Moore, David Chioni

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Macalester InternationalVolume 3 Literature, the Creative Imagination, andGlobalization Article 23Spring 5-31-1996Response to DaviesDavid Chioni MooreMacalester CollegeFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/macintlThis Response is brought to you for free and open access by the Institute for Global Citizenship at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has beenaccepted for inclusion in Macalester International by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information,please contact scholarpub@macalester.edu.Recommended CitationMoore, David Chioni (1996) "Response to Davies," Macalester International: Vol. 3, Article 23.Available at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/macintl/vol3/iss1/2304/19/96  12:49 PM      1880moo2.qxdResponseDavid Chioni MooreI. Carole Boyce Davies Challenges “The Contemporary Transnational”For nearly twenty years, Carole Boyce Davies has been illumi-nating the worlds of African and Black Atlantic cultural studieswith her insights on the literatures of many peoples. On thebroadest range of questions of the oral and written, the properlyAfrican and the diasporic, the lives of women, and the claims oftheory, Professor Boyce Davies has taken a major role in thatgreat collective labor of giving voice and standing to peopleswho have for too long been underrepresented on the globalstage. Now Professor Boyce Davies has come to the MacalesterInternational Roundtable to address, from her own range of per-spectives, a set of questions on globalization, transnationalism,literature, and culture that ordinary or sane mortals might thinkto be impossible, such as, What do we mean when we speak ofthe global? How is this thing called “the transnational” articu-lated in various parts of the world? And what is the role of thecreative artist in this enterprise?As you have just read, Carole Boyce Davies’ answers havebeen dense and complex, even circuitous, and have called uponan extremely broad range of references, both artistic and schol-arly, which, though necessary to her response, may have beenunfamiliar to the general reader — to say nothing of a scholar ofthe Black Atlantic such as myself. This puts me, therefore, in adifficult situation as a respondent. One part of me, of course,wants to respond to her as one specialist to another: to ask her toclarify a range of uncertainties throughout the paper; to ques-tion the terms by which she links cultures on four continents andan archipelago; to push her further to provide extended, closereadings of a few touchstone texts to deepen the broad (perhapstoo diffuse) survey she has proposed; and to ask of her notion of“the transformational” — a transformation from what to what?Now, if Professor Boyce Davies and I were corresponding indetail and at length over a manuscript in progress, or if I were23804/19/96  12:49 PM      1880moo2.qxdher outside reader at the journal Research in African Literatures, orif we were together at a week-long seminar on the Black Atlanticheld in, say, Dakar or New Orleans, I might offer such close anddetailed critiques. But my situation in this response is that of theMacalester International Roundtable and the third volume ofMacalester International, both generalist forums, in which the dis-putes of the specialists’ seminar are perhaps best left behind,and in which my primary responsibility as respondent is to thereader. Thus in the remarks that follow, I would like to do twothings. First, I’d like simply to spell out what I believe one ofProfessor Boyce Davies’ essential messages is. And then I wouldlike to provide examples from two great twentieth-centuryAfro-diasporic writers—Langston Hughes and Alex Haley—toextend with both clarity and global scope the message ProfessorBoyce Davies has brought us.Let me begin by distilling that message. As readers of this vol-ume will know, each of the featured contributors in this issue ofMacalester International was challenged to comment on theapparently new phenomena of globalization and transnational-ism from the perspectives of their life’s work: from an East Euro-pean perspective in the case of Andrei Codrescu; a Classicsperspective in the case of Mary-Kay Gamel; an African andAfro-diasporic perspective in the case of Carole Boyce Davies;and so on. And yet Professor Boyce Davies has argued that fromher perspective, perhaps one of the key presuppositions of ourchallenge to her was wrong. In the world of contemporary glob-alization, the Macalester challenge presupposed, much seems tobe new. No longer can one assume that people will die near theplace they were born. No longer can one suppose that the lan-guage, religion, or even ethnicity of a grandchild will be that ofthe