Feeling against the plot: an African diaspora feminist politics of happiness

ABSTRACT

This essay maps the uneasy terrains of Black feminist happiness in the diaspora as a complex reckoning with radical political and social theories of subject formation Refusing analytics that prioritize loss, injury, lack, stasis, and trauma as the defining features of the Black diaspora, African diaspora feminist happiness displaces whiteness and the West as its referents in favour of more difficult intimacies across Black geographies that imagine fleeting alliances, inevitable inequity, and tension across diaspora communities rather than similarity or belonging. This essay traces texts, often in popular genres, that plot intimacies that acknowledge legacies of injury but seek out other roots and routes to define the present and futures of Black feminine subjects, futures often knowingly in tension with the given materiality and resources of diaspora life, and in tension with the dominant modes of critique hewing toward death and pessimism in the field of Black diaspora studies. Through the global self-help genre, the Afropolitan literary novel, African young adult fiction, and sensational Kenyan LGBTQ cinema, this article traces the generic plots of African diaspora feminist happiness to find neither neoliberal hailed subjects nor subversive resistance. If in the masculine diaspora imagination, coming together via racial and political identity equals a new sense of community, the feminist genealogies that this essay traces through diaspora happiness are uncomfortable and deeply self-conscious about their traffic in capital and middle-class resources and desire. The texts that I look to do not attempt to erase, flatten, or romanticize difference into the poles of resistance and complicity, but instead define diaspora feminist happiness through tension and temporariness. These texts use diaspora pathways as structures of feeling conducive and conductive of happiness even as they do not engage the romance of racial, political, or even ethical community to find them.

KEYWORDS:

• Diaspora
• feminism
• film
• popular
• sexuality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See George Lipsitz (2006); Cheryl Harris (1993) on the relationships between whiteness and property.

2 See Paul Amar (2013) and Peter Hitchcock (2020) on security studies.

3 Raymond Williams (1977) defines structures of feeling as the affective modes of apprehending the political. This essay pairs this with feminist and queer studies analysis of the politics of intimacy and the feelings of feminist politics.

4 See Hortense Spillers (1987) on Black women’s educational success.

5 See Jennifer Nash’s The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (2014), along with Musser (2014); Cruz (2016) and Miller-Young (2014).

6 See Eustace Palmer (2019); Ernest Dominic Cole (2018); Merve Sarikaya-Şen (2020).

7 See M Jacqui Alexander (2006) on specious articulations of Caribbean homophobia that assert the western, white roots of queer desire.

8 Brenna Munro’s (2017) article on African lesbian identity and queer transnational symbolic power is a warning here, too, of the currency of the nation-bound queer African subject as ‘appealing’ subject for diaspora fantasies of vulnerability and the futures of African queerness off of the continent.

9 See Simidele Dosekun (2020) for more on the construction of African femininity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Samantha Pinto

Samantha Pinto is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (NYU Press, 2013) and Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights (Duke UP, 2020). She also co-edited Writing Beyond the State (Palgrave, 2020) with Alexandra S. Moore. She is currently working on a third book, Under the Skin, on race, embodiment, and scientific discourse in African American and African diaspora culture, as well as a book of essays on feminist ambivalence.