Rethinking Epistemologies of Modernity and Migration in Black Studies

Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation reproduces the Alchemy Lecture held in Toronto in November 2022. It is the first in a series published in collaboration between the host, York University, and the publisher, Knopf Canada. With an introduction by Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake and Ordinary Notes, the book puts the four speakers in conversation as they think through migration, borders, diaspora, and climate change.¹ The Caribbean, as a site of intellectual production and historical trauma, plays a crucial role in these interventions. For instance, Nadia Yala Kisukidi and Rinaldo Walcott turn to Édouard Glissant to propose alternative epistemologies to Western settler-colonial logics.² Meanwhile, poet Natalie Diaz probes the possibilities of language to synchronize humanity and the natural environment, while urban studies scholar Dele Adeyemo posits what he calls an infrastructural understanding of Black bodies as a way of reading racial capitalism in Africa.

Europe, writes Kisukidi, is “plagued by its own periphery, . . . by postcolonial hordes who exist in arrangements of time and space that alter geographies and heritages” (74). In this context of mass migration, African and Afro-descended peoples are often viewed through a binary lens in public discourse. On the one hand, there is the figure of “national loyalty” who can be assimilated and put to use in furthering neoimperial interests in the country of origin. On the other hand, there is the figure of the “enemy within” associated with Islamic terrorism (79). Kisukidi attempts to cut through these stereotypes by drawing from Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse and Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity. Rather than framing diasporic communities and migrants as heralding a conquest or invasion, Kisukidi argues for a language of hybridization, creolization, and métissage. She defines creolization as the “unpredictability of a generalized process of cultural hybridization in which the experience of the root appears neither central nor real” (86). Instead of a traditional model of diasporic movement as rectilinear, with a fixed origin and endpoint, she advocates for a model of ubiquity— “the ability to be in multiple places at one time, a quality often associated with divine beings” (75). She offers the idea of the literary “marvelous”—a term with lineage in several continents but one strongly associated with Alejo Carpentier’s idea of “lo real maravilloso”—as a critical construct for reading diaspora.

A vision of a tall ship off the coast of the Italian city of Amalfi serves as Walcott’s entry point into a discussion of migratory movement and climate change.³ Staring at the open sea, Walcott is struck by the notion that “just beyond the ship, just where it looks like sky meets water, is where my people are.” For Walcott, such a sensation signals a type of inheritance, one encompassing “the accumulated histories” and “sedimentations of terror” that define what it means to be Black (105). Walcott invokes Kamau Brathwaite to argue that the Middle Passage should be interpreted as the root of contemporary Black movement across the globe. Through a reading of Glissant, Walcott calls for a “new architectonics of life,” one that moves beyond “European expansionist logics” (130–31). As such, he pushes for a kind of sociality that brings humanity closer to the poetics theorized by Glissant, especially his idea of chaos monde, which Walcott frames as an undoing of the current order of things in a way that leads to utopia. The walking journeys of the Brazilian performance artist Paulo Nazareth from Brazil to New York City, and through the slave routes of southern Africa, serve as important examples of the type of relationality Walcott envisions. Nazareth’s peripatetic aesthetics reaffirm the “body as the most important technology of our lives . . . the prosthesis of our technological fetishism is exposed as Nazareth treks across the Americas and Africa, encountering others and fostering new modes of sociality among the oppressed” (108).

The other two contributors are less concerned with the Caribbean but nonetheless combine well with Kisukidi and Walcott.⁴ Adeyemo, an architect turned documentarian and urban studies scholar, focuses on the lives of sand divers in Lagos’s working-class community of Oworonshoki. He charts the commerce of sand and other critical minerals as part of a system of “sedimentary circulations” in the lagoons of Nigeria’s capital; these “entanglements of the infrastructural life of lagoon dwellers” evince how both “Blackness and Indigeneity” enable these subjects to “simultaneously navigate the nature and urban space” (37). Diaz, a poet and language preservation scholar, muses about the possibilities of language and the primordial relationship between humanity and the natural environment, especially waterways. Invoking her positionality as an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe in Arizona, she proposes the Mojave term mat tayuuch as a “practice that refers to both land and body, an act of relating people and land to one another in a great constellated story” (51). The latter half of Diaz’s section is a free-verse poem called “Alchemy Horse” that uses staccato verse punctuated by scores of plus signs and irregular spacing to critique American settler-colonialism.

One thread that caught my attention is the use of the term Indigeneity, especially by Adeyemo. In his analysis, Adeyemo centralizes the motif of black shoals theorized by the American scholar Tiffany Lethabo King. For King, the black shoal, as a maritime metaphor, is a site of friction with Western epistemes and settler-colonial logics, one in which “Black studies attempts to engage Native studies on ethical terms.”⁵ Yet Adeyemo ignores the embeddedness of King’s black shoals within the Western hemisphere when he applies it to Lagos’s lagoon dwellers. One might ask if his use of Indigeneity runs the risk of reproducing settler-colonialism by applying the term too broadly in a non-Western setting. Another line of thought that can be further explored is Africa’s relationship to external partners. Arguably, Africa has already moved beyond the Euro-American hegemony depicted by the contributors. According to the Brookings Institution, China is Africa’s largest trading partner as of 2009, surpassing the United States at least twice over.⁶ Through its Belt and Road initiative, China has sought to strengthen its ties to Africa through a mix of loans, infrastructure projects, and increased commerce. The only author to make note of this growing influence, and only briefly at that, is Kisukidi, who sees China and other great non-Western powers, such as India and Russia, as “unburdened by a colonial or neo-colonial legacy” (81). A more complete portrait of the extractive economies at work in Africa would more fully consider these dynamics.

Ultimately, this collection showcases the enduring importance of the Caribbean as a lens for understanding Black diaspora on a global scale. The essays link well together while providing unique takes on migratory movement in the modern age. Such scholarship legitimizes diaspora as both subject and object of academic investigation. At the heart of Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation is the idea that the humanities can and must be used to raise up marginalized communities shaped by what Sharpe calls the “crucible” of colonialism, genocide, and slavery (2).

Oliver Ortega is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame. His primary research project analyzes depictions of formal schooling in contemporary Mexican American bildungsroman novels and memoirs. He is particularly interested in narratives centered around second-generation Americans and how these characters negotiate assimilation through the educational system. Oliver has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and international studies from Northwestern University.

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[1] See Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (Duke University Press, 2016), and Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).

[2] Nadia Yala Kisukidi, “Walking Barefoot: On the Marvelous in Literature, Black France, and Diaspora,” trans. Pablo Strauss, 69–101; Rinaldo Walcott, “Towards Another Shape of This World,” 103–32.

[3] Rinaldo Walcott, “Towards Another Shape of This World,” 103–32.

[4] Dele Adeyemo, “Wey Dey Move: The Black Infrastructural Life of Sedimentary Circulations,” 7–41; Natalie Diaz, “Fusings,” 43–67.

[5] Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019), 10.

[6] See Fred Dews, “Eight Facts about China’s Investments in Africa,” Brookings Institution, 20 May 2014, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/8-facts-about-chinas-investments-in-africa/.