grandparent. And no longer can one think of cultures as rel-atively discrete wholes. Rather, this brave new world of theshrinking planet, deterritorialization, or whatever one might callit, is characterized by instability and flux, hybridity and syn-cretization, and by a complex interplay of the global and local.Professor Boyce Davies has given us several excellent Afro-diasporic examples of this, notably in the Brazilian public ritualor performance of candomblé. Candomblé preserves in it elementsof a range of African cultures, and yet at the same time it repre-sents a combination of African elements that exists nowhere inDavid Chioni Moore23904/19/96  12:49 PM      1880moo2.qxdAfrica itself. In addition, Afro-Brazilian candomblé is sustained asa resistance against a counterposed European culture that seeksdominance in Brazil. And yet Afro-Brazilian candomblé incorpo-rates, at times, many indigenous South American cultural ele-ments, and candomblé counts as close cousins other spiritualsystems in both the Caribbean and North America. Four conti-nents, then, hinged around an archipelago, half-sharing half-shares of yet other half-shared networks. Transnational andglobal candomblé indeed.What is interesting from Carole Boyce Davies’ perspective isthat this candomblé is by no means a product of the so-called con-temporary or postmodern transnational moment. Candomblédepends neither on airlines, nor on the Internet, nor on border-less corporations. It is, rather, an artifact of a multicontinental,transatlantic slave-and-plantation system whose origins go backat least to the year 1516, when the first Africans were dragged inchains by Iberian venturers into servitude on Hispaniola (theisland that now comprises the Dominican Republic and Haiti).Thus the Afro-diaspora and its cultural productions are a de-and re-territorialized form of globalization that has continueduninterruptedly for some four hundred and seventy-nine years,and it is still going strong. And so Carole Boyce Davies’ messagemay be: transnationalism, globalization, deterritorialization —nothing new for us indeed.In the great bulk of her paper, Carole Boyce Davies articulatesthe specifics of this centuries-old Black Atlantic system. She dis-cusses the creation of alternative physical and spiritual places byBlack Atlantic culture and details many of the forms it takes: theAfrican-American woman’s novel, Marcus Garvey’s early-cen-tury “Back to Africa” movement, the music of Bob Marley, andnovels by writers such as Amos Tutuola and Ben Okri, to namejust a few. It’s a dizzying network, characterized, she says, moreby reelaboration than by hybridity. For her, the Cuban exilepoet-writer Antonio Benítez Rojo is one of the key theorists ofthis dynamic.One of the main features of this time-honored Afro-diasporicnetwork, according to Professor Boyce Davies, is that it is sepa-rate from, or rather resistant to, that other global network — themuch more recent and awfully fashionable postmodern mili-tary-industrial-Disney-Coca-Cola-Benetton-and-CNN network,Macalester International Vol. 324004/19/96  12:49 PM      1880moo2.qxdwhich tends — though not always successfully — to smooth outlocal differences and impose some sort of universal order. Andso the Afro-diasporic network, though diffuse, internally differ-entiated, and multicontinental, is also quite specific: it does notcover the entire globe and does not pretend to universal rele-vance. In this regard, Professor Boyce Davies has resolutelyrefused the temptation of expanding her claims to anythingbeyond the Black Atlantic system. Her range of references hasbeen, as I have noted, quite dizzying, but has not extended, forexample, to Japan, or Ireland, or Russia.II. Langston Hughes: The Afro-Diaspora in the Global SphereI respect that restriction greatly, and yet at the same time Ialways give in to that temptation. And so, as Carole BoyceDavies’ respondent, I would like to take her paper one step fur-ther by suggesting that the Afro-diasporic network not onlyconstitutes one sort of alternative or resistant transcontinentalsystem, but that its perspective can indeed sustain a fully globalvision. To support this bald assertion, permit me to spend somemoments with two great authors in the Afro-diasporic network:Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967) and Alex Haley (1921 – 1992).Langston Hughes, as many will know, was the great poet of theHarlem Renaissance, and from the twenties to the fifties he wasa leading man in Negro letters.What is less well known is that from 1931 to 1938 LangstonHughes became a global wanderer. Starting out at his mother’shome in Cleveland, the twenty-nine-year-old Hughes traveledsouth to Florida, and from there went on to spend many monthsin both Spanish-speaking Cuba and French- and