"Sets the scene for the book by presenting Kei Miller's 2014 poem The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion as a prime example of the clash between a visually oriented European and a Caribbean person steeped in sound culture. A European mapmaker, voiceless, soundless, ventures into Jamaica, intent on rendering the island according to his silent art of lines, contours, limits, and borders; an art of the eyes. A Jamaican rastaman, voluble, articulate, engages with the European, and questions the outsider's art, resisting it ...
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"Sets the scene for the book by presenting Kei Miller's 2014 poem The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion as a prime example of the clash between a visually oriented European and a Caribbean person steeped in sound culture. A European mapmaker, voiceless, soundless, ventures into Jamaica, intent on rendering the island according to his silent art of lines, contours, limits, and borders; an art of the eyes. A Jamaican rastaman, voluble, articulate, engages with the European, and questions the outsider's art, resisting it with his own; an art of the mouth, the ears, the hands, the whole sonorous, vibrating, living body. Such is the premise of Miller's poem, which sets up a largely indirect encounter between a visually oriented cartographer and a Rastafarian who critiques the practice and methods of mapmaking, and as such challenges the power of the white, European eye, to the point that this power is eventually undercut and gradually superseded by the voice, and by the sounds of the Jamaican and his island. As such, Miller reenacts one of the Caribbean's longest standing cultural clashes, between the visualism-the belief in and reliance on the eye as the primary bodily source of knowledge and power-of the colonizers and their successors, and the more sound-centered existence of the African and Creole people, a way of being and knowing that is partly the legacy of African heritage and partly the result of the plantation and its aftermaths, the myriad ways in which sounds were and are used and adapted as markers of identity and resistance, which sets up a largely indirect encounter between a visually oriented cartographer and a Rastafarian who critiques the practice and methods of mapmaking, and as such challenges the power of the white, European eye, to the point that this power is eventually undercut and gradually superseded by the voice, and by the sounds of the Jamaican and his island"--
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