KIPPS, BELSEY, AND JEGEDE: Cosmopolitanism, Transnationalism, and Black Studies in

Zadie Smith's "On Beauty"

Author(s): Kanika Batra
Source: Callaloo, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Fall, 2010), pp. 1079-1092
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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KIPPS, BELSEY, AND JEGEDE

Cosmopolitanism, Transnationalism, and Black
Studies in Zadie Smith's On Beauty

by Kanika Batra

Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation
was required after the phenomenal success of Smith's first novel White Teeth.1 The status

of Smith's fiction in the Euro- American academy, which is also the setting of On Beauty,

encourages an analysis of disciplinarity and institutionalization. Recent criticism has

directed attention to Smith's portrayal of the American academy in passing. In a review
of Elaine Showalter's Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, Alan McKen-

zie points to "complacency both in the novels and campuses" that Showalter examines
and concludes by commenting on Smith's On Beauty as a "strange" and "wonderful"
novel which he is "not certain" would have benefitted from having been run through the
"very fine mill" of Showalter's critical exegesis (759). Examining a set of novels that he
calls "academic satires," Charles Green briefly discusses On Beauty as Smith's attempt to
bridge "a deeply emotional domestic drama with the public performances of the so-called
culture wars" (183). Green critiques the novel's "limp" treatment of the culture wars but

commends "how Smith successfully treats race" (185). Kathleen Wall reads Smith's On
Beauty and Ian McEwan's Saturday through a theoretical framework derived from Elaine
Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, which provides the title to the novel. Wall's reading is a

curiously apolitical treatment of Smith's trenchant critique of racial and economic disparities. Taking my cue from these critical opinions, I offer a reading of Smith's representation
of blackness in its institutional, social, and aesthetic dimensions.
Marking a shift from White Teeth, which documented multicultural Britain through
Archie Jones's and Samad Iqbal's British-Jamaican and British-South Asian families, On
Beauty is set largely in America, though it briefly references England as well. Presenting the
lives of two families, the Kippses and the Belseys, in the college town of Wellington, the
novel foregrounds the transnational dimensions of the black diaspora that is the subject of
Black Studies as an academic discipline. Smith details a year in the life of Howard Belsey,
English by birth, American by residence, art historian by profession, and liberal multicultural by choice. Howard's marriage to Kiki, his "American wife," and his life in the safe

environs of Wellington comprises Smith's narrative. This marriage between an Englishman

and an African American woman, and the lives of their children, Jerome, Zora, and Levi,
are the lens of Smith's ironical explorations of race, class, and gender relations in idyllic
Wellington. The idyll is interrupted by the arrival of Sir Monty Kipps, neo-conservative
Trinidadian British art historian, housed in the Black Studies Department. The Department
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CALLALOO

is home to Howard's closest friend, Nigerian migr Erskine Jegede, Soyinka Professor
of African Literature and Assistant Director of Black Studies, previously a fellow student
with Sir Monty at Oxford. The vagueness of Sir Monty's job profile at Wellington or the

nature of his duties at Black Studies is in contrast to the neo-conservative anti-affirmative

ideas he propounds.
Douglas Davidson and Frederick Weaver, writing in the Journal of Black Studies in 1985,

wrote that "a central education mission of Black Studies at White institutions is to enable

students to see that the rest of the curriculum is White Studies" (344). This Utopian hope
is unfulfilled at Wellington; in addition, the author's deliberate lack of explanation of Sir
Monty's duties as a Visiting Professor as well as Erskine's position indicate that both serve
as token additions to the cultural diversity in the Wellington faculty and course offerings.
Such tokenism casts doubt - as the author presumably intends - on the very nature and
purpose of Black Studies at Wellington.

While analyzing Smith's representation of Black Studies it is useful to consider the

history of the discipline. Most accounts emphasize that black identity politics and institutional racism were factors contributing to demands for curricular revisions (Hall;
Huggins). This article begins by outlining the emergence of the discourse understood as
Black Studies to propose a dialogue with recent discussions of cosmopolitanism as a way

of understanding its varying emphases on what Houston Baker, Manthia Diawara, and
Ruth Lindeborg call the "vernacular" and the "theoretical" (9). The words carry multiple
meanings: vernacular is understood as lived reality, social activism, and, more recently,

popular culture; the theoretical connotes an analysis of the vernacular most evident in
academic discourse. Next, I read On Beauty in the context of race and class specific theories

of identity to illustrate what Homi Bhabha has called "vernacular cosmopolitanism." The
article concludes by indicating how the novel presents an attenuated discussion of gender
and sexuality. My argument is that through the range of issues the author strives to ad-

dress, the novel paradoxically epitomizes, even while it discredits, an institutionalized