Creole-speak-ing Haiti. After a brief return to his beloved Harlem, Hughesbegan a long literary tour of Negro schools and churchesthroughout the American Deep South — the first time in his lifehe had ever been there. After traversing the American South-west and dipping briefly into northern Mexico, Hughes woundup in San Francisco and, thanks to a generous benefactor, wasable to spend several months on the northern California coastwriting and in contemplation. Then, Langston Hughes unex-pectedly received an offer to work as a screenwriter for a newSoviet film in Moscow — and so he went. After some months ofDavid Chioni Moore24104/19/96  12:49 PM      1880moo2.qxdfitful work on the project, however, the entire film fell through,but by dint of persistence and good contacts, Hughes managedto stay in the Soviet Union for the balance of 1932 and well into1933. From Moscow he traveled into Central Asia and resided inthe ancient cities of Samarkand, Tashkent, Ashkhabad, andBokhara. From there Hughes continued on to the Soviet Pacific,passed through Korea, spent time in Japan, took an extendedvisit to Shanghai in China, and then returned, after a short stayin Hawaii, to San Francisco. Not long afterward Hughes movedto Mexico City, where he worked as a journalist and translatorfor more than a year, then returned to New York to oversee theopening of one of his plays on Broadway, then traveled to Spainto cover the Spanish Civil War for U.S. Negro newspapers, and,finally, at the end of this eight-year odyssey, the now thirty-seven-year-old Langston Hughes wound up in Paris.What is especially interesting from the perspective of thisissue of Macalester International is how Langston Hughes wasable to turn the apparent “limitations” of a “racialized” world-view into a powerful tool for analysis of global structures.Hughes’s lengthy memoir of this period, I Wonder As I Wander, isoverflowing not with Afro-diasporic, but with Afro-planetarymoments.1 I’d like to relate just one of them here. While living inTashkent in Central Asia in 1933, Hughes hired an elderly andformerly aristocratic Russian woman to cook for him while heconvalesced from a major illness. With compassion and a senseof understanding, Hughes tells us of this woman’s life. Grasdani(Russian for “citizen,” which she preferred to “comrade”), hewrites, “for woefully little remuneration prepared my meals,nursed me back to health, and talked to me by the hour in a flowof Russian which I began to understand more and more.”2 Witha certain sympathy, Hughes recounts how this woman hadundergone severe dislocations when the Soviets came to power,and how the recent rise of formerly nomadic Uzbeks, Turkmens,and Tartars under the Soviets left Grasdani, like many otherelderly Russian women, in a changing Central Asia, angry andupset. And then Hughes writes, “In my heart I was sorry forthese irreconcilables” — but then he follows these few words ofsympathy with a parenthetical remark of unreal power. Let meback up and quote the entire sentence—take note of the punctu-ation:Macalester International Vol. 324204/19/96  12:49 PM      1880moo2.qxdIn my heart I was sorry for these irreconcilables (just as my slavegrandparents must have been sorry for certain of the gentler aris-tocrats of the South when the Yankees came).3A remarkable sentence. Here we had been reading a lengthynarrative of Central Asia circa 1933, with an apparently neutralobserver expressing understanding for a dislocated aged Russ-ian woman. And then, without warning, our observer drags usback to the American South circa 1869, and the message, thoughmasterfully understated, is unmistakable. The Central Asians,Langston Hughes is claiming, are colored people just like him,black like me, “Negro Orientals,” as he puts it, fighting againstthe oppression visited upon them by the European world.Hughes had in fact been traveling in Central Asia with the laterfamous Anglo-German-Hungarian writer and journalist ArthurKoestler (1905 – 1983), and had debated with Koestler about thechanges they were seeing. “To Koestler,” Hughes writes, “Turk-menistan was simply a primitive land moving into twentieth-century civilization. To me it was a colored land moving intoorbits hitherto reserved for whites.”4 To really understand the1930s changes in Soviet Central Asia, changes that today we’dcall “local/global” movements, Hughes would write, “you mustobserve with Negro eyes.”5 With Carole Boyce Davies in mind,I’d update that formulation: you must observe the world withAfro-diasporic eyes.III. Alex Haley: Ireland in Afro-disaporic PerspectiveBefore closing my remarks, I’d like to bring up one last instanceof how what Carole Boyce Davies has termed the transforma-tive, Afro-diasporic perspective can illuminate a far distantglobal situation. And my example