ABSTRACT
This chapter applies the notion of ‘territorial bodies’ to various artworks of the oceanic Afrofuturist mythology initiated by Drexciya. It conceptualises territorial bodies by examining how Drexciyan myth-making resists what Kathryn Yusoff calls the inhumanities (2018): an analytical tool describing how white liberal humanism entwines with geology to define both Blackness (purportedly inhumane) and the Earth (the inhuman) as nonagentic, extractable matter. In Drexciyan myth, the unborn babies of pregnant enslaved Africans thrown overboard during the Middle Passage did not drown but survived underwater to build submarine utopias. This rewritten history, and the Black aesthetics of the mythos, offers a generative lens to explore how territories and bodies shape each other: Drexciyans enact a process of submarine reterritorialisation through their aquatically mutated physiologies. The chapter first details the mythology’s submerged place-making, establishing Drexciya as a hydroterritory that unmoors the domineering territorial logic of the nation state. It subsequently demonstrates how Ellen Gallagher’s Drexciya-inspired artworks challenge the racialised geologic grammars that subtend colonial geographic thought. These works alter the anti-Black logics of the fossil to suggest a non-extractivist mode of worlding, based on iterative diffractions of Drexciya’s ideas. This way, the mythology enacts an ongoing, imaginative process of decolonising the inhumanities.
