Freedom at sea

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-179
Author(s):  
Vasuki Nesiah
Keyword(s):  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Age Of Liberty

Abstract The Amistad case deals with an 1839 slave-ship rebellion seeking to reverse the middle passage. The rebels reimagine freedom in counterpoint to liberal freedom and legal authority—a domain that intertwined emancipation and enslavement, the age of liberty and the Black Atlantic, the distance between continents and tides binding them together, redemption of American humanism and attacks on Black humanity.

Quare Times: An Introduction to a Queer Perspective on Afrofuturism and a Reading of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Stüttgen
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Sun Ra ◽  
Oriented Response ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
American Vernacular ◽  
Paul Gilroy

The film Space Is the Place (1974), directed by John Coney, stars Sun Ra who was also co-author of the script. This chapter explores Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism as shown in the film, bringing it into relation with José Muñoz’s notion of a queer future. Rather than focusing on Sun Ra’s sexuality, this chapter argues that his quareness (E. Patrick Johnson’s useful term drawn from African American vernacular) emerges in the sonic and performative aspects of his work. Sun Ra’s spaceship offers a future-oriented response to the slave ship and Middle Passage (as described by Paul Gilroy) and to the limitations of the here and now. The notion of assemblage (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) articulates the quareness of Sun Ra’s collective improvisational practices.

Black Bodies/Libidinal Economies in Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-33
Author(s):  
Carolyn Jones Medine ◽  
Lucienne Loh
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Blacks And Whites

Abstract Barry Unsworth’s Booker Prize winning novel, Sacred Hunger (1992), explores the Middle Passage from the perspective of two central protagonists: Erasmus Kemp, the son of a slave ship builder and owner of the Liverpool Merchant, and Matthew Paris, his cousin and the ship’s doctor. The novel asserts that the “sacred hunger” of the slave trade is the desire for making money, at any cost. In this essay, we argue that one cost, the novel suggests, is the commodification of women’s bodies, particularly black captive women entering the trade. Exploring this libidinal economy, we examine the role of the ship’s doctor, in Paris, as the keeper of the gateway to slavery; the sexual exploitation of both black and white women, and Unsworth’s use of the trace—in this case, the elusive figure of the Paradise Nigger, or Luther Sawdust, who is Paris’ son, Kenke, conceived in a new settlement based on democracy undertaken in Florida and engaged in by both blacks and whites from the wrecked Liverpool Merchant. Capitalism, through human competition, enters that community, which, ultimately, is destroyed as Kemp discovers it and retakes his property. The Paradise Nigger represents a counter-memory and counter-force: a hope that the repetition of master-slave dichotomy in the libidinal economy can be interrupted by something “other” that suggests alternative shapes of human freedom.

From the Black Atlantic to Black-Scholes

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-110
Author(s):  
Luke Munn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Option Pricing ◽  
Financial Market ◽  
Stochastic Equation ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
Black Scholes Model ◽  
Black Scholes ◽  
Slave Ships

Rather than being unprecedented, contemporary technologies are the most sophisticated instances of a long-standing dream: if space could be more comprehensively captured and coded, it could be more intensively capitalized. Two moments within this lineage are explored: maritime insurance of slave ships in the eighteenth century, and the Black-Scholes model of option pricing from the twentieth century. Maritime insurance rendered the unknown space of the ocean knowable and therefore profitable. By collecting information at Lloyds, merchants developed a map of threat within the Atlantic, and by writing a 10 percent buffer into slave-ship contracts they internalized contingency. This codification of risk pressured captains and established a logic for the violence enacted on the ship’s human “cargo.” The Black-Scholes formula of option pricing sought to codify the ocean of risk represented by the financial market. The formula mapped stock movements into a knowable stochastic equation. Traders could quantify and hedge against the unpredictable, rendering the stock market a space of riskless profit. However, the 2008 financial crash demonstrated the limits of spatial calculation. Taken together, these two moments demonstrate the historical continuity of a core imperative to exhaustively capitalize space. This historicization also foregrounds the racialized inequalities coded within these informatic logics. Against the bright innovation narratives of technology, this article stresses a longer and darker lineage based on inequality and dispossession.

scholarly journals The Pitfalls of Picturing Atlantic Slavery: Steven Spielberg’s Amistad vs Guy Deslauriers’s The Middle Passage

