In Fall 2023, we ran an experimental pilot project for the counter-mapping component of the Colonial Networks research project with graduate students at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. We used ArcGIS StoryMaps and the end result was a website called Art, Enslavement, and Resistance in Cap-Français.
Teaching with Maps
This pilot project was run during Meredith Martin’s graduate seminar, French Art, Colonialism, and Enslavement ca. 1660-1830, taught at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts in the Fall semester of 2023-24.
Students worked with two of the project’s georectified maps, both of them colonial maps originally designed by the French cartographer René Phelipeau: his 1786 map of the plantations around Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien); and his 1786 map of the city of Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien).
Students were invited to chooose one story or “counter-point” from a list of people, places, objects, and events that had emerged from our archival research so far. Their task was to research the story, write a short essay about it, select a feature image, and determine the longitude and latitude for the point using one of the georectified maps. Once their “counter-points” had been geolocated, they were added to the collective map they ended up creating together through this process.
Most of the points selected by students focus on the lives of enslaved and free Black inhabitants of Haiti/Saint-Domingue, as well as important events, like the burning of Cap-Français in August 1791, which precipitated the Haitian Revolution. Among other examples featured on the map are stories about individuals like François Makandal, a revolutionary leader of maroons, and Marie Kingué, a healer and diviner, both formerly enslaved on colonial plantations.
For this pilot project we used ArcGIS StoryMaps to compile the points and create the project website, and it served our purposes well. We are keen to use it again in further counter-mapping experiments, although we may end up using different software for the Colonial Networks Critical Counter-Map.