Competing Discourses of Blackness

The journal Social Text just released an issue called Diaspora and Localities of Race 98 (27/1) introduced by Minkah Makalani (2009). She discusses how blackness must be negotiated and has competing conceptions within the African diaspora (6). We compete over discourses of blackness, the production and markers of difference, even how we engage in the exchanges and prooessses of “racemaking.” How we “see” (or perceive) race is an opportunity, says Makalani, to “untangle our implicit understandings of what constitutes membership and belonging” (ibid.). The question at St. Nick’s Pub or Harlem is membership and belonging in what? Racism at the local level in Harlem and for whom? Citizens? Immigrants? At the global level (exploitation of black world musics; visa problems getting into U.S., Islamaphobia)? The lack of facilitation of these issues by academics like me, the role we could play but generally don’t, could be critical to the survival of the informal sectors that make not only St. Nick’s Pub possible but African night at St Nick’s possible. What has it not be my duty to create such translations? What has it be my duty?