some bits of culture and eclipsing others? How the gap than on the platform. does what we craft on paper and in performance intervene, making some small dent in meida: established perceptions of what we thought we Ethnography is our base to build partnerships, knew or what we ignored up until now? collective communities and to privilege voices that may not be heard in the public realm. We renée: deal with the cultural practices of the everyday That night, the gap roared wider and swallowed that affirm, embed, shore up and contest the us all. After a strained dinner together, status quo. Our work emphasizes the Carmelita called me an ‘Imperialist American’ ‘possibilities’ of alternative ways and means: the and chastised the Taller Artists for their lack of quietly done and engaged, the hard everyday concern for their cultural heritage. For her, a work that builds up/tears down through woman of Spanish heritage and an employee of persistence. We know this in our muscles as

73 much as our minds, because we learned the the socio-historical context and the social . l a t e t f a r C power of the story, not just through the academy phenomenon under consideration. These but through home knowledge (Christian 2000; interactions also produce what to some appears a hooks 1990; Moruga and Anzaldúa 1983). seemingly confounding set of social roles and political attitudes among black women.’ Though ethnography is seemingly benign, with (Deborah K. King) its mundane focus on the everyday practices of life, we recognize ethnography’s power to relay renée: the labour inherent in citizenship as an engaged practice. The power of the word, the power of ‘The narrative of one life is part of an bodies, the power of communication. Our tender interconnecting set of narratives; it is embedded in the story of those groups from which are stories, personal and collective narratives, individuals derive their identity.’ gathered in the field. We do not privilege macro- (Paul Connerton) politics and macro-structures though we embed them in our analyses, for they are the charge- meida: points, the events that make our micro-work ‘go’. Ethnography encounters are ethical, activist, Ours is a time intensive practice documenting ambassadorial, coalition-building acts. They are and detailing minute productions of culture. We also balancing acts. We manage fieldwork recognize bodies as always cumbered with floating along our multiple affiliations of multiple narratives of social, economic, political belonging – to the lessons and values we learn at and cultural weight. We chart how bodies, as home, to the codes of ethics and knowledge we active consumers and makers of meaning, learn in academia, and to the new expectations perceive and make use of the power structures and forms of knowledge we are exposed to in the they live within (family, work, education, field. Fieldwork is also a taxing process on the government etc.). How do people react to power? ethnographer’s body; she must always be aware How do people engage power, not only as a force of her changing position. Which hat does she upon them but as a force they dialogue with, wear in what location? How do her multiple contest and tactically use in contexts that commitments coexist and clash? How does she change constantly? Power from above is not only keep track of the personas she must inhabit? to be experienced; power is navigated and negotiated with (de Certeau 1984; Trouillet renée: 1995; Pollock 1998; Savigliano 1995). The nexus of our raced, gendered, classed, black women ethnographers: nationalized selves leaks out in unpredictable profane on sacred ground? and uncontainable ways.

all: mshaï: Our Beginnings in the Field ‘This is the world in which I move uninvited, profane on a sacred land, neither me nor mine, mshaï: but me nonetheless.’ ‘When are you going to get married?’ (Trinh T. Minh-ha) renée: mecca: ‘Se murio tu babe?’ (Did your baby die?) ‘In the interactive model, the relative significance of race, sex, or class in determining the conditions of black women’s lives is neither fixed nor absolute but, rather, is dependent on

