Saltwater Insurgency: Drowning and Gender during the Middle Passage

Abstract

This article resurfaces an enslaved female whom we encounter, drowning, in the archive of the Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie (MCC). To unfold a reading beyond the transcription of her commodified death, I investigate the five localities that conditioned her bodily inscription into history: the archive, the law, the ship, the ocean, and the womb. Traveling through these localities, I disclose, at once, the historical violence against black females through the transatlantic slave trade system and the excess black females proved to be to this very system. Excessive thus, black female lineage provides an alternative to white, patriarchic systems of relation.

Keywords

• dutch slavery
• hortense spillers
• archive
• gender
• drowning
• oceanic