Subversive Cartography: Teaching Mary Prince and Saidiya Hartman

Abstract

This chapter utilizes Hartman’s methodology of retrieval to create a map1 in StoryMap JS2 (“the map” or “this map”) that analyzes multiple geographic spaces in The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route . The map is an archive or a witness to some of the geographical spaces Mary Prince lived (and was sold) as an enslaved woman seeking freedom and the places in which Saidiya Hartman has conducted research or visited in Ghana as a “free” woman. Layering the past over present creates a subversive cartography, one that subverts and unsettles the monolithic geographical narrative of the transatlantic slave trade. Twenty-two locations are mapped that merge past, present, and future as one narrative and not a compartmentalized narrative contained by borders or timelines because “At stake is not recognizing antiblackness as a total climate” (Sharpe 21). This map will elicit questions of responsibility on how to unsettle colonial narratives about Black and African American women. This map interrogates geographical spaces of the formerly enslaved as already and always in existence beyond hegemonic structures that contribute to a capitalist economy.

Full text

ABO: Interactive Journal for ABO: Interactive Journal for
Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
Volume 13
Issue 1
Summer 2023
Article 13
2023
Subversive Cartography: Teaching Mary Prince and Saidiya Subversive Cartography: Teaching Mary Prince and Saidiya
Hartman Hartman
Carolina Hinojosa
University of Texas, San Antonio
, carolina.hinojosa@utsa.edu
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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation
Hinojosa, Carolina (2023) "Subversive Cartography: Teaching Mary Prince and Saidiya Hartman,"
ABO:
Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
: Vol.13: Iss.1, Article 13.
http://doi.org/10.5038/2157-7129.13.1.1350
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Subversive Cartography: Teaching Mary Prince and Saidiya Hartman Subversive Cartography: Teaching Mary Prince and Saidiya Hartman
Abstract Abstract
This chapter utilizes Hartman’s methodology of retrieval to create a map1 in StoryMap JS2 (“the map” or
“this map”) that analyzes multiple geographic spaces in
The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave
Narrative
and Saidiya Hartman’s
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
. The map is
an archive or a witness to some of the geographical spaces Mary Prince lived (and was sold) as an
enslaved woman seeking freedom and the places in which Saidiya Hartman has conducted research or
visited in Ghana as a “free” woman. Layering the past over present creates a subversive cartography, one
that subverts and unsettles the monolithic geographical narrative of the transatlantic slave trade. Twenty-
two locations are mapped that merge past, present, and future as one narrative and not a
compartmentalized narrative contained by borders or timelines because “At stake is not recognizing
antiblackness as a total climate” (Sharpe 21). This map will elicit questions of responsibility on how to
unsettle colonial narratives about Black and African American women. This map interrogates
geographical spaces of the formerly enslaved as already and always in existence beyond hegemonic
structures that contribute to a capitalist economy.
Keywords Keywords
Cartography, digital humanities, geography, mapping, spatial rhetoric, teaching subversive cartographies,
Mary Prince, Saidiya Hartman
Creative Commons License Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Cover Page Footnote Cover Page Footnote
The author wishes to express deepest gratitude to Dr. Kerry Sinanan for her enthusiasm and constructive
criticism to improve this essay. Gracias, Profe!
This pedagogy: concise collections is available in ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830:
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol13/iss1/13

In short, what becomes clear is that the past is neither remote nor distant and that
Africa is seen, if at all, through the backward glance or hindsight. For these
reasons, it is crucial to consider the matter of grief as it bears on the political
imagination of the diaspora, the interrogation of U.S. national identity, and the
crafting of historical counternarratives.
Saidiya Hartman, The Time of Slavery
...the earth is also skin...
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds:
Black Women and The Cartographies of Struggle
In the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
I am a Chicana from the southside of San Antonio, Texas, and my pedagogical
approach is from this positionality. It is important to note that this article seeks to
participate in the work many Black women are already doing: centering Black
feminist perspectives and Black lives in literary studies and digital humanities.