Black Studies. The discipline is presented as disconnected to social reality and actively
participating in the perpetuation of social inequality. Such a view, in my opinion, does
injustice to contemporary work being done under "Black Studies," particularly since the

discipline occupies a relatively marginal position in the Euro- American academy even
today. Smith's profoundly ironical take on the "cosmopolitanism" of transnational academic exchanges of the kind epitomized by Howard Belsey, Monty Kipps, and Erskine
Jegede in their personal and institutional affiliations engages with class specific racialized

identities but leaves unresolved the place of racialized gender and sexuality outside and
in the corporate academy of the twenty-first century.2

Speaking to Each Other

The history, origins, and major concerns in Black Studies are succinctly summarized
in the introductions to two landmark anthologies - Black British Cultural Studies, edited
by Houston Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth Lindeborg, and The Black Studies Reader,

edited by Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, and Claudine Michel - which provide an
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CALLALOO

overview of the discipline in the US and British contexts.3 Baker, Diawara, and Lindeborg
chart the emergence of Black British cultural studies by contrasting Stuart Hall's account
of its emergence in Thatcherite Britain in the 1980s with the history of US Black Studies
in the aftermath of the civil rights and black power movement in the 1960s and 1970s. As
stated in the introduction to the volume, "Perhaps the most striking difference between

theorists and practitioners of black cultural production in Britain and black American
cultural workers, of, say, the black arts and the black power movements, is their assumed
sites of enunciation" (9). According to them, the degree of emphasis on "vernacular politics" and the "theoretical space of enunciation" differs in the two contexts: black social
activism is emphasized in the rise of the field in the US; the theoretical space of the academy is often considered central to the origins of Black Studies in Britain under the aegis
of Cultural Studies departments at the University of Birmingham, the Open University,
Leeds University, and other institutions (Baker et al. 9).
In other words, if the vernacular as lived reality and social activism preceded the theoretical discourse in the US, in Britain the theory is said to have created the conditions for
the enunciation of the vernacular. The inherent problems with such an account are evident
from even a cursory examination of the British context where the racial ferment of the
1950s and 1960s culminating in the Notting Hill Riots of 1959 was coterminous with, if not

prior to, the method of inquiry characterized by Stuart Hall's legacy to the Birmingham
School of Cultural Criticism. In the same way, Black Studies in the US had taken root in
black and white institutions such as Howard University, the Tuskegee Institute, Stanford
University, and Harvard University which offered courses in the study of "Negro life and
culture" in the 1930s and 1940s prior to civil rights activism (Norment 30).
Another difference between the assumed sites of enunciation, evident in the nomenclature
of the two anthologies, is indicated by the adjective "cultural" often used for Black Studies
in Britain unlike the US. This is not simply in the interests of academic diversification since
Cultural Studies and Black Studies occupy parallel and sometimes intersecting trajectories,
but also because the histories of the discipline in Britain and the US often take "culture"
as a referent for the former and "politics" as the mainstay of the latter. The beginnings

of Black Studies in the US have acquired the status of mythical origins. Bobo, Hudley,
and Michel's introduction to the Black Studies Reader indicates how "historic social justice
movements" that "preceded the mid-twentieth-century grassroots activist endeavors . . .
led to fundamental alterations in social and political organizations, including institutions
of higher learning" (1). Some institutions responded to black activism for a more relevant

curriculum: a Black Studies program was established at Merritt Junior College in Oakland, California in 1963, and a Black Studies department at San Francisco State College
in 1967-1968. Bobo et al. place Black Studies in a tradition comprising Chicana /o, Asian
American, and Native American studies, fields that were "born of social unrest in addition

to academic initiatives" (3). The convergences between the British and US academic contexts through developments in Cultural Studies are also acknowledged by Bobo et al. who
mention that in the latter part of the twentieth century, Cultural Studies, "as a theoretical

approach to understanding the position of specific social groups, became a predominant

method of analysis" (8). The legacy of Stuart Hall is undeniable in the cultural turn in
Black Studies, substantiating Baker, Diawara, and Lindeborg's claim that black theory in
the United States "was enormously energized by the persuasive and brilliant analyses of
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black British cultural studies" (13). Smith's first work White Teeth was hailed as an exemplary representation of the multiplicity of cultures and subcultures in postcolonial Britain
that are the subject of Black British cultural studies. For the reader expecting a similar
mlange in On Beauty the expectation is at least partially fulfilled through the expressive
cultures of African American and black diasporic communities revealed in rap, hip-hop,
and Spoken Word poetry.

