Performative Atlases: Memory, Materiality, and (Co-)Authorship

Abstract

Maps have traditionally been conceptualized as visual representations and studied for what they represent. In the past few years, however, scholars from different disciplines have started to approach them from new perspectives. Broadly speaking, art historians have shown increased interest in their materialities, and geographers and map historians in their social and performative aspects. This article reviews and synthesizes these approaches using the example of the atlas in its earliest and latest incarnations (Abraham Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and Google Earth). Atlases are conceptualized as mnemonic tools activated through different types of personal encounters that are at once visual and tactile. Focusing on performative encounters between atlases and their users, the article calls for a re-conceptualization of maps as fluid objects that are always in the making. It also invites a reading of the history of cartography as a history of interactions and co-authorships between map-makers and map users.

Disordered Ordering: Mapping the Divisions of the Ottoman Empire

“…Though some scholars in the 1990s had stressed the importance of examining mapping processes (e.g., Rundstrom 1991), only recently has scholarship on maps as processes or performances grown. Much of this newer scholarship has examined contemporary, popular, or everyday maps in which the map user is actively encountering the map (e.g., DeLyser 2003;Perkins 2009;Brown and Laurier 2005;della Dora 2009). But historical or archival maps have been neglected in recent discussion on the performance or process of mapping.…”

Mapscapes on the Urban Surface: Notes in the Form of a Photo Essay (Istanbul, 2010)

“…According to the representational approach of critical cartography, maps have been studied and deconstructed as powerful representations with a highly ideological content hidden behind the appearance of self-evidence. Following innovative theorization (Kitchin 2010;Perkins 2009;Della Dora 2009;Del Casino and Hanna 2006), maps are instead considered as contingent, relational, and fluid entities that are performed and manipulated by users in their meanings as well in their concrete material consistency. In their Manifesto for Map Studies, Dodge, Perkins, and Kitchin (2009, 229) invited scholars to ''interrogate everyday material encounters with mapping in different contexts.''…”

Geographies of the Book: Review and Prospect

“…So intrinsic is the relationship between writing and thinking geographically that it has been argued that, “Geography begins only when geographers begin writing it” (Wooldridge & East , p. 171). The relationship between geography and its inscriptions—whether in the form of maps, globes, gazetteers, dictionaries, travel narratives or textbooks, among much else—is both significant and complex: geography's epistemic cultures have generated a considerable variety of textual traditions that have been subject to recent scrutiny (Barnes ; della Dora ; Mayhew ; Ogborn , , ; Roche ; Withers ). The hybrid nature of geography is mirrored by the hybrid nature of its texts.…”