"Ground Truth in the Loam:" Literary Mapping as Emancipation

Abstract

In the late 19th century, Ida B. Wells, a black woman from the South, urged international powers to put American racism on the map (Alderman & Inwood, 2021). She used quantitative data to display lynching sites in her famous essay, “Lynching and the Excuse for It,” written in response to Janny Addams article urging readers to give lynchers the benefit of the doubt. Ida B. Wells’ work may be the most notable example of counter - mapping, a cartographic practice that challenges institutional power by leveraging social data for activism. Countermapping is a discipline emerging from critical cartography in which individuals subvert traditional cartography by producing maps that provide alternative perspectives. Inspired by antiracist counter - mapping practices, this paper expands the notion of a map to reimagine not only the phenomena that should be mapped, but the cartographic form itself. Expanding the idea of what constitutes a map is in and of itself emancipatory, say some critical cartographic scholars (Alderman, 2021). I examine the novels, Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena Maria Viramontes and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, to understand how authors configure and reconfigure space to confront injustices such as racism and exploitation.