My contribution is to open a dialogue between Black Studies’ and Latino/a/x/es’
pedagogical approaches to The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave
Narrative as we continue to unsettle colonial geographies and confront anti-
Blackness in literature and rhetoric. History is in a perpetual state of being
(re)written. In this context, we must question our collective and intersectional
responsibility to the enslaved, formerly enslaved, and descendants of the
enslaved. As Saidiya Hartman warns, “How best to remember the dead and
represent the past is an issue fraught with difficulty, if not outright contention”
(Hartman 758). History often fails to acknowledge the multiple cartographic
narratives of the enslaved. While the Middle Passage is a well-known geography
within historiography, many other spatial-political movements of the enslaved
exist. The pedagogy described here develops a mapi to analyze multiple
geographic spaces in The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative
and in Hartman’s own Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave
Route; using StoryMapJS2 (“the map” or “this map”). StoryMapsJS is a free
online tool that uses GPS mapping to pinpoint locations that can be annotated
with photos, data, videos, and more. I follow Hartman’s example to recover the
presence of Black women in the institutional archive. These texts together serve
as an intertextual archive and allow us to witness some of the geographical spaces
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in which Mary Prince lived and the places to which Hartman has traveled. The
layering of the past over the present creates a subversive cartography that
undisciplines and unsettles the predominant geographical narrative of the British
Caribbean. By enacting subversive cartography, Frances Aparicio’s example of
shifting cultural signifiers in language by “rewriting and transforming ‘American’
culture with sub-versive signifiers” (“On Sub-versive Signifiers” 796) shows how
Prince and Hartman’s movements subvert dominant narratives of space and their
relationship to race and gender. As Katherine McKittrick argues, “Geographies of
domination, from transatlantic slavery and beyond, hold in them the marking and
contestation of old and new social hierarchies” (x1x). Subversive cartography
becomes a way to undo these persistent geographies of domination. While
Aparicio calls attention to shifts in language, scholars like Yomaira Figueroa-
Vásquez insist on radical remappings when articulating the decolonial diaspora.
The map narrates the geographic space of both Prince and Hartman across
temporalities to show Black women’s lives interweaving in what Figueroa-
Vásquez calls “radical Afro-diasporic imaginaries that subvert coloniality and
usher in new ways of knowing and being, and interrogate and excavate location
and dislocation” (“Decolonizing Diasporas” 25). The map, “Subversive
Cartography: Mary Prince and Saidiya Hartman,” is a tool for instructors to use in
their classrooms. It is one avenue to undiscipline colonial formations within the
academy with instructors. As Yomaira Figueroa-Vázquez notes, the academy
retains within it “the preoccupation with dictatorship, occupation, and coloniality”
and so she notes “the need to mark it, name it, document its actions, subvert it,
and topple it [as] pressing political concerns within Afro-Atlantic literature”
(Figueroa-Vásquez 34). This commitment, core to African American and Afro-
Latinx methodologies, is fundamental to the thinking leading to Prince’s story’s
digital mapping. The main thrust of this essay is to identify theoretical and critical
synergies between Prince and Hartman, and to use the digital map as an exercise
in archival memory-making. The digital map creates a narrative where Hartman
and Mary Prince are present simultaneously in these specific spaces, whether they
have been present in one another’s temporality and geography or not. One vital
outcome of this article is emphasizing the need for multidisciplinary and cross-
Ethnic Studies work.
As Madelaine Cahuas says:
There would be no Latinx geographies without Black geographies. What I
mean by this is that Latinx and Black geographies are inextricably linked,
because Blackness and Latinidad are not mutually exclusive and because
Black thought, experiences, history and politics, along with the legacy of
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transatlantic slavery, profoundly shape contemporary social and spatial
arrangements in las Americas.
Layering Hartman’s archival work in Lose Your Mother, an autobiographical
account of Hartman’s journey from the US to Ghana and the Door of No Return,
with Prince’s narrative, creates a spatiotemporal artifact that considers how
narratives of slavery remain present within liminal spaces. Hartman sets out to
“engage the past… because Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a
racial and political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago” (16-17).ii
In 1828, Prince crossed from Antigua to London with her enslavers, the Woods,
as their property, and we never know if she could return to her family in the
Caribbean. Reading her journey with Hartman’s journey produces a powerful
intertextual memory of Black space and time. Students must be guided not to
romanticize the journeys of two Black women, one by bill of sale and one by
choice. Mary Prince’s autobiography is integral to creating one of many voices
for enslaved African women in England and the West Indies. Similarly, Saidiya
Hartman’s work is integral in recovering archives and resisting the archival
erasure of enslaved peoples like Mary Prince. The map serves, then, as an artifact
of remembrance because “remembrance is entangled with reclaiming the past,
propitiating ancestors, and recovering the origins of the descendants of this
dispersal” (Hartman 758). The map interrogates these sites where Prince and
Hartman physically stood, keeps them in conversation, and makes their narratives
more immediate. When reading Prince and Hartman together, the map can be
used in classrooms as a ready-made tool for discussing these subversions and acts
of memory.
