Abstract
This chapter examines how Black American experimental art forms deploy non-sovereign histories in tracing the relationships between possible pasts, inhabited presents, and imagined futures. The story of the eighteenth-century slave ship Zong is linked to the events of Hurricane Katrina, via the work of poet Claudia Rankine and filmmaker Cauleen Smith. These artists engage a poetics of the archive through multiple timescapes, rejecting the limits of dominant temporalities and bounded nation-state geographies. Their work posits modes of resistance to everyday and institutionalized racism, speculating about other ways of being, and insisting on radical imagination as a political project of aspiration towards social justice.
It’s disappointing to find out that the past is the present is the future. Nobody wants that. And yet, that’s what it is.
—Claudia Rankine (Guernica, 11/17/04).
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Further Reading
Oldham, James. 2007. “Insurance Litigation Involving the Zong and Other British Slave Ships, 1780–1807.” Journal of Legal History 28 (3): 299–318.
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Walters, W.W. (2017). “Still in the Difficulty”: The Afterlives of Archives. In: Johnson, E., Brezault, É. (eds) Memory as Colonial Capital. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50577-0_10
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