DEVOLVING DIASPORAS: RECEPTION AND MIGRATION

Dr James Procter
Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Newcastle.

Paper presented during SABDET panel titled 'Writing in the Diaspora, Writing for the Diaspora' on Tuesday 12th September 2006 at the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) biennial conference at SOAS 11th-13th September 2006

The abstract for this panel encourages investigation into the limits of diasporic African literature which, it suggests, eclipses local writing from within Africa. The abstract goes on: “Does the difficulty of publishing within Africa mean that we will only learn about contemporary African experiences as the Diaspora mediates them?” In this paper I want to talk about a 3-year collaborative AHRC-funded project starting in January 2007 which addresses these concerns about the way diasporic literature estranges/erases the local, not just in Africa, but also in the Caribbean, India, Canada, and even the UK. If the abstract associates these concerns with issues of uneven production and publication, this project will suggest they are also issues of uneven consumption and reception. This is not an oppositional observation: as we shall see production (writing/publication) and consumption (reading/reception) are mutually constitutive processes.

Reception has become a particularly loaded term in recent years, bound up with current anxieties in Western Europe about the new diasporic subjects - refugees and asylum seekers. Sangatte, Oakenfield, “Shadowy figures roaming the track at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. Afghans, Iraqis, Chinese and Moroccans washed up on Mediterranean shores to be rounded up in their hundreds into grim reception centres: routine and familiar image of the wretched of the earth knocking desperately at Europe’s door” (Guardian May 24 2002). Our project consciously evokes this sense of reception as a question of diasporic hospitality. At the same time, it works with a more specific, literary sense of reception as hermeneutics, interpretation, or reader response. Something of the dual sense of reception as a matter of diasporic hospitality and hermeneutics might be gathered from the following poem:

The poem, of course, is 'Telephone Conversation' by Wole Soyinka, a poem that might be read as a satirical meditation on reception. On the one hand the poem dramatises the encounter between ‘host’ and ‘guest’ that was a central thematic preoccupation associated with African-Caribbean migration to London during the 1950s and 1960s. The private conversation between a guesthouse landlady and a potential African tenant captures a wider climate of (cold) reception in the so-called ‘host’ country; a climate premised (in the poem at least) upon misunderstanding, irrationality and ignorance. More literally (and metaphorically) though, this is also a poem about reception as a certain quality of communication, or mediation over distance, about the ability or inability to receive messages. The conversation is characterised by poor reception, as silence, ellipsis, the economy of the telephone (button a, button b) and the rearing of the receiver, which all threaten to terminate the broadcast signals. The telephone here operates to foreground physical distance rather than intimacy. If the subject of their discussion is obsessively focused on the corporeal, the technology that channels the conversation foregrounds disembodiment and distance (note the punning refs to ‘hide-and-speak’ and ‘wasted journey’ which play on this sense of disembodiment/distance). Register and intonation are crucial here, both to our reading of the poem and the speakers’ reading of each other: again, note the references to ‘wave-length adjusted’, to ‘variation’ of emphasis, and the material quality of the voice as lipstick coated, long gold-rolled, rancid breath . Register is crucial to the English etiquette of reception (as hospitality) as polite, restrained, formal exchange. Yet it is the African migrant’s increasingly ironic use of this etiquette, his use of the word ‘madam’ alongside bottom, that gives him the upper hand in this game of reception, that leaves her in the dark, scrambling to decode the cultural references of his message. It’s her receiver, and her ear that is unsettled at the end of the poem, as it is forced into an imagined intimacy with the black body.

It would be possible to spend the remainder of this paper examining the trope of the telephone in contemporary African diasporic writing, where it continues to function as a condensed metonym of reception. Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999) (a title which foregrounds a fictional concern with the hermeneutic acts of interpretation and translation) is centred on a love affair between Scottish academic Rae, and his Sudanese translator, Sammar, a love affair that is self-consciously mediated in the text by telephone. In Jackie Kay’s Trumpet the many uncanny, disembodied telephone calls and answering machine messages are associated with the dead Joss Moody and the haunting presence of the African diaspora in Scotland that stands behind him. Meanwhile, in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (2001) the asylum seeker Saleh Omar’s persistent refusal to install a phone forms part of his own, self-destructive refusal of the hospitality of Rachel, a worker at his former detention centre in England.