Cosmopolitans of a Certain Kind

The rather sketchy contours of Black Studies, the academic discourse theorizing these

expressive cultures in On Beauty, indicate the tenuous link between the social and the
academic that, Smith suggests, characterize the discipline. This is most evident in the
trajectory of Carl, the "black boy" and "street poet," whom the Belsey family meets at a

free performance of Mozart's Requiem on the Boston Common. There Kiki impulsively
invites Carl to a party celebrating her thirtieth marriage anniversary to Howard, coquettishly stating: "we could do with a few more brothers at this party" (78). Carl's spontane-

ous appearance at the party and unceremonious dismissal indicates the clash between
the "vernacular" and the "theoretical" that effectively characterizes Smith's description
of the gathering:

The Black Studies Department's graduate crowd were out in full

force, mostly because Erskine was well loved by them and they

were, anyway, by far the most socialized people at Wellington, priding themselves on their reputation for being the closest replicas on

campus to normal human beings. Along with large talk they had

small talk; they had a Black Music Library in their department; they

knew, and could speak eloquently of, the latest trash television.

They were invited to all the parties and came to all of them too (107,

emphasis added).

Well socialized though the department is and well aware of black popular culture, there are
limits to the sociability that welcomes the "theoretical" engagement with blackness while

rejecting any interaction with the kind of vernacular sociality represented by Carl.

Carl's status as a "discretionary" student in English Professor Claire Malcolm's class

further marks a tacit acceptance of vernacular sociality, one that is also seen as a cosmopolitanism waiting to be brought out of its cocoon to unfurl in rainbow hues. Claire
meets her poetry class for Spoken Word nights at the Bus Stop, a Moroccan restaurant in
Wellington. Smith describes Spoken Word as,
an art form . . . [that] practiced the same inclusiveness as the venue
itself: it made everybody feel at home. Neither rap nor poetry, not
formal but also not too wild, it wasn't black, it wasn't white. It was

whatever anybody had to say and whoever had the guts to get up

on the small boxy stage at the back of the basement and say it. For

Claire Malcolm, it was an opportunity each year to show her new

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students that poetry was a broad church, one that she was not afraid
to explore (212).

Witnessing Carl's performance of a piece about an ex-girlfriend who had an abortion

without informing him, Claire offers him a place in her poetry class with the purpose of
"refining" his vernacular talents. This pedagogic relationship also indicates an attempted
merging of the vernacular and the theoretical in which the attempt is to translate the former into the latter. The ideological contradictions of such a translation are pointed out by
Bruce Robbins in his discussion of Kwame Appiah' s work:

As amended by people like Appiah, cosmopolitan has emerged in

a decade or two as a widely popular term of praise. . . . Cosmo-

politanism posits the option that fidelity to a particular place and

tradition can be understood, like Ay mara-speaking Bolivian rappers,

as simultaneously and successfully participating in the global, the

modern, and the innovative. However limited the rappers' caloric

intake, therefore, however modest their living conditions and life

chances, their indigenously inflected rapping is taken as grounds

for rejoicing, or for what Appiah has called 'celebration of cultural

variety' (CP, 29). Today it is hard to find a place where the celebration is not in full swing. (49)

Claire's desire to secure and retain Carl as a student in the face of Monty's anti-affirmative

agenda reveals not only the "celebration" of the spectacular transformation she hopes to
effect, lending an air of cosmopolitanism to Carl's vernacular talents, but it also reveals
the strange workings of the Black Studies department.
Other than Erskine Jegede, whose area of expertise is African literature, there is no clear
sense of the purpose of the department within an institution such as Wellington. It is at
best a space existing on the margins of the predominantly white liberal arts institution,
and at worst a misuse of its resources since its curricular and social commitments are never

defined. The superfluity as well as the status quo nature of the department is evinced in its

director's expertise in making people feel important. The very nature of the department

is a means of securing a balance between the liberal and conservative elements in Wellington. This is, after all, the department that houses Monty Kipps, staunch advocate of a

black meritrocracy, as well as provides campus jobs to Claire Malcolm's "discretionary"

kids such as Carl:

When someone was determined to destroy his peace and well-being,

when they refused to either like him or to allow him to live the quiet
life he most desired, when they were, as in the case of Carl Thomas,
giving someone a headache who was in turn giving Erskine a headache,
in situations like this, Erskine, in his capacity as Assistant Director
of the Black Studies Department, simply gave them a job. He created
a job where before there had been only floor space. Chief Librarian of
the African- American Music Library had been one such invented post.
Hip-Hop Archivist was a natural progression (Smith 372).

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The balance Erskine attempts in order to deflect criticism is evident in the position of
hip-hop archivist he creates for the school dropout but immensely talented vernacular
poet Carl. On the one had this is a scathing critique of the dilution of the political content
of Black Studies since its inception in the late 1960s and early 1970s, on the other, Carl's
discovery of the "crossroads" as an important trope in hip-hop music and his excitement
at its political significance forwards the idea, perhaps a stereotype, of an untutored genius
whose potential contribution to the field is devalued by the gatekeepers of the academy.

