Seepage: Viscous Readings of African Diasporic Archives
“[…] before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.” – Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
“The ill humors seep out, tumultuous as lava flows.” – Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth
This panel reflects on “seepage” as both material and metaphor in African and African diasporic archives of militarism, empire, and insurgency. When read attentively, the edifices of colonial and military infrastructure, even those shrouded in secrecy, were latent with slow, creeping movements that erupted and disintegrated– porous spaces for the infiltration of resistant ideas, actions, and matter. The cases presented in this panel interrogate the military optics of what or who was designated as “contaminated,” offer new analytics on “Creolization” when viewed through the political ecology of the swamp, and examine when military infrastructures eventually burst while attempting to close themselves off from so-called local contagion. The attempt to correct for seepage through draining, sanitizing, sealing, and eviscerating often resulted in the growth of new formations– languages, arguments, and itineraries for anti-imperial refusal. We argue that it is precisely in those sopping, viscous encounters that we find generative sites for plumbing creative, political, and intellectual provocations.
Papers and Panelists:
Insurgent Contaminants: Corroding U.S. Military Infrastructure in Eritrea / Amsale Alemu, Howard University
“We were told that the water in the hotel where we stayed was unsafe to drink so we would lug gallon bottles of Gatorade from Kagnew Station back to the hotel to drink and brush our teeth.” –Visitor to Kagnew Station, c. 1970
Kagnew Station was a secret U.S. military communications base in Asmara, Eritrea that operated from 1953 to 1977. Its purpose was to transmit and receive radio relays, navigating trans-Atlantic air travel, fielding communications, and intercepting messages from the Middle East and Soviet Union. It even briefly dabbled in space observation. To operate from Eritrea, the U.S. Army had signed a lease with Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie– only possible because Eritrea was at the time a federated territory of Ethiopia. Employing declassified U.S. state records, oral histories, and Eritrean and Ethiopian periodicals, this paper presents several episodes of the eruptive tensions and moments of anti-military destruction at Kagnew Station made possible through liquids, grains, and waterways. Examples include a rumor that a U.S. grain shipment to Eritrea had been intentionally infected after the Army boycotted Eritrean milk and meat on suspicion that 80% of its cattle were infected with Tuberculosis, as well as a water shortage in 1969 that critics leveraged to blame Kagnew and indict U.S.- and Ethiopian-imperialism. I argue that to wage insurgency against a military base that imagined itself as hermetically sealed from its locality–with its own water system, microwavable food, and criminal code–combatants against U.S. and Ethiopian empire found (at times, mite-sized) openings to corrode and critique one of the most looming structures of U.S. militarism in the Horn of Africa during the early Cold War
“Wet and Unfit for Cultivation:” Racial Fantasy and The Swamp Acts of 1850 / Robin McDowell, Bates College
In 1850, the U.S. government passed “The Swamp and Overflowed Lands Act,” which placed ownership of land “wet and unfit for cultivation” into the hands of the states, with the expectation that the land would be drained and made available for agriculture. This act, along with three subsequent acts passed by the Louisiana State Legislature, I argue, were driven by racial and environmental fantasies as much as by practical concerns. State surveyor logs from this period are full of blank pages, revealing the physical and conceptual challenges of draining swamps, as continuous seepage caused by geological conditions and plantation agriculture frustrated efforts to convert these lands. Louisiana swamps, feared as sites of disease and deadly wildlife, also carried racialized meanings—spaces of Black refuge, refusal, and revolt —which complicated their role in expanding plantation geographies. This duality of lands framed as both valuable and impassable reflected a politics of anti-Blackness articulated through technocratic vocabularies of disciplining unruly natures. By employing a resistant reading of this legislation and attendant archives, I expose the persistent yet elusive fantasy of swamp drainage as both a material and symbolic endeavor.
Wha happenin dey? Lessons from Nelson Island / Zaira Simone-Thompson, Wesleyan University
The reparations project in the Caribbean is centered on the material and lived experiences of descendants impacted by slavery and colonialism, and that extends to the preservation and futurity of Caribbean ecologies: beaches, coral reefs, mangroves, amongst other sources of Caribbean life. Reckoning with the afterlives of slavery and colonialism insists on a keen awareness of human and non-human assemblages that define postcolonial geographies (Bruno, Curley, Smith 2024). This paper explores the formation of colonial infrastructures composed of labor, logics, and ecologies. Focusing on the transformations of Nelson Island, a former site of immigration, militarization, and incarceration in Trinidad, I explore how the development of this small place mirrors the possibilities and constraints of repair. Honing in on the island's colonial and present placemaking practices, I ask whether surviving infrastructures can be repaired? More importantly, what can such infrastructures teach us about relational repair—the entanglements of human and non-human life?
Revolutionary Skillshare: ADFC and Rethinking Community-centered Education / Chenise Calhoun, Tulane University
The African Diasporic French class (ADFC) serves as a metaphor for seepage, in understanding seepage as unconscious matter becoming conscious. The course has resulted in bridging connections across Louisiana and the country thanks to the digital space. The course pinpoints people and moments in the history of African-descendant peoples, linking them geographically and temporally, in order to break down widely-held myths entrenched in nationalism, colonialism, linguistic superiority and racism. And the course has resulted in some African-descendant folks confronting the reality that though public school systems do not cover/have not covered history about the continent or the diaspora, we can give that to ourselves and be the inheritors/stewards of that knowledge in adulthood.
Múcara and Madera: Tangible and Intangible Blackness in Mexico’s Oldest Port City / Karma Frierson, University of Rochester
Heroica Veracruz: open, fun-loving, by the sea. Heroica Veracruz: walled, beleaguered, under siege. The city is all these things and more. Yet these two ideas, as culturally Caribbean and historically heroic, often run parallel narrative lives. In this talk, I look at the intersections of these two faces of Veracruz to consider how Blackness surfaces in the narrative veracruzanos tell themselves and others about themselves. While most often described in the realm of the intangible such as local practices, music, dance, and cuisine, I argue the built environment of Veracruz, a place built to withstand and endure intervention, is also a tangible vestige of the city’s Black heritage despite the lack of discourse. What is more, I ask what present and futures of Mexican Blackness are made possible by revisiting the very materiality of the city, the múcara and madera, and the spatial practices it engendered.