Ghosts from the Abyss. The imagination of new worlds in the sea-narratives of Afrofuturism

Abstract

This contribution aims to investigate a different ghostscape, shaped by the turbulent materiality of the sea: the abyss. A space of trauma and simultaneously of becoming, it is populated by spectral objects, traces, fragments, and, above all, ghosts. Looking into the abyss through the turbulent materiality of the sea (where the turbulence recalls Haraway’s trouble and the materiality a livingness of the world in which “matter comes to matter”), sea-related ghosts from the Black Atlantic to the Black Mediterranean emerge as absences-presences that matter. The emersion of sea-related new worlds is one of the main topics of Afrofuturism narratives: from the Drexciya world to the Novella The Deep (2019) by Rivers Solomon, ghosts of a past - which is never past - evoke the absences of our present cities and imagine possible alternative futures by staying with the turbulent materiality of the sea. What do these ghosts evoke and tell us? How the process of becoming-with happens at the bottom of the sea? How composting and regenerative processes take place in the abyss? Coming from the Abyss, these ghosts (re)emerge to question us about the past, the present and possible alternative futures sea-related, as a presence-absence between the visible and the invisible, the no longer and the not yet, and so a space of possibilities.