Infrastructural Sovereignty in the Black Atlantic

This article locates how the violent afterlives of slavery and colonialism manifest in internet infrastructure, specifically focusing on Google's undersea fiber-optic cable named Equiano. This naming calls on Olaudah Equiano, an eighteenth-century Black man who was sold into slavery and later purchased his own freedom. Equiano eventually advocated for the abolitionist movement and published an autobiographical account called The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). Reading Google's infrastructural initiative against the grain of Equiano's autobiographical narrative, I pursue the histories, lived experiences, and affective registers of enslavement, colonialism, and Black liberation called into being by the invocation of Equiano's name. This article highlights the implications of undersea cable projects for infrastructural sovereignty when Western and capitalist corporations drive the development of internet infrastructure in postcolonial nation-states like Nigeria. Furthermore, I forward Equiano's testimony and his unrestrained desire for freedom as a call to reimagine internet infrastructural politics and data justice. Equiano's autobiography testifies to the capacity of the Black radical imagination to pursue liberatory pathways that had been declared foreclosed under regimes of racial terror. Methodologically, I build on extant scholarship in literary criticism on Equiano's narrative as well as Black and postcolonial digital humanities to illuminate historically situated (infra)structural modalities and the racial politics undergirding them.