As my cultural map, I formulated a Prezi presentation of different theoretical, literary and visual approaches to imagining the Middle Passage. While the representation of the passage in-between is difficult to visualize, we are invited by thinkers, writers and artists to envision the journey from different perspectives. I aimed at focusing on various conceptions, from…

The cultural map “Haitian Vodou at the Crossroads of the Carnival” explores the place of Vodou in the socio-cultural consciousness of Haiti through tracing its origins, foundational belief system and historical importance in parallel with its representations in Haitian art and the Mardi Grass carnival’s character performances. Vodou is a syncretic religion, entangled in Christian…

In week 3, both Dionne Brand and Saidiya Hartman attempted to define the impossible experience of attempting to trace an origin which has been displaced by the transatlantic slave trade. This map is an attempt to represent the entanglement of pasts and migrations (forced and later voluntary) which produce identities and global dynamics but which…

Inspired by the discussion of Zong! in this course and by the lecture on poetry, I chose to create a piece of found poetry connected to NourbeSe Philip’s work. The poem below is composed of words from the following quote found in Zong!, in the chapter entitled “Notanda”, where NourbeSe Philip writes:  “Our entrance to…

Cartography has been perceived as an unbiased practice in the past, the capturing of the world as the world is. But over time it has become clear that map-making is not unbiased as the representation of some matters will always mean the erasing of others. Kei Miller’s poem The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way…

This portrait of a Creole woman is made of thirteen different seeds on a side of an old cardboard box. Taking an ethnobotanical viewpoint, the aim of this portrait is to visualize the intermingled identity of Creole beingness, both on a cultural level as well as on an ecological level. Since 1492, plants, people and…