To my wife,

I am writing to you now on the eve of my departure from Philadelphia aboard a vessel headed to the West Indies. I have heard a great many tales about the promises of the sea—unshackled from the constraints of landed life in America. Tales not just about freedom, but also resistance, as it is borne through these connections to our African brothers and sisters in the West Indies, with whom we share the burden of oppression.

It is such a shame that you cannot come with me and see these things for yourself. Though I leave you now, please know that I will think of you always.

Lovingly signed,
Your husband

Questions:
Bolster claims that “until the Civil War black sailors were central to African Americans’ collective sense of self, economic survival, and freedom struggle—indeed central to the very creation of black America” (2).

1. The elevation of the sailor image suggests that “American” identity (especially African American identity) transgresses national and geographic boundaries by drawing influences from multiple cultural nodes on the world map. What, then, are the tensions between an African-American identity and a “diasporic” African identity? On the other hand, how do they also overlap and constitute one another? What are the relationships between contemporary constructions of diasporic identity within the African American community and similar identity formations in the Latino American and Asian American communities? (the “black Atlantic” v. the “Border” v. the “yellow Pacific”)
2. The world of the black Atlantic was, no doubt, a gendered world, inhabited primarily by men. It then follows that the “creation of black America” was a gendered process, at least with respect to the particular historical period Bolster describes. Aside from a single passing remark, his article downplays the role that black maritime culture played in shaping the experiences of black women on the mainland, and also blatantly ignores the particular sexual cultures (often homoerotic) that existed within the world of the black Atlantic. Thus, how does a conception of African American identity, premised in part upon the iconography of the black, heterosexual, male sailor, affect the contemporary experiences of black women and queers?