This work investigates the long history of Black bodies and Black images as materials subjected to consumption, circulation, and domination.

Across slavery, colonial modernity, and the contemporary digital sphere, Black existence has repeatedly been positioned as something to be ingested—metaphorically through objectification, violence, and sexual exploitation, and, in some historical cases, even literally.

This regime of ingestion reveals a deeper structure in which Black people are denied full access to the normative category of the human and instead rendered as an extra-ontological “non-subject.”

The image of Blackness mirrors this condition. Like the “poor image” degraded through constant reproduction, the Black image circulates widely, often detached from the lived realities of Black people. Its endless movement through screens and networks echoes the earlier circulation of Black bodies across the Atlantic, where utility, meaning, and agency were continually imposed and withdrawn.

As both body and image become viral commodities—readily made and readily unmade—they reveal a tension between disposability and an emergent, unexpected power.

Because dominant structures recognize Black expressive life only as deviant or fallen—disrupting the fixed roles of master and captive—the refusal of these imposed identities becomes a spiritual and political rejection of the very order that sought to define Black existence.

This leads to a distinctly post-human positioning: Blackness as something forged outside the foundational assumptions of Western humanity.

The ocean, which holds the remains of more than two million Africans lost during the transatlantic slave trade, functions as a vast, submerged archive of Black life.

Notably, contemporary undersea internet cables trace many of the same routes as slave ships, creating a continuity between colonial networks of extraction and the digital networks that structure the present. This parallel suggests a symbolic “offloading” of collective Black being into new technological forms, allowing the digital realm to become a site for reframing Black spirituality, identity, and agency beyond the limits of humanist categories.