Atlantic Studies

Global Currents

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Swim your ground: Towards a black and blue

humanities

Jonathan Howard

To cite this article: Jonathan Howard (2022): Swim your ground: Towards a black and blue
humanities, Atlantic Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2021.2015944

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2021.2015944

Published online: 27 Jun 2022.

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ATLANTIC STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2021.2015944

Swim your ground: Towards a black and blue humanities

Jonathan Howard
English Department, African-American Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay engages with the prevailing metaphor in our talk about Black studies; oceanic
ecological crisis: humanity’s carbon “footprint.” As a fitting place to studies; blue humanities;
begin thinking about humanity’s excessive footprint and middle passage;
Anthropocene
dominating interface with the planet, I suggest humanity’s first
large-scale encounter with the deep sea during the transatlantic
age of exploration and colonization. Or the opportunity our
species had to learn that an earthling is hardly the sort of
creature whose interface with a mostly blue planet can be rightly
typified as a standing. Critiquing the global rise of what I call the
“stand your ground subject,” I suggest the drowned Africans
remembered in Olaudah Equiano’s narrative as the “inhabitants
of the deep,” as a more promising place for the humanities to
begin, in Alice Walker’s words, to “reclaim a proper relationship
to the world” through an oceanic recalibration of the human.

Humanity’s footprint already exceeds Earth’s ecological limits. (Lauret Savoy)1

Where do we start? How do we reclaim a proper relationship to the world? (Alice Walker)2

“Dominating stand”
We tell on ourselves every time we speak of our carbon footprint. Carbon in the air, yet still
the prevailing metaphor in all our talk about climate change intuits a more fundamental
problem with how we stand, and perhaps understand. What if the global ecological crisis
is, at bottom, a problem with how our feet meet the ground, and the epistemological cat-
egories of “human” and “planet” that lurk behind how we tend to imagine this crucial
interface? As, for instance, we do quite paradigmatically in that iconic illustration of
human evolution: humanity’s bipedal stroll out of interspecies life. A simple Google
Images search for “evolution” yields countless variations of the well-known image. So
the theory that otherwise threatened to unmoor any fixed distinction between the
human and nonhuman has ironically been assimilated into the popular imagination as
a visual representation instead of man’s (for it is always a man pictured) triumphant sep-
aration: the achievement, in bipedalism, of a new and species-defining relation to the
ground. What we see in this sure-footed, perfectly upright man – hands notoriously
freed up to manipulate and instrumentalize, or, more to the point of this essay, hold
and possess – is not just the fruition of humanity as evolution’s crown (the image

CONTACT Jonathan Howard [email protected]

© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. HOWARD

usually projects no further evolution), but also and less conspicuously, a perfectly docile
planetary surface imagined to support man faithfully and without interruption along the
way. Such a regard for ground has no doubt hastened the advent of a geological age like
the proposed “Anthropocene,” in which human activity has emerged as the most signifi-
cant force determining earth’s future.
But against the grain of humanity’s vaunted bipedalism, what are we to make of the
black refusals indexed by the poet Dionne Brand, who is “giving up on land to light
on.”3 Or of Todd Clifton’s decision in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man “to plunge outside of
history” “instead of making a dominating stand?”4 Combined with environmentalism’s
anxiety about humanity’s footprint, such black refusals of what we might call, after
Ellison, western humanism’s “dominating stand,” suggest a problem with humanity’s
reigning interface with the planet. To interrogate the rise of this “dominating stand” as
the prevailing standard of human being on earth, I propose we might begin with the his-
torical opportunity a critical mass of our species otherwise had to enact and experience its
humanity differently. I have in mind humanity’s first large-scale encounter with a pre-
viously “unknown” and “dreaded” ocean, when sailors were astronauts and the prop-
osition of boats no less extraterrestrial than spaceships.5 In the transatlantic voyages
that proceeded throughout the early modern and modern eras of discovery and coloniza-
tion, a critical mass of humanity encountered earth’s blue and greater face for the very
first time. While it is true that individual groups of humans explored the ocean previously,6
the sustained encounter with the deep sea witnessed during the transatlantic era was
unprecedentedly general. Moreover, because it coincided historically with the “discovery”
of the western hemisphere, and so with the earliest possible attempts to define the
species and the planet as genuine totalities (for any compelled to undertake such a
project) with the benefit of a new and paradigm-shifting awareness of the lands and
peoples of earth’s missing half, this transatlantic era indexed a truly species-wide oppor-
tunity to question whether an earthling is really the sort of creature that can be imagined
predominantly to stand in relation to a blue planet. An opportunity, terribly, that the jet-
tisoned debris of slave ships could not help but make good on – as the truth of the out-
landish situation of those throw-away humans coming online as black in the world.

Blue ancestry
It is not the sort of ancestry we are hoping to discover when we pack pieces of ourselves into
DNA kits promising to help us uncover our origins, but we come from “nothing but the sea.”7
All of us. Our beginnings – and, with the imminent threat of sea-level rise, apparently also our
ends – get no more established than this.8 Land creatures though we’ve evolved to be,
humanity is not spared the unsettling humility of life’s oceanic heritage. The common, if
remote, ancestor all of life shares in the ocean frustrates any pretension toward what
Denise Ferreira da Silva has called “separability” by preserving a consistent witness to the
fact that we, though different in ways that often occasion the thought and naturalization
of our separation, are all bound up together.9 Are, as it happens, kin: “bodies of water” des-
cended from a body of water that we favor with the salt in our blood. Members of what
Astrida Neimanis has termed a “hydrocommons,” by which she attempts to name “the inter-
being of bodies of water on this planet” that, however aestheticized as discrete or separate,
constantly flow and overflow in “gestating, differentiating and interpermeating relation.”10
 ATLANTIC STUDIES 3

But if all life comes from nothing but the sea, how has humanity’s prevailing sense of
who or what we must learn to live with otherwise evolved to be so anthropocentric?
Perhaps nothing obfuscates the extra-human scope of “life together”11 implied by the
shared oceanic origins of life more than humanity’s ideological conceptions and uses
of the oceanic’s geographical other: land. Especially as land figures within the “social con-
tract” that generally constitutes what we might call, borrowing once again from Ellison,
modernity’s “plan of living.”12 As it is traditionally theorized, the social contract exclusively
recognizes other humans and takes as its first principle the protection of private property.
It not only presupposes the individual human subject as the most basic unit of social life,
but also that individual’s property, including and especially the property they claim in
themselves.13 Crystalized at the heart of the social contract’s modern hack to the other-
wise irreducibly ecological problem of life together, then, is a subject not unlike the erect
man we behold at the end of humanity’s evolutionary walk out of the state of nature: the
individual and that individual’s land. This curious person/property hybrid, which sub-
sumes and incorporates the land as a kind of infinite limb, embodies what can be
called a stand your ground subject, which is just my attempt to call the individual by a
name more forthcoming about modernity’s transubstantiation of personhood into an
individuated act of possession.
This subject finds important expression in what Kelli Brown Douglas has otherwise cri-
tiqued as the “stand-your-ground climate” that “makes the destruction and death of black
bodies inevitable and even permissible” in the United States.14 Of course, what I am
calling the stand your ground subject and what Douglas compellingly describes as a mur-
derous and antiblack climate15 are obvious rifts on the infamous stand your ground law
that haunts the murder of a seventeen-year-old black boy named Trayvon Martin on a
Florida sidewalk in 2012. An extension of the “castle doctrine” of English Common Law,
US stand your ground law protects an individual’s right to defend their “embodied
castle” with lethal force whenever and wherever they feel threatened. In particular,
stand your ground law stipulates that a person has no duty “to retreat from the place
in which he or she is ‘castled’; they can stand their ground.” By broadening these laws
into what she takes as the United States’ general “stand-your-ground climate,” Douglas
calls attention to the racial inequity and antiblack violence that has historically animated
the exercise and protection of this right. But the existence of such laws at all raises an
important question: What has needed to become true of both humans and the ground
to support the expectation that humans can be anything quite like “castled” on a
planet like ours? The very formulation “stand your ground” points to epistemological
shifts in our collective sense of the planet that far exceed the United States. That faced
with sufficient and credible threat, the ground can be seamlessly called up into what
Douglas illuminates as the violent “enactment of whiteness as cherished property,” is
but a local expression of a racialized genre of humanity that is otherwise more broadly
known to the world as settlement.16 In fact, to be castled really means to be settled by
another name. It bespeaks a set of racialized expectations around being human on
earth that are the specific legacy of white settler colonialism and a planetary optic that
perceived the entire world as property and castled 85 percent of it by 1914.17
Those of us who never received our invitations to whiteness’ global stand-your-ground
party, however, can hardly forget our deep kinship. This party is metaphor until it isn’t.
Until, there, in the gruesome eye of a lynch mob of smiling bystanders, the soles of
4 J. HOWARD

