UC Irvine

Contemporary art in all its forms can be a means for the exploration and expression of Blackness and the memorialization of Black humanity. This dissertation project addresses art related to the ocean and connected to expanded notions of Blackness and Black humanity. If the ocean can be said to have memory, then surely it is a forceful one, as vast as its spread over the majority of earth’s surface. During the period when the transatlantic trade in human beings from Africa was extant, millions of Africans did not survive the journey through the Middle Passage and thus remain in the ocean in “residence time” as the term is known in the scientific realm, and as illuminated by the scholar Christina Sharpe in her seminal work, “In The Wake: On Blackness and Being.” The ocean’s memory may contain some evidence of the life force of captive Africans, invisible to us in our contemporary scientific methods of discovery, but present nonetheless. Upon their entry into the sea depths they became part of its universe of sea creatures, microbes and its myriad life-generating processes that populate the ocean, some known to us but many as yet undiscovered. For people of African descent they are also our ancestors, and although they cannot ever be recovered in their complete physicality, there is great value in remembering them and accounting for their existence beyond the bare numerical statistics of the trade. They remain part of Blackness and Black identity, and of our unique history as human beings who facilitated the growth of western democracies with the sweat and suffering of their unpaid labor. We can memorialize them as a strategy against the contested spaces and fraught circumstances in which Black people exist, such that a reaffirmation of Black humanity remains ever necessary.