Teaching with the digital map, “Subversive Cartographies: Mary Prince and
Saidiya Hartman”
Instructors can access the map here: https://bit.ly/PrinceHartmanMap. One can
navigate 21 places with various embedded photographs, maps, and videos as a
slideshow. Each highlighted place contains a description of the current meaning
of the place and the corresponding citation to that location in either Prince’s or
Hartman’s narratives. The digital map layers 11 locations for Mary Prince and 10
for Saidiya Hartman, respectively. None of the locations appear in one another’s
text: 1. Brackish Pond, Bermuda (Prince)
2. Hamble Town-Hamilton, Bermuda (Prince)
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3. Spanish Point, Bermuda (Prince)
4. Turk’s Island (Prince)
5. Grand Quay-Grand Cay (Prince)
6. South Creek, Salt Cay (Prince)
7. St. John’s, Antigua (Prince)
8. Winthorp’s Plantation, Antigua (Prince)
9. Moravian Chapel, Spring Gardens (Prince)
10. Hatton Gardens, London (Prince)
11. Anti-Slavery Society, Altenbury, London (Prince)
12. Elmina, Ghana, Africa (Hartman)
13. Manhattan, New York, U.S. (Hartman)
14. Beyin, Ghana (Hartman)
15. Keta, Ghana (Hartman)
16. Queen of All Saints Academy, Brooklyn, New York (Hartman)
17. Curaçao (Hartman)
18. Park Place, Brooklyn (Hartman)
19. Marcus Garvey Guest House, Ghana (Hartman)
20. University of Ghana in Legon (Hartman)
21. Cape Coast, Ghana (Hartman)
The mapping of these locations disrupts present narratives of tourism and
colonialism, reminding us of slavery’s history that continues to reside in these
locations.
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In “Subversive Cartography: Mary Prince and Saidiya Hartman,” former salt
plantations have become part of a tourist economy filled with resorts, luxury
homes, and docking places for cruise ships. “The means and modes of Black
subjection may have changed, but the fact and structure of that subjection
remains” (Sharpe 12). The land continues to exist as currency in coloniality. It
continues to function as a space of production absent of the cartographic
narratives once written upon the land and woven within the fabric of its history.
The continued terrorization and violence of spaces like Grand Cay, and the Turks
and Caicos Islands, from nineteenth and twentieth-century British literature,
ultimately influencing North American literature and canonical texts. These
islands are British territories. “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives
from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and
constitutes one of the main connections between them” (Said xiii). Prince and
Hartman’s routes are not only rewritten on this map; the routes are also layered to
etch a subversive narrative.
Many modern places in the Caribbean, such as the Turks and Caicos Islands,
where affluent people choose to vacation, are the spaces of formerly enslaved
people. Nevertheless, “the history of capital is inextricable from the history of
Atlantic chattel slavery” (Sharpe 5). From resorts to hotels, Airbnb’s, museums,
castles, and more, a new narrative emerges about these spaces continuing to erase
formerly enslaved peoples and the histories of the lands which continue to be
economic repositories that sustain imperialism and capitalism; commerce exports
a new narrative of “getting away” to these places just as previous colonizers
tended to do. Hartman asks, “Yet, what does it bode for our relationship to the
past when atrocity becomes a commodity for transnational consumption, and this
Fig. 1 Landing page of “Subversive Cartography: Mary Prince & Saidiya Hartman”
map
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history of defeat comes to be narrated as a story of progress and triumph?”
(Hartman 760). Hartman, who is from Brooklyn, creates her own subversive
cartography by writing her travel narrative to Ghana in her own words. Though,
Lose Your Mother is more than a travel narrative and autobiography:
It locates Harman’s travel and writing in relation to a longer and
multifaceted legacy of black travel that includes the coerced movement of
black people across the Atlantic during the slave trade, the migratory
travel of black diasporic peoples from the Caribbean to America and from
America to Africa, and the travel of black tourists seeking to recover their
roots in Africa (Brooks 58).
Hartman’s subversive cartography, her consciousness, and (re)visitation become
“the principal authority, an active point of energy that [makes] sense not just of
colonizing activities but of exotic geographies and peoples” (Said xxi). Hartman
reclaims the narrative from the point of departure and the point of witness and
rupture.
