Brenda Marie Osbey’s Black Internationalism

Abstract

The poetry and prose of two African American female poets, Rita Dove and Brenda Marie Osbey, maps two contemporary versions of black diasporic experience of home and identity in movement across literal and figurative, national and transnational, and racialized spaces/places. These poets’ work repeatedly returns to representations of home and identity as displaced, in motion, temporary, in-between and contested. As Susan Koshy argues in her 2011 essay, ‘Minority Cosmopolitanism’ in PMLA, ‘ [t] he feeling of not being at home is a marker of diasporic citizenship, an effect of attachments that position such minority subjects inside the nation formally but between nations culturally. The persistence of unhomeliness also emphasizes the inhospitality of a liberal, universalist model of citizenship that requires a transcendence of ethnic identity’ (601). Koshy’s project, which conjoins the ‘historically divergent projects of ethnic studies and studies of cosmopolitanism’ (592), employs the term ‘minority cosmopolitanism’ to refer to: ‘Translocal affiliations that are grounded in the experience of minority subjects and are marked by a critical awareness of the constraints of primary attachments such as family, religion, race, and nation and by an ethical or imaginative receptivity, orientation, or aspiration to an interconnected or shared world. Crucially, [she argues], minority cosmopolitanism is constituted through a paradoxical relation to cross-cultural contact, registering the disruptions and asymmetries of intercultural encounter while sustaining an openness to its transformative possibilities’. (594) Minority cosmopolitanism allows multiple diasporic articulations of home and identity, as minority subjects navigate translocal affiliations and cross-cultural contact in widely various ways. Contrasting Dove’s and Osbey’s intercultural encounters—one, ongoing and global, the other short-term and diasporically-focused—maps a wide range of African American ‘unhomely’ diasporic citizenship. The paper focuses on Dove’s poem ‘Ars Poetica’ (and reference Sonata Mulattica), Osbey’s poems ‘Geography’ and ‘History’ (and reference her essays about France during her 2004 Carmago fellowship).