This is a digital decolonial art history project that explores deep, largely unknown connections between Haiti (formerly the French colony of Saint-Domingue) and the Paris art world in the years before and after the French and Haitian Revolutions of the 1780s and 1790s.
Colonial Networks is a research project based between New York University and Queen Mary University of London. The project directors are Meredith Martin and Hannah Williams.
Mapping and Counter-Mapping
Colonial Networks emerged through encounters that the project directors had with French historical maps of Haiti/Saint-Domingue – like this 1786 property map – showing the region around the city of Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien). The patchwork of shapes on the map represent the boundaries of plantations, each labeled with the name of the often absentee planter who claimed to own it.
For historians of eighteenth-century French art, the names of the landowners on maps like this surprisingly read like a who’s who of the Paris art world. They reveal the many art collectors, artists, architects, and other art-world figures who directly profited from colonial commerce, resource extraction, and the violence of enslavement.
These maps have become pivotal sources in our project’s interconnected activities, which include:
- critically remapping and foregrounding Haiti/Saint-Domingue’s Black and Indigenous geographies of art, rendered almost invisible on colonial property maps
- researching the social networks and financial connections between the Paris art world and Haiti/Saint-Domingue
- collaborating with museums to consider the legacy of these histories through surviving artworks and provenance
To find out more about our current research, you can visit our About page, explore different components of the project via the images below, or check out Activities for upcoming talks and events.
