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Abstract
This essay draws on Carole Boyce Davies’s influential Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), and its theory of subjectivity as movement, to highlight Davies’s contribution to reconceptualizing efforts of black subjectivity. Relatedly, the essay teases out the potential new uses of the conceptual avenues she opened up thirty years ago. Exploring defiant disrobing within the Black Lives Matter demonstrations; not so much as an easily read feminist or feminine performance of contestation and resistance (though also as that), but as a border-crossing story given life and sensitive to multiple interpretations in social media, academia, and beyond; yields the concept of naked agency and its connected reading praxis, open reading. Naked agency and open reading showcase the unstable nature of subjectivity qua agency, which results from the emerging and subjugating effects of our hyper-digitized age. Through insurrectionary self-exposure, I expand yet depart from Davies’s formulation of subjectivity, thereby inscribing myself within the genealogy of Black women and thinkers that she originated three decades ago.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 These works are a series of meditations on home, exile, and displacement and dislocation. They include Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa (London: Longman, 1985); Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging (Women’s Press Ltd, 1985); Vernella Fuller’s Going Back Home (Women’s Press Ltd, 1992); Merle Collins’s Rotten Pomerack (Virago, 1992); Grace Nichols’s Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (Virago, 1989); Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (Penguin Random House LLC., 1959) and Praisesong for the Widow (Virago, 1983); Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography (Crossing Press, 1982); Michelle Cliff’s Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (Persephone Press, 1980); Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), Annie John (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985), Lucy (Jonathan Cape, 1991), and A Small Place (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988); Alice Walker’s Meridian (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (Random House, 1980); Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (Harper & Row, Publishers, 1937); Toni Morrison’s Beloved (Knopf, 1987); Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (Thorndike Press, 1987); and Marita Golden’s Long Distance Life (Doubleday, 1989).
2 In her analysis of Ama Ata Aidoo’s play Anowa, Davies asserts that Aidoo portrays the multiple subject positions that women can occupy by having the titular character disrupt the boundaries of gender configurations. Aidoo’s troubling of gender constraints resonates with Amadiume (Citation1987) and Oyěwùmí (Citation1997) seminal ethnographic and sociological studies, although the studied Nigerian societies differ from that of the play.
3 Davies has followed her passionate commitment to questions of diasporic and transnational subjectivity in Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008), Caribbean Spaces: Escape Routes from Twilight Zones (2013), several essays, and edited volumes.
4 Recalling Emecheta’s term of flesh in this context can provide an opportunity to initiate a conversation between African studies and black studies where the analytics of flesh offers a corrective to the overemphasis on the body that can be liberated. Hortense Spillers (Citation1987) highlights the flesh rather than the body as that which can escape oppressive structures: “I would make a distinction in this case between “body” and “flesh” and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the “body” there is the “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography” (67). See also Moten (Citation2013).
5 Diverging from received wisdom, Táíwò reconceptualizes the genealogy of modernity in Africa. In How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (2010), he argues that missionaries, including native missionaries such as Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther and christianized natives, for instance in Yorubaland, were the chief agents of introducing and implementing modernity in Africa. Missionaries who pre-dated traders and administrators were invested in fulfilling the promises of modernity (subjectivity, reason, and progress) on the continent, which colonial administrators aborted.
6 This list is not meant to be exhaustive; for brevity, it deliberately covers a limited historical arc.
7 Nfah-Abbenyi explores works of fiction by Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, Buchi Emecheta, Calixthe Beyala, Werewere Liking, Mariama Bâ, Miriam Tlali, Delphine Zanga Tsogo, and Tsitsi Dangarembga.
8 With his conception, Syrotinski analyzes novels and films by Valentin Mudimbé, Bernard Dadié, Sembène Ousmane, Sony Labou Tansi, Veronique Tadjo, and Werewere Liking to show a rewriting of history, which moves beyond binarisms and the fantasy of stable subjectivity.
9 Self-exposure is the most universal and yet most highly context-specific mode of conflict management. Women used it during the Wang Lun uprising of 1774 in China, during the French Revolution, and in 2004 in Manipur, India, to express vulnerability and outrage about rape. In the United States, it has been used repeatedly in Anti-Vietnam War protests (1960a–1970s), in The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) campaigns, “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” (2006–19), in La Tigresa’s “Striptease for the Trees” (2000), in 2015 and 2020 Black Lives Matter protest demonstrations, and in Anti-Globalization and Anti-Iraq War campaigns, 1999 and 2003, respectively (Diabate Citation2020).
10 What I call naked agency has been variously formulated since the 1960s as female genital power, genital power, genital curse, sexual insult, bottom power, genital shaming, women’s mobbing, and punitive delegation. Principally, it is a gesture whereby, in anger or in desperation, mature women expose their nudity accompanied with incantations to punish male targets, seeking to initiate positive social and political change. Diverging from previous studies of naked protest, Naked Agency demonstrates that factors—anonymity, the erosion of social ties, the restructuring of gender norms, the increasing ethnic diversity in major cities, and the potency of the Internet—have deritualized and secularized most contemporary instances of genital cursing. It thus becomes clear that the term “naked agency” is more befitting than genital cursing because it accounts for the backlash (physical and verbal abuse, arrest, threat thereof, and even murder) that the gesture is currently begetting. For more, see Diabate 2020.
11 My approach enriches answers to a question that Gayatri Spivak raised more than two decades ago in her monograph Death of A Discipline (Citation2003). She diagnosed high-theory and Euro/US-centric tendencies in Comparative Literature as leading to the death of the discipline and proposes that the survival and thriving of the discipline hinges on its increasing attempt to become more hospitable to different methodologies, objects of inquiry, and sites of investigation. It is that hospitability that Rey Chow builds up on in “The Discipline of Tolerance” (Citation2011).
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Naminata Diabate
Naminata Diabate is an associate professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. A scholar of African and African diaspora studies and sexuality and gender studies with linguistic expertise in Malinké, Nouchi, French, English, Spanish, and Latin, her work seeks to redefine how we understand specific forms of embodied agency in the neoliberal present in global Africa. Diabate engages multiple sites: novels of 20th and 21st centuries, online and social media, pictorial arts, film, journalism, and oral traditions from Africa, black America, Afro-Hispanic America, and the French Antilles. She is the author of Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (Duke University Press, 2020), which won the African Studies Association 2021 Best Book Prize. Her exploration of naked protest, erotic pleasure, and the impact of Internet media on queerness, breast ironing, and sex strikes has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and collections of essays, including The Journal of the African Literature Association, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Research in African Literatures, African Literature Today (ALT), Interventions, Routledge Handbook of African Literature, and Fieldwork in the Humanities. Diabate contributes regularly to several media outlets, including newspapers, women’s magazines and podcasts. Recently, she wrote for the women’s magazine Voix/Voie de Femme in Côte d’Ivoire, and was featured in PBS’s Academic Minute, The New Books in Women’s History podcast, the South African Podcast, Sound Africa, and BBC World Service’s podcast, The Comb. Currently, Diabate is working on two monographs, “Digital Insurgencies and Bodies” and “The Problem of Pleasure in Africa.” This year, she holds the Ali Mazrui Senior Research Fellowship at The Africa Institute in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates.