Charlotte Goudge

CHARLOTTE GOUDGE, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in September 2023 to aid research and writing on “New Humanist Perspectives of Panoptic Plantationscapes in Antigua.” This fellowship supported completion of a monograph that fundamentally reframes understanding of colonial surveillance and spatial control in Caribbean plantation landscapes. The research introduces the Graduated Recognition Framework, a methodology integrating computational visibility modeling with critical theories of race and perception to analyze how enslaved people inhabited landscapes of partial visibility rather than total surveillance. Using digital spatial analysis across three Antigua estates, the study reveals that plantation landscapes operated as fractured perceptual environments where colonial power was layered, unstable, and seasonally contingent. The work challenges dominant panoptic models by demonstrating how plantation surveillance functioned through ambiguity and graduated recognition thresholds rather than omniscient control. The project develops concepts including aggregate perception, facial recognition thresholds, and zones of ambiguous surveillance that illuminate how racialized control operated through vision, space, and architectural form. By moving beyond binary visibility logic to examine recognition-sheds, the research provides tools for understanding how colonial systems structured terms by which Black bodies could be known while revealing opportunities for resistance within totalizing systems. The completed monograph has been contracted by University of Alabama Press and contributes methodologically by demonstrating how digital archaeological tools can serve decolonial theory while maintaining ethical commitments to social justice.