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…

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…

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…