While European and Spanish cartographers wrote a narrative that upheld empire,
conquest, and genocidal actions, Prince wrote her own cartography. She tells the
reader where she has been in her own words. “I was born at Brackish-Pond, in
Bermuda, on a farm belonging to Mr. Charles Myners,” states Mary Prince (3).
She will continue to name geographic locations as she is sold between enslavers.
This powerful geo-locating is a counter-narrative in the colonial narrative of
slavery. She situates herself and writes herself into history. Prince negotiates her
identity between space, place, and time. Iterations of this spatiotemporal
negotiation are prominent in the first paragraph of her autobiography: “I was born
at . . . When I was an infant . . . I was bought . . . and given . . . ” (Prince 3).
While Kerry Sinanan addresses a different passage, the same can hold true for the
entirety of the narrative: “Prince utilizes the language of empiricism in order to
assert her authority in an absolute way. Her knowledge of slavery, she claims, is
based on what she has seen and felt: her impulse to speak, to tell the truth is based
on her first-hand experience of slavery" (Sinanan 72). By geo-locating places in
specificity, Prince names spaces where she has been sold and where other
enslaved peoples have been sold and used. While she tells her narrative by
location, she is also locating others within a spatiotemporal framework where
conquest and chattel slavery have been devastating.
Hartman’s (re)visit to Ghana resists slave tourism in which the sites of capture
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and ports of departure become romanticized as places to make a reclamation of
ancestry. Hartman documents, archives, and geo-locates places rewritten by
Western extraction as Mary Prince did before her. Brooks explains, “In
chronicling her visits to the slave forts, Elmina Castle in particular, Hartman
considers the ways in which the tourist industry in Ghana participates in the
construction of a single narrative about Africa and about slavery that intersects in
key ways with the singular and limited narrative black émigrés have embraced”
(70). Elmina Castle is an important location because the castle, founded by the
Portuguese, was owned by various colonial figures, and played a key location as a
trading post and major stop during the Atlantic slave trade from Africa to
America. More vitally, millions of enslaved Africans were exported through the
underbelly of Elmina Castle, “The Door of No Return.” Hartman is not coming
home; she is building a bridge between Africa and African Americans (Brooks
71). Hartman confronts the differences between herself and the people of Ghana,
which lends a particular respect and a resistance to erasure (Brooks 71). In stark
contrast, the tourism of the Bahamas completely erases the history of the West
Indies. A deeper question to ask is, who is working in the resorts, serving on the
luxurious waterfronts, and who continues to benefit from this commodification of
land? When the tourist industry of Ghana and the tourist industry of the Bahamas
are juxtaposed against one another, there are clear ways the exploitation of the
land continues. Both have become destinations for different reasons and for the
same economy. “Juxtaposing her own decolonized viewing practice against a
colonized vision, Hartman challenges the Africanist discourse implied by Western
travelers who envision Africa as ‘the heart of darkness, the dark continent, the
blighted territory’” (Brooks 65). In the classroom, we can explore how the
conditions for these afterlives of slavery are anticipated in Prince’s narrative.
As Said tells us, empire functions as a “device and instrument” in literature and
land (Said 85). “Territory and possessions are at stake, geography, and power.
Everything about human history is rooted in the earth..." (Said 7). While in South
Creek, Prince “cut up mangoes to burn lime with. While one party of slaves were
thus employed, another was sent to the other side of the island to break up coral
out of the sea” (Prince 16). In these few lines and the proceeding lines, Prince
maps the labor she and enslaved peoples carried out on the land and sea and their
entanglement in empire and African extraction. Prince details several ways she
and the others would draw salt from the earth. Prince urgently tells us,
“Sometimes we had to work all night, measuring salt to load a vessel; or turning a
machine to draw water out of the sea for the salt-making" (17). Prince plots the
points of salt harvesting along Turks Island. She creates a cartographic image of
Turks Island that resists erasure by present-day tourism to Turks and Caicos
Islands. In horrific contrast, Prince describes Turks Island as a “horrible place . . .
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cruel, horrible place!” (Prince 17). Glistening clear waters and beautiful ocean
views were once cruel and horrible. It is written on the land and on time,
mentioning “raw flesh” against the whiteness of salt from a bucket (Prince 17). If
Prince's political mapping is read via a close reading, the geo-location of Turk's
Island becomes a metaphor for the functionality and the instrumentation of
empire. With this one image, a multiplicity of images and functions erupt to name
how whiteness cultivates, reproduces, exports, and institutionalizes the open
wound of the world.