black folk gasp for ground. Of course, the racialized and violent distribution of the ground
at issue here does not begin or end with lynching. The history of blackness’ foundering is
long. It is Aunt Hester suspended from a hook “so that she stood upon the ends of her
toes.”18 It is stepping off the sidewalk in the Jim Crow South. It is Emmett Till laid to
rest in the Tallahatchie River by white men wanting to show “how me and my folks
stand.”19 It is Trayvon Martin lost to a man standing his ground. It is Michael Brown cal-
lously left to, on, and as the ground. But before any of these, and first, it is “the footprint
on the water, filling.”20 It is the steps middle passing Africans blinked on the face of the
Atlantic during the centuries-long tenure of the transatlantic slave trade. It is the
1,818,681 drowned. 1,818,681 splashes into oblivion, sounding at once the nascent
pulse of white settler colonialism and the seeming geographic disinheritance that is
blackness.21 It is this ground zero of black ab-jection – a literal and primordial throwing
away, over the side, and out of the world – and the problem of meeting zero ground.
It is modernity’s trail of bread crumbs. It is these black antecedents of glacier melt. This
sea-level rise. (How much did the ocean have to rise to accommodate nearly two
million new residents? Statistically negligible I am sure, but large masses always build
momentum slowly, imperceptibly. Rise is rise.) It is Kilmonger’s great, great, great,
great, great, great auntie in the motion picture Black Panther. The ancestors he passio-
nately claims in those “who jumped from ships,” but from whom, precisely because
they jumped, he cannot possibly be descended.22 It is those middle passing Africans sur-
vived to us in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) as the “inhabi-
tants of the deep,” even though we know humans cannot live underwater.
To claim and be claimed by this aqueous genealogy of unsettlement is effectively to
come from the ocean twice. Beyond the universal oceanic genesis in which we all
share, history has caused the African Diaspora to double back and begin again. How to
forget humanity’s blue ancestry when you are created by and in the dramatic reminder
of Middle Passage, what Frank Wilderson has fittingly dubbed the “dawning of blackness”
and “the Black’s first ontological instance?”23 Even if we could or would forget the
redoubled genesis of Middle Passage, history remains our reminder. Not only because
it is full of the mnemonic spectacles of what we might label the ground ceremonies of
white settler colonialism, but also because we take up our lives amidst the quotidian
and uneventful commemoration that is the status quo of a post-settlement world.
Ground ceremonies like lynching, stepping off the sidewalk, or being evicted merely
rehearse what are already humanity’s uneven claims to the ground, before the rope
goes taut. As spectacles, they lay bare the brutal interplay between settlement and the
murderous complex of dispossession and dislocation that is its historical condition of
possibility. They perform the terrible differences that have been opened up by white
settler colonialism in humanity’s interface with the planet – the site where our feet (fail
to) meet the ground and the material circumstances that subtend how or if we stand.
And yet, exclusion from whiteness’ stand your ground party, which Douglas is right in
more ways than she intends to call a climate, is, in and of itself, no great shame. Climate
scientists reviewed the guest list back in 2002 and estimated that only 25 percent of the
human family was invited.24 So we out here. And we got company. Not commiserates
either. Like Hurston, we “do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood,” and we
work toward the integration of this joy that we have in some other direction.25 Let in?
We are trying to be, practice, and turn the world out. Besides, the rent party, that besieged
 ATLANTIC STUDIES 5

celebration of where we live beyond ownership and the social struggle to stay and hold
ourselves together, was always where it was at anyway. Not to mention, Mother Nature is
about to shut that other shit down. In an irony of ironies, the eviction notice has already
been served. The 95 theses of Martin, Malcolm, Baldwin, Ellison, Walker, and countless
other prophets have already been posted to the door. Something about the house
getting too warm. Perhaps more than all the others, Alice Walker’s thesis makes it
plain: “The good news may be that Nature is phasing out the white man, but the bad
news is that’s who she thinks we all are.”26

The ocean’s opportunity

Between our feet and the ground lies a quiet question that, for Henry David Thoreau, still
felt conspicuous in the middle of the nineteenth century. In his essay “Walking” – from
which mainstream environmentalism derives the oft-quoted conservationist mantra
that “in Wildness is the preservation of the World” – it is not at all given that walking
across earth’s surface should involve having to ask: who owns this land? Today, we
bring variations of this question to the ground as naturally as we do shoes, feeling no
great loss and registering no threat quite so significant as the downright “evil days”
Thoreau feared would follow at the heels of humans grown so accustomed to the impo-
verished sense of land as mere property.
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is
not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when
it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and
exclusive pleasure only – when fences shall be multiplied […] and walking over the surface of
God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a
thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us
improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.27

We know with the blood of Trayvon Martin that these evil days have come. We know too
that simply having the deed or lease is no protection against them. Murders like Trayvon’s
may not have been the specific evil Thoreau had in mind – and they generally evade the
purview of mainstream environmentalism – but there is also a racial logic to possessing
land, which can entitle the dispossessed and dispossess the entitled. There is such a thing
as the complexion for possession. Indeed, even what Thoreau praises as “the best part of
the land” had already become “gentleman’s grounds” of a sort to the indigenous peoples
who previously inhabited them and the fugitive slaves who trespassed everywhere they
went. Even if he was ambivalent about it, it is important to recognize that Thoreau’s
walking in the wild proceeded within a racial claim to the land that was no less exclusive
because the United States’ whites-only wilderness belonged to no one in particular.28
To the fugitive slave and the American Indian, Thoreau’s wild likely appeared “con-
strued” and its days “evil” enough already. So long as environmentalism tends to begin
with a Thoreauvian (or for that matter, Thunbergian)29 regard for the wild rather than
the environmental perspectives of the former, environmentalist movements are fatally
locked into an underestimation of their problem. Redress of the climate crisis is not
just about correcting the modern reduction of land to private property or the related
transformation of humanity into a species of aspiring landlords acknowledging little
relation to land beyond ownership. Thoreau addresses these two specific evils
6 J. HOWARD

straightaway in “Walking” by expressing his “wish to speak a word for Nature” and “to
regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of
society.”30 To redress modern humanity’s alienation from Nature by “society,” Thoreau
prescribes a healthy dose of walking in the wild. By bringing humans foot to surface
with land yet to go the way of private property, and so helping them to embody a
human relation to land beyond the narrow logic of exclusive possession, the sort of
walking that Thoreau advocates31 certainly has a role to play in helping humans to
become inhabitants. But the salutary promise of such walking is mitigated by another sig-
nificant transformation. Thoreau’s nonwhite contemporaries knew well that those
humans who had become landowners had also become white. And this racial transform-
ation was in no way incidental to the new and dominating way in which they were
coming to relate to the ground beneath their feet.32 Indeed, the same white supremacy
that justified the dispossession and ownership of other people also facilitated the expro-
priation, private possession, and over-extraction of the landscape. What bars modern
humanity from genuine inhabitation, then, is not just the narrowing of human-planetary
relations to a radically impoverished notion of private ownership, but more specifically
whiteness as the aestheticization of western humanism’s “dominating stand”: the right,
superior, and paradigmatially human way of relating to land as property that was estab-
lished and enforced, through the mechanism of white settler colonialism, as the global
standard of genuine human being.
Nevertheless, I am intrigued that Thoreau’s treatise on walking would lead him to a
place where humans are famously known, save a few rumored exceptions, to be
unable to walk. Indeed, in a mediation on walking and an effort to reimagine the
human as an inhabitant, it is compelling to linger with the unique “opportunity”
Thoreau recognized in the ocean and humanity’s sustained encounter with the Atlantic
in the wake of Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World.
The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to
forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one
more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe
of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.33