74 mecca: times that her face is not smiling. She is sad for ‘What are you doing to give back to your me. community?’ I have seen her several times a week for at least eight weeks. I visit with her parents, she’s meida: stayed over . . . what would make her . . . ‘Where’s Jaden?’ It’s my Spanish, I must have heard her wrong or heard her right and misunderstood the meaning. mshaï: I’m concentrating too hard to mask my shock The most disconcerting time I was asked this question during fieldwork was not by a family ‘Como?’ (What?), I ask her member, although – or maybe, because – they ’Your baby. Your little boy,’ She clarifies. ask often, but by a professor, ‘Did he die?’ a potential mentor, who has known me for over a ‘No, querida,’ I say. ‘I don’t have any babies.’ decade, ‘ooooh,’ she says, face closing in contemplation. a teacher, familiar with my work as an artist and Then opening back up. T h e Q u i l t scholar. She smiles, I smile back I run into him shortly after I get back to Nairobi still a little off-centre to begin my fieldwork and watch her run back towards the street to and visit his office to present my project, play with the other children first, out of courtesy as he asks me to go do so, and then also because I hope he will be a useful I blink hard to snap out of it. resource. So this is how people are trying to make sense of me . . . He goes through the written summary and listens to my presentation with no question, no comment. mecca: And then: This past summer I had a troubling exchange ‘Are you married? Are you engaged?’ with one of my family members. Then he proceeds to gently admonish me that He stopped me in the hall of the house in which the doctorate could always wait, but we were dressing for a graduation, to ask me I am not getting any younger and need to ‘find about school. someone now’. I told him about my fieldwork at the Ronald K. Says that is the research project I need to be Brown / Evidence workshop, how empowering focusing on right now as the doctorate will that was, ‘severely hamper’ my chances of finding and my interest in Cuba. someone willing ‘take me on’. He then asked me ‘Well, what are you doing to give back to your renée: community? How are you making sure that I’m struck dumb by the question. others around you can get to where you are?’ At 4, Naomi stands in the green space between Both very important questions. my yard in Portobelo and the street, white I assumed he was referring to my family saucers with big dollops of maple syrup looking members, so I told him about the educational up at me. She bites the left side of her lip with and job resource information I’d been sending her remaining front tooth. It is one of the rare out.

75 He then started to talk about a theology class he never get from me. I have also had the . l a t e t f a r C was taking. opportunity to be more flexible, to just ‘be here’, more like a stay-at-home mom for the beginning He said he was reading about white evangelical of his life. Yet, at the other end, I have to do my women who would go around and make work – this fieldwork – which requires time, speeches, energy and focus (much like another baby to but they would always do it underneath, or with take care of). the permission of, their husbands. He said something to the effect of ‘back in the The balance of wearing the mommy hat, the day, women would not make a name for fieldworker’s hat and the spouse’s hat is not a themselves. position easily achieved. Is there any space – Usually they would take on their husband’s home or academia – to talk about this? Seems name’. more like a reality that lives in silence. Is it a silence suffering from an ignorance of not I asked him about women like Sojourner Truth, knowing or a force of prescribed reality and pre- what would he say about that. assigned gender roles? I don’t know. He was not happy with my reply. I wonder if in his mind giving back to ‘your mshaï: community’ means While we consciously choose here to identify giving up my dreams for the success of a what we do as ‘black feminist ethnography’, we husband? recognize the changing and contested nature of the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’. The diverse meida: choices our female mentors have made ‘Where’s Jaden?’ I am often asked. regarding their use of these terms encourages And I realize how much the question irks me. in us a respect for the plurality of labels that As if the child must be attached to my hip. African/black women use in their gendered As if as ‘mother’ I must be with him 24-hours-a- approaches to improving their world(s). day. Some engage these terms, embrace and own I do this for myself but also for my child, them working to expand their use in and in for my family and friends, reference to African/black women, for an artistic career that I want to create communities, concerns and contexts; others alongside a scholarly one. have chosen to reject these terms entirely or to qualify them differentiating them from And even my husband falls into this trap of understandings marginalizing African/black perception. Something he could not do in peoples and experiences; while still others are Chicago. In the States we wouldn’t have the wary of all form of labeling refusing to be extended-family childcare set-up that we have caught up in debates on definition. here.

What I am in the midst of is a dilemma of work mecca: ethic, time perception, a difference of cultural tradition and gender roles, and a struggle over ‘When people ask me rather bluntly every now and then whether I am feminist, I not only power. And what is this situation doing to and answer yes, but I go on to insist that every for my child? At one end, I think this is quality woman and every man should be a feminist – time with his aunts, uncles and cousins to especially if they believe that Africans should experience Trini culture firsthand, to grow up in take charge of African land, African wealth, it and be a Trini child for a bit – which he would African lives and the burden of African

