Using Radial Flow Maps to Illuminate the Range of Black Mobility at Sea in the Nineteenth Century
Topics: Black Geographies
, Cartography
, Geographic Information Science and Systems
Keywords: black ecologies, nineteenth century, black geographies, oceanic studies, race, slave codes
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 68
Authors:
Christy Hyman, University of Nebraska Lincoln
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Abstract
Indeed “the sea provides a new epistemology and new dimension for thinking about surfaces, depths, and the extra-terrestrial dimensions of planetary resources and relations.”1 Since “oceanic studies is invested in assessing and moving beyond the limitations inherent in considering literary and cultural works as national products” it allows us to reconsider the mobility of past agents with broadened perspective.
In terms of nineteenth century seafaring people who were formerly enslaved the sea allowed for “the best opportunity to earn a living beyond the reach of patrollers and color prejudice.”2 These people had “embraced errantry or taking to the sea as the closest thing to freedom they could experience.”3
When Dionne Brand lyrically composed “I don’t want no f'ing country, here, or there and all the way back, I don’t like it, none of it, easy as that” she echoed the weariness of existence in hostile communities on land.4
This talk will explore hemispheric mobility of Black seafaring people in the antebellum era. Utilizing radial flow maps and archival records a charting of the politics of mobility will be assessed.
Hester Blum.Introduction: oceanic studies, Atlantic Studies, 10:2, 2013 151-155
Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-century America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011) 102
Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008).98
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) ix
Using Radial Flow Maps to Illuminate the Range of Black Mobility at Sea in the Nineteenth Century
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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