Geospatial Africana Discourses of Violence and Veneration: Africana Memory Decolonization and Reconstruction

• In Event: The Wounds of White Supremacy and the Power to Heal: Restoring Africana Agency from the Trauma of the West

Abstract

Cecil Rhodes was one of the preeminent colonizers of the African continent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A statue of Cecil Rhodes, a major benefactor to the University of Cape Town in South Africa, had been on campus grounds since 1934. After much student protest the statue of Rhodes was removed from the campus on April 9th 2015. However, to this day Rhodes, per his request when alive, is still buried at a sacred burial site for the Kings of Matabele in Zimbabwe that largely European tourists frequent for a nominal fee.From Cape Town, South Africa to Baltimore, Maryland, to New Orleans, Louisiana to Oxford, England and other places there are Black people using monuments to explore ways of doing a sort of decolonial memory construction, preservation, and excavation. Through mapping I plan to visualize an Africological epistemic narrative via qualitative analysis of the spatial juxtaposition of what I term ancestral violence (public monuments and spaces that deify perpetrators or instances of colonial and/or white supremacist violence against Black people) and ancestral veneration (spaces of healing created by Black people in response to colonial and/or white supremacist violence and/or its deification).

My data is spatial, qualitative, and tabular, dealing with select monuments built from 1776-1935. My software of choice for mapping the data is currently Google Fusion Tables and CartoDB. Ultimately, I seek to use this DH project as an African-Centered pedagogical tool for a participatory action research focus group of Africana youth where they would have the opportunity to create what Judith Madera calls counter-cartography and mapping what ancestral violence and ancestral veneration mean to them.

Author

• Christopher Roberts, Temple University