Theoretical Framework

This project is grounded in a theoretical framework that bridges Black geographies, spatial justice, speculative design, and digital ethics. Rather than treat immersive documentation as a neutral act of preservation, it engages cultural memory as a political and speculative intervention—situated in the afterlife of slavery, shaped by racialized spatial extraction, and oriented toward descendant futurities. The concepts outlined below animate Daufuskie3D’s methodological choices, narrative structure, and visual form, offering a critical vocabulary for understanding not only what is represented but how and why it is rendered.

I. Black Geographies and Spatial Refusal

Black Geographies provides a foundational lens for this work by framing space not as passive terrain but as contested ground shaped by race, power, and resistance. Following Katherine McKittrick, Black spatial production must be read through the logics of plantation violence, urban exclusion, and fugitive practice.¹ Daufuskie Island, as a site of historic land dispossession and Gullah survival, embodies these geographies. The project aligns with the tradition of spatial refusal: resisting imposed narratives of erasure or decline by documenting vernacular architecture, oral testimony, and land memory through immersive media. This refusal is both methodological and aesthetic—an insistence on narrating Black spatial life on its own terms.

II. Wake Work and the Afterlife of Slavery

Christina Sharpe’s concept of “wake work” informs the project’s ethical approach to documentation.² To labor in the wake of slavery is to contend with its ongoing structures—displacement, loss, and systemic invisibility. This framework demands that digital documentation not merely recover traces of the past but contend with the racialized systems that continue to fracture Black life and landholding. Immersive preservation, then, becomes a form of wake work: rendering visible not only cultural sites but the absences, silences, and violences that surround them. This ethic guides decisions about what to scan, how to annotate, and when to withhold.

III. Plantation Futures

The term “plantation futures,” as developed by Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, provides a critical framework for understanding ongoing forms of spatial extraction and aesthetic erasure.³ On Daufuskie, private luxury developments now occupy land once held by Black farmers and Gullah families. Gated communities have overlaid historic compounds, and speculative tourism has commodified Gullah culture while displacing its people. This project refuses the logic of plantation futures by reclaiming sites like the Robinson Family Home and the Tabby Ruins—not as nostalgic remnants, but as evidence of Black presence, labor, and endurance.

IV. Vernacular Cartography and Digital Memory

Nettrice Gaskins’ theorization of “vernacular cartography” provides a framework for community-driven spatial storytelling.⁴ Unlike institutional maps that flatten or erase cultural nuance, vernacular cartography centers community memory, layered meaning, and Afro-diasporic spatial logics. Daufuskie3D deploys annotations, ambient sound, and nonlinear pathways to embody this approach—creating a narrative interface shaped by the rhythms, references, and relationalities of Black southern life. This mode of mapping privileges what Sharpe might call “residence time”: the lived duration of memory and meaning embedded in place.

V. Immersive Counterpublics and Speculative Design

Drawing from the work of Michelle Commander and Reynaldo Anderson, this project positions immersive environments as digital counterpublics—spaces where Black communities can narrate futures not yet realized.⁵ Speculative returns, in this sense, are not escapist—they are epistemological strategies. The VR and AR affordances of Daufuskie3D extend beyond visualization; they become tools for diasporic connection, cultural pedagogy, and speculative repair. These worlds are not reconstructions of the past but reconfigurations of memory and possibility.