Inhuman Kinship at Insensible Depths

Abstract

The Afrofuturist mythology of Drexciya rewrites violent colonial histories of dispossession, imagining submarine utopias in which the descendants of enslaved Africans live outside colonial orders. With this submersion, the Drexciyan mythos offers creative visions of oceanic futures—the result of climate change. I therefore ask; what might be learned from Drexciyan relations to the Earth? I first probe Drexciyan–Earth relations through Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019), in which Drexciyans espouse a mode of stewardship over the Earth. Taking up a critical problematization of the possibility of relating to an inhuman Earth vastly greater than ourselves, I explore how The Deep navigates the incommensurability between inhuman nature and human/Drexciyan being. I argue that The Deep ’s Drexciyans are constituted across orders of in/non/human matter, an insight I carry over to Ellen Gallagher’s painting Bird in Hand (2006). There, I find a kinship relation with inhuman matter that accommodates the radical incommensurability of the Earth: I articulate this kinship as a transcorporeal mutuality of be(com)ing with the Earth. Whilst recognizing the asymmetry between their own existence and the Earth’s, Drexciyans insist on a difficult kinship with it. Such kinship relations critique Western practices of extractivism, and probe other praxes of inhabiting the Earth.