From Where Do We Draw Breath? Air's Absence and Blackness

Abstract

Amid an ongoing global pandemic that targets the respiratory system, access to air, to breath, and to life has become a metaphor for ongoing systemic inequalities and exclusions. It is a moment, as Achille Mbembe notes, that renders breath a “fundamental right to existence” that cannot be “confiscated and thereby eludes all sovereignty” (62). Yet, as the fundamental ground on which human life is premised, breath has—during the transatlantic slave trade, through regimes of colonialism and imperialism, and continuing through the present in state-sanctioned murders of Black women, men, and children by the police—functioned historically as a site of racial terror. In other words, the deprivation and weaponization of breath and air often constellate at the Black body. Kimberly Bain observes that Black breathlessness is nothing new, and that its violence echoes repeatedly across the capture of slaves, the hold of the ship, and the repeated forms and structures that deprive Black people globally of air and breath (241). In this essay, I interrogate how the Black body has been figuratively and literally deprived of air. I compare how air’s absence is structured into the architecture of the transatlantic slave trade with the narrativization (and later spectacularization) of African stowaways on airplanes. By focusing on the language of the stowaway as accruing a racializing index that bears the traces of transatlantic slavery, I argue that at the foundations of airlessness and breathlessness is the fact of blackness, an ever-expanding archive that converges at the global border.