The Identity of the Canary Islands: A Critical Analysis of Colonial Cartography

Abstract

The Canary Islands is a non-sovereign archipelago that has been incorporated into the Spanish Kingdom since the 14th Century. These islands, located 100 kilometres off the northwest coast of Africa and some 1000km from the Spanish peninsular, have been subject to malleable and often distorted representations in different official maps, which have often not reflected the geographical reality of the archipelagic territory. This article investigates the extent to which aspects of colonial history, such as cartography (the spatial element), the precolonial past (the element of historical consciousness) and/or new categorisation as a "European ultraperiphery" (the rhetorical element) have affected the socio-political identity of the Canary Islands. The latter aspects have created an identity characterised by a lack of consciousness of the islands' most obvious characteristic -of their being an (offshore) territory of the African continent. Canarian society has thereby lost its "spatial latitude" (ie an African geographical reality) in favor of a "cognitive latitude" (ie its imagination as an extension of Europe).

Cartographic time travel: Reflecting the past, defining the present, and challenging the future using old maps

“…Western cartography is a complex knowledge system with a half-millennium history as »a form of knowledge and a form of power« (Harley 1988a) that both created and interpreted an emerging social, economic, and political spatial structure that was initially imperial (Eurocentric or Northcentric), later national, and eventually global (Sutton 2015;Corujo Hernández 2019). The maps that are now »old« have helped constitute and sustain relationships between different worldviews over the centuries, which conceived of the world first locally and superficially, then increasingly broadly, and finally as a planet.…”