Personalizing Narrative in Torn Apart

The visualized layout of Torn Apart struck me as a salient instance in which DH practices work to graphically negotiate the buried narratives of recent diasporas, while also resisting the urge to classify its scholarly approach under an explicit theoretical framework. This sort of praxis seems to echo how David Scott invites his readers to “think Caribbean studies” by means of persistent inquiry, without necessarily expecting a categorical “answer” on the other end of such questioning. “The point (political, conceptual, disciplinary, moral of mobilizing this image,” or questioning, as Scott claims, seems more contingent upon the unraveling effect that investigative thinking can have on a postcolonial field of inquiry like Caribbean studies. To that point, visualizations such as Torn Apart, I believe, typify scholarship as process: they resist any clear-cut theoretical language, often defined by “foreign” powers; and instead illustrate data in such a way as to encourage its audience to construct their own critical narrative about how, at least in this case, current American power structures like ICE (and their moneyed interests) work to subjugate underrepresented migratory groups. I think the potential for constructing these narratives may lie, for instance, in the nexus between two or more separate data points, as in the case of donors from seemingly distinct political domains. But ultimately there is immeasurable room of critical inquiry amid an accessible dataset like Torn Apart, which is most certainly a virtue when it comes to unraveling the veiled workings of political hegemony in this day and time.