Situating Blackness along the Middle Passage epistemology fails to account for international dynamics and risks undermining the historical complexity of Black life.

When interpellated through the Middle Passage epistemology, Blackness has a limited set of qualitative values or denotations that link it to the events in that epistemology such as the commitment to collective and individual struggle, “racial uplift,” and the maintenance of strong communities through “traditional” or heteropatriarchal family structures. More generally, the Middle Passage epistemology (like other established Black linear progress or antiprogress narratives—e.g., Afrocentrism, PanAfricanism, Negritude, Afropessimism)10 also links all Black collectives across the Diaspora to the experience of racism and the need to overcome it—so how can Ramses II be “Black”? Even further, what does it mean for us to claim him as “Black”? It is hard to interpellate Ramses (or any of the other African kings, queens, leaders, intellectuals, politicians, scientists, etc., whose physiognomy we would acknowledge as stereotypically “Black”) within the qualitative definition of Middle Passage Blackness as making common cause with African Americans—or any other “Black” community fighting racism and seeking socioeconomic and political equality in the African Diaspora. In attempting to interpellate Ramses within this definition, we must produce Blackness as a fixed identity that transcends time and space; through this, Ramses no longer belongs to his own spacetime but retroactively becomes a denigrated “Negro” who must combat his oppression. A paradox or—as Massey terms it, “a dichotomous result”—now confronts us: was Ramses II a Black freedom fighter or a ruler of extraordinary and largely unquestioned power, one of the greatest and most oppressive in the history of Egyptian pharaohs?

It is the qualitative definition of Black progress that creates this dichotomy, a paradox that then “empties out” all meaning in qualitative collapse. The attempt to interpellate Ramses II through a Black progress narrative exposes the continuing attempt and subsequent failure of the progress narrative to interpellate Ramses. He is Black because he is a Black African, but he is not Black, because neither “Black” nor “African” operated as identities in Ramses’s spacetime. Ramses II’s life speaks to the greatness of African empires, but his unapologetic use of massive slave labor should “expel” him from Black progressive membership, the same way in which some discourses attempt to expel Blacks whose actions deliberately harmed other Blacks.

While we should perhaps not lose sleep over the “odd individual” whose terrible behaviors bar him, her, or them from full or perhaps even partial mention in a Black progress narrative, there are other Black individuals who are barred from mention who have not acted against the principle of striving for collective progress. This dichotomy also threatens to create interpellative problems for Blacks who, unlike the Egyptian pharaoh, move across the Atlantic at the same time as millions of Black Africans are being sailed to and sold into the Americas, but not in the same directions, veering away from our progress narrative.

Black slaves transported outside of the Americas to Europe, India, and elsewhere do not retain a collective identity. They are sold individually and disappear into households, perhaps factories, fields, or country roads and city streets, intersecting with populations at large. From the point of view of Black linear progress narratives, progress has not been achieved because the collective has evanesced (and is therefore unable to achieve its goal of overcoming racism), or read another way, their histories have become irrelevant to the collective historical theme of overcoming racism. Qualitatively speaking, it appears difficult if not impossible to interpellate Blackness using a Black Atlantic linear progress narrative in a significant and lasting way. In “The World Is All of One Piece: The African Diaspora and Transportation to Australia,” which is included in Ruth Simms Hamilton’s book Routes of Passage, Cassandra Pybus reprises a version of Sidney Mintz’s question about the qualitative limits of Black Atlantic studies:

A transnational historical consciousness and a capacity to encompass experience in disparate time and space are great strengths of African diaspora studies. In so far as there is a weakness, it is that the Atlantic world remains the locus of discussion. While some attention has begun to drift toward the Indian Ocean, less scholarship has been directed toward the distant Pacific. . . . In the diaspora at the detailed penal transportation records we can find information about the African end of the eighteenth century that is very hard to come by elsewhere and that points in directions in which historians may not otherwise look.11

Pybus understands that her topic is framed by African Diaspora studies yet constrained by its “Atlantic focus”; she then observes that despite this swirl of scholarly activity in the Atlantic, there is a “drift” and “direction” toward the Indian Ocean and the “distant Pacific.” This passage draws a connecting line moving horizontally (well, south by southeast) from the moment of the American Revolution in the Middle Passage timeline to other moments in those kingdoms and empires that border the Indian Ocean and, more specifically, to the moment of the British penal colony of Australia.