Prince was sold for 300 dollars to Mr. Wood, who lived in St. John, Antigua
(Prince 21). Prince continues to locate herself almost as if plotting points into
Google Earth and thus continuing to pen a cartographic image of her life
intertwined with racial capitalism. Prince becomes awfully ill in Antigua, with
rheumatism and St. Anthony’s fire (Prince 21). Her narrative becomes a walking
map detailing each place and condition she has inhabited. Sinanan explains that
Prince is a cultural artifact for present-day consumption in heritage cultures of
liberal abolition; she “has been reconstituted as a cultural artifact for the present
but is presented to us in ways that obscure her presentation in the present as an
artifact (emphasis hers, Sinanan 70). It is also fitting, then, to explain how Prince
creates herself as a text and a map of her subjugated life: “The body African
henceforth inscribed with the text of events of the New World. Body becoming
text” (NourbeSe Philip 95). The invention of perceived locations relies on
“whose” and “what” extensions. For example, “Whose past? Whose land? What
counts.” Further, how long do these definitions last, and how long do these
imaginings count? These are the questions that Prince’s narrative and attention to
her mapping can lead to in the classroom for all levels.
Marked by her time in Ghana, Hartman faces the tensions of for who, for what,
and for how long:
I was a stranger in the village, a wandering seed
bereft of possibility of taking root. Behind my back
people whispered, dua ho mmire: a mushroom that
grows on the tree has no deep soil. Everyone avoided the
word “slave,” but we all knew who was who. As a
"slave baby,” I represented what most chose to avoid:
the catastrophe that was our past, and the lives exchanged
for India cloth, Venetian beads, cowrie shells, guns, and
rum. And what was forbidden to discuss: the matter of
someone’s origins (Prologue).
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In this passage, Hartman locates not only where she is physically but also where
she is situationally and spatiotemporally. Moreover, all of this is a matter of
narrative and power. She begins her journey as a stranger. Going to Ghana does
not promise welcome, nor does it promise rootedness, as she explains. Hartman
creates a powerful image of herself without roots, further solidified by the image
of the mushroom growing on a tree. Mushrooms serve as networks for trees to
communicate. In this passage, Hartman hears whispers of folks referring to her as
a mushroom that grows on a tree severing the possibility of becoming networked
into the place she physically finds herself, a place where she makes geographical
sense, yet at the same time, does not. “The geographical sense makes
projections—imaginative, cartographic, military, economic, historical, or in a
general sense cultural. It also makes possible the construction of various kinds of
knowledge, all of them in one way or another dependent upon the perceived
character and destiny of a particular geography” (Said 78).
Hartman and John Ray speak in Cape Coast where he explains to Hartman that
‘“there are nine major slave routes in Ghana . . .. Every step you take in Ghana
crosses the trail of slaves’” (Hartman, Chapter 1). John reveals a different
network, where the enslaved and their journeys are etched into the land and water.
While Hartman finds herself in liminal existence, she resists forgetting these
carved narratives. Hartman finds herself at a contested site, or a place of
collective memory, “and the concomitant failure to integrate varied and often
tenuous histories and perspectives within the slave forts is the reproduction of
forgetting in spite of the central mission and invocation of heritage tourism to
Fig. 2 Last page on the map; twenty first location: Cape Coast, Ghana (Hartman)
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remember'' (Brooks 71-72). Hartman’s physical existence at the forts on the coast
of Ghana creates an additional cartographic route of remembrance—a counter-
narrative. She is both a contradiction and a paradox (Brooks 76). Hartman
explains “these peregrinations might be less about the search or reclamation of
home, than expressions of the contrarieties of home” (Hartman 764-765). Both
Hartman and Prince cannot return to a point of origin even if for different reasons
though freedom is the point. This cartography has no beginning and no end. Of
the servants in England, Prince urges, “They have their liberty. That’s just what
we want'' (34). Hartman’s (re)return to Ghana is about “the unfinished project of
freedom” and our responsibility as scholars and readers to that unfinished project
moving it toward completion (Brooks 77). Hartman acknowledges that the routes
of strangers form a mother country and realizes that it is as close as she will ever
arrive at the origin. “I realized too late that the breach of the Atlantic could not be
remedied by a name and that the routes traveled by strangers were as close to a
mother country as I would come,” explains Hartman (emphasis hers Chapter 1).