Perhaps in oceans most of all, wildest wild, is the preservation of the world.34 For
Thoreau, Europe’s passages across the Atlantic were a significant development in
what he generally perceived as the “westward tendency” of human history. “Columbus
felt the westward tendency,” he writes, “more strongly than any before. He obeyed it,
and found a New World.”35 But in addition to the historical Columbus, Thoreau locates
a mythic exemplar of humanity’s westward tendency in Arnold Guyot’s The Earth and
Man (1849), an influential contemporary work, in which the Swiss-American geographer
imagines human history as the “adventurous career westward” of a prototypical “man
of the Old World.”36 Within the epic scope of the Old-World Man’s metonymic journey
from the Old World to the New, Thoreau calls special attention to his encounter with
the ocean. Though no place for a walk, the ocean intensifies what Thoreau essentially
holds good and salutary about walking and what he identifies, following Guyot, as the
human race’s westward impulse: namely, the opportunity to interface with the wild.
For the prospect of human inhabitation, Thoreau esteems Europe’s historical ventures
into the Atlantic even above “the best portion of the land” for affording a unique
 ATLANTIC STUDIES 7

opportunity: first “to forget the Old World and its institutions,” and second, to
avoid the wreckage on “the banks of the Styx” for which these institutions seemed
to him fated.
Thoreau is hardly alone in calling attention to this enormously consequential transat-
lantic moment. The historian Stephanie Smallwood has similarly argued that, “for early
modern people everywhere in the Atlantic basin, the initial encounter with the Atlantic
as an arena for human activity was profoundly transformative.”37 Offering a sense of
the nature and scale of these profound transformations, the anthropologists Sidney
W. Mintz and Richard Price contend that the world created in the wake of 1492 was a
truly “New World” because “those who became its peoples remade it, and in the
process, they remade themselves.”38 And to this already interdisciplinary witness to the
global significance of these transatlantic passages, we can now add the science of
climate change, which has recently proposed the sixteenth century as the likely origin
of the Anthropocene.
In the sixteenth century a new planet-wide human-driven evolutionary experiment began
which will continue to play out indefinitely. What plate tectonics did over tens of millions
of years is being undone by shipping in a few centuries and aviation in a few decades. We
are creating a New Pangea. This fits one of the hallmarks of a new epoch, as it is a geologically
significant change to life on Earth. It is an important event in the context of Earth’s history.39

Notwithstanding the important critiques of the “New World” designation, the sixteenth
century witnessed the creation of a veritably new world by inaugurating the “new
planet-wide human-driven evolutionary experiment” now broadly recognized as the
Anthropocene. Theorized by the historian Alfred Crosby as the “Columbian Exchange,”40
the transatlantic traffic of this century initiated a “global reordering of life on earth,”41 a
massive biotic exchange between earth’s eastern and western hemispheres that has
been written indelibly in earth’s fossil record, and which evidences perhaps the earliest
signs of humanity’s global geological agency.
Furthermore, the climate crisis that defines this human-dominated era of planetary
life lends specific context and urgency to what Thoreau feared would end with society’s
inevitable collapse if the opportunity afforded by the planet’s oceans went unheeded.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, with ships still making their way across the
Atlantic, humanity’s ability to capitalize on this first opportunity already seemed in
doubt to Thoreau, who had already begun to look forward to the second chance of
the Pacific, “three times as wide.” Yet, a dramatic irony stalks the contemporary
reader of Thoreau’s optimistic words about the can’t miss opportunity of the Pacific.
Who will tell him the bad news? That the human race has already missed its last
chance. That the “adventurous career westward,” for which he and Guyot held so
much optimism, ultimately evolved to make of the Pacific, a nuclear testing site
dubbed the “Pacific Proving Grounds.” A New Pangea, indeed, when even the ocean
can be reckoned ground. Who will tell him that, with the contemporary threat of
sea-level rise, the world has already arrived at the overflowing “banks of the Styx.”
Maybe Thoreau was wrong to expect any different of a westward tendency so
thoroughly entangled, with devotees like Columbus, with white settler colonialism.
Had he inspected the footprints of Guyot’s “man of the old world” as closely as we
shall now, he might have found ample reason to temper his optimism.
8 J. HOWARD

Fear of a blue planet

To the humans coming into contact with the deep sea for the very first time throughout
the transatlantic era of discovery and colonization, the ocean presented a kind of gut
check. Notice how the “man of the Old World,” who Thoreau lifts up as an exemplar of
walking, stumbles upon reaching the Atlantic in Guyot’s The Earth and Man:
The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends
from station to station towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization
superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he
pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns
upon his footprints for an instant.42

A conspicuous “pause” worries the middle of what Guyot otherwise depicts, in the heroic
metonym of the Old-World Man (OWM), as the seamless westward march of European
civilization. Aside from this pause, the OWM’s journey reads a lot like human evolution
is popularly imagined to look: a continuous line of human progress. But his proud gait,
measuring successively superior civilizations with every stride, falters conspicuously at
the Atlantic. This hiccup in his triumphant journey registers the fear and anxiety that gen-
erally characterized Europe’s first contact with a previously “unknown ocean.” Although
the Portuguese had been in the Atlantic since at least the middle ages, and up and
down the Atlantic coast of West Africa by the mid-fifteenth century, the reticence of
the OWM clocks what was nevertheless for most Europeans, in the wake of 1492, a gen-
uinely novel encounter with the Atlantic not as a coastal sea, but an unbounded deep.
Accordingly, the ambulatory powers of the OWM falter not merely at an “unknown”
ocean, but an ocean whose “bounds” are unknown. It is specifically by the landless
realm of the deep sea that the OWM is undone. Indeed, for all early modern humans
encountering this face of the Atlantic for the very first time, the deep presented a
space no less extraterrestrial than outer space. So alien and strange were these waters
without a shore, and so precarious and uncertain these first voyages into its untested
abyss, that as a site of human habitation, the deep stood no less opposed to terra
firma than outer space in the imaginations of early modern humans.43
Face to face with this astonishingly unearthly realm, the OWM not only stops in his
tracks, but “turns upon his footprints” and retreats back to dry land. But he does not
retreat to stay. Rather, after a “long and teeming repose,” “his faculties are reawakened,
he is reanimated.” And “[a]t the close of the 15th century,” while he initially feared this
“unknown” and “dreaded” ocean, he returns newly empowered by the “genius of the
age” to attack and subdue it into the gentle servant of his colonial desire.
Then recommences his adventurous career westward, as in the earliest ages […] Under the
guidance of the genius of the age, he attacks this dreaded ocean, of which, to this time,
he knows only the margin. He abandons himself to the winds and the currents, which bear
him gently towards the coasts of America. (233)

At this point in his epic journey, the OWM’s powerful stride decelerates into an even
greater triumph of standing. Upon reaching “the coasts of America,” Guyot narrates
how the OWM first “treads,” then “establishes himself little by little,” and finally “gets a
foot-hold.”44 Thus, however exemplary for Thoreau of walking, the telos of the OWM’s
“adventurous career westward” is ultimately revealed to be a dominating stand. Any
 ATLANTIC STUDIES 9

attempt to separate out the adventurous spirit of his westward impulse from his colonial
one is troubled by the continuity implied by the fact that, after his oceanic hiccup, the
OWM is said to recommence his journey just “as in the earliest ages.” The OWM’s ultimate
settlement of the Americas, then, represents not an aberration from, but the consumma-
tion of a walking practice that was always about settlement.
When we recognize this foothold as the ultimate end of his walking, is it any wonder
that the OWM would falter at an ocean that would sooner take hold of him? In dramatic
contrast to terra firma, the ocean swallows us whole. It would not have us stand safely
separated from difference, and materially coerces a belonging, which poses a profound
disruption to the categorial aesthetics and metaphysics that otherwise ground western
humanism and its ontologics of separation. The ocean pulls the rug out from under
our soles with a receding interface that profoundly unsettles the modern fiction of
Humanity’s separation from Nature, which makes the stand your ground subject thinkable
and imaginable in the first place. And yet, since the OWM is said to simply resume his
adventurous career westward just “as in the earliest ages,” and without any explicit
mention of a ship, does the OWM simply walk across? Does this almost complete
elision of the materiality of the maritime and the peculiar challenges it poses to human
locomotion not imply that the same walking which brought him to the ocean ultimately
carried him over? And if we cannot identify any significant changes to his essential loco-
motive method, what did change to embolden the OWM to attack the ocean he first
feared? After being so thoroughly undone by the deep, how do we account for his rea-
nimation? And how might his reanimation signal a broader reanimation, in this transat-
lantic moment, of Europe’s sense of The Earth and Man, as Guyot would have it?
Perhaps, the answer has something to do with the fact that after he “turns upon his
footprints,” there is no actual mention of the OWM ever turning back around. In his
rematch with the deep, he appears not to face the ocean so much as back into it. If
you look closely, the footprints that lead up to the threshold of the Atlantic and spawn
European colonization proceed heel-first. In a poor rendition of the moon walk, the
soles of white folk proceed backward, heading west, but facing east. Never turning
around to genuinely confront the ocean, the OWM seems to revive his confidence to
resume his “adventurous career westward” by decisively reorienting himself toward the
land. He gathers the strength to reenter the sea by fixating on terra firma, suppressing
his dread by sustaining, even at sea, a hallucination of dry land. And we learn from Small-
wood that, in this bad faith encounter with the ocean, the OWM is very much a faithful
metonym for Europe’s transatlantic passages:
By the time Europeans began to colonize the New World, voyagers to the west were
confident that their journey would follow a linear path, with known beginning and end
points. European seamen translated the land-based systems of time–space reckoning of med-
ieval Europe to the wider temporal and spatial context of life in a “new” Atlantic world. Hour-
glasses and astrolabes measured time and space; and applied mathematics and geometry
turned these into the Cartesian coordinates seamen used to recognize place in the seemingly
formless arena of the sea.45

In other words, Europeans made the “unknown ocean” of the Atlantic knowable in terms
of land. Aided by “land-based systems of time–space reckoning,” whatever interruption
was posed by the deep was sufficiently mitigated by the technology of the boat.
10 J. HOWARD

Indeed, for the European, the boat was, or at least aspired to be, land at sea, which is why
one settler could liken a ship at sea to “a cradle rocked by a careful mother’s hand, which
though it be moved up and down is not in danger of falling.”46 Even at sea, then, the ship
guarantees the promises of terra firma, enabling the untroubled continuation and colonial
spread of the OWM’s adventurous career westward, a career which was always fated to
end in the foothold of what was always a stand your ground subject
More to this point, the OWM’s unrepentant footprint embodies a decisive reorientation
not merely to land, but more specifically to the land practice incubated during his “long
and teeming repose,” which he spends “under the influence of the soil of Europe, so richly
organized,” sowing “the numerous germs wherewith he is endowed.”47 A far cry from
Thoreau’s wild, the richness of Europe’s soil inheres not in the soil itself, but in its docility,
its availability to being organized. In other words, Guyot invokes Europe’s soil not as a
surface valuable in itself, but as an interface, the site of an idealized relationship
between the “Earth” and “Man.” The land enclosures which had begun in England by
the sixteenth century help specify the nature of this idealized interface by illuminating
just how “Europe’s soil” was coming to be organized during this period.
By the sixteenth century the first enclosures were occurring in England, driving commoners
off communal land to give landlords the exclusive use of it for increasingly lucrative sheep
farming. Every piece of land was coming to be privately owned – with one person owning
exclusive rights to it – turning the whole Earth into private property, just as we think of it
today.48

To be “under the influence of the soil of Europe,” then, is moreover to be under the
influence of the specific mode of relating to land as private property. Significantly, this
specific human-planetary interface is also explicitly racialized by Guyot in the justification
he offers for the OWM’s colonial foothold and, by extension, Europe’s expropriation of
indigenous land. In a familiar rehearsing of white settler colonial ideology, he reasons
that “America is made for the man of the Old World” because “the human race of the
New World, the Indian” had otherwise failed to “open the soil with his ploughshares, to
demand the treasures it encloses” and “work out all the wealth of its inexhaustible ferti-
lity.”49 This distinction in land practice and use further maps onto the racist distinction
Guyot establishes between the agricultural “white race” as “the most perfect type of
humanity” and the “copper-colored […] hunting tribes of the two Americas” (229). We
know that American Indians had robust agricultural practices, and that their reduction
to mere hunters above was a common ideological screen for expropriation. However, it
is still significant to note how, in racial distinction to the supposedly inferior “Indian,”
the whiteness of the white race inheres as much in a normative way of relating to land
as in skin color. The whiteness of European settlers is embodied in an exclusionary and
extractive land practice that also functioned as a litmus for true humanity.
Thus, at the historical moment when humanity might have otherwise discovered itself,
through its historic encounter with the deep, to be hopelessly immersed in Nature, the
species, as reflected in the metonymic hero of the OWM, is reanimated instead as a
stand your ground subject whose primary interface with the planet is that of the foothold
of private property. And this interface, this particular embodiment of the Earth/Man
relation, announced itself to history and an emerging global ecology as whiteness. But
even before the foothold, it is the OWM’s unrepented footprint, his turn away from
 ATLANTIC STUDIES 11

