Abstract
“Souls on Board” assembles the modern history of counting the number of passengers on board a ship so that in the event of a wreck, all might be found. Though the practice continues in the present, when airline pilots are required to state the number of passengers on a flight to air traffic control, the phrase reflects the spiritual courage required to undertake risky sea voyages in the age of sail. The chapter explores the cultural and racial politics of counting passengers through the history of the Middle Passage, in which many enslaved people died at sea. Focusing on the wreck of the São José Paquete Africa near Cape Town in 1794, the chapter explores Black Studies’ critique of quantification as a counter-historical approach to modern mobility.
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Notes
- 1.
Layson’s math is wrong: by his count there should have been 239.
- 2.
The phrase appears in Acts 27, when Luke records being shipwrecked on Malta with the Apostle Paul: “And we were all in the ship two hundred three score and sixteen souls.” Acts 27:37, KJV.
- 3.
See for example the National Air Traffic Controllers’ Association: https://www.natca.org/index.php/insider-articles/1572-nov-4-2016-the-mystery-of-souls-on-board; and the Professional Pilots’ Rumor Network: https://www.pprune.org/atc-issues/359490-term-souls-board.html
- 4.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Mariner, 2019: 196–209.
- 5.
On histories of the Middle Passage, and involuntary Black travel as counter-history, see Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” Small Axe 12:22 (June 2008), 1–14; and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. (London: Verso, 1993).
- 6.
On racial capitalism, see Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. [1983]. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
- 7.
On the enslaved person’s persistence in a state of injury, see Achille Mbmebe, “Necropolitics” Public Culture 15:1 (2003), 11–40: 21.
- 8.
Much of the critical discussion deals with the politics of baptism after landing in the New World. Hamilton reports that before a 1667 law declaring that Christians could hold other Christians in bondage, enslaved people were not baptized. On soul-making in postcolonial theory, see Gayatri Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” Critical Inquiry 12:1 (Autumn 1985), 243–261.
- 9.
Ulrike Schmieder, Katja Füllberg-Stolberg, and Michael Zueske, eds. The End of Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Approach Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011: 55.
- 10.
- 11.
Jaco Jacques Boshoff, et al. From No Return: The 221-Year Journey of the Slave Ship São José. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2016: 64. Further citations are to this edition and appear in the text in parentheses.
- 12.
Though, by publication, more may have come to light.
- 13.
Slave Wrecks Project, “Our Mission.” https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/initiatives/slave-wrecks-project. See also the ePix series “Enslaved,” in which the actor Samuel L. Jackson joins Diving With A Purpose to excavate the wreck of the Guerrero.
- 14.
On the notion of “between” as entanglement, blur, and “difference without separation,” see Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 313.
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Zieger, S. (2024). “Souls on Board”: A Counter-History of Modern Mobility. In: Louis-Dimitrov, D., Murail, E. (eds) The Persistence of the Soul in Literature, Art and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40934-9_13
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