Blue Black Ecstasy: Ellen Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic, Oceanic Feeling, and Mysticism in the Flesh
Journal of the American Academy of Religion June 1, 2023 Justine M. Bakker 9 citations
Ellen Gallagher's ongoing series 'Watery Ecstatic' depicts real and imaginary underwater life through drawings, films, reliefs, and paintings. The article argues that this series engages with mysticism, (para)religion, and constructions of blackness, humanness, and animality. Placing the series in conversation with Sigmund Freud and Fred Moten, the author identifies a particular kind of mysticism called blue black mysticism: an experience of sociality that, through the oceanic, refuses categorical distinctions and modes of identification that ground normative and racialized ideations of humanness and subjectivity. This mysticism, by engaging the alterity of the ocean, troubles the racialized, hierarchical boundary between human and nonhuman animals.