Doctoral Dissertation Research: Digitally Mapping The Black Atlantic: Spatial Imagination and the Politics of Reappropriation between Africa and North America

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

Drawing upon the fields of black Atlantic studies, architectural history and theory, and cultural geography, this doctoral dissertation research project seeks answers to the question: How and why did groups and individuals re-imagine their physical environments in the black Atlantic? The dynamic and often complicated process of re-imagining is explored using the concept of spatial reappropriation, a term that refers to the conscious process through which a group or individual reclaims a physical space that was previously imagined in a way that was disparaging to that group or individual. In many cases, spatial reappropriation critically reconfigures built environments by creating new ways of seeing, being, and becoming in those sites. Spatial reappropriation responds to the period of early transatlantic travel and the ways in which some human landscapes were mapped as modern and others as non-modern. With the onset of transatlantic travel, many groups formed spatial imaginations, or ways of seeing, ordering, and inhabiting space, that were informed by European Enlightenment concepts of man in which the significance of race and place in establishing ones identity were key. The ways in which groups or individuals occupied space, particularly in the black Atlantic, therefore never were arbitrary but were always informed by the types of spatial imaginations they invented or inherited about a particular site. This doctoral dissertation research project has two main research objectives. The first objective is to develop a grounded theory of spatial reappropriation in the black Atlantic. The second objective is to create a set of interactive digital maps of black Atlantic sites that will help to visually document the transfer of ideas about race and space from one country to another. To meet these objectives the doctoral candidate will draw upon three case studies from the U.S. and the West African Republic of Liberia. Liberia's relationship with the U.S. provides unprecedented evidence for the ways in which landscape and architecture contain embedded ideological concepts like modernity, freedom, and utopia, because even though the Republic of Liberia was formally established by free blacks in 1822; the republic initially was contrived by white members of the American Colonization Society as early as 1801. This longstanding and complicated relationship enables a cross-regional analysis of race and space in the Atlantic world. To visually document and analyze instances of spatial reappropriation, the student will employ historical archival and ethnographic research methods like focused interviews and participant observations along with spatial analysis using participatory mapping applications drawn from geographic information science. The combination of these methods will facilitate a four-sided research approach towards understanding the multi-directional exchange of ideas about space between Africa and the U.S. The results of this study will produce a geographically multi-sited digital map that will enable researchers to take space and spatial factors including landscape and architecture as critical modes of interpretation and employ new Web 2.0 mapping applications to research, analyze, and present new ways of thinking about spatial relationships in the black Atlantic. In addition, the digital map will allow community members within each study site to map and learn about processes of spatial reappropriation in their black Atlantic community. By developing new pedagogical materials and practices for conducting collaborative research using participatory GIS and a community-centered praxis, this study also will provide underrepresented communities in Liberia and the U.S. with new tools for negotiating and reappropriating the spaces around them. With GIS and other digital tools, politically disenfranchised communities in Liberia can begin to map their own futures after fourteen years of civil war. This project will investigate new challenges to re-imagining urban and rural space in Africa and will offer new tools for confronting the spatial legacies of settlement, colonialism, and civil war. Furthermore, this project will broaden the scope and volume of geographic knowledge produced on Africa and its Diaspora in North American scientific scholarship. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career. This award is jointly supported by the NSF Geography and Spatial Sciences Program and the NSF Office of International Science and Engineering.