Yet if part of this project will involve tracing the representation of reading and reception in migrant metropolitan literature, our primary interest is in the reception of the texts themselves, beyond London. It is in this sense that we use ‘devolving diasporas’, to refer to both a shift outwards from the metropolitan centre, and to a move away from the text itself as the fixed centre of meaning. Despite the fascination with ‘dissemination’ in diaspora studies, the reading of diaspora texts has been understood in a decidedly linear fashion, establishing what Janice Radway calls “a spatial starting point and a temporal moment of origin [the writer/writing] which the reader is regarded as coming after, as subsequent to” (2001: 7).) To start with the reader is to radically undermine the imaginary coherence of textual tropes such as the telephone, and gives us albeit limited access to the voices and experiences of local interpretive communities in Africa and their reception of diaspora culture.

For example, if we look outside the texts of Soyinka during his time as a migrant in London via, say, the BBC archives, other reception stories become available. As a broadcaster for the ‘Calling Nigeria’ radio programme, Soyinka was stung by the reaction of listeners in Nigeria who complained variously about “his enunciation, fundamental assumptions and arrangement of material”, as well as the fact that he “talked down” to his audience in his early series on African culture. Such archives tell a different story of voice, intonation and reception to that found in ‘Telephone Conversation’, exposing important tensions between the internal and diaspora communities highlighted in the conference abstract.

This tension becomes even greater when we think of contemporary diasporic novels by migrant metropolitans? Just how many West Indians in Trinidad have read Small Island? Is there anyone reading Leila Aboulela’s celebrated fiction in Khartoum? Whatever the answers to such questions (and we hope to provide some of them through the project), reading diasporic literature has to be regarded as more than a matter of personal choice, but also of economics, of language, literacy and so on. Devolving diasporas is motivated by a sense that contemporary studies of diaspora in the arts and humanities are founded upon a largely unexplored discrepancy. Despite revelations in postcolonial studies since the 1980s concerning the nomadic, itinerant nature of migrant identity, there remains the sense of a genuine place (London, Bombay, New York) of diasporic activity. Certainly, diasporic cultural production and criticism within the UK is unequivocally London-centred. Since the 1980s canonical and proto-canonical works by Hanif Kureishi, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie and Monica Ali have helped make the link between the migrant and the metropolis axiomatic. The aim of this project is not to question the significance of the capital for diasporic writing, or to propose a separate canon organized around some kind of literary ‘north-south divide’ (whether conceived in national, or global terms). Rather, our objective is to foreground the presence of a ‘devolved’ diasporic culture both within and outside the UK. The main way in which we intend to do this is through the establishment of a transnational network of reading groups.

Despite the current UK interest in diasporic 'texts' (e.g. White Teeth) and 'authors' (e.g. Zadie Smith), little is yet known about the actual 'readers' of migrant literature and of how they make sense of the texts they read. With the exception of Stephanie Newel’s work on reading in colonial Ghana (2002), still less is known about the consumption and production of meaning in relation to these texts beyond the metropolitan centre. One of the primary objectives of the devolving diasporas project is a detailed analysis of the reception of diasporic cultural production beyond London. There are two distinct, yet overlapping phases to this project. The first will be UK-based and will involve making audio-visual recordings of 5 reading groups in Central Scotland (where the idea for this project took place). By analysing group responses to 4 diasporic texts (Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Andrea Levy’s Small Island, Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth) we aim to devolve the social production of meaning in relation to diasporic literature, which we would argue is predominantly London-centred, while making available empirical access to the ‘live’ reception of diasporic texts for the first time. The reading material deliberately comprises both ‘local’ Scottish writing (e.g. Jackie Kay's The Adoption Papers) and proto-canonical metropolitan works (e.g. Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004)), while some of the texts move between Scotland, North Africa and India. The texts were deliberately chosen because they have attracted the kind of mainstream, middlebrow interest that has made them popular with already existing reading groups. And because they emerge out of a strikingly similar regime of value and have notable coherence in terms of publication dates, sites of production, fictional preoccupation and transnational consecration. This will allow us to make more substantive comparisons across the readings of these texts.

