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Winner of the 2003  Prix des Hémisphères Chantal Lapicque,  and translated into German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English, Fatou Diome’s  2003  novel,  Le Ventre de l’Atlantique  [  The Belly of the Atlantic , 2006] plays on the image of the Atlantic as an oceanic belly. This article explores the usefulness of the black Atlantic epistemology (Glissant  1990 , Gilroy  1993 ) as a site for imagining the production of diasporic space, alongside the critique that ‘by excluding Africa, Gilroy has in effect narrowed the Africanness or Africanity of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Masilela  1996 , p. 88). Through Diome’s novel, I explore how this intersects with a feminist project of rendering visible the spatialization of difference, through an engagement with the geographies of domination. Borrowing from Zymunt Bauman’s (2006) notion of liquid modernity, I therefore propose ‘liquid feminism’ as a framework that relates the globalised oceanic mobilities of African migrants to the structures of patriarchal domination which render black women’s lives ‘ungeographic’ (McKittrick  2006 ). I start by exploring the geographic sensibility of Diome’s poetics, including her use of the language of geography and her personification of the Atlantic Ocean. I then analyse how her portrayal of a g eulwaar  matriclan subverts the notion of Western feminism as rescuing African women who are trapped by ‘tradition’. Finally, I explore Diome’s notion of ‘geographic suicide’ as associated with the reflexivity of African women as modern subjects a site for the ‘affective mapping’ (Flatley  2009 ) of diasporic identity. Ultimately, the article illustrates how Diome’s feminist re-imagining of the black Atlantic centres Africa and Africanness, combating the temporal dislocation that fixes the continent as a space that is lost in the originary moment of rupture of the Middle Passage.

Oceanic bellies and liquid feminism in Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique