| Historically, mapmaking and cartography emerged as part of the European expansion into the Caribbean, but it was not as if indigenous people of the Americas or others—especially the Africans brought here as captives—had no cartography. Indeed they did, as they, too, had myriad ways of representing their cosmos. These latter representations—both Amerindian and African—might be alternatively described as “cosmograms.” This dissertation examines the several cartographies and cosmographies of the European, Amerindian, and African arrivants, as representing not merely worlds, but world views.; Cartography and cosmography are significant in regard to the operations of the Caribbean imagination. Thus, work by poet Kamau Brathwaite and novelist Wilson Harris will be examined in light of the map-making impulse. |