will come, appropriatelyenough for Macalester, from the files of a former World PressInstitute associate, Reader’s Digest contributor, and DeWitt Wal-lace protégé, Alex Haley. As many know, in 1965 Alex Haleypublished his collaborative Autobiography of Malcolm X, andeleven years later he offered the world his pathbreaking histori-cal novel Roots, which apparently traced Haley’s heritage acrossthe historical abyss of the Middle Passage and claimed to haveDavid Chioni Moore24304/19/96  12:49 PM      1880moo2.qxdidentified, in Africa, exactly the village from which Haley’sancestors had come.What is less well known is that while preparing his researchinto Roots, Alex Haley pursued not only his African but also hisCherokee, English, and Irish ancestry. And, in the fall of 1966,Haley became a member of the Irish Genealogical Research Soci-ety and traveled to the Emerald Isle. Passing through his pater-nal grandmother Queen’s two Irish grandfathers, James Jacksonand Jim Baugh, Haley traced himself to the small Irish village ofCarrickmacross, circa 1707, forty-three years before the apparentbirth of Kunta Kinte in the Gambia. And so in the fall of 1966Alex Haley left the Dublin archive and went to this little town,showed up at the local pub, and introduced himself—this Afro-diasporic man—as a long-lost son of that Irish village. In a doc-ument located deep in the files of the Haley Archives inKnoxville, Tennessee, one finds Haley’s report of that remark-able encounter, in a letter he wrote to his Reader’s Digest editor,Maurice Ragsdale, dated December 14, 1966.6 “They were mosthospitable,” Haley wrote in that letter, “until,” he continued,“they learned I’m Protestant.”What a remarkable Afro-diasporic moment — a transforma-tional moment, as Carole Boyce Davies would put it. Suddenly,and in a flash, as we saw with Langston Hughes, the extensionof an Afro-diasporic network into an unexpected place—in thiscase into a small pub in Ireland — lends insight into anintractable situation. This extension speaks of the multiple axesof identity that we all contain, some of which we are entirelyunaware. It speaks of the history of the Irish peoples, of itscrimes and the difficulty of their resolution. It speaks of how noculture’s discriminatory priorities are universal. It speaks, ofcourse, to the unsettled status of the diasporic peoples of theBlack Atlantic. In its telling absence from the final text of themassively popular if academically banished Roots, it speaks tothe social construction of identities through fiction. And, amongother things I could go on to list, it speaks of humor. These Afro-diasporic moments, to conclude, coming as they do from thetransformative pens of creative artists such as Hughes andHaley, do full justice to what Edward Said, in his masterful con-tribution, has termed the writer’s moral and dramatic functions,and in so doing they provide a better Afro-diasporic, and global,vision.Macalester International Vol. 324404/19/96  12:49 PM      1880moo2.qxdNotes1. Langston Hughes, I Wonder As I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (1956;reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). Hughes’s prior volume is The BigSea: An Autobiography (1940; reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). Thecanonical account of Hughes’s life during this period is Arnold Rampersad,The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1: 1902 – 1941: I, Too, Sing America (New York:Oxford University Press, 1986).2. Langston Hughes, I Wonder As I Wander: 146.3. Ibid., 147.4. Ibid., 111.5. Ibid., 111. Arthur Koestler’s eventual fictionalized account of the darkerside of what the two men saw together is his classic Darkness at Noon, trans.Daphne Hardy (1940; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1968).6. For details, see letter from Alex Haley to Maurice Ragsdale, editor of theReader’s Digest, dated 14 December 1966, Haley Archives, University of Ten-nessee, Knoxville, Box 3/80, Folder 10. Also of interest is Alex Haley,“Researching the Unknown,” Writer’s Yearbook 44 (1973): 26 – 30 and 106; and,of course, Haley’s great work, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (GardenCity, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976). An essay dealing substantially with Haley’s“multiplicity” would be my “Routes: Alex Haley’s Roots and the Rhetoric ofGenealogy,” Transition: An International Review, n.s. 4.2, no. 64 (Fall 1994): 4–21.The primary gateway to Haley scholarship is my “Revisiting a Silenced Giant:Alex Haley’s Roots: A Bibliographic Essay, and Research Report on the HaleyArchives at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville,” Resources for American Lit-erary Study (forthcoming).David Chioni Moore245

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