–destabilising the points of stabilisation, disrupting the legacies of time and space that hold towards the suck effect of portal extraction. Today, Google Africa is replanting the slave route from Europe to South Africa, calling its new private subsea cable after the writer and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano (c.1745–1797). And thus, Equiano is tethered to the geography of his enslavement rather than his subsequent liberatory geographies of the sea. In this naming, he is interned once again in the abyssal depths of the Middle Passage, re-anchoring to this projection of an undersea grave to “open up” Africa to google cloud infrastructures. We might imagine the Black mythos of Detroit techno duo Drexciya here,as an army of aquatic people rise from the subterranean depths to give dignity and another geography of world-building to Black life. The portal as a planetary analytic, that is mobile and migratory, offers a way for interdisciplinary practitioners to map the interconnected geographies and afterlives of colonial infrastructures; constituting spatial imaginaries that were deployed as blueprints in the emergence and maintenance of extractive planetary futures.
Kathryn Yusoff, Kerry Holden and Casper Laing Ebbensgaard, Planetary Portals: “Dreaming in Continents” from East London to the Cape in the Colonial Praxis of Emergence and Extraction (2022)
Racoon
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