Maps are never neutral objects.
They serve as tools of power and domination, and they can hide as much as they reveal.
Visible and Invisible
Phelipeau’s 1786 map of the plantations around Cap, which first enabled us to “see” the profound links between Haiti/Saint-Domingue and the Paris art world, also renders invisible the lives of enslaved and free Black and Indigenous individuals, who lived, labored, and resisted across these lands.
This branch of the Colonial Networks project is engaged with a digital re-mapping of Haiti/Saint-Domingue – one that uses counter cartography to make visible some of these intentionally obscured Black and Indigenous histories. Using digitized georectified colonial maps, we are transforming maps like Phelipeau’s into an interactive digital counter-map that allows users to explore alternative geographies and histories of art in Haiti/Saint-Domingue.
On one of the plantations on Phelipeau’s map, for instance, we can relocate the crucial site of the Ceremony of Bois-Caïman – a vodou ceremony enacted by enslaved Black inhabitants in August 1791 that became a pivotal event in launching the Haitian Revolution. This event has been a captivating subject for reinterpretation by Haitian artists like Jacques-Richard Chery and Ulrick Jean-Pierre, and the site outside Cap is marked today by street murals depicting the event.
Collaborative Critical Counter-Mapping
Creating this critical counter-map of Haiti/Saint-Domingue is a collaborative action. We are working to bring together a network of scholars and creative practitioners – including French historians and art historians; scholars of Black, Caribbean, and Indigenous studies; and Haitian and Caribbean diasporic artists – to foreground the life of Black and Indigenous inhabitants before, during, and after the Haitian Revolution.
We are undertaking archival and object-based research to build a portfolio of points and mapping layers through which to develop this counter-mapping of Haiti/Saint-Domingue. Content for the counter-map will be generated by a collaborative network of participants and will take various forms (texts, images, sound, and video).
Sites and objects reinscribed through this critical counter-mapping will seek to:
- relate the experiences of Black and Indigenous inhabitants, particularly through moments of resistance, acts of making, and traces of cultural preservation
- explore the cultural complexity and hybridity of Haiti/Saint-Domingue’s art worlds during the period of French colonial occupation and the early years of Haitian independence
- highlight the presence and involvement of non-human actors and natural resources, which embody the ecological devastation wrought by colonialism
Other Links
- A pilot version of the counter-mapping project that we ran with students at NYU: Counter-Mapping in the Classroom with StoryMaps
- Critical Counter-Mapping Black Geographies of Art in Haiti/Saint-Domingue: a collaborative workshop with scholars of Black and Caribbean history, French art history, and Digital Humanities