The Sanctioned Antiblackness of White Monumentality: Africological Epistemology as Compass, Black Memory, and Breaking the Colonial Map

Abstract

In the cities of Richmond, Virginia; Charleston South Carolina; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Baltimore, Maryland, this dissertation endeavors to find out what can be learned about the archaeology(s) of Black memory(s) through Africological Epistemic Visual Storytelling (AEVS); their silences, their hauntings, their wake work, and their healing? This project is concerned with elucidating new African memories and African knowledges that emerge from a two-tier Afrocentric analysis of Eurocentric cartography that problematizes the dual hegemony of the colonial archive of public memory and the colonial map by using an Afrocentric methodology that deploys a Black Digital Humanities research design to create an African agentic ritual archive that counters the colonial one. Additionally, this dissertation explains the importance of understanding the imperial geographic logics inherent in the hegemonically quotidian cartographies of Europe and the United States that sanction white supremacist narratives of memory and suppress spatial imaginations and memories in African communities primarily, but Native American communities as well. It is the hope of the primary researcher that from this project knowledge will be gained about how African people can use knowledge gained from analyzing select monuments/sites of memorialization for the purposes of asserting agency, resisting, and possibly breaking the supposed correctness of the colonial map.