Both she and Prince, while born in different places, are strangers as they travel,
forging new cartographies and counter-narratives that are not replacement
narratives; theirs are narratives that exist with and alongside and yet contradict
existing narratives of the routes of enslaved peoples. “Recognizing black
women’s knowledgeable positions as integral to physical, cartographic, and
experiential geographies within and throughout dominant spatial models also
creates an analytical space for black feminist geographies: black women’s
political, feminist, imaginary, and creative concerns that respatialize the
geographic legacy of racism-sexism" (McKittrick 53).
The map interrogates our spatiotemporal awareness of past and present by
respatializing mapped and unmapped routes. Students can witness
cartographically, via the digital, a site of slave auction which has now become a
burgeoning tourist site for the wealthy to escape present realities. In other words,
the map presents the imperative to see the amelioration of whiteness as it persists
in the erasure of Black consciousness and Black women’s narratives already
written on those lands. It is equally urgent to cartographically witness a site of
export of Black bodies which has now become a tourist attraction, to see castles
where the enslaved lived, which uses African American consciousness to keep
those places trapped in time—places never quite attainable in the human
imagination. Hartman states, “Images of kin trampled underfoot and lost along the
way, abandoned dwellings repossessed by the earth, and towns vanished from
sight and banished from memory were all that I could ever hope to claim. And I
set out on the slave route, which was both an existent territory with objective
coordinates and the figurative realm of the imagined past, determined to do
exactly this” (Hartman Chapter 1). In this “figurative realm of the imagined past,”
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Hartman and Prince are dispossessed bodies with coordinates etched into spatial
consciousness. McKittrick warns, “the dispossessed black female body is often
equated with the ungeographic, and black women’s spatial knowledges are
rendered either inadequate or impossible” (121). Prince’s awareness of the
location where she was sold or lived is a spatial awareness that produces a
subaltern space because it is from her perspective and geopolitical positionality.
Written from the perspective of Black women, the power of geography shifts, and
the meaning of the space becomes alterable.
Black intellectuals already wrote these places/locations; this map unsettles the
Columbus narrative and the narrative that chattel slavery happened long ago and
too far away both in place and history to affect the present still; it unsettles the
erasure of an awareness that the United States reaps the benefits of chattel slavery
and often reproduces it--still. McKittrick suggests that “Geographic alternatives
are best displayed through communicative acts—geographic expressions that, as
mentioned in previous chapters [of Demonic Grounds], cite/site under
acknowledged black geographies” (143).
This map is not only about placing Prince and Hartman in the context of the West
Indies or resistance to tourist routes but about respatializing the narrative of
chattel slavery in the West Indies. Similarly, Katherine McKittrick articulates for
the geographic location of Canada, “Thus, it is not simply a matter of placing
blackness within Canada, or the world; nor is it a matter of superimposing black
maps atop the nation-space. Rather, black diaspora theories hold place and
placelessness in tension, through imagination and materiality, and therefore re-
spatialize Canada on what might be considered unfamiliar terms... it advances a
different sense of place” (McKittrick 106).
The map seeks to unsettle and blur the lines between the binaries of past and
present, enslaved and free, African and African American, ancestral and
collective memory, and statistical data and lived epistemologies. By unsettling
these lines, a liminal space emerges from a layered consciousness that Christina
Sharpe calls the wake. Adapting the images from the Middle Passage, she writes,
“As this deathly repetition appears here, it is one instantiation of the wake as the
conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding
aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery” (Sharpe 2). The locations are more than
locations in the world pulled from literature; they are “ongoing locations of Black
being: the wake, the ship, the hold and the weather” (Sharpe 16). This map also
shows how both conversations (Prince and Hartman) are still ongoing and present.
To memorialize the castles in Ghana or place a plaque for Prince in London is to
enslave the narrative of Black testimonies, to freeze the wake in time. Mary
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Prince’s memorial plaque is in England, but she was not free in England. This
plaque’s location erases her life before England, which was mostly all of it
(Sinanan 70-71). This erasure perpetuates the myth of slavery as a past event. It
upholds capitalistic endeavors on the luxurious islands—a getaway from the
perceived labor of everyday lives for those who can afford it. “In commemoration
of Prince [elsewhere], we seem to want the simulation of the real slave but do not
want to recognize it as a simulation [right here]” (Sinanan 76). Slavery becomes a
keychain we purchase at the destination boutique after the Caribbean ship docks.
The land is a continuous enterprise. “The actual geographical possession of land
is what empire in the final analysis is all about” (Said 78).
