Glass Transition: Figuring the African Diaspora in From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate

This essay analyzes Nathaniel Mackey’s deployment of glass imagery in From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. While the title evokes fragility as the primary property of glass, a greater emphasis is placed on its malleability as the series progresses. To gain perspective on Mackey’s creative use of the image, the first section of the essay examines the meaning attached to glass in mid-century African American literature. Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Gwendolyn Brooks employed the image to depict and criticize the experience of racial segregation. For Mackey, however, glass figures African diasporic culture that is always already broken. This brokenness is embraced as a necessary part of improvisation, and Mackey works and reworks the material to the point of recasting it as an antifragile matter. Glass transition thus provides the physical analogue to the diasporic aesthetics that undergird black expressive practices, enabling Mackey to both embody and theorize the aesthetics of the diaspora in From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate.