In the Break, in the Wake: Black Aliveness in Peace Peloton’s Draft

This article puts Christina Sharpe’s theories of “the wake” and “wake work” and Kevin Quashie’s theory of “Black aliveness” in conversation with Peace Peloton, a nonprofit organization promoting Black businesses and community through the activities of cycling and neighborhood events. The author reads Peace Peloton’s gatherings and the draft of turbulent air produced by their pelotons, or groups of bicyclists in motion, as radical Black performances and what Sharpe calls “wake work.” Acts of resistance and resilience enacted in the aftermath—the wake—of the Transatlantic slave trade, Peace Peloton’s rides and gatherings as “wake work” reject the ontological othering of Black bodies and being and dynamize what it means to be in a wake. Enacting Quashie’s sense of “worldmaking,” Peace Peloton’s “wake work” challenges presumptions of the outdoors and road cycling as white spaces, for white people, and reclaims for Black worldmaking once majority Black, now gentrified spaces of commerce and leisure. An interdisciplinary look into a cultural expression that has heretofore gone unexamined, this chapter weaves into its application of contemporary Afrodiasporic theory the history of redlining, cycling physics, writing on Blackness and the outdoors, Alexis Pauline Gumb’s short story “Bluebellow,” and Fedeke N. Castor’s Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifa in Trinidad. It is through this ambitious and innovative interpretative lens that the author illuminates Peace Peloton’s “wake work” and Black worldmaking and situates them within the broader corpus of Afrodiasporic literature and cultural expressions.