The British art historian Sir Monty Kipps is one such gatekeeper. Monty's ongoing
feud with Howard, who is on the Affirmative Action Committee, sits uneasily with his
"space" in Black Studies. Much like the Black Studies Department, as Howard's best friend

at Wellington and Monty's former classmate at Oxford, Erskine is located between the
poles of liberalism and conservatism and never once takes an open stand against Monty.
In what can only be seen as Smith's attempt to redress the balance of blame, she makes

a black man responsible for advocating an anti-affirmative action policy. Such a stand
directly affects "street" kids like Carl, but, more importantly, it echoes voices against the
dilution of academic standards by affirmative policies in American universities. One of
the most famous among these positions is Harold Bloom's argument against the lowering

of standards in the academy. Kipps's and Bloom's stand is best summarized by Henry
Giroux's critique: "by contrasting cultural politics with popular culture and the decline of
academic standards, Bloom conveniently cloaks the contempt he harbors for minorities of
race, class, and colour and their 'uncivil' demands for inclusion in the curricula of higher
education and the history and political life of the nation" (344).4 Smith's representation

thus connects to ongoing debates in Cultural Studies and Black Studies about the public
and social relevance of these fields in the US and British academy (Cole; Jennings; Giroux).

Smith's portrayal of institutional gatekeeping by well-placed black and white academics points to the pervasiveness of racial disparities both inside and outside the academy
that validates Black Studies as a legitimate and necessary field of study even in the face
of opposition.

Ethnicity, Identity, and "Vernacular Cosmopolitanism"

Houston Baker's optimistic account of the emergence and future of Black Studies in
the early 1990s that includes an analysis of hip-hop, rap, and the presence of black youth
in elite university campuses across the US can also be seen as an attempt to connect the
vernacular and the theoretical in ways suggested by Black British cultural studies theorists
such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. In his analysis Baker recounts the opposition to Black
Studies from black intellectuals such as Sir Arthur Lewis and Kenneth Clark (precursors of
the fictional Monty Kipps) and their charges of compromising intellectual rigor for "Political

Correctness." Despite this opposition, Baker writes that academics such as Henry Louis
Gates, Moelfi Asante, and Cornel West "are joined with innumerable undergraduate and
graduate students to build the American Black Studies project securely for the twenty-

first century" (27). When one considers the precarious positions of many Black Studies
programs or departments across the US and England - the dismissal of eleven members
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of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham University, historically

building on the significant work by Stuart Hall and others, on the specious charge of failing
to meet Research Assessment Criteria; the controversy around Cornel West's departure
from Harvard; and the sinking fortunes of Black Studies programs across the US - Baker's
predictions seem unduly optimistic (Webster; Wilson; West).

Baker's observation that "a steady urban beat" has "carried Black Studies from academic migrancy to forceful, scholarly citizenship in the American university" (32) suc-

cinctly introduces the inextricable links between race, popular culture, migration, and
institutionalization that Smith explores in On Beauty. This is most evident in the Belseys's
interactions with "outsiders": Jerome's short-lived affair with Monty's daughter Victoria
and his fascination with their religious convictions that afford a studied contrast with his
own liberal, non-religious family; Zora's infatuation and interaction with Carl, who gains

an entry into Claire Malcolm's poetry class and a job at the Black Studies Department;
and Levi' s gradual awareness of race and class disparities through Choo, a former French
teacher from Haiti who "hustles" imitation Gucci and Prada goods on the streets of Boston
for a living. Smith's representation of the class specific dimensions of the black diaspora
through Haitian migration to the US brings to the fore cultural identity, race relations, and

economic stratifications - key concerns explored by Black Studies from its inception.

These concerns can be charted through the theoretical oeuvre of Stuart Hall whose
influence is well-acknowledged in US as well as British traditions of Black Studies. To
begin, the two different concepts of identity presented by Hall are a cornerstone of Black
Studies. If, as Hall has suggested, one crucial way of thinking about cultural identity is in
terms of the idea of "one, shared culture" such that our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes providing a stable frame of reference,
the other is a position which recognizes that cultural identity is marked by similarities

as well as differences, and is therefore a matter of "becoming" as well as "being." The

most important aspect of this discussion is Hall's acknowledgement that the second view
"qualifies, even if it does not replace, the first" ("Cultural Identity" 211-12). Hall extends
his discussion on identity through the idea of ethnicity that "acknowledges the place of
history, language, and culture in the construction of subjectivity and identity, as well as
the fact that all discourse is placed, positioned, situated, and all knowledge is contextual"
("New Ethnicities" 168). One of the ways in which racial disparities can be interrogated in
On Beauty is by making apparent "the thoroughly naturalized link between 'race' and 'ethnicity'" that is the legacy of Black British studies interrogation of the intellectual traditions
of British Marxism (Baker et al. 4). Hall's theorization of black labor is in these terms, "the
class relations which ascribe it, function as race relations. Race is thus, also, the modality

