From Where Do We Draw Breath? Air's Absence and Blackness
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Amid an ongoing global pandemic that targets the respiratory system, access to air, to breath, and to life has become a metaphor for ongoing systemic inequalities and exclusions. It is a moment, as Achille Mbembe notes, that renders breath a "fundamental right to existence" that cannot be "confiscated and thereby eludes all sovereignty" (62). Yet, as the fundamental ground on which human life is premised, breath has—during the transatlantic slave trade, through regimes of colonialism and imperialism, and continuing through the present in state-sanctioned murders of Black women, men, and children by the police—functioned historically as a site of racial terror. In other words, the deprivation and weaponization of breath and air often constellate at the Black body. Kimberly Bain observes that Black breathlessness is nothing new, and that its violence echoes repeatedly across the capture of slaves, the hold of the ship, and the repeated forms and structures that deprive Black people globally of air and breath (241). In this essay, I interrogate how the Black body has been figuratively and literally deprived of air. I compare how air's absence is structured into the architecture of the transatlantic slave trade with the narrativization (and later spectacularization) of African stowaways on airplanes. By focusing on the language of the stowaway as accruing a racializing index that bears the traces of transatlantic slavery, I argue that at the foundations of airlessness and breathlessness is the fact of blackness, an ever-expanding archive that converges at the global border.
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Air and its absence structure the unfolding of Black existence in an anti-Black world. Thinking the air as preeminent in forming a genealogy of Blackness means interrogating how air is harnessed to manage the environment and conditions of captivity during transatlantic slavery, as well as how the repeated deprivation of air from Black people in the "afterlife of slavery," is a primary motif through which a global Black condition can be animated and theorized (Hartman 9). Eva Horn argues that by shifting our analysis of air from "mere mass" to "medium," air is expanded to incorporate the "movement and perception (hearing, sight, and smell), [End Page 187] as well as communication, travel, situatedness, and dislocation…and climate" (Horn 9). Horn posits the possibility of a different epistemology of air which advances a kind of simultaneous dilation and contraction of the traditional scales of analyses, from communities, nation-states, and continents to the body, speech, and breath. In this way, glossing over the air or forgetting the air, as Luce Irigaray accuses Western metaphysics of doing, also glosses over how our access, or lack of access, to air has been a catalyst for the creation of narrative and representational tools, forms, and rituals that shape how people live and die. Irigaray shows the air to be the "unthought of being" in Western metaphysics, by depicting its prevalence in Eastern metaphysics and practices such as yoga and meditation (14). What Irigaray forgets, however, is that air, like other seemingly universal concepts, is "disfigured by blackness" (Douglass and Wilderson 119). Blackness destabilizes or forces into being a dis-ease with universalities that sideline the immensity of slavery and its ongoing innovations. This is what Saidiya Hartman (in a conversation with Frank Wilderson III) calls "the position of the unthought," a position occupied by the slave (185). If air and the slave are both 'unthought,' then conventional analysis must be viewed through the prism of Blackness to account for the intersection of air and the grammars of slavery. Therefore, a study of air or breath must exceed (not overlook) the scientific discourse on atmosphere and the related anthropogenic effects manifested in the study of weather and/ or air quality.
One approach to air that understands it as a medium is Ghanaian poet Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang's poetry collection, Cape Coast Castle. In the collection, the architectural structure of transatlantic slavery—the slave castle with its underground, cavernous structures—are depicted as amplifying the violent mechanisms and techniques through which captured Africans were funneled into a category distinct from their captors. This transmogrification, where enslaved Africans were...
