Jumping Overboard: Examining Suicide, Resistance, and West African Cosmologies during the Middle Passage (2018)
Lee N. June (Advisor)
Stevenson, Robert L. (Author)
Lee N. June
Michigan State University
Physical Details: 185
Language: English
This dissertation examines slave ship mortality, slave ship suicides, and resistance through the lens of traditional West and West Central African cosmologies. The results offer an alternative analysis of suicide by drowning as a form of resistance during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The cases examined in this study recount the testimonies of slave ship captains, surgeons, crewmembers, and linguists who travelled onboard slave ships in the Middle Passage and subsequently documented their experiences. This study proposes that the slave ship engendered a new spatial phenomenon for many enslaved West and West Central African people. Interpreted through this lens, these sources offer evidence that the cosmologies of these enslaved people, in the context of the torturous experiences on slaving vessels, encouraged self-destruction as one of many forms of resistance and one that offered the prospect of a spiritual return back to Africa. The evidence from the cases reveal at least three overlapping practical concepts that informed captives’ decisions to leap overboard: agency, martyrdom, and transmigration. I analyze these cases through the lens of traditional West and Central West African cosmologies, utilizing Africana Critical Theory and slave suicide ecology to develop a critical frame for understanding what motivated suicides by drowning. In doing so, I arrive at an alternative interpretation of these events that resists the implicitly White Supremecist framing found in many earlier historical accounts.
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