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.