Under the Sign of the Middle Passage: Black Solidarity Reimagined

The Middle Passage is now the central metonym for life and death in US Black arts and cultural criticism. It was not always so. In the mid-twentieth century, after long being overlooked, the Middle Passage was brought back into public consciousness by academic slave trade studies. Writers turned to this scholarship, I argue, to confront overdetermined intraracial tensions that arose in the post-civil rights era, transforming the ship's hold into an image of solidarity. To trace this transformation, I analyze poems by Robert Hayden, Primus St. John, and Nathaniel Mackey. Hayden's "Middle Passage," the canonical literary imagining of the event, in fact reveals deep divergences from later Middle Passage poems, stemming from the altered social situation of their composition.