and disavowal of the earth as ocean, that records the very first steps of humanity’s exces-
sive carbon footprint. The disavowal of the overwhelming majority of our planet that
cannot be stood is the condition of possibility for a subject that stands too much.
Although humans have always impacted their environments, anthropogenic climate
change as a global crisis is rooted most fundamentally in a set of authoritative decisions
about what The Earth and Man are individually and in relation that, critically, Europe made
on behalf of the entire world before managing to colonize 85 percent of it.50
The decisions embodied in the OWM’s turn away from the ocean, and with it any
experience of earth beyond that of a docile surface, are not only that “Earth” is a docile
surface, but also that “Man” is the entitled ruler and exclusive owner and steward of
that surface. It is a decision about what “genre”51 of the human, to employ Sylvia
Wynter’s language, represents “the most perfect type of humanity;” and consequently,
a decision too about the nature of the earth as the automatic ground and infinite limb
of this normative humanity. It is a decision that the life of Man is ideally expressed not
as inhabitation, as life in nature or, God forbid, immersion, but rather separation
(whether in unapologetic domination or careful stewardship). It is no mere coincidence,
either, that whiteness comes to be historically named against the larger backdrop of
humanity’s first large-scale encounter with the deep, which otherwise represented
humanity’s widespread opportunity to deepen its relationship to the planet. Because
whiteness is this decision, is western humanism doubling down on land and a racial
fiction of separation, is modernity’s answer and resolution to the fear of a blue planet.
It is these decisions, embodied in the unrepentant footprint of the OWM, that were
poised to go out into the world, already exhibiting what can be readily recognized
today, in soil exhaustion and overpopulation, as classic signs of ecological crisis. For
what precipitates the OWM’s transatlantic venture in the first place was the fact that he
had “tilled the impoverished soil and yet the number of his offspring increases” (233).
Yet, Europe’s were not the only passages across the Atlantic. Over the course of the
near 400-year tenure of the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved Africans were also
coming into contact with this “unknown ocean,” albeit under radically different
circumstances.
[E]nslaved Africans entered the Atlantic without the information and background that
enabled their European captors to navigate the open sea. When confronted with the
phenomenon, African captives responded to the Atlantic as Europeans had done: they
made it knowable in their own terms. But the conditions of their Atlantic experience
shaped that process, just as the particular conditions of maritime exploration had shaped
the integration of the Atlantic into European culture and consciousness.52

Recognizing just how much of our planet is ocean, the stakes of its integration into culture
and consciousness are nothing short of humanity’s knowledge of Earth and, what’s more,
itself in relation to the Earth. What, then, are the prospects of a word for nature, or man as
an inhabitant of nature, that emerges out of a western culture that made the deep know-
able in terms of “land” and integrated it into European culture and consciousness as little
more than a docile surface? In contrast, what were the conditions of the black maritime
experience of Middle Passage? And just how did these conditions alternatively come to
shape the integration of an unknown ocean, and by extension the planet, into the
black imagination? Smallwood details that enslaved Africans lacked the benefits of “the
12 J. HOWARD

information and background that enabled their European captors to navigate the open
sea,” and consequently, would have experienced the Atlantic not in the familiarizing
terms of land, nor in ways aided by abstraction or linearity, but directly, immediately,
and unrelentingly as ocean. Rather than the OWM’s “adventurous career westward,”
perhaps a more promising place to begin to reimagine “man” as an “inhabitant, or part
and parcel of Nature,” then, are the middle passages of those remembered by Equiano
as the “inhabitants of the deep.” Since they, in a way better proportioned to the material
composition of our blue planet, assume the ocean, and not the land (and still less private
property), as ground zero for social and ecological thought.

The Negro question

There is a question undocumented to history. No archive testifies to its ever having been
asked in the precise words we shall consider here. It boasts no paper trail and still less any
sonic record. Yet the combined insight of the historiography of the transatlantic slave
trade allows us to infer its asking by illuminating a significant detail defining the black
maritime experience of Middle Passage. Most of the captives gathered before the Atlantic
on the coast of West Africa – poised to board slave ships as modernity’s cargo – were
encountering the ocean for the very first time. This blue expanse stretched now unend-
ingly before them in a geographic harangue of landlessness, the planet’s conspicuous
failure to resolve back into terra firma, as water was apt to do in the rivers and lakes
that served as their closest aquatic reference. Having “never before seen any water
larger than a pond or rivulet,” Equiano recounts his dramatic first contact with the
ocean in this way:
The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave
ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with
astonishment, which was soon converted into terror when I was carried on board. I was
immediately handled, and tossed up to see if I were sound, by some of the crew; and I
was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were
going to kill me.53

Equiano’s experience was typical of those, who, like him, were captured in the interior of
the continent and subsequently marched to the coast.54 But there were also those for
whom the ocean was not a complete novelty. In Undercurrents of Power, Kevin Dawson
chronicles the rich “aquatic culture” of coastal West African societies that demonstrated
significant cultural and economic engagement with the ocean long before the rise of
New World slavery.55 However, even these were no more cosmologically prepared for
the deep they would encounter once the coast vanished than those lacking any
oceanic experience at all; since, as Smallwood tells us, “the landless realm of the deep
ocean did not figure in pre-colonial West African societies as a domain of human (as
opposed to divine) activity.” Thus, for middle passing Africans:
the slave ship was not just a setting for brutality and death, but also a locus of unparalleled
displacement. As the sight of land grew faint, or as the land disappeared suddenly on the
closing of the hatch, the disorientation that for many had begun with the process of procure-
ment on the African coast became more marked. Out of sight of any land, enslaved Africans
commenced a march through time and space that stretched their own systems of reckoning
to the limits.56
 ATLANTIC STUDIES 13

In Barracoon, Zora Neale Hurston registers this “unparalleled displacement” in her record
of the black maritime experience of Cudjoe Lewis, the last known US survivor of Middle
Passage. Years after his transatlantic passage, Lewis could still recall the visual freefall
he and his shipmates experienced once land vanished from the horizon: “We lookee
and lookee and lookee and lookee and we doan see nothin’ but water. Where we
come from we doan know. Where we goin, we doan know.”57
In the oft-cited first chapter of Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant approximates the
terrible wonder of this black maritime experience by performing a haunting act of ven-
triloquy. The words may be his, but they sound out questions that, in their unmoored
suspense, seem to emerge from the veritable mouths of the Africans hovering over
the face of the deep. “What kind of river […] has no middle? Is nothing there but
straight ahead?”58 With these words, Glissant sounds out what may just be the original
Negro question. The great irony obtaining in what is known to history as the “Negro
Question” is that it is really a masquerading answer. When, in Notes on the State of
Virginia, Thomas Jefferson asks concerning the Negro, “What further is to be done
with them?”,59 he is not asking a question so much as rehearsing the “Negro Answer”
to the still more basic and irreducible question of social (and indeed ecological) life:
How do we live together? The answer given by modernity in the Negro Question is
racial separation; an answer that is itself inextricable from modernity’s other answer
to the question of life together – humanity’s separation from nature. In contrast to
this more familiar Negro Question so insincerely asked by so many of the earth’s
nations, Glissant’s questions bespeak the Negro question in earnest by voicing the
literal questions that middle passing Africans asked of a blue planet while in the
throes of becoming black.
These attempts to represent the blue inquiry which characterized the black maritime
experience of Middle Passage also bears traces of a profound reckoning with nothingness.
But the kind of wrestling with nothingness that troubles whether nothing is quite the
referendum on non-existence we think it is, that overwhelms and surprises with just
how substantial the things we call nothing can be, and that calls into question the criteria
that inform such valuations.
What, then, of the nothingness figured in Glissant’s “nothing but straight ahead” or
Lewis’ “nothin’ but water”? Fred Moten invokes the same negative pronoun when, in
his own meditation on the meaning of Middle Passage, he observes that: “It’s terrible
to have come from nothing but the sea, which is nowhere, navigable only in its constant
autodislocation. The absence of solidity seems to demand some other hailing that will
have been carried out on some more exalted frequency.”60 To come from nothing, and
to come from “nothing but the sea” – which, following ecocritical scholar Dan Brayton
and process theologian Catherine Keller, so regularly signifies nothing in western
culture – seems to demand a velocity of redress whose horizon is the terrain of some-
thing.61 The “terrible” in being claimed by and laying claim to the spatial dis/inheritance
of “nothing but the sea” inheres in the ocean’s disappointment of our basic spatial expec-
tations. The ocean frustrates what is otherwise, in the wake of white settler colonialism,
generally expected to be the always already settled negotiation of ground. What we
are in the habit of calling “ground” is actually a war we have won with cement.
Walking, our endless victory parade. But as a liquid, what Moten describes as the
ocean’s “constant autodislocation” alternatively confronts us with a planetary surface
14 J. HOWARD

