UC Santa Barbara

A key concept in critical media infrastructure studies is infrastructural invisibility, which means technological systems go unnoticed by users until there is an unplanned break, disruption, or malfunction in optimal operation. This study complicates the notion of invisibility by examining the often-overlooked infrastructures of Black body trafficking in the 19th century Atlantic World to consider an instance in space and time when the optimal functioning of infrastructures depended upon the planned excommunication of unwanted (Black) bodies and what this integrated operational exclusion—not a break or disruption—means for the concept of path dependency or grafting. Black Cells of Ships utilizes an interdisciplinary case study method to focus on an infrastructure of ships sponsored by the American Colonization Society (ACS) to make the case that technology mediates Black humanity, shaping who belongs in the category of the human with rights such as citizenship, freedom of mobility, and land protections. To answer questions about the ACS infrastructure, the ACS archival documents from approximately 1818 to 1847 were examined and visits to historical sites were conducted.The chapters of Black Cells of Ships examine the mediating processes that enabled the excommunication of free Blacks carried out by an infrastructure of ships. Chapter One, “Infraction: In-Between,” explores how the ACS constructed free Blacks as an infraction, helping the planned exclusion of Black bodies via infrastructure to go unnoticed. Chapter Two, “Refraction: To Excommunicate” maps out the mediations, meaning the specific logical processes, of the ACS infrastructure that facilitated the removal of free Blacks from the United States, the displacement of Indigenous Liberians, and the creation of a new place called Liberia. The third chapter, “Contraction: Black Translucence,” examines specific ways infrastructures of Black body trafficking in the 19th century and electronic signal traffic in the 20th and 21st centuries share an infrastructural purpose. And finally, the fourth chapter, “Extraction: In Dark Medias Res,” investigates how media constitute generative settings for the construction and representation of racialized subject positions.