#The Pursuit of Happiness_ Black Women Diasporic Dreams and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism

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The Pursuit of Happiness- Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism

...It was this line of thinking that annoyed Gayle and led her to these passion-ate statements in her interview. Here, she claims that Jamaicans are ignorant, or at least less informed and educated about the ways racism operates, because they do not have access to the worldwide observations that activists and writers such as Maya Angelou and Malcolm X publicized to the African American people. Seemingly unaware of the activism and writings of Caribbeanists such as Marcus Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey, Walter Rodney, and C. L. R. James, Gayle perpetuates a strong sense of African American ownership over the experience of racism. She was not able to recognize that racism operates in a variety of ways and may be differently connected to class, gender, and nationality in various locations. Nor was she able to push against “a homogenization of transnational Black [American] identities,” as Clarke and Thomas urge.

Similar to Pratt’s commentary on European conquests, much of the research on contact zones focuses primarily on the power dynamics between people ra-cialized as “white” (Europeans or North Americans) and those “Others” racial-ized as Black, Asian, or Latino (“non-Europeans”).8 However, I employ Pratt’s concept of “contact zones” to explore what Tina Campt and Deborah Thomas call “diasporic hegemonies.”9 Campt and Thomas apply a feminist transna-tional analysis to the African diaspora, drawing attention to the ways racialized, classed, gendered, and nationalized differences are marked and interrogated within African diasporic communities. I contend that Girlfriend Tours, and the Jamaican tourist industry in general, are useful for investigating how African Americans hold on to hegemonic ideas of Blackness that provide insight into how they see themselves and how they imagine their diasporic kin. Brent Hayes Edwards points out in The Practice of Diaspora that the diaspora is configured and reconfigured through miscommunication and untranslatability.10 Diasporic contact zones enable us to examine those critical moments when individuals are aware of “the ways transnational Black groupings are fractured by nation, class, gender, sexuality, and language,” and to observe how these disidentifications or misidentifications are constitutive of diasporic subjectivities.11 Subsequently, I offer this theorization of “diasporic contact zones” to examine how African Americans and Jamaicans express their understandings of racialized subjectiv-ities (indexed by nation, class, and gender), in spaces where interlocutors are simultaneously imagined as diasporic community members and nationalized “Others.” In this way, I attempt to move anthropologists away from concep-tualizing diaspora as communities of similarities toward one of communities working with, and through, difference.

...Here, Dent wonderfully illustrates the nationalized, classed, and diasporic forces at play as Girlfriends utilize their American class status and citizenship to travel to other countries, but imagine these spaces — Africa and Jamaica — in narrow ways that serve their own nationalized conceptions of Blackness. This “proto-type of Blackness” they hold on to prescribes certain stereotypes and notions about what Blackness is and hinders one from seeing how privilege influences access to other Black spaces.

...In this way, Jamaica was viewed as greatly impacted by Africa, as a space that was closer to African culture because of its location in the historical transatlantic slave trade and because it was predominately Black. Jamaicans were seen as holding on to traditional African culture in ways that African Americans could not for numerous reasons: (1) African Americans were one geographical step farther away from Africa in the slave trade; (2) the white majority in the United States desecrated and purposely erased African influences; and (3) African Americans were not able to know, or were not inter-ested in knowing, their connections to Africa in the ways Girlfriends assumed Jamaicans did and could. For some of the women, Jamaica was imagined as an island paradise where the land and people are natural (represented by the Rasta’s dreadlocks), earthy (especially the ganja), sensual (heard in the lyrics Jamaican men use to draw in tourist women), and hypersexual (ascribed onto the Black bodies of young men interested in older, foreign women).

While there seemed to be some shared understandings about how gender operated in the United States and Jamaica, there were different notions about what Blackness meant, how it was utilized, and what it required of those racial-ized as Black. Additionally, though Girlfriends were more open to recognizing the ways their American citizenship and economic status gave them access to privileges that Jamaicans did not have, some had a harder time seeing how they contributed to the oppression and exploitation of Jamaicans through tourist practices. These different conceptualizations and experiences of what Black-ness is sometimes led to moments of diasporic disconnect and mistranslation between Jamaicans and African Americans. The emphasis placed on race and racism by African Americans, while Jamaicans focused on class, added fuel to these fractures.

While African Americans’ dias-poric focus was almost always centered on what they saw as an original dis-persal moment of transatlantic slave trade, Jamaicans were not focused on this moment in the same way. Instead, Jamaicans often demonstrated Stuart Hall’s claim that the Caribbean is the home of hybridity, and in these spaces there are multiple forms of origin moments. While African slave trade came up as an important element in Jamaican history, it was not the central node for their un-derstanding of Blackness and Black identities. More often than not, in relation to the concept of “diaspora,” African Americans and Jamaicans were speaking past one another and not speaking of the same diasporic community.