1970 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Ethical Challenge ◽  
Patrick Chamoiseau ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Atlantic Slavery ◽  
The One

The task of remembering the transatlantic slave trade poses a particular challenge to historians and artists alike. Not only does it revolve around an emotionally and ideologically loaded issue, there is also rather little documentary and testimonial evidence to draw upon, particularly so regarding the Africans’ view of the trade. To make things worse, the most important and often quoted source – the second chapter of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) dealing partly with life in the belly of a slave ship – has recently been uncovered to be probably ‘fictional’ rather than based on personal experience.  On the one hand, the arts are particularly called for in this situation to fill the documentary gaps and silences through acts of experiment and imagination, and they may indeed have a redemptive effect by offering, in Hayden White’s terms, successful ‘emplotments’ of a traumatic past. One the other hand, this redemptive potential simultaneously poses a serious ethical challenge: As Theodor W. Adorno has warned with reference to the Holocaust, it is precisely by making ‘sense’ of human suffering, and by making accessible to the ‘senses’ what is utterly senseless and incomprehensible, that injustice may be done to the victims. In this paper, I will try to illustrate this problematic by looking at two recent films that have attempted to represent the horrors of the middle passage – Steven Spielberg’s canonical Amistad (a terrible failure, in my view), and Guy Deslauriers’ film The Middle Passage [Passage du Milieu]. Based on a script by the Martiniquean novelist and poet Patrick Chamoiseau, the latter example uses an aesthetic approach which may point at a way out of the dilemma outlined above.

scholarly journals Middle Passage to Freedom: Black Atlantic Consciousness in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage and S. I. Martin's Incomparable World

2003 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Nowatzki
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Physical Mobility ◽  
The Caribbean

Charles Johnson's novel, Middle Passage, and S.I. Martin's novel, Incomparable World, illustrate through mobile, culturally hybrid protagonists Paul Gilroy's notion of Black Atlantic consciousness, which is based on cultural hybridity and physical mobility across the Atlantic between Europe and Africa, America and the Caribbean. I argue that both novels blur the line between freedom and slavery, between oppressed and oppressor, and disrupt the links between blackness and slavery, between mobility and freedom. In both novels the diasporic Black Atlantic experiences privilege masculinity, since neither novel includes black women who can experience the mobility that the male protagonists do.

Classicisms in the Black Atlantic

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Shared Goal ◽  
Paul Gilroy

This volume presents a series of studies on literary, artistic, and political uses of classical antiquity in modern constructions of race, nation, and identity in the Black Atlantic. In the fraught dialogue between race and classics there emerged new classicisms, products of the diasporic chronotope defined by Paul Gilroy as originating in the violence of the Middle Passage. Contributions to the volume explore the work and thought of writers and artists circulating in the Black Atlantic, and their use of heterogeneous classicisms in representing their identities and experiences, and in critiquing hegemonic Eurocentric or racialized classicism. Ranging across anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone worlds, and coming from an array of disciplinary perspectives including historical and biographical approaches, literary studies, and visual arts, these essays join in the shared goal of examining past and present intersections between classicisms, race, gender, and social status.

scholarly journals Crossing Merfolk Narratives of the Sacred: Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms and Gabrielle Tesfaye’s The Water Will Carry Us Home

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jalondra Davis
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
African Religions ◽  
African People ◽  
Combine Water ◽  
Critical Attention

This article defines what I call the ‘crossing merfolk’ narrative, the idea that African people who jumped or were cast overboard during the Middle Passage became water-dwelling beings. While critical attention has been increasing for 1990s’ electronic music duo Drexciya, whose sonic fiction contains the most well-known example of this narrative, this is actually a recurring tradition in Black oral and artistic culture that can be traced to West and Central African religions. I focus particularly on what I call ‘crossing merfolk narratives of the sacred’, M. Jacqui Alexander’s term for African diasporic religious traditions anchored in West and Central African cosmologies. Analysing the role of the sacred in two crossing merfolk narratives, Nalo Hopkinson’s 2007 novel The New Moon’s Arms and Gabrielle Tesfaye’s short film The Water Will Carry Us Home (2018), I argue that these texts expand the Black Atlantic imaginary and transform mermaid lore. I develop the term ‘diasporic collage’ to describe the ways in which Hopkinson and Tesfaye reference and combine water spirits and ritual practices from multiple African diasporic traditions into narratives that intersect mermaids and the Middle Passage.

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