76 development. It is not possible to advocate for makes the feminist spirit/engagement the independence of the African continent effervescent and exciting but also intractable without also believing that African women might and difficult to name. have the best that the environment can offer. For (1998: 5) some of us, this is the crucial element in our feminism.’ renée: (Ama Ata Aidoo) As I sit shoulder-to-shoulder with my sisters, macomères, friends binding patches of fabric mshaï: together, I realize that I have not experienced Some African/black female scholars have made critical/performance ethnography and black the choice either to reject these terms entirely feminist ideology as separate. On my body, in my or to qualify them, differentiating their own experiences, in my training, they have always work from understandings of feminism/ist cohered. Of the four black female scholars under associated with historically recent European whose direction I trained in undergraduate and and American social movements founded to graduate classrooms (that there were only four struggle for female equality (Oyewùmi 2003: 1). speaks to the state of black female There are those who prefer to use alternative T h e Q u i l t representation in the academy as instructors terms, such as Alice Walker’s womanism/ist and professors), all are community-centred (1983: xi, xii) and Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi women who call themselves black feminists. D. (1985: 72) or Clenora Hudson-Weems Africana Soyini Madison was the first to introduce me to womanism/t (1998: 153–4). Others distinguish critical ethnography. Her pedagogy, praxis and black/African feminism/ist from other everyday life braids critical/performance understandings of feminism/ist centring ethnography and black feminist ideology African/black women very specifically in intimately. When several of my co-authors and I descriptions of themselves and their project: entered a doctoral program together, we took Black, Africana, Afrikan or African feminism/ist (US) black feminist theories with Sandra or womanism/ist, African feminism/t etc. The Richards and the same semester we took thoughtful analyses that have produced these critical/performance ethnography with Dwight distinctions draw attention to the ways in which Conquergood. His handouts included quotes other factors – in particular race, class, from Zora Neale Hurston and lyrics from Sweet ethnic/national identity and sexuality – Honey in the Rock. intersect with gender in determining the In a moment of self-consciousness, I watch my experiences, challenges and priorities of hands dance needle and thread through thin African/black women. sheets of cloth, my body learned to quilt this way Still others are wary of labelling, refusing to before my mouth learned the names of things. get caught up in debates on definition, claiming by their silence on the matter the right not to be meida: named by others, even though they may engage in the kind of work others label ‘feminist’ or that ‘Particularly for people of colour, life-lived, performs ‘feminism’. As Obioma Nnaemeka whether on the concrete pavement of inner-city streets or the backwoods of a rural southern explains, they community, is the root of our beginnings and the are not hung up on ‘articulating their feminism’; root of our understandings. The early quotidian they just do it. . . . [W]hat they do and how they experiences of the people we knew were our “first do it provide the ‘framework’; the ‘framework’ is sight”, and it is through them that we began to not carried to the theatre of action as a name and theorize the world.’ definitional tool. It is the dynamism of the (D. Soyini Madison) theatre of action with its shifting patterns that

77 mshaï: mshaï: . l a t e t f a r C As scholars seeking to articulate what we do, we This includes not only the diversity embodied in have chosen to use these terms while and articulated by African/black women but acknowledging the right to self-naming and self- also in other ‘feminist’ intellectuals whose definition, in order to bring together diverse commitments are similar to our own – Trinh influences which address our positionality, Minh-ha, Chandra Mohanty, Gloria Anzaldúa, priorities and commitments as African/black Purinma Mankekar and so many others. Their female scholars. Our gendered and racialized insights contribute to the shaping of the bodies are inseparable from the epistemological research methodologies, priorities and frameworks we use. We do not agree with interpretative paradigms articulated here as everything emanating from our mentors; we do central to twenty-first-century black feminist not always agree even among ourselves, and the ethnography. daily challenge is to identify ‘the piece of the way to go’ with each of the theories (Boyce- mecca: Davies 1994: 46) without getting trapped into These concerns make black feminist commitments that contradict our own. ethnography a necessary radical intervention Identifying work that fits in the broad gamut we for this moment, our moment, the twenty-first have identified above as ‘feminism/feminist’ century. Through stories, we address black allows us to bring into the conversation voices, disempowerment by reframing blackness itself. perspectives and experiences that might We are concerned with stories of survival, otherwise be isolated from each other. community and self-development, and the formation of critically active and positive renée: instances of cultural citizenship, which One of my sister-quilters picks up a piece of transform blackness from its place as a troubled cloth to add to her quilt-pattern. I grimace. With and devalued source into a valuable one. We are so many prettier pieces in her pile, I wonder why speaking about and with everyday folks she has chosen that one. I look up at her to ask, concerned with creating equitable civic when I see her eyes fixed on the fabric in my engagements to serve the ongoing work of de- hand, her eyebrows knitting and un-knitting colonizing minds. like mine. We meet each other’s gaze, laugh, meida: tease and continue working. Unlike past historical moments where protest and agency were made combustible through meida: large-scale forums negotiating civic rights – I would re-learn over time and space the things slavery, Civil Rights, anti-colonial Independence my mother fed me in my youth: You serve a movements – our moment, perhaps, has a purpose higher than yourself. You must be open, quieter but no less important revolution to flexible and willing to engage the unfamiliar. serve. Most certainly, we acknowledge our due Knowledge is a humbling practice. Community to those ancestors and those moments is the most precious asset. And so, I continue to preceding us. seek these things, knowing they are not the highest priority in the cult of the mainstream, renée: but also firmly believing they are the necessary They are the foundations for our contemporary route. They are the seeds towards the power of plight towards social change. Yet, even as we change. share similar concerns and a similar ethos with previous movements, questions resound for this particular moment we are living through:

