Drawing the Caribbean

A journey through cartographies, imaginaries, and the city

Abstract

How is the Gulf-Caribbean configured as a place defined and measured by its physical conditions? And as a space perceived, lived, represented, and imagined, how is it inserted within the ecumene understood by the Western world? This communication seeks to explore the five centuries and a little more of the Caribbean as a desire, as a territory and as a horizon. Inspired by the centuries of great explorations and transatlantic voyages, three "courses" are proposed that, mobilizing the tools of history, geography, urban studies and visual arts, reconstitute certain mechanisms and processes through which today’s Greater Caribbean is apprehended as the complex transterritorial entity that it constitutes. The first course takes us to the chimerical past of the Sea of ​​Darkness and the legendary islands that will become the Antilles archipelago; the second course is a journey through the port cities frequented by steamships in the era of transatlantic expansion, while the third course is set in the natural and tax havens of the contemporary Greater Caribbean.

Keywords: Caribbean Sea, visual culture, image of the city, territory