The hubs for these reading groups will be provided by the City of Edinburgh Ethnic Library and The Mitchell Library, Glasgow and will draw upon a range of reading constituencies: rural and metropolitan, academic and lay, ‘diasporic’ and ‘indigenous’. The data from all reading sessions will be recorded, transcribed and analysed using conversation analytical methods. The reading groups will perform three functions:
(i) they will provide us with the raw material for a sustained, comparative study of diasporic reception, between different ‘interpretive communities’;
(ii) they will allow us to promote the presence of a ‘devolved’ diasporic literature in Central Scotland since 1980 (marked by the beginning of Jackie Kay’s composition of The Adoption Papers), and
(iii) they will allow us to move outwards (devolve) from a text-centred approach to diasporic literature by exploring the constitutive role of the act of reading.
Of course, viewed in isolation the Scottish reception data will tell us little about diasporic cultural production as a global, or transnational event.

The second phase of the project will develop the case study of Scottish readers to produce a comparative reading of diasporic reception by extending the reading network to incorporate Canada, India, North Africa, and the Caribbean. We are currently working with the British Council and local academic representatives in each location to establish this network. Reading groups within these dispersed locations will be recorded discussing the same texts as their Scottish counterparts, allowing us to identify and assess similarities and differences between reading values, priorities and interpretations. All reading groups will be networked via an online chat room, allowing individual readers to extend their discussion of the texts within a larger virtual 'community'.
Exploring diaspora texts in terms of local reception contexts will allow us to question hierarchies of reading that govern canon formation, and to explore an alternative archive of diasporic production beyond London by non-diasporic South Asian, African and Caribbean communities. ‘Devolving Diasporas’ is centrally concerned with what (if anything) happens to a metropolitan text when it is ‘moved’ from London, and made available to different readers in Central Scotland, and beyond, and the project raises a number of local, empirical and more general, theoretical questions:

What is at stake in moving from a discursive emphasis on dislocation in diaspora studies, to an emphasis on location in ‘lived’ migrant communities at a regional, national and transnational level?
How does reception of the same text differ across the transnational reading network, and how do we account for those differences? Is there a correspondence between the production of meaning and value in relation to diasporic texts across particular ‘interpretive communities’ (e.g. in Central Scotland, or N.Africa)? Is there a significant degree of disagreement within these communities?
How does the concept of reception allow us to rethink notions of diasporic identity? How do readers articulate their identities in relation to texts they read?
How adequate is reception theory to the analysis of diaspora communities, which elude the conventional boundaries (domestic, institutional, geographical) of national audiences?
What (if any) changes in attitude towards migrant communities can be mapped through reading groups? How do we square the celebrated metropolitan reception of writers like Andrea Levy with localised hostility towards asylum seekers and refugees?

These are ambitious questions and it is important to remain alert to the very real limitations of what this project can achieve through the transnational reading network. Critics have pointed out that such research ‘brackets off’ acts of reading from the variety of other social practices that make up everyday life (e.g. Nightingale 1989). Others have noted it places a naïve trust in empirical data, granting too much authenticity and truth-value to reader responses (e.g. Turner 1993, Frow 1995). We acknowledge these criticisms and intend to foreground the very real limitations of both our reading network and our analytical approaches in related publications. However, we would also insist that some empirical sense of the diasporic audience, however contingent, provides a productive antidote to some of the theoretical excesses of diaspora theory.

While some of the most innovative diaspora studies of the late 1980s and 1990s managed to articulate materialist concerns with migrant metaphors (e.g. Brah 1996, Mishra 1996, Hall 1986, 1988), we share Revathi Krishnaswamy’s concern that diasporic discourse ‘de-materializes the migrant into an abstract idea’ (Krishnaswamy 1995). Our project works within this context to relocate diasporic cultural production within a devolving regional, national and transnational landscape. In short, we will pursue local acts of reading within a global context of diasporic dispersion and dislocation.

