Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

"Alive … again." Unmoored in the Aquafuture of Ellen Gallagher's Watery Ecstatic

2017; The Feminist Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wsq.2017.0001

1934-1520

Suzanna Chan,

Japanese History and Culture

The marine life and aquatic worlds depicted in Ellen Gallagher's Watery Ecstatic series of artworks conceive an aquafuture through Afrofuturist aesthetics. They feature the black Atlantic in countermemories that reinscribe the historical murder of African women through a myth of their survival and transformation into aquatic beings. The artworks defy contemporary eliminations of, and assaults on, black lives to claim a spectacular present and posthuman future. This essay explores the artworks' queer politics and undoing of race and gender binaries through interdisciplinary means conceived of both in the spirit of the artworks themselves and the cultural boundlessness of Afrofuturism.