Bodily Wreckage, Economic Salvage and the Middle Passage

Abstract

In spring 2018 a digitally manipulated seascape flowed around London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery. Sondra Perry’s installation Typhoon Coming On (2018) animates a part of J. M. W. Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840), a painting depicting the Zong massacre of 1781 where the captain of a British ship threw 133 enslaved people overboard in pursuit of economic compensation through the ship’s insurance policy. As a maritime catastrophe that reveals anti-blackness and finance capital to be co-constitutive phenomena, the Zong massacre provides Perry with the means to contemplate the Atlantic as a site for the transformation of bodily wreckage into economic salvage under the commercial logic of racial capitalism. In this article I explore Perry’s remediation of Turner’s painting by thinking about the co-choreography of bodies and ocean in each of these seascapes. In her refusal to stage the bodily wreckage of the Middle Passage, Perry presents the transatlantic slave trade not as an exceptional event punctuating the history of seafaring but as the very foundation of capitalist modernity. Responding to concepts developed by Édouard Glissant, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter and Christina Sharpe, I consider the ways Perry critiques Turner’s depiction of the slave ship’s bodily wreckage and his attendant white abolitionist morality, and instead remediates the scene of the Zong massacre around the whispered presences of Black liberation.

Notes

1 For representative instances of such framings of the Zong incident see: Baucom (2005); Philip (2008); and Sharpe (2016).

2 Perry’s exhibition inhabits the square architecture of the original building but not Zaha Hadid’s undulating extension of 2012.

3 At the time of writing, the British press reported the Serpentine Sackler Gallery’s foundational economic relationship to another chemical industry bound up with racial capitalism. In April 2019 the Serpentine announced that it would no longer take funding from the Sackler family who had donated a £5.5m grant for the opening of the Sackler Gallery in 2013 and who are the primary owners of Purdue Pharma, “the Connecticut-based pharmaceutical company that manufactures the highly addictive opioid painkiller OxyContin” linked with the U.S. opioid epidemic (Michalska and McGivern, 2019).

4 See Stanger (2016) for a discussion of this interplay as a defining feature of ‘choreography’. For a history of the shifting definition of that term, see Foster (2011: 15–72).

5 Hartman has shown that ‘the slave is the object or the ground that makes possible the existence of the bourgeois subject and, by negation or contradistinction, defines liberty, citizenship, and the enclosures of the social body’ (1997: 62). My discussion of Perry’s work is indebted to the model developed by Hartman for thinking about the afterlives of slavery.

6 For a summary of the incident and its ensuing trial, see Philip (2008: 189). The painting’s historical subject is debated by Costello (2012), who draws on existing arguments that the subject of Turner’s painting was a later historical phenomenon: that of pursuit and jettison after the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807.

7 For a discussion of the painting’s history in relation to the abolitionist context, see McCoubrey (1998).

8 This problem of bearing witness to Black suffering as strategy for moral self-composition is in some ways the inverse to that problem articulated by Hartman when she asks: ‘how does one give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence of the benumbing spectacle or contend with the narcissistic identification that obliterates the other?’ (1997: 4).