Reception study provides a productive context for thinking about issues of diasporic location and devolution because it is fundamentally resistant to the idea that meaning resides in one place. If London has played a dominant role in securing the meaning and value of diasporic texts, reader response criticism suggests the presence of alternative ‘interpretive communities’ (Fish 1980), and ‘horizons of expectation’ (Jauss 1982), while cultural studies insists dominant meanings are ‘negotiated’ (Hall 1980, Morley 1980, Fiske 1987) in different ways by different audiences. Classic ethnographies of reception (e.g. Radway and Morley) focusing on actual audiences have complicated these theories further, exposing contradictions within social groups (and even individual readers), and emphasising the dangers of ‘reading off’ class, ethnicity or gender as determinate factors.

The ‘devolving diasporas’ project will need to remain alert to these dangers. For example, it is likely that the reception data will reveal contrary and conservative readings that jar with the kinds of ‘reading for resistance’ associated with some postcolonial studies: such interpretations need to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as an aberrant form of reading. What if the romance ‘sub plot’ of Ali’s fiction is prioritised over reading for diasporic difference? Literary critics, and postcolonial academics in particular “tend to repress consideration of variety in reading practices because of our assumption that everyone reads (or ought to) as we do professionally…” (Long: 11). This fact has postponed the study of reading groups because, as Elizabeth Long argues (2003), they lack “obvious relationship to formal political processes” (ix) and because they are associated with a middlebrow culture lacking the authentic, or revolutionary possibilities of popular/subaltern formations. The reading groups are not to be understood as representative of a wider constituency of readers, and our reception focus is not an attempt to track the ‘real’ diasporic reader.

Perhaps one reason an account of diasporic reception on this scale has not been attempted until now is that it represents a radical challenge to the notion of unified textual meaning: diasporas are peculiarly resistant to the interpretive coherence provided by national and communal boundaries (a fact dramatically foregrounded by the Rushdie Affair). Our aim is to highlight rather than smooth over such interpretive incoherence, which points to a more unruly, undisciplined picture of diaspora culture than that to be found within the relatively coherent theories of postcolonial studies. By combining a ‘devolved’ perspective on diaspora with an analytical study that situates diasporic narratives in a context of reception, we are proposing an alternative approach to diaspora in order to rethink what has, paradoxically, become a relatively coherent, unified and ‘settled’ field of inquiry.

Devolving Diasporas: Reception and Migration in Central Scotland, 1980-present
Principal Investigator:
Dr James Procter, School of English, Newcastle University (j.r.procter@ncl.ac.uk) Co-Investigators:
Dr Bethan Benwell (b.m.benwell@stir.ac.uk); Professor Jackie Kay (jackie.kay@ncl.ac.uk); Dr Gemma Robinson (g.robinson@stir.ac.uk)

Wole Soyinka, ‘Telephone Conversation’ (1962)
The price seemed reasonable, location
Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived
Off premises. Nothing remained
But self-confession. “Madam,” I warned,
6 “I hate a wasted journey – I am African.’
Silence. Silenced transmission of
Pressurised good-breeding. Voice, when it came,
Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled
Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was, foully.
10 “HOW DARK?” … I had not misheard … “ARE YOU LIGHT
OR VERY DARK?” Button B. Button A. Stench
Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.
Red booth. Red pillar-box. Red double-tiered
Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed
15 By ill-mannered silence, surrender
Pushed dumbfoundment to beg simplification.
Considerate she was, varying the emphasis –
“ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?” Revelation came.
“You mean – like plain or milk chocolate?”
20 Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light
Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted,
I chose. “West African sepia” – and as afterthought,
“Down in my passport.” Silence for spectroscopic
Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent
25 Hard on the mouthpiece. ‘WHAT’S THAT?” conceding
“DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS.” “Like brunette.”
“THAT’S DARK, ISN’T IT?” “Not altogether.
Facially I am brunette, but, madam, you should see
The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet
30 Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused –
Foolishly, madam – by sitting down, has turned
My bottom raven black – One moment, madam!” – sensing
Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap
About my ears – “Madam,” I pleaded, “wouldn’t you rather
35 See for yourself?”

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