Conference Agenda

This paper examines Yvette Janine Jackson’s 2017 narrative electronic soundscape composition Destination Freedom as not only a science fictional critique of anti-Blackness, but of the planetary conditions the history of anti-Blackness helped to induce. Destination Freedom is about an Atlantic slave ship that transforms into a spaceship voyaging towards a new, unspecified planetary home. It opens in the hold of a ship making the Middle Passage where sounds evoking creaking timbers, clanking shackles, lapping waves, strained breathing, and tense heartbeats produce an acoustic architecture of capture. Gradually, these sounds morph into the crackle and thrum of rocket engines. The closing minutes render the weightlessness of outer space, narrating an open-ended journey away from the constitutive anti-Blackness of modernity on Earth.

I ask what it means to situate Destination Freedom not only within American or world history, but within planetary, geological, climatic history. Jackson’s counterfactual sonic narrative—thwarting the Middle Passage in favor of interplanetary flight—ponders an ecological hypothesis articulated by philosopher Déborah Danowski and anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: without the pillage of the Americas and rise of plantation capitalism, there may have been no Industrial Revolution and thus perhaps no climate breakdown. Destination Freedom prompts scrutiny towards how the extractive anti-Blackness of colonization and its plantation enslavement economies structured environmentally destructive modern capitalism and the Anthropocene climate crisis. And rather than centering themes of ecological entanglement or pastoral relationality like much ecocritical artmaking, by thematizing flight from the world, Jackson’s work parallels Afropessimist theory’s figure of the end of the world—the complete dismantling of modernity’s paradigms—narrating the total refusal of world systems predicated on the domination of nature and racialized people.

Black speculative sound practices sidestep the orthodoxies of the environmental humanities, proposing that routes to livable ecological futures require us to radically abjure systems of extraction, accumulation, and environmental plunder—including ones predating the Industrial Revolution and the rise of fossil fuels. By thematizing interplanetary travel, Destination Freedom gestures toward a different possible Earth: one not predicated upon the catastrophes of racial slavery, colonial empire, and the domination of nature, but upon futures still underway.