in which class is 'lived,' the medium through which class relations are experienced, the
form in which it is appropriated and 'fought through'" ("Race" 55). Such a disruption of
the class-mediated link between race and ethnicity is indicated in Smith's novel through
the youngest Belsey, Levi, as he gradually becomes aware of the reasons for the presence
of Haitian, Mexican, and Lebanese immigrants in Wellington. Early on in the novel Levi's
imitation of a class specific form of black culture involves dressing, talking, and walking
like a black man in the "hood." His preferred class and racial identity receives a rude jolt
when he interacts with Choo and perceives the inextricable connections between blackness,

diaspora, citizenship, and institutions. Choo's anger at waiting tables at Wellington on

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less than minimum wages and his grief at stepping down from teaching to serve another
black man like Sir Monty Kipps indicate the modalities of race and class in the diaspora
that supplement the African American perspective offered by Carl.
The most ubiquitous diasporic presence is that of the Haitians, introduced in the novel
by a brief description of the Belsey's hired help, Monique, "a squat Haitian woman, about
Kiki's age, darker still than Kiki" (10). Monique' s presence leads Kiki to a "strange moment,
nervous of what this black woman thought of another black woman paying her to clean"
(10-11). Levi' s anger at this situation includes an awareness of Wellington's exploitation of
cheap diasporic labor as well as at his family's participation is this exploitation by paying

Monique less than four dollars an hour because she is not "American." His knowledge
of the various connotations of "black" traverses the distance from when he thought that
"black folk were city folk" and "people from the islands, people from the country" were
"obstinately historical" to when he acknowledges the role of historical and social processes
shaping the fortunes of the Haitian people (80).

Homi Bhabha has spoken of the "ethical urgency for revising cosmopolitanism for
the contemporary world order" to take into account the lives of millions of refugees and

migrants by posing the question: "Are the Stoic values of a respect for human dignity
and opportunity for each person to pursue happiness adequate cosmopolitan proposals
for this scale of global economical and ecological disjuncture?" (41). The world-making
of the dispossessed is explained by Bhabha as an "experience of modern living that Julia
Kristeva has called 'the cosmopolitanism of those who have been flayed' or what . . . [can

be] tentatively name[d] a 'vernacular cosmopolitanism'" (43). This is in contrast to the

more apparent cosmopolitanism of privileged diasporic individuals who are otherwise
on the "outside" of American academia, though unlike Carl their outsider status is more

a matter of geography rather than class: Erskine Jegede is a Nigerian migr; Howard
Belsey is a British expatriate; and Monty Kipp is Trinidadian-British. The differences
between these immigrants and those from Haiti and Mexico implicate the university as
one of the sites for the propagation of economic and racial disparities, thus calling into
question its left-liberal academic discourse on racial and economic justice. Exposing how
the town utilizes immigrants' services as cheap public and private labor allows Smith to

present Wellington as a site of capitalist exploitation: "structures through which black

labor is reproduced - structures which may be general to capital at a certain stage of de-

velopment, whatever the racial composition of labor - are not simply 'colored' by race:
they work through race" (Hall, "Race" 55). The participation of Kiki, Howard, and Levi
in this system is not held up for special censure, though they are the vectors of Smith's
articulation of the pitfalls of liberalism.

Gender, Sexuality, and the Counter-politics of Blackness

Thus far I have argued how an equal emphasis on politics and culture in Black Studies
in the US and Britain helps in the articulation of the vernacular and the theoretical also

presented in Smith's fictionalization of the transnational black diaspora. Black Studies

scholarship on race, ethnicity, and class that is implicitly evoked in the novel can be placed
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in dialogue with recent revaluations of cosmopolitanism from the perspective of ethnic

minorities, migrants, and refugees, as suggested by Bhabha and Robbins, among others.
I have modeled a transnational form of inquiry by using both British and US theorists'
contributions to a counter-politics of blackness to read On Beauty. In this section, I would

like to focus on gender and sexuality as key modalities in recent articulations of this
counter-politics. As Paul Gilroy observes, "sexuality and gender identity . . . express the
evasive but highly prized quality of racial authenticity. Their growing power in configuring contemporary notions of blackness raises once again the critical issue of how the

complex dynamics of race and gender come together." Following Hall's analysis of race
as a modality in which class is lived, Gilroy' s assertion that "the naturalness of gender
can supply the modality in which race is lived and symbolized" (Small Acts 7) helps map
Smith's exploration of race, gender, and sexuality in On Beauty on the axes of historical
and contemporary anxieties.
Smith foregrounds black male sexuality as one such source of anxiety. Levi' s discomfort

when he senses a "crazy" black woman looking at him while he walks down Redwood
Avenue in Wellington arises out of an awareness of being the only black kid in a white

neighborhood. Walking to his house he thinks that a T-shirt that said "YO - I'M NOT
GOING TO RAPE YOU" might be useful "like three times a day while on his travels. . . .

