Irreconcilabilities and Transgressions:
Transnationality and History in Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise
Yu-yen Liu
Much has been written on the ways in which writers in diaspora transform and
transgress geographical, cultural, and historical borders with their works. Since the
rubric of diaspora emerged as a pivot for theoretical work in the humanities, literary
studies, and area studies, it has implicitly included in its definition an attachment,
however imaginary, to an originary nation-state. While diaspora may have arguably
associated with concepts of mobility (migration, exile, etc.), it actually follows a logic
of sedentary networking; it is inherently transnational. In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Gilroy writes that the effects of the "new
racism" that arose after WWII "aligned 'race' closely with the idea of national belonging" (10). Gilroy then argues for an alternative to conflating race and nationality:
"cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in
their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational
and intercultural perspective" (15). The discussion of the image of “the Atlantic”
has been found in numerous critical writing. The study of transnationality (the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space or borders) in the African diaspora has not yet received the critical attention it deserves.
The project will join other scholars’ effort in celebrating the growing recognition
that historical forces and theoretical paradigms have always already cut across national boundaries and therefore demand focus on both internal and external borders in
global and transnational contexts. Echoing this theoretical concern, this project aims
broadly to examine and foreground the role that the Caribbean writing plays in the
imagining of transnationalism and diaspora. To this end, I plan to read Michelle
Cliff’s fiction alongside the paradoxical relation between the concepts of nation, history and diaspora. The project will seek to endorse Cliff’s refusal to meet the structural expectations of historical novel, and to chart the writer’s paths of resistance—a
unique model of diasporic writing that negotiates gender, identity, sexuality, nation,
nationality, race, ethnicity and history at the same time.
Transgressions and fluidity of content and form seem to be especially relevant to
the experience and writing of women, from the time of slavery to the present. For
women who are inhabiting marginal spaces, the ability to cross boundaries is a related
occurrence. Even Middle Passage and margin thus become empowering rather than
disempowering tropes, despite the troubled history behind them. Cliff’s writing is
characterized with these elements. As a novelist, short-story writer whose work
produces lyrical and haunting evocations of ethnic identities, and of the black diaspora,
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Cliff tells as well as imaginatively retells her own personal history and the collective
history of her people. Cliff uses her fiction to rescue the past. Hence, Francoise
Lionnet has called Cliff an “autoethnographer,” for the interest and focus of her narratives are not simply the retrieval of a repressed dimension of the private self, but the
rewriting of their ethnic history, the re-creation of a collective identity through the
performance of language (1992: 334). In her work, Cliff conceptualizes her ethnic
women characters across gender, history, and nation, voicing her preoccupation with
histories of resistance and oppressed people. Though Cliff obsesses on the recovery
of migration and the history of resistance, she does not ignore the dangers and pitfalls
of such a claim. No Telephone to Heaven rescues Clare's female lineage and traces
her through her mother's line, moving from America, England and Europe to Jamaica;
the novel shows the irreconcilabilities of Jamaican identity, but it also draws attention
to its severed and disjunctive nature. Cliff is hence committed not only to the rewriting of history, but she is also committed to creating “a body of resistance literature
that describes and formally enacts the struggle for cultural decolonization” (Schwartz,
1993: 595). Cliff’s Free Enterprise (1993) details the problems that arise when history is created and documented without the input of marginalized people. In reading
this novel, I will especially investigate Cliff’s use of multidimensional time in relation
to Homi K. Bhabha’s idea that the creation of “alternative temporalities” provides a
means to articulate the differential histories of race, gender, class, and nation in a
transnational culture. Seen from a transnational perspective, Cliff's work virtually
describes the 'varieties of agency', to borrow Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s words,
that traces the alternative histories of the oppressed peoples silenced under the empire-building of the U.S. In considering Cliff’s challenging the concept of American
identity, this project also seeks to join the recent scholarship that opens up dialogue
between the fields of American studies and postcolonial and diaspora studies. Concepts such as nation, identity, colonization, diaspora, migration, and resistance will
thus be discussed in a re-configured terrain—the transnational background. Hopefully, the yoking of these different perspectives in my project will yield a fresh approach to issues concerning diaspora.
Key words: diaspora, nation, history, transnationality, American studies
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