#thinkingoutsideofthebox

Spaceships and Slaveships 

If y'all read my blog for my intelligent, faux-scholarly posts on Afro-futurism, Afro-pessimism, black identity and slavery, Y'all would notice that instead of saying slaveship I write spaceship. For 2 reasons: 

1.  It was essentially a spacial unit, ironically, with very little space. 

2.   The slave trade has traditional sci-fi elements that evoke the drama of  an alien invasion/abduction. 

For example take Mark Dery’s reading on the Middle Passage Experience: 

African-Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees. They inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done to them; and technology, be it branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, or tasers, is too often brought to bear on black bodies.

from Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0