On Reading: “The Sea and The Land: Biopower and Visuality From Slavery to Katrina”
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1776-1851), Slave Ship: (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhon Coming On) 1840. Oil on canvas. 90.8 x 122.6 cm.
Mirzoeff opens his essay with a nagging question, “What have we learned post-Katrina,” which serves as an umbrella inquiry for a series of concerns:
How must we imagine and understand climate change through cultural lenses?
How does the sea impact human sciences, particularly as a material agent, and a location of both marked and contested power?
How does the sea function mythically and spiritually, as both a threat and aid to life (134)?
Essentially, Mirzoeff is mapping the “intersection of [biopower’s] central concerns with “race” and sovereignty,” and the “biopolitical” implications of the sea, or the natural world (134). As Mirzoeff opens and proceeds to develop his ideas, he first takes issue with Foucault’s idea “that biopower was a modern innovation (134).” Mirzoeff argues that biopower, and the need to “produce and accumulate life,” was built into the development of the Western world on the back of chattel slavery (134). This premise is further developed through the visuality of both slavery and Katrina events, and allows Mirzoeff to arrive at a critical evaluation of how the ocean and the natural world intersects with cultural concerns of race and subjectivity.
I find myself most interested in the intersection of the natural world, race, and power. Culturally, there exists a complicated relationship between Black Americans and nature as a direct implication of chattel slavery. As a poet, Black woman, and naturalist I often realize and experience this tension when my eco-poetry is consumed without the same vigor or enthusiasm as poetry (either my own or written by other Black women) confronting issues of race, gender, or power politics.
Amidst the current administration’s assault and violence on Black and brown bodies, a question has emerged in the poetic community—How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This, as written by poet Hanif Abdurraqib in a series of poems with the same title. This question, posed to Abdurraqib by a white viewer at a reading, assumes Black people are not concerned with the natural world, are not afforded the luxury to pastoralize life, and that the current state of race relations is not grounded in biopolitics that historically terrorize Black lives.
If I may, I’d like to reframe Mirzoeff’s inquiry, and nest his evaluation of Katrina events under a larger, more profound umbrella—What have we learned post-slavery about the nexus of the natural world, sovereignty and subjectivity? Katrina, I argue, harnessed the systematic implications of slavery and its ensuing power politics.
Mirzoeff introduced me to Res nullius, in this essay, which is the idea that the sea was considered “a nothing thing,” subject to conflicting and contradictory sovereign claims” during the early modern European colonialism period (135). This allowed the sea to become a violent, circulating pool to transport and dispose of African bodies. Rightly, Mirzoeff identifies this conflicting and contradictory act of using a free body of water to transport unfree human bodies (136). Thus, this watery highway became a watery grave for African bodies, and it is believed this Atlantic waterway possess spiritual and mythical vengeance.
As “Biopower and Visuality” progresses, Mirzoeff recalls this vengeance in the characterization and visuality of the sea in art depicting slavery, and documentaries covering the Katrina events.
I find this analysis engaging because I am able to trace ideas that interconnect critical analysis of slave narratives/literature, as well as modern social criticism of Black bodies and nature/natural bodies. Mirzoeff uses art created by Joseph Mallord William Turner to observe what he calls the “immersive viewpoint” of slavery. The art utilizes the sea as a character and fully immerses the viewer as close-up spectator and arguably participant of slavery at sea. I liken this act of humanizing slavery to the abolitionist intentions of slave narratives—“to reveal the truth of slavery and so to bring about its abolition (Olney 154).”
As Mirzoeff explores Spike Lee’s documentary, When the Levees Broke, his analysis echoes the humanizing act of slave narratives, although in a slightly different manner. Lee’s documentary voices one central theme, in my eyes, “I survived, and I exist.” This thematic foundation shares the same thematic grounds of slave narratives,
“the argument of the slave narratives is that the events narrated are factual and truthful and that they all really happened to the narrator, but this is a second-stage argument; prior to the claim of truthfulness is the simple, existential claim: “I exist.” Photographs, portraits, signatures, authenticating letters all make the same claim: “this man exists. (Olney 155).”
Our understanding and ability to trace the connection and the onus between these two different events (Atlantic slave trade and Katrina events), allows us to greater understand the location of the Katrina events in biopower, biopolitics, and struggles of race.
From this place, we can revisit Abdurraqib’s poems, and other media by Black folk interacting with the natural world, and arrive more capable of tracing the complicated relationship. We cannot assume this complication means an inability for the Black woman to pastoralize the ground under her feet, or the Black man’s inability to capture the sea licking his heels, but perhaps we must allow ourselves to acknowledge the spiritual and mythological connections between Black Americans and the environment.
Works Cited:
Abdurraqib, Hanif. “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like
This.” 4 July 2018. www.poets.org. Web. 4 Feb. 2019.
Lee, Spike. “When The Levees Came.” YouTube, 22 Oct. 2008. Web. 4 Feb. 2019.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “The Sea and the Land: Biopower and Visuality From Slavery to
Katrina.” The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. London: Routledge, 2013. 134-147. Print.
Olney, James. “I Was Born”: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as
Literature.” The Slave’s Narrative. Eds. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. 148-175. Print.
Turner, Joseph Mallord William. Slave Ship: (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhon
Coming On). 1840. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Web. 4 Feb. 2018.
https://www.mfa.org/collections/object/slave-ship-slavers-throwing-overboard-the-dead-and-dying-typhoon-coming-on-31102