Bodily Wreckage, Economic Salvage and the Middle Passage

Abstract

In spring 2018 a digitally manipulated seascape flowed around London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery. Sondra Perry’s installation Typhoon Coming On (2018) animates a part of J. M. W. Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840), a painting depicting the Zong massacre of 1781 where the captain of a British ship threw 133 enslaved people overboard in pursuit of economic compensation through the ship’s insurance policy. As a maritime catastrophe that reveals anti-blackness and finance capital to be co-constitutive phenomena, the Zong massacre provides Perry with the means to contemplate the Atlantic as a site for the transformation of bodily wreckage into economic salvage under the commercial logic of racial capitalism. In this article I explore Perry’s remediation of Turner’s painting by thinking about the co-choreography of bodies and ocean in each of these seascapes. In her refusal to stage the bodily wreckage of the Middle Passage, Perry presents the transatlantic slave trade not as an exceptional event punctuating the history of seafaring but as the very foundation of capitalist modernity. Responding to concepts developed by Édouard Glissant, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter and Christina Sharpe, I consider the ways Perry critiques Turner’s depiction of the slave ship’s bodily wreckage and his attendant white abolitionist morality, and instead remediates the scene of the Zong massacre around the whispered presences of Black liberation.