Kalunga, or Decentering the Middle Passage

• In Event: Afro-Brazilian Waterways and the Black Atlantic I - Diaspora: Ancestrality and Emancipation in Waters

Description for Program

Can we decenter the Middle Passage in narrating Black lives during the transatlantic slave trade? The question is motivated by ethical and epistemological concerns that I face in narrating the lives of African people on the last slave ship from the Congo to Brazil. The captives were eaten alive by vermin, ravaged by disease, and thrown overboard. What are the ethical stakes of writing about this horror—to bear witness and mourn, or to create a spectacle of their suffering? Afrofuturists reimagine the Atlantic as a space of Black life, e.g. Drexciya, the underwater civilization created by the children born of pregnant African women thrown overboard during the transatlantic journey. Drexciya reimagines the Middle Passage as a “realm of possibility,” but still preserves the Middle Passage as the foundational moment for diasporic Black life. The epistemology of slavery remains. For many West Central Africans, the ocean was the kalunga, the threshold separating the land of the living and the ancestors. The ocean was not a space of death, as the Middle Passage insists, but a place of rebirth. Centering their cosmologies allows us to narrate African lives that existed within the context of, but was never reducible to, their enslavement.

Author

• Yuko Miki, Fordham University