Middle Passage captives forged a shared diasporic identity through collective resistance

Evidence

In these moments, slave traders were conditioning Africans for plantation slavery. But the captives were also forming a new identity, a diasporic Blackness, forged out of their collective fate, as they found strength in one another with every miserable day that passed. Uprisings of captives at sea were rare but were the most spectacular instances of collective resistance. A 1731 insurrection involved 140 Africans; they killed most of the crew and escaped with the ship. Much more frequent acts of resistance took the form of recalcitrance, a refusal by captives to eat or to exercise. They plotted conspiracies to poison the crew’s food and beverage. And they also took complete control of their individual bodies and minds when they sought freedom in another realm. The surgeon Isaac Wilson recalled a man who threw himself into the sea and seemed to relish his own drowning. He “went down as if exulting that he got away,” the physician remembered. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 284

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘diasporic Blackness’ as an identity forged in the Middle Passage — a central reframing concept distinct from later plantation identity.
• QUESTION: Claims suicide on the crossing was a form of resistance achieving ‘freedom in another realm’ — worth checking how scholars debate the agency/desperation framing of slave ship suicides.
• XREF: connects to: The middle passage’s trauma becomes a shared origin for collective identity. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 90