Sharpe urges, “How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing? . . . How
does one memorialize the everyday?” (Sharpe 20). When cruise ships dock at
Grand Cay, they leave a wake. Cruise ships loaded with vacationers and tourists
dock on living history, on a consciousness that persists within the erasure of
luxury resorts, immaculate landscapes, and top-tier service. Wake after wake
creates another narrative, insisting on intersecting routes. Sharpe’s call to action
warns, “At stake, then is to stay in this wake time toward inhabiting a blackened
consciousness that would rupture the structural silences produced and facilitated
by, and that produce and facilitate, Black social and physical death” (Sharpe 22).
While Sharpe acknowledges that “Black peoples in the wake” are stateless and
nationless, Hartman also acknowledges this reality and forges additional
intersectional routes of existence through her work to rescue or resuscitate the
archive.
There is a careful line to balance between historiography and creating Mary
Prince as a “spokeswoman for all slaves, a symbol and a de-historicized, de-
contextualized artifact that presents the fictional as the biographically real”
(Sinanan 77). This map is not a plaque; on the contrary, the map is a living text in
the context of present-day reclamations of narrative spaces. By not viewing
Prince’s journey as one that is stand-alone, instead, Hartman’s travel narrative is
layered upon, within, and in tandem with Prince’s travel, the danger in
romanticizing a narrative that is catch-all becomes a counter-narrative, subversive
cartography. Hartman’s narrative cannot exist without Prince’s, and neither can
Prince’s narrative continue beyond the archive without Hartman’s.
Mary Prince is not a spokeswoman for all enslaved peoples though she is often
presented and memorialized as one (Sinanan 77). It is important to show that most
of her narrative details her life spent in the West Indies, and this is a truer
narrative of who she was than the plaque in London suggests. There are only two
locations plotted in England for Mary Prince. While other historical timelines
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exist from which to extract information about places Prince had been, relying
solely on her autobiography keeps her narrative in the conversation, an essential
point since her autobiography remains largely inaccessible (Sinanan 77). Hartman
and Prince were not in the same exact geographical locations, but their narratives
intersect in more ways than one. Visually, their journeys cross one another, yet
both are profoundly entangled and enmeshed with one another. They both create
a wake, a cartographic narrative that lives beyond maps, space, and time. This
map is intentionally borderless. A graphic watercolor background, as opposed to a
traditional cartographic map, visually layers and blurs both Hartman and Prince’s
routes to show the spatiotemporal implications of both narratives. I am not doing
wake work, as named by Sharpe, because it is created for and created by Black
people. While this is an introductory way to use this map, I present, to the best of
my ability, a map that merges past, present, and future as one narrative and not a
compartmentalized narrative contained by borders or timelines because “At stake
is not recognizing antiblackness as a total climate” (Sharpe 21).
A few questions remain that Latina/o/x/es and Chicana/o/x/es should continually
ask of ourselves: What more about my perceptions of slavery and its continued
narrative will we choose to unsettle? Beyond this chapter, how will we continue
to grow in awareness or unlearning antiblackness? How can we learn even when
it is uncomfortable or seems never-ending? How can our work not silence or erase
Black women’s voices and lived epistemologies?
Notes
This essay is part of a special issue: “Teaching The History of Mary Prince (1831), guest edited by
Kerry Sinanan,” Aphra Behn Online 13, no. 1 (Summer 2023). To read the essays in the cluster,
follow this link: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol13/iss1/.
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Works Cited
Aparicio, Frances R. “On Sub-versive Signifiers: U.S. Latina/o Writer Tropicalize
English.” American Literature vol. 66, no. 4 (1994): 795-801.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2927701.
Brooks, Tisha M. “Searching for ‘Free Territory ’in Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your
Mother.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association vol. 50,
no. 2 (Fall 2017): 57-83. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44862250.
Cahaus, Madelaine. “Interrogating Absences in Latinx Theory and Placing
Blackness in Latinx Geographical Thought: A Critical Reflection.” Society
and Space Journal, Latinx Geographies Forum, January 23, 2019,
https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/interrogating-absences-in-latinx-
theory-and-placing-blackness-in-latinx-geographical-thought-a-critical-
reflection.
Figueroa-Vásquez, Yomaira C. Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of
Afro-Atlantic Literature. Northwestern University Press, 2020.
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2008.
—. “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors.” Souls: A
Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society vol. 18, no. 1
(2016): 166-173. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2016.1162596.
—. “The Time of Slavery.” The South Atlantic Quarterly vol. 101, no. 4 (2002):
757-777. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/39111.
McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies
of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Nourbese Philip, M. A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays. Mercury Press,
1997.
Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative. Dover
Publications, 2004.
Said, Edward. “Empire, Geography, and Culture.” Culture and Imperialism. First
Vintage Books Edition, 1993, pp. 3-14.
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—. “Introduction.” Culture and Imperialism. First Vintage Books Edition, 1993,
pp. xi-xxviii.
—. “Narrative and Social Space.” Culture and Imperialism. First Vintage Books
Edition, 1993, pp. 62-79.
Sharpe, Christina. “Chapter 1.” In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke
University Press, 2016, pp. 1-24.
Sinanan, Kerry. “The ‘Slave ’as Cultural Artifact: The Case of Mary Prince."
Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture vol. 49 (2020): 69-87.
https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2020.0007.
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Appendix
The transdisciplinary nature of these projects lends well to the literature or the
rhetoric classroom spaces. I would challenge instructors to bring these into their
humanities and ethnic studies classrooms, possibly science and mathematics. One
does not have to have experience in geography or cartography to engage these
resources. For instructors interested in teaching courses on mapping and colonial
spaces, the following projects are already in existence:
● Women and the Places of African Diaspora
● Migrations and the Black Experience
● Preserving Significant Places of Black History
● Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Introductory Maps
Students may choose other locations from both texts, which will also work. If a
location lives merely in collective memory and not in the present time, the
location can still be plotted on the map on top of or alongside the current location
to show the layered history of a place.
Sample Lesson Plan
Subversive Cartography: Mary Prince and Saidiya Hartman
Objective
Students will create a digital map that plots the journeys of Mary Prince and
Saidiya Hartman via slave narrative and travel testimony respectively. Students
will use primary and secondary sources including the StoryMapsJS digital
platform to create an interactive digital map.
Tools Needed
● Computer, laptop, tablet
● Access to the internet
● Knight Lab’s StoryMapJS
● Primary Texts
○ Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave Narrative
(1831)
○ Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave
Route (2006)
● Secondary sources
○ Choose 2 -3 secondary sources
○ Keywords: diaspora, chattel slavery, digital humanities, slave narratives,
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etc.
Course Overview
1. Introduce Mary Prince and Saidiya Hartman and their contribution to
literature, testimonios, and historical as well as cultural legacies.
2. Gather into groups. Each group will choose three locations from each of
the narratives. (It is assumed that both texts have been read in their
entirety.) Locations should vary from group to group. Groups should begin
researching these locations both in historical and contemporary contexts.
3. Groups will discuss these locations and their findings in terms of chattel
slavery, imperialism, colonialism, diasporas, and what it means to
undiscipline or unsettle dominant narratives.
4. Each group will work collaboratively to create a digital map in
StoryMapsJS. The platform itself is not collaborative, so groups will have
to choose one person to locate, plot, add a citation, and aggregate media to
the digital map. Groups can choose these elements together but one person
will be responsible for adding these elements to the digital map.
5. Once maps are complete, have students present to the class their digital
map and findings. Why did they choose these locations and what thematic
connections did they make to chattel slavery, imperialism, colonialism,
diasporas, unsettling, and undiscipling?
6. Take a few minutes after each presentation to have other groups engage
with the presenters ’work.
7. Students may individually reflect on all the maps presented via a written
reflection piece about how creating a map helped them understand the
narratives differently or more deeply. Was this digital tool effective for
what they were assessing? How could this tool improve or be more
conducive to analyzing these two narratives?
8. Students can brainstorm a final digital research project using their maps.
Discussion Questions
1. How can we ethically map a story of someone who was enslaved or is
currently marginalized?
2. What resources would we need to inquire to create a more comprehensive
framework for mapping an enslaved woman and a free woman?
3. What is our responsibility to both the digital humanities and Black
communities as we undertake this map? Who does it benefit? Who is
further marginalized as a result of the creation of this map?
4. How does your perception of this map change if you have not been to the
locations on the map?
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5. How do you hold praxis and theory in productive tension in your
approach?
6. Are you citing Black women?
i Hinojosa, Carolina, Subversive Cartography: Mary Prince and Saidiya Hartman
https://bit.ly/PrinceHartmanMap
ii There are many Black geographers doing this work: Katherine McKittrick, Caroline Bressey,
Tiffany Lethabo King, Yomaira Figueroa-Vázquez, Lorgia Garcia Peña, and more. The University
of British Columbia has an excellent reading list of Black geographers and works here:
https://geog.ubc.ca/news/a-reading-list-of-black-geographers/
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