Subversive Cartography of the Lowcountry

Recital Hall

The study of critical cartography allows for the questioning of traditional mapping practices and the ways in which boundary drawing reflects the power structures of society. John Pickles stated in "A History of Spaces, Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World," "…instead of focusing on how we can map the subject [we must] focus on [how] mapping and the cartographic gaze have coded subjects and produced identities" (Pickles 2004: 12). This presentation examine maps from Gloria Naylor's novel "Mama Day," Cornelia Walker Bailey's memoir "God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man," and other examples of hand-drawn maps of the Lowcountry as models of critical cartography that serve to articulate and denunciate the continual destabilizing boundaries of the Sea Islands due to tourism development, land grabbing, and taxation practices that have coded the space since the mid-twentieth century.