78 mecca: mecca: What are we struggling against and for now? To find a way of speaking out – of articulating What under-girds our notions of ‘struggle’? what it is I have to say, even when I can’t find the What is our purpose? What will incite a words immediately paradigm of social change today? mshaï: mshaï: To honour and affirm Black/African women’s How is value assigned to different experiences ways of speaking and making meaning and modes of blackness? How can we talk about the range and diversity of black experiences on meida: a global scale? To know, honour and cite Black/African scholars and artists in my work renée: How do we honour and uplift the modes of renée: knowing and being we are invested in and use To build coalitions that respect differences even across-the-board in all the communities we as they seek points of similarity T h e Q u i l t engage? How do we bring them into conversation with each other? mecca: To make room for collective meaning-making, meida: that embraces others’ ideas and concerns and At the root of this work lies an ethical input responsibility, an oath obligating each of us to navigate carefully and honestly through our mshaï: multiple allegiances to our local histories and To bear witness homes, to those ethnographic communities in which we work and to academia, in which we build our future livelihoods. It is a balancing act meida: without end. To bear witness

all:These are our beginning steps towards a renée: twenty-first-century black feminist To bear witness ethnography. mecca: tenets of a twenty-first-century To call up memory, consciously respecting its black feminist ethnography power to heal as well as to hurt

meida: mshaï: To build my work on the foundation laid by To claim space for those who have been those who had gone on before marginalized in the spaces that I work

renée: meida: To hold in trust what I have received as a legacy To analyze, working to understand why what is for those who come after me, not just in the so is so, and whether it should stay as is or academy but in all the communities I belong to change . . . and how

79 renée: all: we imagine and put forth the visions of . l a t e t f a r C To offer solidarity to struggles that are not my community we desire own but that challenge the same oppressions mshaï: mecca: Through the stories we seek To challenge artificial boundaries that separate activism, artistry and analysis meida: The stories we are told mshaï: To build my peer-group, even as I mentor and renée: seek mentors And the stories we choose to tell meida: all: To always embrace These are the Tenets of a Twenty-First-Century Black Feminist Ethnography all: with joy references renée: Aidoo, Ama Ata (1998) ‘The African Woman Today’, in The call of scholarship – and do my best to make Obioma Nnaemeka (ed.) Sisterhood, Feminisms and what I do a joy Power: From Africa to the Diaspora, Trenton and Asmara: Africa World Press, pp. 39–50. mecca: Alexander, Renee Jacqueline (2006) ‘Art as Survival: To not be afraid to trust the aspects of myself as The Congo Tradition of Portobelo, Panama’, Ph.D. a spiritual super-natural being dissertation, Department of Performance Studies, Northwestern University. mshaï: Anzaldua, Gloria (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco: Aunt Lute. To not be afraid of who I am – a twenty-first- century African/Black woman who is a creative Ampka, Awam (2006) ‘Archetypes, Stereotypes and Polytypes: Theatres of the Black Atlantic’. Keynote intellectual and passionate about the things I Address at the Black Performance Studies care about Symposium, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University, 21 October. meida: Atkinson, Wayne (2001) ‘Not an Iota of Racial Justice: To expose the inequities of power through the Reflections on the Yorta Yorta Native Land Claim stories bestowed to me through the rites of 1994–2001’, Indigenous Law Bulletin 5(6). fieldwork Aubrey, Lisa (2005) ‘Diaspora and Citizenship: Redefining Affiliations and Allegiances’, Respondent renée: Comments for panel, Black Diaspora Performance To document, unveil, inspire and incite change Symposium, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern through the story in its many forms – oral, aural, University, 12 November. embodied, written and digitally mediated Baker, Houston A. (2000) ‘Generational Shifts and the Recent Criticism in Afro-American Literature’, in Winston Napier (ed.) African American Literary mecca: Theory: A Reader, New York: New York University As invested agents in a worldwide human Press, pp. 179–217. community Brown, Elsa Barkley (1989) ‘African American Women’s Quilts’, Signs 14(4): 921–9.

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