NAVIGATIONS

Diasporic Transports and Landings

Anita Gonzalez

An aerial grid of cultural migrations in 1840 might show a satellite hovering over the Atlantic Ocean, recording data as boatloads of Africans land on various shores of a circum-Atlantic landscape. Once grounded, African migrants would begin to enact performances of social disenfranchisement. Both historically and in contemporary contexts, these transatlantic voyages, and their corresponding landing points—New York, Jamestown, Hispaniola, Cuba, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Liverpool—have become sites for negotiating new identities with other ethnic and social groups. Historical maps depict transatlantic slave migrations as triangle voyages. Ships laden with textiles travel to Africa, where they buy and sell. Ships of enslaved workers travel to the Americas and empty their loads. Finally, ships of sugar and/or cotton travel back to Europe. Economy, transport, and territory are part and parcel of this international exchange of blackness. In the colonial worlds of the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries Africans were just one of many economies of goods and services that moved across the seas. Each destination was a new beginning—a new origin point—for a diaspora experience.

Now imagine the aerial grid realigned so that the destinations—points outside of mainland Africa—are origin points for negotiating new social and political experiences. As conversations about the African diaspora broaden, it is impossible to ignore the complex interactions and transformations that constitute the field. "Recognizing that diasporic connections are made and remade, undermined and transformed means that they are neither universally constituted nor static" (Clarke and Thomas, 19). Too often, African diaspora performance is read as a response to Euro-American or white frames of reference. This stance ignores the complex interplay of African descendants with other ethnic groups in the panorama of social identities. Jacqueline Nassy Brown simplifies this notion, asserting: "Diaspora is better understood as a relation rather than a condition" (38). The interplay of ethnic communities at each local site is what constitutes transnational experiences of diaspora (Fryer; Small; Nassy Brown). Concepts about blackness are developed within the subject "blacks" and also constructed by others in response to the presence of Africans and African descendants.

Performances of blackness were unnecessary before African encounters with other ethnicities and their social practices. In the absence of common languages, performance—physical, vocal, and emotional—captures the ongoing negotiation of social status. This means that points of origin, claims of authenticity, national or racial inclusion, are all relative. This chapter examines two case studies, one contemporary and one historical, in which black performance is part of an ongoing and evolving dialogue with other ethnicities for economic and social status. My project focuses on local mediated practices that are responses to African presence. At two distinct geographic sites—Liverpool, England, and Oaxaca, Mexico—non-black performers use African identities as cultural collateral for a social acceptance that approximates whiteness. I call this process of negotiating with blackness a social navigation. Performers of all ethnicities learn the social codes of power and subservience, and then use performance to jockey public opinion as they steer a path toward upward mobility. In Liverpool, transplanted Irishmen use minstrelsy to distance themselves from the rapidly growing African and Black Caribbean community. In Oaxaca, the Chontal Native Americans impersonate the rebellion of their Negrito neighbors. In both cases, "black performance" requires a masquerade in which layers of applied makeup, or the impermeable surface of the physical mask, substitute for inferior social status. Social whiteness or mainstream acceptance is the ultimate goal for each of these ethnic communities that seek to distance themselves from negritude.

Smoked Irish and Whiteness

Whiteness studies of Irish heritage generally focus on the mid- to late nineteenth century, a historical time period when Irish populations migrated en masse to mainland England and consequently to the United States. The potato famine that ravaged Ireland between 1845 and 1855 was a direct impetus for this relocation. Poor Irish migrants congregated in ghettos and slums—the North End in Liverpool and Little Five Points in New York, where the transplanted "white Negroes" and real Negroes rubbed shoulders and became nearly indistinguishable. Stereotypical representations of Irish, while fictional, circulated and perpetuated ideas about Irish lifestyles. The Irish, like the African Americans in the United States, were associated with rural practices and agricultural communities. Irish were commonly referred to as "niggers turned inside out," while blacks were called "smoked Irish." Noel Ignatiev, in his foundational text How the Irish Became White, describes how constructs of race were used by the Catholic Irish to move from their status as an oppressed "race" to an oppressing group within the Americas. Nineteenth-century racial notions fixed the Irish at the lowest rung of the Caucasian hierarchy so that "by the 1860s the 'representative Irishman' was to all appearances an anthropoid ape" (Curtis, 2). Stigmatized but not subjugated, the Irish, especially in Liverpool, were far from passive victims of such prejudice. TheEmerald, "the first Irish Magazine ever brought out in Liverpool," drew critical attention to "Irish misrepresentations, for the vulgar stage representation of them has contributed more than even their own worse conduct has done toward making our countrymen in England objects of contempt, or of a condescending patronage (like the...