Ghosts from the Abyss: the imagination of new worlds in the sea-narratives of Afrofuturism

Abstract

This contribution aims to investigate a different ghostscape, shaped by the turbulent materiality of the sea: the abyss. A space of trauma and simultaneously of becoming, it is populated by spectral ob- jects, traces, fragments, and, above all, ghosts. Édouard Glissant,1 a major thinker of the abyss, identi- fied it with the space of loss opened by the Middle Passage in the Atlantic Ocean during the slave trade. Paul Gilroy2 will name this space The Black Atlantic: a space of violence of the rising capitalistic system and its colonial routes, a space of memory of Black subjectivities. Attending the wake3 that reproduces this trauma along the sea lines, another such abysmal space is, today, The Black Mediter- ranean: a space of violence along the migrants’ routes, a space of (re)generation of sea-related Black counter-practices, counter-narratives, and counter-subjectivities.4 With this as a background, we can see how abysses are not signified by an absence, but on the contrary by a counter-presence: since “drowning is not ashes, water is not earth, and bodies disappear differently”,5 the ghosts inhabiting the abysses are not mere abstract or metaphorical figures, but presences-absences made of a differ- ent materiality: they are an “intermediate presence between the visible and the invisible, the real and the unreal, the past and the present, the conscious and the unconscious”: such “absences can have a subjectivity of their own, an agency, a regime of perception that makes them de facto presences”.