With a diasporic heart, Gayle feels a respon-sibility to lift the mask and teach Jamaicans about racism. In other parts of the interview, she describes her fear that her diasporic kin in Jamaica could be hoodwinked, like she imagines her ancestors in Africa were before they were forced into a boat to endure the Middle Passage. Mark wants African Ameri-cans to recognize that they are acting like masters and treating those they seek to have kinship with as less than. According to him, they are acting superior, exploiting and thinking lowly of Jamaican workers in the tourist sector, which Mark notes is how they themselves feel as Black people in the United States.

...In fact, many scholars of happiness argue that the expectation, the imagining of something that may happen, is more powerful and gratifying than actually obtaining it. So while these women may never actually get the type of diasporic relationships they desire, or the happiness they envision as ever-present in Ja-maica, their practices, their “do-something” actions, and their imaginings of diaspora are productive in their lives.

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The Pursuit of Happiness- Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism

Because Black women’s lives demonstrate the dynamism of race and gender and speak to issues of power and privilege, their experiences are cru-cially important for understanding the tensions and exchanges that emerge in this transnational, increasingly globalized world. However, the experiences and narratives of Black women, particularly Black American women, are scarce in transnational studies.7 Moreover, scholars and journalists who do address the lives of Black American women often limit their analyses and representations in three ways: (1) they present narratives that constrain these women’s experi-ences to the national borders of the United States, neglecting to understand how their lives are influenced by transnational processes and various forms of mobility; (2) they discount the differently racialized and gendered experiences Black women have when engaging these transnational processes; and (3) they frequently offer a one-dimensional view of these women’s struggles within spaces of institutional and social oppression, presenting them simply as sad, depressed women without also engaging their desires and ability to experience pleasure, leisure, and happiness.

They arrive to see a sea of Black people they believe look like them and have experienced the same burdens of racism; yet frequently Girlfriends have their diasporic dream shattered or at least disrupted by their American privilege and hegemonic understandings of Blackness.

These African American women find themselves deeply located in the enigma of American Blackness — a space where their race, nationality, and pursuits of happiness converge. Their ability to travel (by obtaining a passport and having access to “disposable” income) signifies a certain achievement of the American dream. However, these particular Americans are traveling specifically because it seems that successfully accomplishing their pursuit of happiness is almost impossible within U.S. borders. The gendered and racialized contours of their lived experiences are often what trigger the tracks of their tears. In Jamaica, their Blackness ushers them into new networks of relationships, even if these rela-tionships are at times tense with power differentials linked to their nationality. Their Americanness continually gets in the way, disrupting these friendships and the fulfillment of their diasporic dreams. In the end, they seem “Black” enough but too “American” to be situated comfortably within the diasporic relationships they seek with Jamaicans. Furthermore, their experiences with historical and contemporary racism make them too “Black,” and arguably too much “woman,” to exhale comfortably within the embrace of American society. Perhaps these contradictions, ambiguities, and mistranslations are embedded in being Black, woman, and American. And perhaps it only gets more complicated if you have the audacity to try to be Black, woman, American, and happy.

...In her research on second-generation Filipinos, Wolf defines emotional transnationalism as the process of sustaining transnational connections through emotions and ideologies.  “Emotional transnationalism” conceptualizes the am- biguities and contradictions embedded in the Girlfriends’ pursuit of happiness in the context of global racisms and patriarchies. This group’s understanding of their racialized and gendered subjectivities is not contained by, or simply attached to, their nation-state, but rather is deeply connected to their partic-ipation in transnational processes and an engagement in what they envision as a diasporic community. These women’s choices about whom to love, how to relax, and where to find personal acceptance and community tie together countries and cultures using technologies that are different from those of the past. New technologies often result in new forms of connectivity and belonging that link to historical racialized and gendered ideologies. As I observed their emotions and tracked their tears from the United States to Jamaica and back, I wondered what led Girlfriends to use these technologies and seek leisure experi-ences. The concept of emotional transnationalism offered a theoretical lens that enabled me to answer two central research questions: First, why do people like the Girlfriends seek out transnational and diasporic experience, and how might their desire for such experience reflect nationally specific affective and political economies of race and gender? Second, how might our understandings of the racialized, gendered, and emotional aspects of transnationalism shift if we place Black women at the center of our research?

Emotional transnationalism is important for understanding how these women have created a transnational emotional social field — a field that includes two countries that are geographically bounded but also constructed emotionally, culturally, and virtually. Researchers interested in transnationalism and global-ization have theorized the fascinating ways goods, ideas, and people increas-ingly cross national borders and geographic boundaries. However, less atten-tion has been paid to the transnational dynamics of emotions — how people carry emotions with them as they move, experiencing them individually and collectively and across time and space.

Anderson describes the nation-state as a unique form of political community shaped by historical forces and imaginings of commonality. He argues that a “community is imagined if its members will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion.”5 Community is often imagined “because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”

I aim to frustrate particular notions about diasporic community by high- lighting some of the power differentials within diasporic formations. By an-alyzing how affective transactions influence the creation and maintenance of diasporic relationships, particularly those in which national, economic, and gendered differences frequently become marked, I am using gft as a lens to investigate diasporic diversity. Additionally, instead of anchoring the notion of diaspora in prevalent histories of pain and suffering, this book shows how people use leisure, laughter, and the pursuit of happiness to construct diaspora.