The Salt Bones explores the slave ship as a unique site for the formulation of modern ecological reason through close readings of eighteenth and nineteenth century abolitionist literature, and the contemporary creative works of poet M. NourbeSe Philip (Zong!), novelist Octavia Butler (the Parable duology), and director Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild). In these diverse texts, the slave ship emerges as a matrix of ecological relations and resource regulations that continues to discipline populations in the present. These regulations underwrite ongoing environmental racism and point to an ideological investment in reproducing ecological precarity. My research reveals that this same structure of ecological relationships, if read against the grain, enables an unexpected intimacy with nonhuman entities, both organic and inorganic. As such, black literature, broadly conceived, offers radical possibilities for an environmental ethics that critically supplements the prevailing environmentalist paradigms of sustainability, conservation, and preservation.

While environmental theorists have not fully explored black literature as environmental philosophy, I argue that the history of racial slavery is fundamental to understanding the hierarchical distinction of humanity from the natural world. The Salt Bones asks, therefore, if the violent legacies of slavery persist in the margins of our most operative concepts of nature. Beginning with M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 poetry volume, Zong!, I explore how the deprivations of the slave hold produce new ecological models for managing racial difference. I then examine the infamous eighteenth century illustrations of the British slave ship Brookes to uncover how the codes of scientific objectivity and realist representation extend the objectification of black bodies imposed by the violence of captivity. My third chapter traces the spaceship trope as a critical rehabilitation of the slave ship in Octavia Butler’s Parable series, and elucidates how the precepts of Afrofuturism disrupt the dynamics of anthropocentric historical time. Moving from literary to cinematic production, my final chapter analyzes how Benh Zeitlin’s 2012 feature film Beasts of the Southern Wild negotiates the ecological legacies of the slave ship through a multiracial politics of climate change resistance.

This dissertation intervenes in theories of reproduction that posit transformative kinship as inherently liberatory or redressive of structural violence. Instead, it interrogates the role that speculative imaginaries play in rearticulating the social order, specifically concerning antiblackness. The project considers emerging interdisciplinary conversations about race, kinship, and population through a reading of poiesis as a theorization of antiblack violence. This reading not only approaches antiblack violence as a sign or consequence of the reproduction of the social, but rather seeks to understand how antiblack violence potentiates and renews the processes and performances that set up social reproduction—how such violence continually solves for what, how, and who must be captured in order to resource forms of being and sustain its continued formation as lifeworld. In order to highlight the ways this particular reading of violence (or this violence as reading) engages the metaphors and materiality of pregnancy and birth, I term this preformative or subtendent antiblackness gestational violence. I argue that gestational violence—a metaphorical and (dis)embodying violence that brings being(s) to form both conceptually and conceptively—is the key creative force through which society renews its modes of relation and stabilizes the symbolic order. Without antiblack violence the material reproduction (of bodies, of being, of society) cannot continue. The title of the dissertation plays on the term life expectancy in order to note the thick grammatico-poetical join of antiblack violence, measures of aliveness, and processes of bringing life into being. The primary texts I choose to think with in this dissertation—Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred, David Marriott’s poem “Riverflesh,” Assata Shakur’s Assata: An Autobiography, and Donna Haraway’s poetic scholarly monograph Staying with the Trouble—elaborate these layers of life expectancy and allow me to parse the performativity of gestational violence.