Making Maps

Still thinking a little bit about spatial imaginaries (whatever that means precisely).

I found a collection of essays on the relationship between imperialism and urban space (edited by Felix Driver and David Gilbert) yesterday, and though I've only made it through the introduction (that being, perhaps, a very grad school way of reading), a quote caught my eye:

The representation of London as the 'home city of empire' directs our attention to the ways in which notions of 'home' and empire could be mutually constitutive rather than mutually exclusive. The idea of empire has often been regarded in Europe as a matter of diffusion, extension and expansion: as something which happens over 'there' rather than close to home. Recent work inspired by the 'post-colonial' turn in literature and the humanities has suggested a shift in our angle of perspective, towards the impact of imperialism 'at home'.

Thinking as I have been over the past couple of days about Wall Street and Main Street and these other imagined spaces, and listening to the vice-presidential debate the other night (both candidates insistence on the world happening somewhere else, over there), Driver and Gilbert's introduction serves as a kind of reminder that the dividing lines are never so neat as we make them out to be. If the most recent credit crisis involved the recognition that the problems on Wall Street can make themselves suddenly felt on Main Street - say, when small businesses can't get short-term credit - then it also might be worth thinking about the ways in which conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are spatialized closer to home. Is it in building new pipelines in Alaska to achieve energy independence (and by extension, be able to avoid foreign entanglements)? I'm not sure and haven't thought enough about the topic to have good examples close at hand.

And while still on the topic of maps, Jordan linked to a recent post at Making Maps (which looks like a fascinating site). The post took an image from an old map-drawing textbook; strangely enough, the lab sections I taught last week turned on the issue of drawing maps. One of the broad things it was possible to take away from the labs was the difficultly we all face with drawing world maps - for most of us, I think, the central issue is that we don't have any frame of reference for drawing the world, nothing to help us trace the continents. That was one of the interesting things about the old map: It took a human skull as its guide or referent. And to be sure, there are all sorts of issues with representation and power and racial stereotypes built into representing Africa as a human skull, but it's an interesting image nevertheless. One might think of other relationships drawn between the world and the human body: Europe, famously, named after Europa; the Atlas Mountains in the shape of Atlas holding up the Western horizon; the fertile steppes, with its reproductive overtones. I think it's Plato's Protagoras that turns on the issue of man as the measure of all things, and it's interesting to think about the way that the human image comes back as a way of establishing or producing geographic knowledge.

As a last - and brief - aside, Making Maps also links to a recent article authored by a couple of UCLA professors whom I happen to know. Not having actually read the article in full, I wouldn't presume to comment on it, but Si se puede seems to make a good point relative to the original article. Again, not having read the original article, I don't have much to add beyond a wry smile at the occasionally small academic world.