Pirating Blackness/blacktranssea.com (2021)
Interactive Movie ~20 mins
Pirating Blackness / blacktranssea.com (2021) by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a work of decolonial, gender, and feminist importance. Co-commissioned by QUAD, Derby and The Mechatronic Library for Haunting Alongside Our Shadows (2021), the work operates not simply as a retelling of the Middle Passage, but as a restructuring of its epistemological frame.
Following a virus infecting your computer, the history of your existence begins to unravel. You must retrace the journey your ancestors took across the sea in order to determine your place in a present that overwrites the existing one.
This premise immediately dislodges linear historiography. The Middle Passage is not fixed in the past; it is recursive, computational, and unfinished. Rather than reproducing the familiar spectacle of Black suffering — what scholars have termed the Black Death Spectacle — the work splits into two narrative branches: Colonisers (2) and Those that were carried across the sea (1). This bifurcation is not aesthetic; it is structural. Violence is contained within the coloniser branch, while the other narrative reclaims space for Black interiority, kinship, and futurity. In doing so, Brathwaite-Shirley refuses the automatic attachment of torture to the Black body. Instead, she offers a gender-expanded, feminist critical fabulation of the Middle Passage — one that foregrounds how binary kin-making itself functioned as a colonial technology. Race does not precede slavery; it is produced through it, alongside the imposition of rigid gender systems that overwrite precolonial multiplicities.
As Eric Williams writes, “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.” Yet this work extends that insight further, demonstrating how colonial expansion required not only racialisation but the reconfiguration of kinship, gender, and reproduction as extractive infrastructures. Inside and around the ships, an erased historiography unfolds. These vessels carry not only bodies but diseased social logics: homophobia, transphobia, and what Sylvia Wynter describes as the over-representation of Western bourgeois “Man” as the only mode of the human. Against this, Brathwaite-Shirley replaces secular humanist epistemology with a sacred Black trans cosmology, carried through oral, sonic, and affective registers.
Her voice — a maternal, haunted canticle — moves between past and Black trans futures. It fills the silences of erased trans-normative cultures with lived experience. The question is not only what it means to be a Black trans mother, but what it means to hold life under conditions of precarity; then and now. The work’s second movement turns to precolonial African gender systems, where power, kinship, and identity were not rigidly fixed. Women occupied positions of authority as rulers, landholders, and spiritual figures. Gender-expansive roles — such as the mudoko dako among the Langi, or woman-to-woman marriage across multiple societies — demonstrate that binary gender was neither universal nor inevitable.Colonialism did not simply dominate; it replaced. Complex kinship systems were overwritten by rigid binaries aligned with Christian and Aristotelian frameworks. Homophobia and patriarchy, often framed as indigenous, emerge here as colonial imports.
This re-reading culminates in one of the work’s most striking gestures: the presence of flos pavonis, the Peacock Flower. Floating within the ship as a pulsating, speculative form, it references the historical use of abortifacients by enslaved women in Suriname. As recorded by Maria Sibylla Merian in 1705, enslaved populations used the plant to prevent their children from being born into slavery.
This act reframes reproduction as resistance. In an economy where enslaved bodies were capital, refusal to reproduce became a radical assertion of personhood. Yet this knowledge, unlike other colonial “biogolds” such as quinine, was never fully integrated into European medicinal systems. Its suppression reveals what Londa Schiebinger identifies as culturally produced ignorance: knowledge deliberately left undeveloped because it threatened patriarchal and economic structures.
Here, gender and empire converge. The displacement of midwives by male obstetricians, and the erasure of plant-based reproductive knowledge, mark a broader shift in control over bodies and futures.Brathwaite-Shirley’s work does not simply recover these histories; it reactivates them. In her speculative world, the ocean itself resists colonisation. Ships are destroyed. Colonial trajectories collapse.
To play as the coloniser is to encounter repeated endings — a series of creative deaths. To play as one carried across the sea is to enter a different archive: one of refusal, care, and survival.
This is not a work about the past. It is a recalibration of the present. A demonstration that alternative worldviews — grounded in Black trans history, embodied knowledge, and suppressed epistemologies — are not only recoverable, but operational.