that utterly frustrates the human desire to stand and, more significantly, the colonial
aspiration to settle. But rather than despise or eschew what can register in the ocean
as nothingness relative to expectations of a docile earth, Moten alternatively calls us to
a rigorous and invested interrogation of that nothingness. Forwarding a question
whose stakes he describes as “the undercommon inheritance of earth and air,” he
urges that we actually ask: “What is the nothingness, which is to say the blackness, of
the slave?” What if the nothingness and blackness of the enslaved is blueness? That
other hue frequently dismissed as nothing in the western imagination, but which ironi-
cally constitutes most of everything on a planet that really “ain’t nothin’ but water.”62
This is the blue planet, the “undercommon inheritance of earth and air,” we stand to
inherit together as we learn to ask about and inquire into the nothingness of the
ocean. As we do, we are want to notice that nothing is less a pronouncement on non-
existence than it is the name we give to all that lies, not outside of life, but outside our
plan for living. And humanity’s prevailing plan for life on this watery planet of ours is
decidedly terracentric. But if on terra firma, it is possible to interpellate the surface of
the planet as the guaranteed and given instrument of our walking, to sterilize it of all alter-
ity, to domesticate and delineate it, to reduce it into private property, to enclose it in walls
or national borders, the ocean, by contrast, elicits our restless and conscious negotiation
of not only space but our relations with one another in space. In the “absence of solidity,”
where nothing of the stand your ground subject enshrined as the archetype of human
being can be pursued, the struggle to live consciously with not only other humans, but
also fully animate spaces, can indeed register as nothingness. But if so, it is a nothingness
worth inquiring into. Because, unlike the modern plan for living presently exhibiting all of
the signs of pending collapse, it indexes a contingent and radically inclusive practice of
life together, whose first principle is neither property nor the individual, but rather the
irreducible fact of relation both human and nonhuman in its scope.
This ecological life of the hold that I am attempting to describe comes clearer when we
consider that the middle passing Africans, who watched land disappear from the horizon,
could not be certain of its eventual return. For who was there who cared to stop and
explain, in a language the enslaved could understand, arrival: that they were headed
some place other than the suspended now of the Atlantic? These unique circumstances
meant that Middle Passage was for many of the enslaved, not a crossing, which implies
knowledge of arrival, but an extended, suspended, arrested departure. The language of
“Middle Passage” is both ironic and anachronistic in this respect, for it grants a knowledge
of arrival where there was none, either for those who foundered in the Atlantic along the
way, or for those who did eventually arrive on the shores of the New World but could not
have known that they would. Thus, to speak of middle passing Africans is ironically to
speak of those who were without the “middle.” Belied in what we call “Middle
Passage,” is a black maritime experience whose predicament and passion are perhaps
better and more faithfully recognized as an inhabitation of the deep, even if by his original
variation of the phrase, Equiano intended only the drowned.
In other words, Middle Passage required middle passing Africans to perform a terrific
feat of the imagination. Suddenly displaced from any and all signs of land, and neither
being assured of reaching some future elsewhere beyond the Atlantic, theirs was the his-
torical labor of having to make a ground out of no ground, of having to imagine and
improvise a life lived absolutely at sea, without even the faintest relief of a future promised
 ATLANTIC STUDIES 15

land. Which is to say, that for the two months or so it took on average for a ship to cross
the Atlantic, middle passing Africans rehearsed and practiced an unstable occupation and
precarious negotiation of space that, because they could not be certain it would ever end,
came to be conflated in their minds with the work of living. With life. When life is irredu-
cibly ecological and always already names life together. Indeed, while all the modern
world aspired to the settlement of land, the middle passing African was absolutely at
sea, coming to know the planet through its second, greater face.

Black oceanic study

Simultaneous, then, with the well-remarked suffering endured by enslaved Africans
during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, proceeded what we have yet to fully appreciate
as a collective and sustained inquiry into the nature of the ocean and the prospect of
human life on a blue planet. But perhaps we are better poised to appreciate such black
oceanic study now, amidst the “oceanic turn” currently underway in the humanities
with the emergence of what Hester Blum has called “oceanic studies” or what Steve
Mentz has alternatively termed the “blue humanities.”63 Within this general oceanic
turn, Elizabeth DeLoughrey has further elucidated a still more specific shift, with the
growing public awareness of global sea-level rise, “from a long-term concern with mobi-
lity across transoceanic surfaces to theorizing oceanic submersion” in a way that renders
“oceanic space into ontological place.”64 Yet, that to study the ocean there is even a need
to turn, implies that the humanities, not unlike the OWM, are otherwise somehow turned
away. Dan Brayton argues precisely this in his book Shakespeare’s Ocean, where he ques-
tions whether our backs are to the sea and traces what he theorizes as the “terrestrial bias”
of western culture.65 That is, its defining over-preoccupation with land at the expense of a
general and sustained neglect of the ocean. A 2010 documentary that identifies the ocean
as The Forgotten Space amidst the international flow of global capital further suggests this
neglect.66 To forget an ocean constituting no less than 70 percent of earth’s surface rep-
resents no small feat of amnesia. In the familiar needle haystack analogy, we forgive and
expect the loss of the needle. But by forgetting the sea, the West has remarkably managed
to somehow lose the haystack. In turning to weigh the prospect of oceanic studies now
and contemplate with DeLoughrey “The Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene,” the
humanities would do well to consider that protracted oceanic study staged by the
slave ship within the black maritime experience of Middle Passage. Over a period span-
ning five centuries, the talking commodities brimming the holds of slave ships asked
bewildered questions of our blue planet. One can hardly imagine another instance
when the study of the ocean more urgently or intimately coincided with what it meant
to be alive.
If, following Blum, “oceanic studies seeks to reorient our critical perspective” to the sea
and its “capacious possibilities for new relational forms,”67 then we can likewise begin to
appreciate the possibilities of black oceanic study by revisiting the oft-remarked shipmate
relationship formed between Africans who arrived in the Americas on the same slave ship.
Of this relationship, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley writes in her important essay, “Black Atlan-
tic, Queer Atlantic”: “the emergence of intense shipmate relationships in the water-
rocked, no-person’s-land of slave holds created a black Atlantic same-sex eroticism: a
feeling of, feeling for the kidnapped that asserted the sentience of the bodies that
16 J. HOWARD