By moving us horizontally into the Pacific, Pybus traces the journey of those (primarily) U.S. Blacks who allied with the defeated British and accompanied them on their return to England. Once there, the promised support from the Crown never materialized, and many of these former soldiers, spies, and support staff found themselves on the London streets. These (primarily) men would have been in competition with an already burgeoning class of the dispossessed filling the streets of London and other industrial centers. As Robert Hughes argues in his monumental history of the settling of white Australia, The Fatal Shore, land grabs by the aristocracy and the replacement of cottage industries with large industrialized factories deprived farmers, laborers, and urban workers of their former careers as well as prospects for new ones (many machines, such as looms, required fewer adult workers). Theft, especially with the poor now rubbing shoulders with the wealthy in crowded urban centers, skyrocketed, and Parliament responded with deeply punitive measures; to steal a bit of ribbon or bread could send you to prison or heavy labor or, most fearful of all, condemn you to “transport” (to a British penal colony). With the American colonies no longer available for convicts, Britain turned to its recently neglected “discovery” of Australia as a convenient replacement, and so white and Black Britons, along with a few U.S. and Caribbean Blacks, found themselves transported as part of the First Fleet settlers.

Pybus’s second horizontal reading comes, counterintuitively, mostly through records created by hierarchies such as court, maritime, colonial, and penal records, due to the paucity of “horizontal” archives (correspondence between peers, diaries, etc.). Pybus, not unlike Hughes in The Fatal Shore, constructs a horizontal narrative of these Black convicts and settlers through (unavoidably) mostly vertical archival sources: state, judicial, colonial, and penal records that read these human beings as mere numbers filling ships, accepting punishment, and perhaps enriching the Crown through forced labor. To an even greater extent than Hughes, Pybus works to retrieve the very multivalent human experiences behind these records of discipline and punishment, to see the interactions denoted, denounced, and pronounced through their eyes, so to speak, looking out horizontally rather than down from the (at least figurative) heights of the judge’s bench and foreman’s lash.

Yet despite these two horizontal readings, qualitative collapse looms here because Pybus has framed this history as a horizontal connection to what is ultimately a vertical framework that finds meaning in the struggle against racism. Pybus’s Black Founders offers us a notable exception to our assumptions about Blackness, but in her work, as in other histories she mentions, Blackness evanesces as the convicts and settlers perhaps married, procreated, and most certainly died without moving a coherent Black Atlantic collective forward in its quest for equality in a majority white society. Or, rather more complicatedly, in Black Founders Blackness evanesces into either the white Australian population or the Australian Aboriginal population, in the latter case an indigenous Blackness. Most likely reflecting on this, Pybus herself does not think that this discovery of Australia’s “Black founders” radically changes the history of the African Diaspora or Australia: “My point is not that this cohort of convicts is especially significant to the history of Australia—though it certainly challenges the conventional reading of the colonial experience—but to examine what it can tell us about the wider world.”12

If we add Epiphenomenal time to our Black Atlantic frame, however, we can avoid the qualitative collapse that (re)produces these histories as interesting in their own right but marginal to our understanding of Black Atlantic history. Interpellated through Epiphenomenal time, the Blackness in Black Founders first changes a person’s relationship to Blackness and indigeneity. Rather than simply “losing” indigenous status once captured and then sold, Blackness intersects twice more with indigeneity, and on two continents: North America and Australia. In both cases, indigenous peoples sometimes helped Black slaves escape, the latter often marrying into specific American Indian nations. Middle Passage U.S. Blackness now shares a spacetime through indigeneity and raises questions about Central and South American intersections (such as the Garifunas of Nicaragua).13 One might also see a third, more controversial intersection, between U.S. Blacks who “returned” to establish the free state of Liberia and the indigenous populations who found themselves oppressed in the resulting socioeconomic and political hierarchy. The qualitative value of Pybus’s Blackness now meaningfully intersects with the Americas but is not swallowed by it, because the frame is horizontally comparative rather than vertically subordinating.

The intersection of Blackness with indigeneity in the Americas, Australia, and Africa also subverts the notion of a “purely” diasporic Blackness, even within the progress narrative itself, because the latter honors indigeneity as the “origin” to which the collective must eventually return. In this moment of interpellation, origin/home is achieved not necessarily through return but through intersections with other “first nations” in the Atlantic and Pacific. Even further, we can see how Blackness, in intersecting with indigeneity when (formally) seeking “return,” as in Liberia, might produce not egalitarian unity but instead oppressive hierarchy.