Honouring these histories is not retrospective. It is generative. It points toward futures in which knowledge, autonomy, and kinship might be otherwise
Interactive Movie ~20 mins
Pirating Blackness / blacktranssea.com (2021) by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a work of decolonial, gender, and feminist importance. Co-commissioned by QUAD, Derby and The Mechatronic Library for Haunting Alongside Our Shadows (2021), the work operates not simply as a retelling of the Middle Passage, but as a restructuring of its epistemological frame.
Following a virus infecting your computer, the history of your existence begins to unravel. You must retrace the journey your ancestors took across the sea in order to determine your place in a present that overwrites the existing one.
This premise immediately dislodges linear historiography. The Middle Passage is not fixed in the past; it is recursive, computational, and unfinished. Rather than reproducing the familiar spectacle of Black suffering — what scholars have termed the Black Death Spectacle — the work splits into two narrative branches: Colonisers (2) and Those that were carried across the sea (1). This bifurcation is not aesthetic; it is structural. Violence is contained within the coloniser branch, while the other narrative reclaims space for Black interiority, kinship, and futurity. In doing so, Brathwaite-Shirley refuses the automatic attachment of torture to the Black body. Instead, she offers a gender-expanded, feminist critical fabulation of the Middle Passage — one that foregrounds how binary kin-making itself functioned as a colonial technology. Race does not precede slavery; it is produced through it, alongside the imposition of rigid gender systems that overwrite precolonial multiplicities.
As Eric Williams writes, “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.” Yet this work extends that insight further, demonstrating how colonial expansion required not only racialisation but the reconfiguration of kinship, gender, and reproduction as extractive infrastructures. Inside and around the ships, an erased historiography unfolds. These vessels carry not only bodies but diseased social logics: homophobia, transphobia, and what Sylvia Wynter describes as the over-representation of Western bourgeois “Man” as the only mode of the human. Against this, Brathwaite-Shirley replaces secular humanist epistemology with a sacred Black trans cosmology, carried through oral, sonic, and affective registers.
Her voice — a maternal, haunted canticle — moves between past and Black trans futures. It fills the silences of erased trans-normative cultures with lived experience. The question is not only what it means to be a Black trans mother, but what it means to hold life under conditions of precarity; then and now. The work’s second movement turns to precolonial African gender systems, where power, kinship, and identity were not rigidly fixed. Women occupied positions of authority as rulers, landholders, and spiritual figures. Gender-expansive roles — such as the mudoko dako among the Langi, or woman-to-woman marriage across multiple societies — demonstrate that binary gender was neither universal nor inevitable.Colonialism did not simply dominate; it replaced. Complex kinship systems were overwritten by rigid binaries aligned with Christian and Aristotelian frameworks. Homophobia and patriarchy, often framed as indigenous, emerge here as colonial imports.
This re-reading culminates in one of the work’s most striking gestures: the presence of flos pavonis, the Peacock Flower. Floating within the ship as a pulsating, speculative form, it references the historical use of abortifacients by enslaved women in Suriname. As recorded by Maria Sibylla Merian in 1705, enslaved populations used the plant to prevent their children from being born into slavery.
This act reframes reproduction as resistance. In an economy where enslaved bodies were capital, refusal to reproduce became a radical assertion of personhood. Yet this knowledge, unlike other colonial “biogolds” such as quinine, was never fully integrated into European medicinal systems. Its suppression reveals what Londa Schiebinger identifies as culturally produced ignorance: knowledge deliberately left undeveloped because it threatened patriarchal and economic structures.
Here, gender and empire converge. The displacement of midwives by male obstetricians, and the erasure of plant-based reproductive knowledge, mark a broader shift in control over bodies and futures.Brathwaite-Shirley’s work does not simply recover these histories; it reactivates them. In her speculative world, the ocean itself resists colonisation. Ships are destroyed. Colonial trajectories collapse.
To play as the coloniser is to encounter repeated endings — a series of creative deaths. To play as one carried across the sea is to enter a different archive: one of refusal, care, and survival.
This is not a work about the past. It is a recalibration of the present. A demonstration that alternative worldviews — grounded in Black trans history, embodied knowledge, and suppressed epistemologies — are not only recoverable, but operational.
Honouring these histories is not retrospective. It is generative. It points toward futures in which knowledge, autonomy, and kinship might be otherwise