slavers attempted to transform into brute matter.”68 Such “feeling of, feeling for” one
another in the hold of the slave ship was queer, Tinsley explains, not primarily “in the
sense of a ‘gay’ or same-sex loving identity” but “in the sense of marking disruption to
the violence of normative order” and “connecting in ways that commodified flesh was
never supposed to” as a “praxis of resistance.”69 But what happens when we extend
the scope of this “feeling of, feeling for” from the human to the nonhuman, and the aston-
ishing shipmate that middle passing Africans also claimed in the ocean? What comes to
light in the black oceanic study of the Africans of the hold is a still more radically queer
“feeling of, feeling for” the deep, and by extension, our blue planet. Which is to say
that Middle Passage is humanity’s Earth Landing. One small step for the captives who
would have taken more, but could not. One giant step for humanity. Indeed, the “inhabi-
tants of the deep” took perhaps the most earnest steps a human can take on our blue
planet. Their ambulation is a significant moment in the evolution not of humanity, but
of humanity’s environmental humanity, far more significant than the flag-planting
humanism that walked the moon. This ecological “feeling of, feeling for” the ocean con-
stitutes a still greater disruption to the violence of normative order by connecting in ways
that the human, imagined as separated from nature, was never supposed to.
Further helping to elucidate the implications of such “feeling of, feeling for” the ocean
is the aesthetic philosophy of Gaston Bachelard, and the poetic import he ascribes to
material reality. In his book, Water and Dreams, Bachelard argues that “it is possible to
establish in the realm of the imagination, a law of the four elements which classifies
various kinds of material imagination by their connections with fire, air, water, or
earth.”70 In short, these four elements, which Bachelard distinguishes as “fundamental
elements,” furnish the imagination with the “particular rules and poetics” expressed in
their physical properties. Consider, for example, how the contemplation of the flow of
water might inspire a poet or a rapper to reproduce the same phenomenon in a
flowing lyric. Bachelard’s term for the imagination so informed by the physiopoetic prop-
erties of one of the four fundamental elements is the “material imagination;” and he
speculates that ancient philosophic and aesthetic systems often made “a decisive
choice along these lines.”71
If matter indeed lends itself to imagination in the manner Bachelard describes, then
beyond merely signaling black abjection or the condition of “social death,” Middle
Passage can be further recognized as having staged an extended meditation on the
ocean, with untold poetic and imaginative potential. Thus, beside the blood-stained
gate through which the enslaved serially passed into hell of slavery, we have also to
recognize the gathering and fellowship of this black and blue ecclesia. These “called
out” ones, gathered with and to a kindred ocean, whose fate it also was to furnish the con-
stitutive outside of western humanism’s plan for living. But beyond their mere exclusion,
those who were “called out” were also calling out their own name. Calling themselves
together in the cohering passion of their blue inquiry. “What kind of river […] has no
middle? Is nothing there but straight ahead?”72 Asked again and again and again,
together, over the course of four hundred years. A kind of intergenerational mantra
accompanying and announcing the birth of diaspora. This blue, they also passed through.
Read this way, the ocean, beyond its familiar status of spatial wound or unmarked
grave, may also be understood to furnish the African Diaspora with the “fundamental
element” of what I am calling, extending Bachelard’s term, the material imagination of
 ATLANTIC STUDIES 17

blackness. Perhaps, this is the water-inspired imagination to which the Afro-Canadian poet
Dionne Brand refers in A Map to the Door of No Return, when she writes, “water is the first
thing in my imagination.”73 Or to which M. NourbeSe Philip gestures when, in a journal
she kept during the writing of her poem, Zong!, she observes that “always what is
going on seems to be about water.”74 Of course, to speak of some “decisive decision”
on the part of the African Diaspora to adopt water as its “fundamental element” is com-
plicated by the fact that the diaspora, at least initially, had very little choice in the matter.
Blackness is devoted to the deep by history, not volition. Yet we learn from Equiano’s nar-
rative that a devotion conceived under the conditions of coercion can subsequently turn
willful. After being whipped for the first time aboard the slave ship, Equiano tellingly
writes: “although, not being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first
time I saw it, yet nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped
over the side … ”75 Thus, after an initially forced encounter with the ocean, Equiano sub-
sequently comes to willfully desire the sea. And though he is prevented from jumping
ship physically, we nevertheless see him jump ship in his mind, glimpsing the operation
of what I am calling the material imagination of blackness, a mind and imagination given
to water. Of course, the violence that motivates Equiano’s desire to jump ship complicates
the willfulness of his decision as being positively for the sea as opposed to merely a nega-
tive escape from violence. And yet, Equiano’s apparent misnaming of those who did
manage to jump ship physically suggests a positive vision of what it was that middle
passing Africans were jumping to: “Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the
deep much more happy than myself. I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as
often wished I could change my condition for theirs” (41). Why does Equiano use “inhabi-
tants,” a word typically reserved for the living, to describe those, who jumped to their
deaths? Moreover, how can he possibly claim to envy these drowned slaves their
freedom? Yet, if we suspend our initial objections to Equiano’s apparent misnaming of
the drowned, and take seriously the lives that were lived underwater, awfully abbreviated
as they were, then what emerges is a profoundly ecological vision of human life and
freedom on a blue planet. The very human ecological life after which Thoreau was
groping when he sounded out a word for “man as an inhabitant, or part and parcel of
Nature.”76 The inhabitants of the deep yield precisely such an “inhabitant,” as it would
need to be imag(in)ed on a planet significantly more deep than terra firma. And what
the blue inquiry registered in Glissant’s questions holds out to us is that all middle
passing Africans, and not just those who jumped or were thrown overboard, were inhabi-
tants of the deep, in so far as they all weighed the prospect of a human life lived absol-
utely at sea.
But what are the stakes of locating, amidst the incredible violence and suffering of
Middle Passage, the conception and operation of the material imagination of blackness?
Bachelard again is helpful here for his delineation of the problem of a materially impover-
ished imagination. For Bachelard, the imagination that neglects matter “deserts depth,
volume, and the inner recesses of substance.” Consequently, such an imagination pro-
duces images that, according to Bachelard, “cannot survive because they are merely
formal play, not truly adapted to the matter they should adorn.”77 But if the imagination’s
failure to discover its matter is a problem for poetry, leading to insufficiently imagined
images that “cannot survive,” might the material impoverishment of the imagination
also prove a problem for other exercises of the imagination. Say, for example, the
18 J. HOWARD

dominant imagination of human life and freedom within a western culture that, according
to Brayton, has its back turned to most of the matter on the planet. Might Bachelard
condemn the superficial steps we take on concrete as “mere formal play, not truly
adapted to [their] matter?” Maybe the human imaged by the “foothold” of the OWM
and the stand your ground subject just “cannot survive.”
Is this not the basic witness of ecology? That the life and freedoms of the reigning
practice of human being are unsustainable. Perhaps humanity’s excessive carbon foot-
print is all that could be reasonably expected of a western culture that has dispropor-
tionately imagined with respect to (a caricature of) land, human life and freedom on a
planet predominantly made of water. It’s in light of the terracentric and radically
impoverished environmental imagination of whiteness, that the stakes of the recog-
nition of the material or environmental imagination of blackness come clear. For if
life has any integrity, such that any sustainable practice of human life would need
to be conceived in proportion and relation to the material realities of our blue
planet, then it may just be that the inhabitants of the deep adapted the human to
the matter it should adorn. That by undertaking the awful labor of conceiving and
improvising human life absolutely at sea, what the Africans bereft of the middle actu-
ally managed to do was live. That within what we sometimes have occasion in black
studies to appraise as their “social death,” we have yet and further to recognize a still
more profound practice of black ecological life. The life we must all learn to live before
the ocean comes home to roost, baptizing the soles of the forgetful. Faced with the
prospect of our submarine futures, who knows but that, at these deepest depths,
the “inhabitants of the deep” speak for us, asking their blue questions, inaugurating
the ecological life of the earthling.