Black Founders also provides us with perhaps unheard of dimensions of Blackness that, once recognized, might usefully connect to other possible spacetimes that share this dimension. As noted before, the “Atlantic Blacks” who arrived with the First Fleet and on subsequent convict ships experienced a range of lives or careers that cannot be summed up through one collective trajectory, especially that of the progress narrative. Pybus shows that in our present moment of reading, Blackness becomes ambiguous in its meaning in these early colonies. On the one hand, racial designations are clearly marked in the official records, but unlike in the Americas, socioeconomic and political castes are not created to wholly segregate them. There are many marriages one would designate as “interracial,” but even if one could access some understanding of how “interracial marriage” would translate in this spacetime, marriage is rarely an ideal that denotes the cessation of difficulties over differences. As more than one wag has pointed out, the dominance of heterosexual marriage certainly does not reflect an egalitarian harmony of relations between the sexes. The marriages in question are thus racialized outside of social racializations, meaning that to be Black in these colonies does not automatically designate a subaltern status below that of whites. In cases where Black convicts were executed or subjected to physical punishment (whipping was the most common), we might see racially motivated causes, but in the brutal tide of regular executions and torturous punishment, it is difficult to extrapolate consistently a narrative in which this Blackness can be separated from the brutal imperial and capitalist caste system that ruled all British subjects, including the white working poor.

Blacks intermixing with the white working poor populations in England and Australia intersect with similar interactions during the earlier spacetime of indentured servitude in the United States and the later one of late nineteenth-century Irish immigration to northeastern urban centers of the United States. If we step back from Pybus’s initial frame, which connects the history of the Black Atlantic in Australia horizontally, and instead honor the horizontality of her interpellations of Black individuals and their intersections (through marriage, penal life, executions, manumission, etc.), one can read this history as a series of moments that intersect not only with Black Atlantic histories in the Americas but also with histories in Europe, Africa, and perhaps India. It should be noted that, while we are discovering intersections of collectives, we do so wholly within idealist frameworks that can be further interpellated only through individuals who make up those collectives; beneficially, however, the collective identities that intersect with these individuals produce yet more collectives in more spacetimes—more dimensions of Blackness across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

While the era of the Middle Passage produces many and varied kinds of Blackness through the intersection of linear and Epiphenomenal time, the conflated eras of World War II and the postwar era offer yet more. I understand World War II and the postwar period as a conflation of eras because it is impossible to pinpoint where one ends and the other begins; however, when we are operating with Epiphenomenal time, this ambiguity is productive rather than restrictive. Indeed, breadth, depth, ambiguity, ambivalence, and dominance are the strengths contributed by these overlapping eras: breadth because World War II involved almost the majority of Black Africans and Black Diasporans across the globe, whereas slavery—which forms the cornerstone of the Middle Passage epistemology—did not; depth because the various narratives, such as that of Black African men attempting to resist forcible conscription by French and British colonial forces, or that of African American men and women who fought for the right to be drafted, require explanation and further research; ambiguity because we find Blackness where we do not expect it and struggle to interpret it, such as Black German individuals who served in Hitler’s army and Black Brazilian troops tasked with defending Italy; ambivalence because it is a war and its equally destructive aftermath ironically connects the African Diaspora many times over with ease and diversity; and finally, dominance because World War II and the postwar era constructed an interpellative frame that has been used by so many across the globe, a frame that highlights the contemporary and global importance of Blackness far more frequently than themes of the Middle Passage ever do. While the rise of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), the Arab Spring, and other sociopolitical and economic events seem to signal the framing of a new era, journalists, pundits, and politicians alike still interpret many of these events as effects of the World War II/postwar era.

