Unmapping Through Sound
Tao Leigh Goffe · 2025
Tackling how maps have been deployed as tools of imperial capitalist extraction, this chapter offers alternatives through sound technologies for wayfinding in the Caribbean and its diaspora. Where the limits of two-dimensional visualizations of land flatten the archipelago, sound records offer other dimensions for decolonial meditation. By reflecting on born-digital cartography, new sensory possibility for understanding space is amplified by sonic and digital technologies. The author outlines the digital project, Unmapping the Caribbean, coauthored with her students and a team of technologists, employing Esri&s;s ArcGIS Story Maps platform. It examines soundscapes of Marronage and Indigeneity in five geographies: New York City, Suriname, Hispaniola, Cuba, and Jamaica. Relational sedimented racial histories of the archipelago emerge through the author&s;s concept of “unmapping” as opposed to “remapping,” by tuning into soundscapes. Centering the way sound orients the human body in space, the politics of the opacity and Afro-Indigenous refuge in the Caribbean come to sonically articulate sovereign archipelagic being.