Blackness in the Diaspora

In times of globalised juxtapositions, correspondences, opacities and confrontations, as well as the ever-circulating notion of networked images (cf. Sluis and Rubensberg, 2008), we face the almost daily challenge of proclaiming information of value for our (collective) selves. So, whenever we inaugurate awareness for minorities on the basis of skin colour and discuss racial normativity these days, we should keep in mind that skin colour hides or marks certain privileges or inferiorities in society. These circumstances have lately become crucial discussions, specifically in the context of blackness. 

Black is not a colour. Black is also not (only) a shade. The colour black has a socio-political meaning to it. It is used to categorize and identify a certain group of people, who’s skin colour is in fact not ‘black’ but a whole range of different tones. Blackness serves here as a socio-political visual marker, which was harshly demonstrated in the instance of seconds in which police officers needed to identify a black subject like George Floyd. 

Blackness in the world also stands for migration and diaspora from the African continent. In his chapter contribution Africa and its Diaspora to the volume The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Quayson, 2013), Ghanaian scholar Ato Quayson emphasizes the importance of Africa’s “relationship to its variant diasporas and the implications this has for understanding the socio-cultural and economic changes taking place in the continent itself” (p. 628). Quayson identifies key diasporic conditions and Africa’s shifting relation to its diasporas by declaring its diaspora the ‘sixth region’ of the continent, with contemporary discourse on concepts of diaspora often considering the idea of cultural places instead of cultural territories (Cohen, 2008). This is underlined by the fact that there have been more African-born Africans migrating to the United States annually since 1970 than were sent there each year throughout the 400-year period of slavery, whereas the World Bank estimates that in 2010 there were 30.6 million Africans living outside their homelands (Quayson, 2013). 

In her introduction to the panel discussion African Diasporic Countervisualities at Barnard Center for Research on Women New York, in February 2019, Tina M. Campt reckons relatedly that “African diasporic for many means the forced and voluntary migrations and displacements of Africans from the Middle Passage through the present. I would add to that that it is also the creative links of relation, affiliation and affirmation forged by racialised communities in and between their multiple sites of dwelling”.

Photographic agency (cf. Azoulay, 2008) pairs as well with a countervisual notion, as described by Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011). The uncomfortability of African diasporic counternarratives lies in their countervisuality as such and the resistance towards visual normativity many of these images engender. In his conception of countervisuality, Mirzoeff refers to representation and the dominance of hegemony in the visual field. Countervisuality then becomes “the attempt to reconfigure visuality as a whole” (p. 24). The right to look as a first articulation of countervisuality indicates the importance of infiltrating normative dynamisms of visuality by means of proclaiming the right to look and the right to look back: “the right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to political subjectivity and collectivity (…) the opposite of the right to look is not censorship, then, but visuality” (p. 1, 2). Images of visuality in Mirzoeff, like myths in Barthes (1957), naturalize their underlying power structures. Hence, countervisuality denaturalizes normative images in an uncomfortable way. In relation to Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, Mirzoeff sees that “countervisuality’s realism is not necessarily mimetic” (p. 26), but it expresses the subversive moment of simultaneous display of representation and disruption of its authority.

This embodies the disruption of visuality itself, since, “visuality and its visualising of history are part of how the West historicises and distinguishes itself from its others” (Mirzoeff, 2011: XIV). This introduces a transcultural entanglement that goes beyond a binary perspective of the coloniser against the colonised and pleads for the idea of an interconnectedness that leaves the African subject in a fairly autonomous position, while incorporating complex notions of its identity (cf. Mbembe, 2001).

References:

• AZOULAY, Ariella (2008), The Civil Contract of Photography, New York: Zone Books.
• BARTHES, Roland (1957), Mythologies, New York: Noonday Press.
• CAMPT, Tina M. (2019), moderation of panel discussion “African Diasporic Countervisualities”, Barnard Center for Research on Women, New York, February 11th, 2019, available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XgYQvx9bJA
• COHEN, Robin (2008), Global Diasporas: An introduction, Second edition, New York: Routledge.
• MBEMBE, Achille (2001), On The Postcolony, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
• MIRZOEFF, Nicholas (2011), The Right to Look. A Counterhistory of Visuality, Durham: Duke University Press.
• QUAYSON, Ato (2013a), “Africa and its Diaspora”, Graham Huggan (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, Oxford University Press.
• SLUIS, Katrina and RUBENSBERG, Daniel (2008), A Life More Photographic; Mapping The Networked Image, London: Routledge.

 

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