Feeling against the plot: an African diaspora feminist politics of happiness

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay maps the uneasy terrains of Black feminist happiness in the diaspora as a complex reckoning with radical political and social theories of subject formation Refusing analytics that prioritize loss, injury, lack, stasis, and trauma as the defining features of the Black diaspora, African diaspora feminist happiness displaces whiteness and the West as its referents in favour of more difficult intimacies across Black geographies that imagine fleeting alliances, inevitable inequity, and tension across diaspora communities rather than similarity or belonging. This essay traces texts, often in popular genres, that plot intimacies that acknowledge legacies of injury but seek out other roots and routes to define the present and futures of Black feminine subjects, futures often knowingly in tension with the given materiality and resources of diaspora life, and in tension with the dominant modes of critique hewing toward death and pessimism in the field of Black diaspora studies. Through the global self-help genre, the Afropolitan literary novel, African young adult fiction, and sensational Kenyan LGBTQ cinema, this article traces the generic plots of African diaspora feminist happiness to find neither neoliberal hailed subjects nor subversive resistance. If in the masculine diaspora imagination, coming together via racial and political identity equals a new sense of community, the feminist genealogies that this essay traces through diaspora happiness are uncomfortable and deeply self-conscious about their traffic in capital and middle-class resources and desire. The texts that I look to do not attempt to erase, flatten, or romanticize difference into the poles of resistance and complicity, but instead define diaspora feminist happiness through tension and temporariness. These texts use diaspora pathways as structures of feeling conducive and conductive of happiness even as they do not engage the romance of racial, political, or even ethical community to find them.