“The Inhabitants of the Deep:” Water and the Material Imagination of Blackness

“The Inhabitants of the Deep:” Water and the Material Imagination of Blackness by Jonathan Howard Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: __________________________ Nathaniel Mackey, Chair __________________________ Frederick Moten __________________________ Priscilla Wald __________________________ J. Kameron Carter Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 ABSTRACT “The Inhabitants of the Deep:” Water and the Material Imagination of Blackness by Jonathan Howard Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: __________________________ Nathaniel Mackey, Chair __________________________ Frederick Moten __________________________ Priscilla Wald __________________________ J. Kameron Carter An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 Copyright by Jonathan-David Mackinley Howard 2017 Abstract And Moses said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” If the biblical Exodus begins with Moses turning to see the bush burning, yet not consumed, my dissertation turns aside to see that “sign and wonder” which arguably founds the kindred exodus of the African Diaspora. That great, if impossible, sight which Olaudah Equiano beheld from the deck of a slave ship: the slaves underwater, yet not dead, those he bafflingly names the “inhabitants of the deep.” In a narrative explicitly committed to telling the truth about the horrors of the African slave trade, why does Equiano use “inhabitants,” a word typically reserved for the living, to describe those we know to be dead? Moreover, how can he possibly claim to “env[y] them the freedom they enjoyed?” 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 life and freedom. Compelled by Equiano’s miraculous vision of life and freedom underwater, Inhabitants of the Deep undertakes a black ecocritical study of the trope of water in African Diasporic literature. Over the course of five chapters, I elucidate how black literature recursively figures “how it feels to be a problem,” to borrow W.E.B. Du Bois’ oft-cited phrase, as a crisis of having no ground originating with and haunted by the waters of Middle Passage. Take Bigger Thomas in Native Son, for instance, whose fear rendered his legs “like water.” Or the black folk in Invisible Man, who shoot up from the South with a gait like “that of deep sea divers suffering from the bends.” Or even Emmett Till (or Trayvon Martin more recently), whose Tallahatchie River grave belies the radical iv exclusion of blackness from modern subjectivity and its constitutional obsession with the right to “stand your ground.” In black studies, perhaps the most influential delineation of the “problem” of being black is Orlando Patterson’s notion of “social death.” On the one hand, inhabitation of the deep in the texts I examine registers this radical exclusion from human society. But on the other hand, I also argue that, due to the seemingly conflicting demands of a responsibility to bear witness to how we are weighed in the water, relatively little scholarly attention is given to the emancipatory and ecological ends to which black folks also, in the words of the old negro spiritual, wade in the water. Employing ecocriticism’s broader analytic of the ecological, rather than an exclusively human notion of the social, this study argues for the ecological and revolutionary significance of such wading. Far from social death, I posit that inhabitation of the deep, when recognized as exclusion from a social configuration of the human that is itself asocial and anti- ecological, actually uniquely positions blackness to think and enact a more genuinely social, because also ecological, life. Besides outlining a genealogy of black wading in the water, this study primarily contends that such wading is performed most significantly as an act of imagination. One that historically derives from African captives’ momentous encounter with the ocean precipitated by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Although Africans undoubtedly possessed their own conceptions of water prior to the Atlantic crossing, historian Stephanie Smallwood has explained that “the landless realm of the deep ocean did not figure in precolonial West African societies.” Thus, I argue that the Middle Passage required African slaves to perform a terrific feat of imagination. Theirs was the historical labor of v 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 land. Inhabitants of the Deep looks at the black expressive traditions produced in the wake of and profoundly informed by this imaginative feat. Thus, beyond merely figuring a “problem,” as yet another sign of black abjection or social death, I argue that water also yields the feature element of what I call, following Gaston Bachelard, the material imagination of blackness. This is the water-wading imagination that I understand to be at work when Dionne Brand writes in Map to the Door of No Return, “water is the first thing in my imagination,” or when M NourbeSe Phillip writes in Zong!, “always what is going on seems to be about water.” Over the course of three chapters, in a project both multi-generic and interdisciplinary in scope, I outline the creative history of this water- wading imagination as it may be detected in black fiction (Chapter 1), drama (Chapter 2), and photography (Chapter 3). Ultimately, I demonstrate how the water-induced problem of having no ground has simultaneously occasioned a longstanding meditation on the physiopoetic properties of water. And this meditation, I argue, has given rise to a black poetic and ethical imagination that inspires literary creation as well as enactments of black social life that, in their refusal of solid ground, embrace a more ecological and entangled vision of life and freedom. BROADER SIGNFICANCE By taking up water in this way, my dissertation participates in the recent “oceanic turn” of the environmental humanities as exemplified in the emerging subfield of vi “oceanic studies” and books like Dan Brayton’s Shakespeare’s Ocean. Included in this turn is a critique of what scholars have labeled the “terracentrism” or “green bias” of the environmental humanities, which are terms meant to express the field’s over- preoccupation with land at the expense of a general neglect of what Herman Melville called the “watery part of the world.” Brayton, in particular, argues that this neglect stems from a longstanding cultural status of the sea in the West as an ahistorical realm of disorder and chaos or what he alternatively describes, in a manner stunningly similar to the cultural status of blackness in the West, as “a void forever evincing a hostile alterity” and “lying eternally outside of human social constructs.” While I largely affirm this critique, which serves to amplify, by extending to the sea, ecocriticism’s originating critique of a neglect of the environment at large, I do so by calling attention to the unacknowledged ways in which black literature’s ongoing meditation on water speaks to and anticipates the oceanic turn currently underway in the environmental humanities. Furthermore, I arrive at this important critical conversation from the vantage point of the writings and voices of those who hardly enjoyed the inside of humanity’s social contracts to begin with. What populates the constitutive outside of humanity’s social contracts is not only the ocean, as the hyper-marginalized sector of an already marginal environment, but also blackness. Thus, in order to be thought completely, I propose that blackness and the environment must be thought together, since it is their colluding degradation and exclusion which founds modernity’s dominant configuration of the social. For this reason, I turn in Inhabitants of the Deep to a study of the material vii imagination of blackness. Born, as I claim, of the material realities of the “lived experience of blackness,” and that experience’s encapsulating likeness to an experience of water, the material imagination of blackness has long understood that the Earth consists of both land and sea, and set about the labor of imagining life on Earth accordingly. August Wilson captures this exact insight when he writes in Gem, “Some know about the land. Some know about the water. But there is some that know about the land and the water. They got both sides of it.” Spared neither the vicissitudes of nature’s greens nor its blues, the material imagination of blackness merits critical attention precisely as that which harbors the knowledge of “both sides of it.” In the context of environmentalism’s growing attentiveness to “the watery part of the world,” its significance should be understood in relation and distinction to an otherwise impoverished western environmental or planetary imagination that to increasingly devastating effects has disproportionately imagined, with respect to land, life on a planet overwhelmingly made of water. viii Dedication for my father, who baptized me in the atlantic in the name of

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