To offer a cultural map of the Caribbean, the archipelago profoundly characterized by transculturality and historical, political, social and other kinds of entanglements and Creolization, I used The Salt Roads, written by Jamaican-born speculative fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson, as a point of departure to offer a rendition of the ways in which sociopolitical, cultural and…

The focus of my cultural map is the Haitian Revolution, which took place roughly from 1757 through to 1820. In “Hegel and Haiti”, Susan Buck-Morss makes an argument against the marginalization of the colonies in narratives about moves towards democracy and equality during the Enlightenment period (836). Never having encountered this revolution in any of…

For a long time now, I have wanted to create an overview of key writers that I encounter during my studies. I will often recognize the name, but be unable to place the writer – where they are from, what their key writings are etc. The cultural map that I have created has been the…

This map is a geographical representation of the authors cited in Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature”, Dadedalus. I have added some information present in Alison Donnell’s “’The African Presence in Caribbean Literature’ Revisited: Recovering the Politics of Imagined Co-Belonging 1930–2005″. Brathwaite distinguishes four kinds of written African literature in the Caribbean….

The cultural map I have created maps music development in Jamaica, with a focus on the 20th century. While music is something I am personally interested in, I also believe that the kind of music people produce is telling of their opinions, moods, (cultural) affiliations, and any type of tension or lack thereof that defines…

This collection of pictures is about the imaginary moments of the origin of Jamaican Creole represented in Zong!. Impressed by the variety of non-English languages in the book, I traced the foreign words listed in Glossary, located the words I can identify and numbered them in a code which combines page number and line number…

For my cultural map, I wanted to make a musical trip to the island of Puerto Rico. Among all the artists I decided to focus on the Puerto Rican composer Tite Curet Alonso. Tite Curet is one of the most important figures of salsa. He composed nearly 2000 salsa songs, boleros, and ballads. I chose…

My cultural map of Aruba takes the shape of a long poem that I have recorded and that takes the reader around the island as I know it. The poem is based on my personal memories. My parents used to live on Aruba from 1989 to 1993. I was not born at the time but…

In the context of this course, my cultural map traces the journey of indentured labour from the East Coast of India to Guyana (or British Guiana, as it was known earlier) in the Caribbean. I have based it entirely on Gaiutra Bahadur’s book, Coolie Woman: An Odyssey of Indenture (2013). Bahadur’s work makes visible an…