The Black Aquatic

This essay argues that thinking through black diasporic life as birthed through a unique and ongoing relationship with bodies of water (sea, oceans, rivers, creeks) can and does aid in analyses of contemporary art and its engagement with black subjectivity. I am concerned with how bodies of water are foundationally formative of blackness. And secondarily I pursue how this foundational aspect of blackness is both an act of representation worth engaging contemporary art and also a limit on what some representations of contemporary art can do to undo the brutal history of the aquatic birth of blackness and its perpetuation.