Mappare la rete testuale Makandal, di Kate Simpkins e Laura Johnson, tradotto da Anna Romagnuolo
Author(s)
Date Issued
2021
Type
article
Volume
20
Start Page
139
End Page
154
Abstract
François Makandal d. 1758, who was
an African enslaved on a sugarcane
plantation in pre-revolutionary Haiti,
was known as a healer who had
knowledge of herbal medicine that
European scientists could not explain.
The fetishes he made, called makwanda,
were the source of his powerful medicine
as well as his name. After losing his arm
to the sugar mill’s running cylinders
designed for extraction of the juice
from cane, he became a maroon and
led a long-term campaign of resistance
against the plantocracy by using his
knowledge of plants to poison and
terrify the colony. He was captured
and executed in 1758, but news of the
events was reproduced in the letters
of planters and scientific treatises as
well as plays and novels. This article
gives an account of the process and
theory behind creating a digital exhibit
meant to illustrate this effect, The
Makandal Text Network. Developed
through collaborative scholarship with
the Early Caribbean Digital Archive,
we attempt to decolonize Makandal
from the epistemological suspicion
through which Enlightenment science
frames non-European knowledge
ways. Makandal was an active agent of
counter-colonial knowledge production
and his story is embedded within the
great and brutal engine of scientific
knowledge production that French
agronomy monetized on the same soil.
Our article suggests ways that digital
scholarship, with West Central African
knowledge culture as an integrating
subject and presence across archives,
contributes to interdisciplinary
interest in the relationship of the early
Caribbean to American studies
Additional information
La rivista pubblica in lingua italiana ma fornisce abstract in lingua inglese. Il titolo italiano dell'articolo è: Mappare la rete testuale Makandal