There was always some old lady who needed to be reassured on that point" (80). Much
like threatening black male sexuality, a threatening black female sexuality emerges in the
novel through Howard's amazement at the way in which Victoria offers herself to him.
Much like anxiety about affirmative action policies for ethnic minorities, Smith displaces

the burden of critique when it comes to gender and sexuality. As a young black man
whose sexuality was historically threatening to white women, Levi would be expected to
inspire fear among white residents of Wellington. Yet, he feels discomfited when seen by

an old black woman in the neighborhood. In the same way Howard's anxiousness about
his sexual encounters with Victoria effect a historic reversal of white male sexual oppression of black women.

If Victoria's sexuality corroborates Angela McRobbie's description of the "phallic"

woman, it also partakes of the brash self-confidence of a younger generation of women

that Robbie diagnoses as "post-feminist masquerade." Part of this masquerade involves

a celebration of the "freedoms associated with masculine sexual pleasures" including
"sex as light-hearted pleasure, recreational activity, hedonism, sport, reward, and status"
(McRobbie 83). This display of "masculinity enhances . . . [the woman's] desirability since
she shows herself to have a sexual appetite similar to her male counterparts" (McRobbie
84). Howard's experience with pornography courtesy of Victoria lends another dimension
to the clash between the vernacular and the theoretical testing the limits of his class-specific

cosmopolitanism. In his short lived sexual liason, Howard experiences these limits as a
challenge to his understanding of the vernacular as lived reality and popular culture:
"Howard, who had almost no personal experience of pornography (he had contributed
to a book denouncing it, edited by Steinern), was riveted by this modern sex, hard and

shiny and fluid-free and violent" (379). His rarefied theoretical sensibilities honed on a
deconstructive critique of Rembrandt's art and a vague liberal feminism cannot understand Victoria's self-managed sexual aestheticization, though he is temporarily fascinated
by it. From demanding a sexual encounter on the day of her mother's funeral to sending
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him semi-pornographic pictures over email, and, finally, dressing up like a stripper for
an encounter in a cheap motel, Victoria's chic post-feminist black female sexuality doesn't
object to but rather demands an objectification of desire on its own terms. This is in contrast to Carlene Kipps's docile domesticity and Kiki's black feminist beliefs marked with
an awareness of her sexuality.
Though Kiki's feminism is in direct contrast to Victoria's "post-feminist masquerade," hers
is by no means an asexual femininity; rather Smith places that sexuality within a complex
matrix of class and sexual orientation. Confronted by Howard's affair with Claire, Kiki's
outburst reveals that she finds other men desirable, though unlike him she has remained
faithful in their marriage. The outburst also reveals her racial isolation in Wellington:
Everywhere we go, I'm alone in this . . . sea of white. I barely know
any black folk more, Howie. My whole life is white. I don't see any
black folk unless they be cleaning under my feet in the fucking caf
in your fucking college. Or pushing a fucking hospital bed through
a corridor. I staked my whole life on you. And I have no idea any more
why I did that (Smith 206).
In reverting to black vernacular patterns of speech ("they be") Kiki's outburst links her
lived experience of racial isolation to her language in much the same way as Carl's reaction
to Zora's jealousy of his relationship with Victoria.5 In the moment that he understands
that Zora is championing his place in the poetry class for reasons other than his talent, he
distinguishes himself from the Belseys in the same race and class specific way that Kiki
distances herself from Howard:

"People like me are just toys to people like you . . . I'm just some

experiment for you to play with. You people aren't even black any
more man - I don't know what you are. You think you're too good for
your own people. You got your college degrees, but you don't even
live right. You people are all the same," said Carl, looking down, addressing his words to his shoes, "I need to be with my people, man - I
can't do this no more." (418)

Both encounters reveal the pitfalls of the liberal multicultural utopia that intellectuals
like Howard, Claire, and Zora attempt to create through their personal relationships and

vocal political convictions.

