Content area
Full text
Paul Gilroy's seminal work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness shifted the grounds of African American and Caribbean studies in its claim that nationalist-and cultural nationalist-frameworks for the study of black diaspora cultures neglected the productive cultural exchanges, cultural mobility, and "outernational" reaches of black cultures (17). He offered to the field the insight that in contrast to seeing identity as tied to "roots and rootedness" we might more productively see "identity as a process of movement and mediation that is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes" (19). Twenty years later, Gilroy's insights on the transnationalism of black dia- sporic culture are a standard for the field, yet perhaps it is time to explore further what happens when diasporic cultures are moved into unexpected territories-when they are pushed "off route," so to speak. Vancouver poet Wayde Compton illustrates a commit- ment throughout his work to "rewriting a northern actuality" in the face of pressing and inherited diasporic narratives that render black Western Canadian experience, in his terms, "Afroperipheral": "the appendix of the epic and the echo of the odyssey" (After Canaan 16-17). "In the periphery," Compton argues, "there are things to be learned from owning and exploring oblique kinds of blackness" where "radical experiments of identity can be tried" (13). Compton engages with the inheritances of black diasporic culture through his citation of writers such as Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, and at the same time explores the cultural and creative possibilities of new circuits made possible through new cultural exchanges, challenging the idea that black Vancouver culture is merely periph- eral to an already-established diasporic core. Gilroy himself anticipated this need for a reorientation of diaspora theory: "Critical space/time cartography of the diaspora needs . . . to be readjusted so that the dynamics of dispersal and local autonomy can be shown alongside the unforeseen detours and circuits which mark new journeys and new arrivals that, in turn, release new political and cultural possibilities" (86). That Gilroy's remarks are made in the context of a discussion of contemporary music is significant here: Compton's challenge to the unidirectionality of diasporic circuits is expressed through his evocation of musical remix and the sonic movement of culture through electronic circuits and the airwaves, making black Vancouver...