Abstract

This thesis examines Black South African artist Mohau Modisakeng’s three-channel video Passage (2017) and Black American artist Ayana V. Jackson’s photographic self-portraiture series Take Me to the Water (2019) as contemporary Afrofuturist reimaginings of the Middle Passage of the Transatlantic slave trade. In this thesis, I draw on Trinidad-born poet and writer Dionne Brand’s concept of ancestral Black water, understandings of symbolic dress, and Black American poet and writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ notion of submerged perspectives to suggest that Modisakeng and Jackson foreground repair, or healing, in their Afrofuturist contemporary art. The artists’ reimaginings of the Middle Passage are examined in relation to the scholarship of Black geographies and women and gender studies scholar Katherine McKittrick and what I call the “reparative imaginary,” a framework that enables a reading of Passage and Take Me to the Water as works that hold the potential towards healing from intergenerational cultural and historical trauma. This framework is informed by British Ghanian writer and Afrofuturist theorist Kodwo Eshun’s conceptualization of chronopolitics, or Afrofuturist historical intervention, Black diaspora literature and culture scholar Christina Sharpe’s concepts of brutal and liberatory imaginations, and ethical considerations offered by Black American literature scholar and historian Saidiya Hartman and Black diaspora and culture studies scholar Rinaldo Walcott. Modisakeng and Jackson foreground submerged perspectives in their Afrofuturist reimaginings of the Middle Passage and in doing so imagine freedom, or an otherwise futurity, from increasing anti-Black racism and violence, for African or Black diasporic persons.