Smith also delves, albeit in passing, into sexual alterity as a way of exposing the pitfalls
of liberal and conservative ideologies. Kiki's name, which evokes "ki-ki," a term popular
in the 1940s and 1950s for lesbians who didn't believe in butch-femme role playing, and

her admission of a close emotional and sexual relationship with a woman in her youth
complicates the terrain of sexuality explored in the novel.6 In her conversation with Carlene,
Kiki mentions the headiness of the 1970s marked by racial and sexual assertion:

"I guess I mean there was a revolution going on, everybody was

looking at different lifestyles, alternative lifestyles ... so whether

women could live with other women, for example."

"With women," repeated Carlene.

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"Instead of men/' confirmed Kiki. "Sure ... I thought for a while

that might be the road I was going to go down. I mean, I went down
it some way." (177)

Carlene's comment that "It's not very uncommon in the Caribbean" places Kiki's disclosure in the tradition of black diasporic female sexuality made famous in Audre Lorde' s
fiction, poetry, and essays as well as in dialogue with Frantz Fanon' s famous assertion in
Black Skin, White Masks that there is no homosexuality in Martinique as "the result of the
absence of the Oedipus Complex in the Antilles" although "the schema of homosexuality

is well enough known" (180). However, even here, any discussion of Kiki's sexuality is
foreclosed by Carlene's revelation that Monty's best friend, the Reverend James Delafield
who delivered the benediction on President Reagan's inauguration, is gay. Kiki's irksomeness at "find [ing] her own revelation passed over so quickly" is dissipated by the humor
of the discovery that Monty's conservatism falters over his acceptance of the Reverend's
sexuality along with his enjoyment of his company and cigars (177-78). Besides Carlene's
placement of Kiki's relationship with women in the traditions of the black diaspora, an
authentication of female bonding is evident in the painting of Maitresse Erzulie, the Haitian

voodoo goddess associated with female empowerment and sometimes lesbian women,

that she wills to Kiki.7

The lack of a sustained discussion of Kiki's sexuality resonates with the silence and
invisibility surrounding black women's sexuality except in the phallic mode that best
characterizes Victoria. Evelyn Hammonds has observed that, "the historical narrative
that dominates discussion of Black female sexuality does not address even the possibility
of a Black lesbian sexuality or of a lesbian or queer subject" (308). This neglect has been
remedied in recent theorizations of the field that not only disrupt the silences in the historical narrative but also introduce concerns of sexuality as essential to any contemporary
discussion of race. Such concerns further the political and cultural agenda of Black Studies in ways that might also lead to a reinvention of the field and its alliances with other

interdisciplinary endeavors such as Queer Studies.8

If we accept Kobena Mercer's claim that "the profusion of rhizomatic connections of
the sort that constitute an evolving black queer diaspora community implies another way
of conceiving the 'role of the intellectual/ not as heroic leader or patriarchal master, but
as a connector located at the hyphenated intersection of disparate discourses and carrying out the task of translation," then Smith's "intellectuals" do not do anything to serve
as "connectors" despite being in a unique position to do so by virtue of their own privileged diasporic locations (30). The connections Mercer urges the intellectual to make also
resonate with the epigraph to E. M. Forster's Howard's End - "only connect" - to which

Smith's novel alludes constantly. While Forster's novel epitomized a failure of connec-

tions across class, Smith's extends Forster's discussion to include race and class concerns

but founders on gender and sexual politics of the intellectual troika of Kipps, Belsey, and
Jegede, marked by their numerous extra-marital liasons. It is, in fact, the "non-intellectual"
Kiki's turn towards a support network of women, among them Carlene and the "lesbian"
friends - whom Howard, for all his apparent liberal pretensions, detests - that indicates
the rhizomatic connections between race, gender, and sexuality. Although this is not the
focus of Smith's novel, such connections are essential for a performative resignification
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of Black Studies, a task undertaken by black intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic as
well as black activists, artists, filmmakers, performers, and musicians.

Whither Black Studies?

Smith's fictionalization of the Black diaspora underscores and comments on the trans-

national dimensions of Black Studies, which, as indicated in this article, can be seen in
dialogue with theories of cosmopolitanism. Much of this work focuses on the search "for
mobile and flexible frameworks for studying the shifting landscapes of diaspora, in which
'polities' and 'culture' neither reflect each other, determine one another, nor substitute
one for the other, but enter into complex relations of mutual articulation whose outcomes
are rarely ever predicted in advance" (Mercer 16). In On Beauty liberal politics and black

culture are brought to a head on collision towards the conclusion with the fiasco surrounding the Haitian painting owned by Carlene Kipps that she leaves to Kiki. Ignoring
Carlene's wishes, her family keeps the valuable painting for themselves, and it finds an
unusual home in Sir Monty's office in the Black Studies Department. When the painting is
stolen from there, the first suspect is Carl. In what is perhaps the weakest turn of Smith's
plot, Carl drops out of the narrative, pointing to the failed agendas of the cultural and the
political in Wellington College. Though the institution has a department of Black Studies

in place, it has minimal consideration for people whose lives are the objects of its study
besides their use value as cheap labor or token additions as "discretionaries" contributing
nominally to diversity to satisfy the institution's social conscience.

