Racism and Sexism Questions

“Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage” by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

A FA M & W M N S T 10 3

Omise’ke Tinsley Omise’eke Tinsley is Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Motivated by love for boundless black femme creativity, her research focuses on queer and feminist, Caribbean and African American performance and literature. She recently completed a manuscript entitled The Color Pynk: Black Femme-inist Love and Criticism, which

explores black femme aesthetics of resistance in the Trump era. Earlier monographs include Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism (2018); Ezili’s Mirrors: Black Queer Genders and the Work of the Imagination (2018), winner of the 2019 Barbara Christian Prize in Caribbean Studies; and Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature (2010). She has published articles in journals including GLQ, Feminist Studies, Yale French Studies, and Small Axe and is a contributor to Time, Ebony, The Advocate, and Huffington Post.

Conceptualizing the Queer Atlantic against the Middle Passage

Tinsley is interested in exploring the queer relationships among captives of the slave ship where spaces were segregated by sex;

For her, the relationships develop between same sexes indicate a type of resistance from the commodification of their bought and sold bodies– expressing feelings and feelings for their co- occupants.

Another type of relationship outside of the bonds of slavery and against the reinforced practices where filial ties were severed (Angela Davis)

Against the forced passages of slavery, Tinsley is “[proposing] to intervene in this polarization (between European and Other/ new sites and old sites of blackness) by bridging imaginations of the “choice” of black queerness and the forced migration of the Middle Passage.”

To ask: “What would it mean for both queer and African diaspora studies to take seriously the possibility that, as forcefully as the Atlantic and Caribbean flow together, so too do the turbulent fluidities of blackness and queerness? What new geography– or as Fajardo proposes, oceanography– of sexual, gendered, trans-national, and racial identities might emerge through reading for black queer history and theory in the traumatic dislocation of the Middle Passage?”

“Developing a black feminist epistemology to uncover submerged histories– particularly those stories of Africans’ forced ocean crossing that traditional historiography cannot validate” (194). • Erotics of black feminist epistemology (origins

of knowledge) • “Sex is not about sex, then; it is about pain. While

the Atlantic– rather than remain primarily a site of diasporic trauma– is optimistically metaphorized as space that expands the horizons of black consciousness, sex is pessimistically metaphorized as a sorrow song that never yields deep pleasure” (196).

• Tinsley is attempting to recover and recuperate Queer Atlantic as a site & sight of these relations, identities, and pleasures.

Olaudah Equiano

• Former slave and abolitionist, wrote a memoir depicting the horrors of slavery;

• Tinsley drawing from Equiano notes how the sight of the ocean was traumatic;

• “I was beyond the measure astonished at this, as I had never before seen any water larger than a pond or a rivulet, and my surprise was mingled with no small fear…. 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 to terror.”

Erotics of Resistance

vThe force of the ocean as it encounters the “chattel wounds” and stains of the ship;

v“the stains of gendered and reproductive bodies were among the first sites of colonization” (198); we can think of Jennifer Morgan here and the legal code of partus sequitur ventrem, how slavery was the enterprise of racial capitalism mobilizing colonialism at the expense of the enslaved reproductive body

v“At the same time, unnamed rebellions took place not in violent but in erotic resistance, in interpersonal relationships enslaved Africans formed with those imprisoned and oozing beside them” (198).

v“As fragmentarily recorded here, 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 slavers attempted to transform into brute matter” (199).

Queer Atlantic

“This Atlantic and these erotic relationships are neither metaphors nor sources of disempowerment. Instead, they are one way that fluid black bodies refused to accept that the liquidation of their social selves– the colonization of oceanic and body waters—meant the liquidation of their sentient selves.”

Yet regardless of whether intimate sexual contact took place between enslaved Africans in the Atlantic or after landing, relationships between shipmates read as queer relationships. Queer not in the sense of a “gay” or same-sex loving identity waiting to be excavated from the ocean floor but as a praxis of resistance. Queer is the sense of marking disruption to the violence of normative order and powerfully so: connecting in ways that commodified flesh was never supposed to, loving your own kind when your kind was supposed to cease to exist, forging interpersonal connections that counteract imperial desires for Africans’ living deaths (199).

Queer Atlantic: A methodology

“Formented in Atlantic cross-currents, black queerness itself becomes a crosscurrent through which to view hybrid, resistant subjectivities,

opaquely, not transparently.”

-- reclaiming the lost narratives/ stories of the enslaved through literary and archival imagination;

-- also conceptualizing them as sentient beings (not just objects, commodities, bodies without desire or relationships)

- Queerness and erotics make clear that desire and connection were established among the enslaved

Ana Lara’s Erzule’s Skirt Miriam and Micaela

v Tinsley notes how “Lara imagines the choppy surface of the Mona Straight as a window through which the “other side of the water”– the liminal space where ancestors and spirits reside in Vodoun cosmology– touches the realm of the living, mirroring the protagonists’ journey from the bootm of the ocean and through the lens of Micaela’s psychic visions.”

v La Mar is the black Atlantic… embodies and queer

“…. A material body who whispers in Micaela’s ear, whose waters she enters, whose depths she longs to explore, whose sexuality is neither overexposed nor hidden. I see her as an image of the queer black Atlantic not primarily because she arouses the sensuality of another feminine character, though, nor even because her appearance to Micaela performs a femme desire that needs no masculinist gaze (à la Benítez-Rojo) to validate its apparition” (201).

To think the black queer Atlantic, not only must its metaphors be materially informed; they must be internally discontinuous, allowing for differences and inequalities between situated subjects that are always already part of both diaspora and queerness. They must creatively figure what Rinaldo Walcott imagines as “a rethinking of community that might allow for different ways of cohering into some form of recognizable political entity . . . [where] we must confront singularities without the willed effort to make them cohere into oneness; we must struggle to make a community of singularities.” The black Atlantic is not just any ocean, and what is queer about its fluid amor is that it is always churning, always different even from itself.

Black queer theory as a critical methodological approach

Centering Centering blackness and queerness together and equally fluid in informing identity, narrative, and meaning;

Bridging Bridging and bringing to the fore that which might be lost in the currents of the ocean (recovering them from the bottoms of the ocean and moving with the currents);

Tracing Tracing the historical linkages of imperial desire and the resistance against structures of power