Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

denisse andrade, Graduate Center, CUNY

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Description:

If Sea is History, as Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott tells us, it is not an unbounded force of nature, but a constellation of contradictory practices: on the one hand, the present histories of racial capitalism and colonialism. On the other, strategies and projects to survive and live free. Through this aquatic terrain, roots and routes criss-cross one another across continuities and discontinuities of past, present, and future.

As with the historical record, the register of the aquatic reveals as much as it obfuscates or elides. Beyond the visible (the ship and the container, the vessel that enables flight in search of refuge), there is all that accrues in water (ice melt and toxicity, spirits of ancestors—drowned, submarine maroons or river mummas), and because of it (relations, cross-pollinations, life).

This session calls on the aquatic in conjunction with Glissant’s archipelagic thought (1997) to conjure intimacies that re-order geography and question ontological determinations of Blackness, as in the collaborative spirit of projects like: Bandung, the Tricontinental Conference, iterations of the Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, and others deeper in history. “Rather than being locked in the territorialization imposed by imperialism and postcolonial nationalism” (Verges 2003 p. 242), we draw inspiration from these and other relational trajectories of people moving through water to renew ideas about more liveable futures. As such, the aquatic emerges as the material condition of Modernity (Gilroy 1985), and the possibility of a kind of modernity from below (Hall 1996).

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda