Is there a history of Black mapmaking, and if so, how might one write it? Framing this question not as a factual investigation but as an ethical challenge, this lecture looks to a series of four case studies - maps produced by Black artists in the 1740s, 1810s, and 2010s - to rewrite a history of mapmaking attentive to fugitivity, illegibility, and embodied ritual practices. Each mapmaker complicates notions of place, nation, and belonging while offering plural, spiritual, and material strategies to reclaim and remap colonial geographies. In so doing, these mapmakers chart new forms of relating to the land and various elsewheres which do not rely on settler colonial schema that make racial hierarchy coterminous with the production of space. 

About the Speaker: Dr. Matthew Rarey is an Associate Professor of African and Black Atlantic Art History and the Chair of Art History at Oberlin College and Conservatory

Image: Jaime Lauriano, Accuratissima Brasilia Tabula, from the series Invasão, Etnocídio, Democracia Racial e Apropriação Cultural, 2016. Courtesy of the artist, São Paulo, Brazil. 

This lecture is part of the "Reparative Histories of Art", a project of the Department of History of Art & Architecture and funded by the A W Mellon Foundation.