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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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. … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

This cultural map was based on various maps of Jamaica online and shifting between scales on Google Maps. The quotations are from chapters 1 and 3 of Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands by Stuart Hall, with Bill Schwarz (2017).

Borinquén or Puerto Rico: ¡Que Viva La Música!