Black and Blue: Black Ecologies of the Oceanic

As Vanessa Agard-Jones writes, water is the “romantic metaphor that has irredeemably made its place in the Caribbean and African diasporic studies.” Waterways—oceans, seas, rivers—were a technology of enslavement and, by extension, the development and global expansion of racial capital. As such, Black thought, Black syncretic religious practices, and Black expressive productions return to the metaphors and materialities of water and the oceanic, giving rise to what might be called “blue thought.” Blue thought is an analytic for interceding into the ostensibly stable categories of the human, climate, and apocalypse by differently historicizing the formation of the Anthropocene, histories of weather and climate, and the ongoing operations of racial capital (which persist into our collective imaginings of the end of the world) through the figure of water, the oceanic, the tide, the Atlantic.

This course is a study of blue thought in Black arts and letters. We explore what the ocean—and rivers and lakes, shorelines and shoals, sand and mud, etc.—offers Black creative theorization of living in the wake of enslavement.

Sample Texts:

• Blake; or the Huts of America by Martin Delany

• A Map to a Door of No Return by Dionne Brand

• Drexicya discography

• M.Archive by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

• The Black Shoals by Tiffany Lethabo King

• In the Wake by Christina Sharpe

• Ezili’s Mirror by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

• Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip

Sample Assignment:

Write a thank you letter to the theorist/creative that has most impacted your work thus far this semester. Letters should be no more than three pages, either typed or handwritten. It should critically reflect on what changed after you engaged with their text, where you see their text operating in your daily life, and any other details you find pertinent. These thank you letters will be emailed or snail mailed (your choice, if possible) to the theorist/creative you address it to.