• Unmapping the Caribbean: Sanctuary and Sound
    Tao Leigh Goffe (New York University)
  • The St. Martin Project: The Impact of Hurricanes on the People of St. Martin
    Catherine Benoît (Connecticut College)
  • Digital Technology and Disaster Management: A Comparative Study between India and Haiti
    Upasana Bhattacharjee (Indian Institute of Technology), Ranjani Srinivasan (Indian Institute of Technology)
  • Moderator: Angelique V. Nixon (University of West Indies, St Augustine)


Unmapping the Caribbean: Sanctuary and Sound
Tao Leigh Goffe (New York University)

What would a map of sanctuary look like? We take up these questions to anchor the precarity of refuge and what it means to be a refugee in the context of the Caribbean. Critiquing the imaginary of an secret island hideaway and vacation paradise, we imagine a decolonized archipelago. This project grew out of a set of conversations alongside the NYU #SanctuarySyllabus published online by Public Books. How can one map the intimacies of four continents, to evoke Lisa Lowe’s reconstellation of the historiography of the Americas with the Caribbean plantation as focal point? In this multimedia presentation as artists, activists, and educators, we will showcase our use of digital mapping technologies–StoryMaps, ArcGIS, and Inquisite– to tackle the conceptual grounds of what it would mean to map sanctuary. Framed by fugitivity we examine the potential and limitations of mapping marronage and indigeneity in the Caribbean. We use maps as objects anchored in the question of contestation over space and race in the region, to re-open the dialogue between creolization and indigenization amplified by the digital.

The St. Martin Project: The Impact of Hurricanes on the People of St. Martin
Catherine Benoît (Connecticut College), Lyndsay Bratton (Connecticut College)

The St. Martin Project is a multimodal web presentation of a project we are developing on the history of migrations and on the impact of Hurricane Luis (1995) and Hurricane Irma (2017) on the populations of St. Martin. The website focuses more specifically on the aftermath of Hurricane Luis, when immigrant neighborhoods were razed by the French and Dutch states and undocumented foreigners were deported in higher numbers than in preceding years. Originally conceived as a digital companion of a book published in 2015 by Catherine Benoît and based on a collection of personal archives covering 25 years of fieldwork on the AIDS epidemic, the website is developing into a more ambitious project. The St. Martin Project is now a collaborative digital humanities project supported by the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program at Connecticut College, involving faculty, librarians, and students. The project will enable partnerships with the people of St. Martin, including migrant groups that constitute about 40% of the population, as well as with the people of St. Martin who moved to Staten Island, NY and New London, CT beginning in the 1930s. The website is multilingual in French and English, and will be soon accessible to Hispanophone speakers to reflect the islanders’ multilingual practices. It includes a crowdsourcing feature for the inhabitants of St. Martin–both on the island and in the United States–to facilitate engagement and partnership with these communities. We aim to decenter and decolonize the study of the Caribbean by enabling individuals to share their own stories.

Digital Technology and Disaster Management: A Comparative Study between India and Haiti
Upasana Bhattacharjee (Indian Institute of Technology), Ranjani Srinivasan (Indian Institute of Technology)

The closest human beings can get to mitigating natural disasters is by equipping themselves with the knowledge of preparation. Emerging forms of knowledge today range far and wide, with the Internet and ICTs gaining more prominence in everyday interaction and communication. This paper seeks to trace the crucial relationship between ICTs and natural disasters through two comparative studies: Haiti (2010 earthquake) and India (2015 Chennai floods). The paper discusses the role of technology in relation to natural disasters in three stages: pre-disasters, during disasters and post-disasters. At the crux of the comparative analysis is an assessment of how technology shapes flow of information and affects public response to disasters. In the same context, the shortcomings of technology are probed. Accessibility to technology thus forms an important element of the study. In addition, the study tries to evaluate state response to natural disasters as facilitated by ICTs within the two countries. A complementary analysis of the role of external actors such as the UNISDR is also undertaken. Finally, the comparative analysis seeks to identify the takeaways of disaster management with respect to ICTs in both countries and recognize how they can learn from one another.