By Dr. Suzanne Scafe
The journal African and Black Diaspora has just
published a Special Issue titled “African-Caribbean Women Interrogating
Diaspora/Post-diaspora” (2020).
The articles in this issue originated as papers
presented at a conference held at London South Bank University in July 2018,
representing the work of a network of scholars from the UK, Canada and the
Caribbean, who had been focusing on Caribbean women’s mobility, and, in
particular, issues of diaspora, globalization and transnationalism.
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| Guyanese-British artist Desrie Thomson-George. |
The conference was attended by more than 70 scholars,
students, activists and artists, and was accompanied by a show of
life-size sculptures and paintings by Guyanese-British artist Desrie
Thomson-George.
This artwork tells the story of Thomson-George’s alter
ego Jilo, and her struggles and journey to survival. The work was used to
illustrate the Research Network’s first publication, a collection of essays in
the open access journal, The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies (https://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/june2019/index.asp)
As
conference co-organizers, Dr. Leith Dunn and I were also pleased to welcome
British novelist Diana Evans, whose third novel Ordinary People (2018),
shortlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Literature, was launched at the
conference, and prize-winning short-story writer, novelist and journalist Alecia
McKenzie, who read a story from her ground-breaking collection Satellite
City (1992) as well as a recently written poem.
The
second edition of the award-winning Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives
in Britain (2018), by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, was
also launched at the conference
The
articles in Africa and Black Diaspora, an international journal, address
the complexity of the diasporic experience for Caribbean women, the fluidity of
the migration process and the importance of the material and affective links
forged by individuals on either side of the migration divide.
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| The cover of Heart of the Race. |
Pat
Noxolo’s article, for instance, uses the iconic poem by Jamaican writer Lorna
Goodison, “I am becoming my mother”, as well as a series of family photographs,
to frame the author’s own reflections on the relationship with her mother and
her mother’s own process of migration and settlement in Birmingham during the
1960s. In the process of this analysis, Noxolo examines what concepts of
diaspora or post-diaspora mean to communities and to the experiences of
individuals and their families.
Focusing
on her experiences as a teacher and black feminist activist in the UK from the
1960s to the 1990s, Beverly Bryan also uses a series of personal photographs to
trace the physical, political and psychological effects of the journey from
migrant to a settler.
Other
articles explore the meaning of home: Gabriella Beckles-Raymond argues that
concepts of home are central to African-Caribbean women’s understanding of
diaspora. Home is used by the author as a theoretical and ethical framework,
and she traces the changes in the meaning of home, from a concept that implies
a state of dependency to an interdependent state, characterized by the loving
and “liberatory”.
Several contributions focus on literature and
visual arts, and include analyses of the work of Zadie Smith, Edwidge Danticat,
Chimamanda Ngozi Ndiche, and Caribbean-diasporic visual artists Nicole Awai,
Aisha Tandiwe Bell, Andrea Chung, Elizabeth Colomba and Jeannette Ehlers.
In a reflection of the conference’s diverse
participants and presentations, this Special Issue includes the work of two
poets, Jenny Mitchell, and Paris-based McKenzie, whose novel Sweetheart
was the 2012 Caribbean Regional winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize. The
poetry of these writers reflects the issue’s themes of migration, diaspora,
home, history and belonging.
