“Views from Somewhere”: Mapping Nineteenth-Century Cholera Narratives

Using ArcGIS, I map the ways in which primary and secondary sources describing an 1850s cholera epidemic in the Caribbean spatialize the epidemic. More specifically, I probe the scale at which varying narratives report the epidemic to consider whether it was understood as a broad, regional event, or at the level of specific colonies or islands. I draw upon post colonial and feminist critiques of the map, and keeping in view the situated nature of knowledge, create alternative maps of the epidemic. I approach the epidemic’s archival traces through the lens of archaeological theory, discussing them in relation to scale and movement.