The unfortunate ephemerality of reading, especially in the context of grad school where you are constantly ingesting and (in theory) digesting, is that waiting one-day too long to write about a text will dissipate much of the impetus to write. Such is the case with my reading of Brent Edwards’ The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. The text is nothing short of phenomenal for a number of reasons that I can only touch on, including of course the fierce elegance and eloquence that has won Edwards my ‘man crush’. In lieu of a class presentation like summary of main methods, arguments and stakes, allow me to engage in a kind of writing exercise. I have picked out three quotes, the first of which was random but incidentally pointed to a something I was trying to say during a recent discussion group meeting; I will offer them in the order they are found in the text and extrapolate from them; this is, mind you, an intellectual and writing exercise––be kind in your reading.

“To put it another way, the contradiction is that Maran, in employing the metaphor of the “recording instrument,” thereby speaks, and speaks as a black modern voice, figuring himself even as he claims with the same gesture to be silent” (92)
    First, this is a brilliant close reading by Edwards, made possible of course by his extensive archival and translation work. More importantly, the ‘recording instrument’ metaphor is a trope often engaged in encounters with the culturally Other, especially in those encounters made possible by an “expedition” away from the metropole. This particular encounter is especially problematic in the larger historical context within which it takes place, namely the search for and practice of Black internationalism. Such a project of solidarity is, obviously, subverted by a colonialist world-view that dismantles race consciousness in favor of a hierarchy that is based at once on geography and class. That is, a colonial subject is both spatially removed from the hubs of intellectual and cultural activity, while also class-ified as exploited without the privileged (revolutionary) role of a workingman.
    More generally, the idea of “recording,” especially those private thoughts and phrases of the Other, is a prevalent and problematic trope in travel writing. I have in mind Said’s extensive and foundational critique of British travel writers who would venture out into her majesty’s empire and report back all that was already known; those savages are lucky to have us there to help civilize them. Edwards’ dismantling of the “recording” metaphor’s logic helps elucidate the false transparency with which travelers speak, a falseness that is enormously useful in locating the ‘metropole’ subject even while they ‘hide’ it. The travel narrative’s structure of address, its intended and unintended audience, the logical and cultural assumptions, and (my favorite site of interrogation) the terms used to structure their encounter with the other (e.g. savage), all play a crucial (if unintended) role in locating the metropole’s phantom subject.
“But in a complex dynamic between the craze for jazz and the desire for a feminized exoticism, shows were constructed around Baker precisely to make the point that she could represent a kind of universal feminine colonial other…..Baker’s body was the consummate “ideological artifact”….[and] served as the locus of a metonymic operation: balck, brown, and yellow bodies were all incarnated in the writhing limbs and “sculptural” gesture of Baker as interchangeable objects of colonial desire” (162).
     Here is an introduction (or re-introduction) of the metropole/ colony encounter within the metropole itself. Moreover this encounter is gendered and recorded (“incarnated”) on Baker’s body itself. Colonial literature’s propensity to gender the encounter with the Other is a well worn topic, one that finds interesting manifestation especially in the gendering of the land itself. The Americas were often portrayed as a naked (at least bare chest) woman waiting for “penetration,” a word that was often deployed to describe the process of interior land exploration. Similarly, Baker, in her metonymic role, performs this ‘nakedness’ as the colonial other ‘exposed’ or ‘unveiled,’ revealing of course what ‘we’ knew all along. That is, to return to the earlier metaphor, she ‘records’ the metropole’s (sensationalized) view of the colony and simultaneously affirms the ideological grounding of such a view through her eroticized performance. (Baker’s presence and project, of course, is far more nuanced than the rather dismissive reading I have given here)
“The most complex point in Banjo may be this suggestive double entendre (“Everybody’s Doing It”) that points both to sexuality and desire and to bodily exploitation in the modern capitalist system. “Selling black bodies” here has to do with gender and sexuality, not just race” (208).
    Appropriately, we arrive at the beginning. That is, we arrive at the primary logic driving colonial expansion, capitalism. However, this is a capitalist logic that finds myriad expression in gender, sexuality, and desire, all of which are recorded, represented and re-presented to the very system that spawns them. More clearly, the gendered erotica of land waiting to be “penetrated” is recorded and represented in literature, maps et al. These representations are re-presented to the metropole, in one form, as Baker’s body ‘sold’ as a performance whose foregrounding of the perverse metonymic colonial logic is subsumed in the desire it creates.

…too tired…