Here, low, in this river bend: Visualizing Bvlbancha's Colonial Ecotones with Adrian Anagnost

In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Adrian Anagnost (Tulane University / Clark Fellow) charts a cross-cultural history of visualizing territoriality in the lower Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf of Mexico. Among Indigenous inhabitants, the area that would become New Orleans was known as Bvlbancha—the land of many tongues, or many waters. This region was located at the threshold of land and water and, by the eighteenth century, at the borders of empires—where multiple approaches to territorialization overlapped. For this lecture, Anagnost brings together Indigenous Plaquemine material culture with environmental history, European cartography and artistic practices, and embodied approaches to land management.

Presented in person in the Clark auditorium.

Image: Attributed to Ignace-François Broutin, Carte particulière du cours du fleuve Missisipy ou St Louis, à la Louisiane, depuis La Nouvelle-Orléans jusqu'aux Natchez (detail), 1731. Bibliothèque nationale de France