Notes from the Diaspora

Acknowledgments

It has been over a decade since I first put pen to paper, or should I say, since I typed the first page which started the journey of bringing together this collection of chapters. During that time, my thoughts have shifted in many ways, more so through discussions as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Institute for the Studies in Education (OISE), and through my time teaching undergraduate and graduate students at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to Professor George Sefa Dei, Nana Adusei Sefa Tweneboah, for his mentorship and resolute support as my supervisor during my doctoral studies at OISE. Nana provided years of intellectual guidance and steadfast comradeship through my struggles and heart-warming moments. I would also like to thank the students in Nana’s thesis group. Our conversations resonated with me in many ways, and will always serve as a signpost of solidarity. Thanks to Professor Shirley Steinberg for providing a pathway to publish this work, which gives voice to some of the untold stories of the Diaspora. Thank you Professor Kari Dehli for your discerning thoughts and gentle reminders about ←ix | x→the unevenness of the writing process. To Professor Peter Trifonas, I am thankful for your earnest considerations that raised important questions for the inquiry. To my mummy, Lynette Simmons, and brother Dexter Simmons, thank you for your unbounded love, support, and belief in me. My spouse, Mairi McDermott, and children Ida and Leo Simmons, you encourage, stimulate, and provide unending care and love. These moments are dear to my heart. My nieces Brianna and Chelsea Simmons, your curiosity inspires me. My father, Reynold Simmons, your presence has always been with me. Jim and Veronica McDermott, thank you for your conversations at the dinner table which serve as a tacit prompt regarding the significance of doing this work. Liam McDermott, you remind me of the importance of laughter when thinking through these everyday historical moments.

Introduction: Notes from the Diaspora

This writing emerged from the myriad conversations I had while working through the cultural constellations of my Diasporic life. I engaged these constellations through an autoethnographic approach to make sense of my experiences of Black life as contoured through the local and the global. During the course of writing this text, my theoretical sensibilities grew in ways allowing for relational readings of my social environments. In so doing, I broached some of the limitations and possibilities involved in the process of this mind work. This text portrays my intellectual journey, filled with struggles, contradictions, and coming to make sense of my ongoing politics, which over the course of the collection has changed yet sometimes remained fixed.

Notes from the Diaspora traverses through distinct temporal periods from the late 1980s to 2020, broaching historical and contemporary tropes of Black life. Journeying through the chapters written post-2000s, I attend to a series of discussions concerning germane themes immanent to the Black experience, such as colonization, modernity, race, decoloniality, becoming and unbecoming of the human, Diaspora, and questions of belonging and citizenship. In this collection of chapters, ←1 | 2→I draw from a range of scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Claudia Jones, Sylvia Wynter, C. L. R. James, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among other social theorists to situate intellectual discussions regarding Diasporic communities. The articles are primarily concerned with the ways in which Diasporic people make sense of their experiences within their contemporary society through transoceanic histories, and simultaneously how they come to reimagine and construct different ways of being human as shaped through particular enactments of self-determination. The chapters uncover the variant interests, present epistemological challenges, and historical issues about my Diasporic life, by dialoguing with the present within historical instantiations of modernity and colonization. The discussions take up the different ways of presenting current challenges for Diasporic social formations, the interplay of cultural tradition and modernity, contestations over knowledge production, and the roles and significance of local cultural resource knowledge for thinking about Diasporic life in its varied representations. Other related discussions include social stratification, inequality, and questions of identity.