Even the most rigid histories cannot sustain a completely linear Second World War narrative. For example, the invasion of Poland in 1939 must be explained by the rise of Nazism, which perhaps requires a notation about the Versailles Treaty. Likewise, the bombing of Pearl Harbor is necessary to explain the entrance of the United States into the war as a direct combatant. The Second World War, therefore, has at least two beginnings and, even by conservative estimates, at least two endings: the surrender of the Nazis in Berlin and the signed surrender by the Japanese on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

This gives us a war with at least two timelines to which there correspond two themes, two notions of progress, and many ways in which occupied nations must be understood: as collaborators, as wholly oppressed, as underground resisters, and so on. This nonlinear set of peoples, places, and events forces anyone seeking interpellations through World War II to accept all the exceptions to its linear progress narrative—that is, it forces researchers to incorporate great nuance into their interpellations (in asking when the Second World War ended, for example, we have to amend the question to reflect all the surrenders and dates that dominant discourses on World War II cite in response because, whether there were multiple wars or one great war may be a matter of definition, but there is no question that there were multiple narratives that intersected). This means that qualitative collapse will occur less frequently in interpellations made through a wholly linear progress narrative on the war (because dominant discourses do not offer, really, any wholly linear narratives of it), but when it does, the effect is almost always “deafening,” as if it were drowning out alternative interpellations.14

Blackness can manifest through this multidimensionality, in most cases quite easily. In contrast to the difficulty involved in explaining how Blacks from the Atlantic found themselves in Australia, the global reach of the Second World War makes it easy to explain how Blackness has spread almost everywhere. When using both Epiphenomenal and linear spacetimes to interpellate Blackness in these eras, no long, creative narratives are needed to explain the presence of West Africans under British rule, East Africans under Italian Fascist rule, or the fight for equality both at home and abroad that was the self-appointed task of many an African American man or woman in uniform; moreover, using both spacetimes enables Black European studies to explain without much difficulty how Blacks of African descent came to fight under Hitler. We can arrive at these explanations by starting with the individual, rather than the collective, as a point of interpellation. We can then link such an individual to his, her, or their variously realized collective identities (understanding that we should never claim that an individual is fully realized, as we can work within distinct spacetimes only as they are imagined in the now, not in both the present and the past).

Unfortunately, many of these dimensions as interpellated through the postwar epistemology are easily achieved through vertical structures: we need only locate (in ascending order) a military battalion, a regiment, or a division that would contain Black soldiers and its encampments and headquarters. Vertical readings alone can often interpellate an agential and diverse Blackness: Black soldiers and field nurses with agency, Black civilians with choices, and a whole roster of intersections with a broad variety of peers (soldiers and civilians) across vast geographies. At first glance, performing vertical interpellations through linear narratives appears to bear the same fruit as a horizontal reading: Blackness with agency and diversity.

This might explain why so many Black collective progress narratives of World War II use this multidimensionality to produce hierarchical, or vertical, interpellations for the collective. The “Windrush narrative” of Black Britain, for example, readily narrates the contributions of Black British Caribbeans in the Second World War, yet uses a progress narrative to interpellate this Blackness. Like the histories of African American men who fought for the United States during World War I, the “Windrush” narrative underscores the painful hypocrisy of serving the British Crown only to be treated as an undesirable emigrant in the postwar era.15 Drawing on oral histories of service in the war and archival records from the British War Office, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1999) interpellates Black Britishness as agential and diverse, a proud component of the history of World War II but of official British histories of the war more particularly.16

To be sure, even when operating within World War II/postwar frameworks, we encounter obstacles. Hierarchies of power are not (unfortunately) wholly erased, and they can be complicated by the complexities of global alliances and rivalries (no matter how easily they are manifested in the postwar epistemology). The postwar epistemology’s emphasis on the “now,” in the absence of a geographical center (a component of even the most traditional narratives of the Second World War/postwar era),17 allows, say, Samoan warriors aiding the Allies to be interpellated through collective identities that certainly include hierarchal structures (e.g., the military command structure) but also relationships whereby power must constantly be negotiated (e.g., in relationships between soldiers or between soldiers and civilians). The “now” complicates power, meaning that while an Epiphenomenal interpellation enables agency, it will also reflect those vertical hierarchies that inevitably accompany so many moments of interpellation in every individual life across the globe.18

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18. One could read Smith’s first novel as interpellating Blackness through U.S. versions of Afropessimism, but this is a distinction lacking meaningful difference. While it eschews the Middle Passage Epistemology’s progress narrative (Blacks are destined to always be oppressed), it needs this linear progress narrative to argue against progress. While claiming to be static, U.S. versions of Afropessimism nonetheless doggedly track each moment of the Middle Passage Epistemology to state yet again that no progress has been made.

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