Review of Samantha Pinto\'s Difficult Diasporas

Pinto, Samantha. Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic. New York and London: New York University Press, 2013. Print. $27.00. Paperback

Since the seminal issue of Diaspora, diaspora studies have privileged the formation of boundaries, space, and historical moments to understand nationalist discourse. While feminist scholars working in diaspora studies have argued that this privileging fails to account for myriad forms of difference in representation, it still remains difficult to discuss diaspora without accounting for geographic and nationalist specificity. For Samantha Pinto, this poses a critical problem as these spaces form masculine nationalisms and marginalize the role of female bodies. Pinto's Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic provides a critical intervention to discuss female writers in the black diaspora by using feminist and postcolonial theory to emphasize aesthetics and form. Using the phrase "difficult diasporas," Pinto looks to innovative feminist writing and interdisciplinary analysis to examine the "aesthetic and critical terrains that imagine feminist potential to occupy diaspora's very form [and produce] transgressive … loops of circulation that cannot be easily traced to [fixed points]" (3-4). To articulate this, Pinto incorporates "an aesthetics of identity" in her reading to illustrate how black female bodies and voices are confined by traditional discourses of diaspora.
The choice of innovative black feminist texts to locate connections between diaspora and feminist studies helps Pinto critically reimagine black women as subjects of diaspora while also opening up possibilities of reading. Because Difficult Diasporas focuses on the circulation of ideas and bodies of black women, the text is divided to draw out the use of historical bodies and the limits and possibilities of discipline specific discourses. Her first three chapters take an interdisciplinary approach to discussing black female bodies in feminist texts that investigate the intersections between race, gender, labor, and politics of the black diaspora. Pinto begins with black Scottish writer Jackie Kay's Bessie Smith, an innovative narrative that merges Kay's memoir with a profile of Bessie Smith, to negotiate a transnational and queer diasporic identity. Kay's work introduces Pinto's project because it offers "innovative circuits for critically reading black women's aesthetic performances and the feminist desires that connect and ground them to intellectual practice" (20). While Pinto's first three chapters develop these "innovative circuits" through tracking the representation of specific black female bodies, her use of the "jar" and "bottom" as metaphors organizing her first two chapters muddies the discussion. However, her third chapter, on the performance of dislocation of black female bodies in postcolonial plays, is particularly useful in considering the role that standard historical narratives have in diaspora studies.
The second half of Difficult Diasporas turns to the boundaries of disciplinary discourses, like anthropology and political history, in understanding the black female experience and Pinto chooses authors who test those limits and place gender at the heart of black modernity. In Pinto's fourth chapter, Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse and Erin Brodber's Louisiana, a postmodern fictionalization of Hurston's subject, are read as challenges to anthropological discourse; Hurston and Brodber's texts disrupt modernist narratives of political subjectivity in the black diaspora to illustrate the absence of black feminist subjectivity. Unfortunately, Pinto's use of Hurston's text is minimal. However, the discussion of short story collections and innovative poetry in chapters five and six effectively illustrate Pinto's project of linking aesthetics and form to feminist representation. In these short pieces, black feminist writers stretch the boundaries of genre, representation, and language in order to confront gendered power in diaspora.
Pinto's interdisciplinary project is a complex one and she often juggles far too much. In trying to tackle various intersections and trace connections between seemingly disparate figures and moments in the black diaspora, the literature occasionally falls to the wayside. Despite this, Pinto's use of lesser known texts to perform critical feminist work challenges current thinking about diaspora and its narratives. By carefully illustrating the core contradictions of diaspora that fail to adequately and critically address problems of representation and nonnormative experiences for black women, Pinto provides an important and necessary venue to place gender at the center of aesthetic and formal representations of diaspora.