Notes
1. Savoy, Trace, 42.
2. Walker, Sent By Earth, 27.
3. Brand, “Land to Light On,” 47.
4. Ellison, Invisible Man, 438, 441.
5. In a way reflective of a general anxiety marking early modern rhetoric surrounding the ocean,
Arnold Guyot characterizes the Atlantic as an “unknown” and “dreaded” ocean in his mytho-
logization of Europe’s initial encounter with the Atlantic and subsequent colonization of the
New World. Later in this essay, I consider the passage in question, which is also quoted exten-
sively by Thoreau in “Walking,” in greater depth. See Guyot, The Earth and Man, 233.
6. There are, for instance, the extensive sea-faring histories of China, Indonesia, the Arab world,
and the Vikings, which all predate Columbus.
7. Moten, The Universal Machine, 199.
8. Elizabeth Deloughrey argues that “due to sea-level rise, our planetary future is becoming
more oceanic. Scientific discourse has positioned the ocean as an evolutionary origin for
life on earth and, given the imminent threat of rising sea levels, our anticipated destiny”
(“The Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene,” 33–34).
9. Silva, “On Difference Without Separability,” 57–65.
10. Neimanis, “Bodies of Water, Human Rights, and the Hydrocommons,” 161, 176.
11. I borrow this phrase from the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his book, Life Together.
12. I borrow this phrase from Ralph Ellison, who writes in Invisible Man that “the mind that has
conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern
was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals” (580, my emphasis).
 ATLANTIC STUDIES 19

13. Locke writes in The Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), “The great and chief end, there-
fore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the
preservation of their property” (276). Likewise, in The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau writes:
Where shall we find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole
aggregate force the person and the property of each individual; and by which every
person, while united with ALL, shall obey only HIMSELF, and remain as free as
before the union. Such is the fundamental problem, of which the Social Contract
gives the solution. (12, my emphasis)
14. Douglas, Stand Your Ground, xiii.
15. Douglas’ use of climate here bears strong resonances with Sharpe’s theorization of “the
weather” as a climate of antiblackness in her crucial book, In the Wake.
16. Ibid., 44.
17. Charles Mills quotes Edward Said as contending that by 1914, “Europe held a grand total of
roughly 85% of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions, and common-
wealths.” See Mills, The Racial Contract, 29.
18. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 5.
19. Huie, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” 200–208.
20. Roberson, Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In, 36.
21. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, “Estimates.”
22. Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler (2018; Marvel Studios, 2018), DVD.
23. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 37, 38.
24. In the article credited with coining the phrase, “The Anthropocene,” climate scientist Paul
Crutzen observes the following: “So far, these effects have largely been caused by only
25% of the world population.” See Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” 23.
25. Hurston, “How It Feels to be Colored Me,” 114–118.
26. Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, 346.
27. Thoreau, “Walking.”
28. The wilderness was whites only not in the sense that nonwhites were always formally barred or
absent from the wilderness, but rather in the sense that any nonwhite presence or relation to
wilderness still had to negotiate the general and exclusive land-claims of the unfolding enterprise
of white settler colonialism. For the American Indian, this meant the possibility of expropriation,
while for the black American this meant (the possibility of) being reduced to property, too.
29. I am thinking here about the controversy surrounding the publication of an “all-white” photo-
graph of prominent young climate activists, including Greta Thunberg, which deliberately
cropped out the Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate. See https://www.theguardian.
com/world/2020/jan/24/whites-only-photo-uganda-climate-activist-vanessa-nakate.
30. Thoreau, “Walking.”
31. Thoreau illuminates the significance of the “art of Walking” by analyzing the etymology of the
verb “to saunter.” He writes:
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art
of Walking, that is, of taking walks – who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering,
which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in
the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,” to
the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a
Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend,
are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in
the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans
terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having
no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. (n.p.)
32. Of course, the same goes for women, whose capacities as land-owners were also restricted
during colonization. And along with whiteness, the maleness of landowners is also not inci-
dental to this emerging dominant relation to land.
20 J. HOWARD

33. Thoreau, “Walking.”

34. Thoreau’s privileging of the ocean here also recalls for me Foucault’s declaration, at the end
of his essay “Of Other Spaces,” that “in civilizations without boats, dreams dry up” (27).
35. Thoreau, “Walking.”
36. Guyot, The Earth and Man, 233.
37. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 126.
38. Mintz and Price, The Birth of African-American Culture, 84.
39. Lewis and Maslin, The Human Planet, 166.
40. The “Columbian Exchange” is explicitly cited by Lewis and Maslin in The Human Planet as a
possible starting point of the Anthropocene. See also: Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian
Exchange.
41. Lewis and Maslin, The Human Planet, 11.
42. Guyot, The Earth and Man, 233 (emphasis added). This passage is also quoted by Thoreau in
“Walking.”
43. A reviewer of an earlier draft of this essay has helpfully pointed out that “the Portuguese had
been in the Atlantic since the middle ages (and perhaps earlier) and all over the Atlantic coast
of West Africa by the mid fifteenth century.” Likewise, as Kevin Dawson illuminates in Under-
currents of Power, West Africans living on the Atlantic maintained a vibrant and substantial
“aquatic culture” including the ocean that preexisted European contact. Indeed, Europeans
and Africans were not uniformly unfamiliar with the Atlantic. But this knowledge, I argue, per-
tained mostly to a knowledge of the Atlantic as a margin or barrier, as Guyot and Thoreau
refer to it respectively. My specific claim, then, is that all early modern humans were
largely if not entirely unfamiliar with what Stephanie Smallwood calls the “landless realm
of the deep ocean” (124, emphasis added). That is, the sea of Middle Passage.
44. Guyot, The Earth and Man, 233 (emphasis added).
45. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 131 (emphasis added).
46. Ibid., 129.
47. The agricultural practice in view in Europe’s “richly organized” soil is specifically a profit-
driven commercial agriculture that presumes private property. And while Guyot does not
acknowledge it as such, it’s the ecological crisis instigated by overpopulation and the soil
exhaustion wrought by such a land practice that motivates the OWM, having “tilled the impo-
verished soil and yet the number of his offspring increases,” to set out for the Americas in the
first place. See Guyot, The Earth and Man, 233 (emphasis added).
48. Lewis and Maslin, The Human Planet, 174.
49. See Guyot, The Earth and Man, 231–232.
50. Before the transatlantic confrontation of hemispheres of humanity previously separated for
millennia, such encapsulating knowledge claims about the earth or the human species
were not only not yet possible, but for most of the global human community also unnecess-
ary and unimportant. It’s not until the historical onset of white settler colonialism that it
becomes both possible and necessary for some humans to speak a totalizing word for
both the planet and the species.
51. I am indebted here to Sylvia Wynter’s helpful discussion of the “genres” of humanity. See “The
Ceremony Must Be Found.”
52. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 126.
53. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 38.
54. Although I attend to Equiano’s account of his experience of Middle Passage as if it is indeed
biographical, I am aware of Vincent Caretta’s Equiano, The African and the now widely
accepted possibility that Equiano was actually born in South Carolina and that his account
of his personal experience of Middle Passage is fictional. But this possibility only strengthens
the essential claim I am making in this essay, as Equiano’s effort to craft a believable and faith-
ful account of Middle Passage suggests that this oceanic encounter was common enough
among Middle Passage survivors for Equiano to both know and reproduce it.
55. Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 2.
56. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery.
 ATLANTIC STUDIES 21

57. Hurston, Barracoon, 55.

58. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 7.
59. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 155.
60. Moten, The Universal Machine, 199.
61. See Dan Brayton’s Shakespeare’s Ocean and Catherine Keller’s The Face of the Deep.
62. Ibid.
63. Mentz, “Blue Humanities,” 69.
64. Deloughrey, “The Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene,” 32.
65. Brayton, Shakespeare’s Ocean, 15.
66. I learned of this documentary through Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,
which offers an illuminating analysis.
67. Blum, “Terraqueous Planet,” 26.
68. Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic,” 199.
69. Ibid.
70. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 3.
71. Ibid.
72. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 7.
73. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 6.
74. Philip, Zong!, 195.
75. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 39.
76. This scene of a fugitive Black ecology strongly recalls two examples Kathryn Yusoff analyzes in
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, which also use fleeing bodies suspended in the air as
imaginative pathways to decolonial ecologies, though not embedded in moments of suspen-
sion into the ocean/ic.
77. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 2–3.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Jonathan Howard is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Yale Univer-
sity. His research broadly interrogates western ideas about race and nature, weighing their
entangled contribution to the formation of a modern world in ecological peril while also exploring
black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice. His current book
project, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, undertakes a black ecocritical study of the
trope of water in African Diaspora literature.

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