Middle Passage

During an Anglo-American literature course, we especially focused on the Middle Passage and its authors, which led to this essay were I briefly explore Cugoano's and Equiano's autobiographies, along with Hayden's and Boone's poems. These texts are looked at through the lenses of various studies, above all Gilroy's and Du Bois'.

While historical studies of the Atlantic slave trade have amply demonstrated the magnitude of slave mortality during the Middle Passage, only recently have they started to examine how the captives might have endured and coped with this traumatic experience. Although it constitutes a major topos in African diasporic culture, the Middle Passage has only occasionally been represented directly and in details in novels and in films. This article examines three recent narratives of the Middle Passage, Fred D'Aguiar's novel Feeding the Ghosts (1998), Guy Deslauriers's film Passage du milieu (2000), and Stephanie Smallwood’s historical study Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (2007). Beyond their individual poetic, aesthetic, and scholarly qualities, what is most striking about these three texts is that they all use the figure of the living dead in order to explore the captives’ experience of the transatlantic journey. If the ghastly quality of the living dead powerfully captures the life-threatening material and physical conditions the captives endured on the voyage, its dual, liminal character also allows D'Aguiar, Deslauriers, and Smallwood to represent the metaphysical, psychological, social, and cultural journey they were forced to undertake. Through their use of the trope of the living dead, these three texts show that if death is indeed a central aspect of the experience of the Middle Passage, it impacts the captives in ways that go well beyond the issue of mortality.

Auf den Sklavenschiffen, die im 19. Jh. zwischen Afrika und Brasilien verkehrten, waren Köche für die Versorgung der Verschleppten und der Mannschaften zuständig. In den Häfen versorgten Verkäuferinnen sowohl die Versklavten als auch Arbeiterinnen und Arbeiter mit Nahrungsmitteln. Melina Teubner rückt in dieser kollektiven Biografie die Lebens- und Arbeitsbedingungen von Menschen in den Mittelpunkt, die sonst wenig im Fokus der Geschichtsschreibung stehen, ohne die die Logistik des Sklavenhandels jedoch nicht hätte organisiert werden können. Sie leistet damit einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Geschichte der »zweiten Sklaverei«, d.h. der Phase nach dem offiziellen Verbot des Sklavenhandels (1815/17 bzw. 1831 in Brasilien), sowie zu einer neueren Welt- und Globalgeschichte der Materialität von Schifffahrt, Ernährung und Arbeit.

Call for Papers
Globalized Peripheries
New Approaches to the Atlantic World 1680–1850
Date: July 5th–7th, 2018
Place: European University Viadrina
(Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany)

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• The exchange and movement of goods and people across
the oceans
• Merchants and merchant networks
• Consumption and material culture
• (Proto-)Industrial production and development
• Theories of political economy
• (Religious) Minorities as agents of trade
• Gender from a global perspective
• Theoretical and methodological approaches to “Atlantic
History” and/or “centers” and “peripheries”
Although the conference has no specific regional focus, we explicitly invite papers focused on the following “peripheries” of the Atlantic World and/or its historiography:
• Central and Eastern Europe
• West and West Central Africa
• South Asia

Proposals of ca. 300 words as well as a short CV (max. 1 page) should be sent to: globalized-peripheries@europa-uni.de
by October 15th, 2017.

We only accept proposals sent electronically to this e-mail address. Feel free to contact us at this address should you have any further questions. Please also indicate if you would like us to consider your proposal for publication.
We look forward to receiving your proposals!
Klaus Weber, Jutta Wimmler, Anka Steffen & Torsten dos Santos Arnold
www.kuwi.europa-uni.de/globalized-peripheries

In this paper, I confront Middle Passage memory, discussing how it haunts us in the present moment and to what effect. I understand Middle Passage memory as the social memory of the diasporic African collective experience of  the transatlantic Crossing,  and I propose that we live in the afterlife of slavery,  in that the catastrophe of the Crossing, and the legacies it represents, reverberate into the present moment. I identify these reverberations in the continuities of oppression in the current systems of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and global capitalism, which perpetrate the ongoing social, political, and economic construction of Black and Indigenous bodies as fungible, enslaveable, genocidable, and exiled from the category of human.

Co-researcher/author of content; Designer/Webmaster of website.

On August 23, 2015, a ceremony recognizing Boston as a Middle Passage port site will take place. This event is part of a larger effort by the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project (MPCPMP), an international, grassroots organization dedicated to commemorating the more than 2 million people who perished in the Middle Passage of the transatlantic human trade and the 10 million who survived. Partnering with historical and cultural societies, academic institutions, churches, visitor and tourist bureaus, and community organizations, the MPCPMP’s aim is to research, identify, and facilitate remembrance ceremonies at all ports of captive Africans’ entry during the 350 years of the transatlantic human trade in North, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Europe.