This Google Map represents the beginning of a work-in-progress geocoding project to map the imagination of geography in African-American historical writing in the Nineteenth Century. Through the above link, you will find a map of various events and historical figures found in William C. Nell's important abolitionist history, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1854) with accompanying text and some images. 

 

In beginning this project, I am interested not only in investigating what Martha Schoolman has called the key political interventions of abolitionist geographies (2015) but also how digital humanities tools might respond to and be transformed by the African-American literary history. This project was first formulated at "Seshet" a National Endowment for the Humanities  Digital Humanities workshop held at Howard University in 2016. 

 

African-American texts present unique challenges to DH tools. In the case of geocoding, a consideration of the role of mapping as a tool used in the surveilling and conquest of enslaved and maroon populations has to remain at the center of our investigations. But just as black historians transformed the narrative codes of C19 nationalist histories from within (Ernest 2004), it is possible to imagine a creative mapping of American space that would transform the false totalization of the underlying map through the overlaying of disfiguring lines of flight.

The accompanying map is a first attempt to use a single, partially nationalistic and ideological and partially subversive, text to demonstrates the possibility of such a project for research and pedagogy. By mapping various episodes from Nell's text, we can see an America overlayed with a least six modes of C19 black movement:

1) Two modes of Black Atlantic movement (Middle Passage and Transatlanticism)

2) Fugitive Slave Movement

3) Internal slave trade Movement,

4) Maroonage, and slave revolt geographies

5) Occluded geographies of soldiers deforming the sites of national history

6) Centers of Black Abolitionist action

This allows us to see how in even a single text of black American history, there emerges a multiplicity  of critical geographical interventions that can be used to layer the visual narratives of maps with subversive and disfiguring traces.

My continuing goals for this project includes incorporating both historical and more typical literary canonical narratives, and to build classroom assignments around various textual maps that will allows students to engage with archival texts they may not otherwise have access to in the classroom through the lens of a variety of critical textual, geographical, and visual literacies.