Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic, Queer Imaginings of The Middle Passage

'Ships in the Atlantic were mobile elements on which shifting spaces between fixed places merged.'

These were places where race, gender, nationality and sexuality were transfixed in space and time. Human bodies interacted without influence or scrutiny from external forces. On these journeys, relationships were forged, between Europeans and Africans on pirate and merchant ships. Some of these were Queer relationships between the same sexes.

Oceans and seas were important sites of exploration and wonder for differently situated people. These spaces offered no escape from inequalities. The changes in the sea currents brought about transformation and stripped away conceptions of race, sexuality and nationality as all aboard endeavored to survive as a collective. Crosscurrents of history were interwoven conceptual and maritime experiences.

'These experiences developed to transform radicalized, gendered, classed and sexualized statuses.'

The slave ships were spaces where the shackled experienced brutality and genocide. Through their collective resistance, unions were formed to escape the torment and torture they experienced. Slaves were confined in sex-segregated holds and captive African men and women conceived impassioned bonds as a means to survive and resist “the commoditization of their bought and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for their co-occupants on these ships.”

These spaces may have offered the space and time for these bodies to engage in intimate same- sex relations. This also affirms a long flowing history of black queerness. The experiences of those on the Black Atlantic middle passage expel the notion that black queerness it is a new fashion and post- modern invention borrowed and adapted from Euro - American Queer Theory. The Middle Passage journeys between Africa and the Caribbean and America’s were an important centre for the evolution of Black History.

Through their struggles for self- preservation and their defiance to captivity, it became a site of human bonding, beauty, sensuality, desire and resistance against oppression.