The Door of No Return, a powerful symbol of the Middle Passage and African diaspora, finds renewed meaning in contemporary Afrofuturist literature’s engagement with oceanic spaces and historical memory. As author Dionne Brand demonstrates in A Map to the Door of No Return, this threshold represents not just historical trauma, but also a complex site where Black identity is continuously negotiated and reimagined. This relationship with water and memory manifests distinctly in works like Toni Morrison’s Love and Rivers Solomon’s “The Deep,” while finding historical resonance in spaces like Newport, Rhode Island’s maritime heritage.
Morrison’s Love engages with what York University Black Studies professor Dr. Christina Sharpe terms “wake work” — the ongoing process of living with and through the aftereffects of slavery’s violence. Set in a coastal Black resort community, the novel centers on the complex legacy of Bill Cosey and the women whose lives intertwine with his. Through multiple perspectives and timeframes, Morrison examines themes of love, memory, and class while exploring how African Americans created their own spaces of leisure despite segregation. The novel’s coastal setting reflects what Katherine McKittrick identifies as “black geographies” — spaces where African American communities have created alternate cartographies of belonging despite historical displacement. Whereas Rivers Solomon’s “The Deep” explicitly enters Afrofuturist territory by reimagining the history of the Atlantic slave trade through the lens of water-breathing descendants of pregnant African women thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. The novel follows Yetu, a historian who carries the collective traumatic memories of her people, the wajinru. This reimagining aligns with what Kodwo Eshun terms chronopolitical intervention, where Afrofuturism constructs counter-futures that challenge traditional narratives of progress. The novel exemplifies Afrofuturism’s capacity to, as Mark Dery originally defined it, reimagine Black futures through both historical memory and speculative possibility.
Newport, Rhode Island provides a concrete historical anchor for these literary explorations. As documented by Christy Clark-Pujara in Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island, Newport was deeply implicated in the enslavement trade while simultaneously hosting free Black communities that created their own cultural spaces. This duality reflects what Saidiya Hartman terms the “afterlife of slavery” — the persistent impact of historical violence alongside continuous Black resistance and cultural creation. The convergence of these narratives — historical Newport, Morrison’s fictional resort town, and Solomon’s underwater world — demonstrates what Michelle Wright terms “physics of blackness,” where Black identity exists across multiple temporalities and spaces. These literary and historical intersections also create what Tina Campt calls “black visuality” — ways of seeing and imagining Black life that transcend conventional temporal boundaries. Through these works, we may see how contemporary Black authors use oceanic spaces to explore both historical trauma and possibilities for renewal, creating new frameworks for understanding Black identity and experience across time and space. •
Ikea M. Johnson is an Assistant Professor of English at Salve Regina University. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Louisiana State University. Her research interests include Afro-Asiatic and Buddhist thought and the intersectionality of spirituality in literature.
Works Cited
Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Vintage Canada, 2001.
Campt, Tina M. Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe. Duke University Press, 2012.
Clark-Pujara, Christy. Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island. NYU Press, 2016.
Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.”
Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 179- 222.
Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism.”
CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 2, 2003, pp. 287-302.
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. McKittrick, Katherine. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 12, no. 8, 2011, pp. 947-963.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.
Wright, Michelle M. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
