Normalized Alterity: Visualizing Black Spatial Humanities

Abstract

This article aims to envision more just visual representations of Black spatial collectivity. In light of transformative work in critical cartography and recent turns to narrative cartography, digital mapping has arguably come to offer an opportunity for radical and democratized visualizations. However, the historical and contemporary anti-Blackness of mapping urges caution. Moreover, prominent critical cartographic urges to eschew normativity risk advancing diminished and distorted representations of historically Black communities. In turn, this article questions the extent to which visually countering the ongoing anti-Black work of dominant maps (e.g. erasure of Black communities) might avoid altogether appropriating the medium. Presented are animations created with audio clips from oral histories collected in rural Southern (US) communities. Created in collaboration with a professional animator, these brief animated clips do the work of countering historic erasure without reinforcing the hegemonic legibility of dominant cartographic productions.