From Wikipedia: "'The Slave Ship,' originally titled 'Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on,' is a painting by the British artist J. M. W. Turner, first exhibited in 1840. In this classic example of a Romantic maritime painting, Turner depicts a ship, visible in the background, sailing through a tumultuous sea of churning water and leaving scattered human forms floating in its wake." Turner's painting demonstrates many of the themes represented in this project -- black (il)legibility, black (non)being as permanent sinking, a total climate of anti-blackness.

Blackness, Breath, and (Non)Being: Scenes of Illegibility

Kellen Aguilar Academia, Essay Leave a Comment

This project turns away from a positivistic discourse of black enfranchisement in order to attend to expressions of blackness as a condition of ontological death — that is, as an …