While Smith is not questioning Black Studies as a mode of social and cultural interrogation, she expresses a legitimate sense of skepticism of the ways in which it fulfills an

academic need without taking into account the social. What is observable in the "flexible frameworks for studying the shifting landscapes of the diaspora" offered by Black
Studies' analysis of race, class, gender, and sexuality that have been highlighted in this
article is that ethnicity and class are the modalities through which race is articulated, but
often a progressive racial politics faces an impasse when confronted with articulations of
gender and sexuality. Indeed Smith's clever representation of shades of blackness in On
Beauty founders when it attempts to consider black hetero- or homosexuality as a source
of anxiety. As a field of inquiry premised on taking into account intersectional identities,

Black Studies itself involves a set of complex intellectual, institutional, and pedagogic
negotiations that limit as well as facilitate its political edge. Acknowledging these limitations while facilitating these articulations is crucial at a time when race and racial justice
seem, in some circles, to be redundant terrains of social inquiry even as the reality of black
lives attests to their continued importance.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article was first presented at the second Black European Studies (BEST) conference held at the Freie
University, Berlin, in July 2006. 1 acknowledge with gratitude the travel grant offered by the organizers that

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enabled me to present these ideas at the conference. Karima Laachir patiently heard this paper in Berlin.
I thank her for suggestions towards its improvement. Thanks also to the reviewer for the many valuable
suggestions which have been incorporated in this article.

NOTES

1. First generation British Caribbean writers include the novelists George Lamming, Samuel Sel von, C.
L. R. James, and Andrew Salkey. Some of the prominent poets of this era were Edward Brathwaite

and Louise Bennett, also known as "Miss Lou" in the Caribbean.

2. For a useful account of cosmopolitanism, see the introduction to Cheah and Robbins's anthology

Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. In a recent essay Robbins observes, "celebrations

of cosmopolitan diversity have largely been uninterrupted by the issues of economic equality or
geopolitical justice. I wonder whether it isn't time to stop and ask how much of the praise is merited,
what work cosmopolitanism is and isn't doing (51).
3. See also the essays in The African American Studies Reader, edited by Nathaniel Norment Jr. The anthology provides a good account of the emergence of the discipline and includes analyses of gender

and sexuality Norment mentions in the introduction that "African Diaspora Studies can enhance

African American Studies by providing more inclusive cultural, political, economical and educational
perspectives. It can provide a framework for correcting the misinterpretation and subordination of
the African diaspora" (xxxvi). My choice of The Black Studies Reader over The African American Studies
Reader is dictated by the former's focus on "Black" in a transnational rather than a predominantly

African American context.

4. Since Smith loosely bases Wellington College on Harvard University, it is reasonable to assume that
she expects her readers to remember the clash between vernacular and theoretical cosmopolitanism
epitomized in noted African American intellectual Cornel West's encounter with Harvard's president
Lawrence Summers in 2001. The immediate cause of West's resignation from Harvard was Summers's view that his work, specifically his hip-hop CD titled Sketches of my Culture, that included
rap and spoken word poetry, did not meet standards of academic relevance expected from faculty
associated with Harvard. For West's clarifications about and an account of the debates surrounding
the controversy, see his article "Why I Left Harvard University" adapted from his book Democracy
Matters published in 2004.

5. It is an interesting paradox that while Zora's name evokes that of Zora Neale Hurston, a proponent
of folk and African American vernacular, her association with Carl is marked initially by suspicion,
later by infatuation, and finally by a sense of exasperation at his new found role as archivist in the
Black Studies Department.
6. See Audre Lorde' s listing of terms used by lesbians in New York in the 1950s in her "biomythography" Zami, where the narrator recalls being "part of the 'freaky' bunch of lesbians who weren't into
role playing, and who the butches and femmes, Black and white, disparaged with the term Ky-Ky,
or AC /DC" (178). See also John D' Emilio's historical account of lesbian identities in Sexual Politics,
Sexual Communities, which cites an informant, a woman from New Orleans, who remembers that
in the 1950s, "If you didn't pick a role - butch or femme - and stick with that, people thought you
were mixed up and you didn't know who you were and you were laughed at and called 'ki-ki' - a
sort of queer of the gay world" (99).

7. Carlene's handwritten note willing the painting to Kiki evokes Ruth Wilcox's similar note willing
her house, Howard's End, to Margaret Schlegel. Smith has acknowledged in several interviews that

E. M. Forster's novel, Howard's End, is an intertext to On Beauty.

8. See the essays in the anthology Black Queer Studies edited by E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson.

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