In the Wake: How a Girl Becomes a Ship

Abstract

Engaging NCOBPS call for papers on "Identity Politics: Gender, Class, Ethnicity, Sexuality, and Religion" I am submitting a paper abstract titled “In the Wake: How a Girl Becomes a Ship.” In this paper I ask what it means for people of African descent in the diaspora to be, or to be said to be, in the wake of Atlantic slavery. I theorize being “in the wake” primarily through, within, and against an image from the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti of a young Haitian girl with the word “SHIP” on her forehead. In this work I theorize an aesthetics and politics of "the wake," and I seek to activate the multiple registers of "wake" (to mean keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, the consequences of, awakening and coming to consciousness, etc.) as a means to understanding the ways that slavery's violence emerges within the renewed dangers of contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, material and other dimensions of Black non/Being as well as in Black modes of resistance.