Unmasking Maps, Unmaking Empire: Towards an Archipelagic Cartography

Abstract

The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.--Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations" What Joseph Campbell in his classical study calls the "monomyth" is, as psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés notes, a meta-narrative that "informs and […] spiritually grows the cultures, and the peoples within those cultures, through its universal cache of idioms and images." 1 Acknowledging that human placemaking, meaning-making, and storytelling rely on mental mapping and mapmaking, this essay expands the scrutiny of narrative structures of placemaking towards the realms of spatial imaginations, human geographies, and transnational cartographic practices of mobility. Tracing both colonial and anti-colonial nodes of these practices across oceanic circuits makes visible what Albert Wendt described as "so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature." 2 What emerges is, I suggest, an archipelagic cartography that opens new venues for critical reconceptualizations of islands, mainlands, centers, peripheries, colonial histories, and transnational future trajectories.Be it through gesturing directions, drawings in the sand or stick figures, the urge to conceive maps is perhaps as old as humanity itself. Embellishing the depths of ancient caves in northern France, some of the earliest-known maps in fact do not partition the surface of the earth but trace constellations of the night sky. Knowing little about their creators, we may nevertheless assume that they, like all following generations, looked beyond terrestrial borderings in search of meaning, connection, and transcendence. Much like modern maps, these first known cartographic specimen embed spatial symbols within networks of meaning. They construct, communicate, and naturalize spatial imaginations by imparting them with stability and authority. In this sense, all maps are acts of poiesis through which people engender spatial meaning