The afterlives of slavery and the narrative pressures of black precarity in Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article uses Ethiopian American novelist Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air to map the links between the black diaspora in the United States, which traces its roots back to Atlantic chattel slavery, and the newer black diasporas descended from twentieth-century African migrants in America. It draws on Sylvia Wynter's work on defining statements of the human in European thought; on Saidiya Hartman's concept of the afterlives of slavery and on Christina Sharpe's thinking on the wake and wake work, to read Mengestu's How to Read the Air as demonstrative of the continuities between the two diasporas framed by a logic of black subjection, black fungibility and racial capitalism. It further argues that Mengestu's novel is an important meditation on the continued undervaluing of black life centuries after the official demise of chattel slavery through the precarious figure of the economic migrant.