Paper short abstract:

Archipelagic Cosmology maps migration narratives of eight men and their contemporary Afro-Mediterranean crossings. Through listening to these stories and mapping their journeys, I hope to suggest that this creates a portrait of the black diaspora as archipelagic.

Paper long abstract:

Archival recordings of the Afro-Mediterranean Oral History Project are records of the intimate lives of African migrants' relationship with the Mediterranean Sea. Like maps of the night sky, lines of African mobility portray constellations, cosmos, and galaxies as organic documents that change in shape and direction with the subject's position, yet they are identifiable as living webs of maritime mobility. The archipelagic, as defined by Michelle A. Stephens and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, lends itself to fluid cartographies of literal and metaphorical connectivity. The archipelagic unites islands and stars in their holistic isolation, thus forming a cosmology of intimacy. As our larger panel explicates, the migratory journeys of these men are individual quests that are simultaneously unique and recognizable in a deeper pantheon of African diasporic narratives: linked through the violence of crossings, reunited through media and technologies of communication, and shared through narratives of place, displacement and memory. Literally, this paper traces the ways in which Afro-Mediterranean mobility is an identifiable archipelago across the night sky and the sea floor; and figuratively, the Afro-Mediterranean archipelagic portrait connects distant space, deep time, and future trajectories to gesture to a cosmic portrait of an archipelagic black diaspora.