"Arts, Faculty of"@en . "DSpace"@en . "UBCV"@en . "Amit, Dotan"@en . "2010-06-08T15:59:59Z"@en . "2010-04-07"@en . "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/25508?expand=metadata"@en . " 1 Putting it on the Map: Imperial Gazing and Cartographic Meaning Dotan Amit April 7, 2010 UBC ASTU 400J \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Power and Knowledge in International Relations 2 Introduction Ideally practiced, the science of cartography as a method describing space is one that presents objective, detached, and neutral geographical knowledge. The history of cartography is typically imagined as a progression of newer and ever-progressing technologies and techniques developed for the most part by European explorers and geographers over the past few centuries. As such, maps are judged almost solely on the degree to which they successfully \u00E2\u0080\u0098mirror\u00E2\u0080\u0099 reality.1 Seen in this simplistic manner, mapmaking can be anything but ideological. Such \u00E2\u0080\u0098cartographic positivism,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 however, is indeed an ideal, as it fails to acknowledge that many so-called \u00E2\u0080\u0098geographical realities\u00E2\u0080\u0099 were/are not universal. A positivist understanding of the practice of mapmaking neglects the role that maps have had in a quintessentially imperial project of inscribing power- laden knowledge and meanings onto space. This activity has historically been one very important way in which expanding empires have cast a geographic \u00E2\u0080\u0098gaze,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 or way of seeing, which facilitated the transformation of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cseized space into a legible, ordered imperial territory.\u00E2\u0080\u009D2 Though it is explained in varying and nuanced ways, such a \u00E2\u0080\u0098gaze\u00E2\u0080\u0099 is ideologically and epistemologically grounded in a Cartesian approach that treats geography as a reality that exists \u00E2\u0080\u0098out there,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 ready to be catalogued and mapped.3 The first part of this essay will introduce and treat \u00E2\u0080\u0098Cartesian perspectivalism\u00E2\u0080\u0099 as the 1 H.J. Andrews and John B. Harley. The New Nature of Maps. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2001. 5. 2 Gear\u00C3\u00B3id Tuathail. Critical Geopolitics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 4. 3Andrews. 3; Tuathail, 5; Daniel Clayton. Handbook of Cultural Geography. Anderson, Kay et al eds. California: SAGE Publications Ltd., 2003. 358; David Cosgrove. Apollo`s Eye. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2001. 2. 3 epistemology that informed imperial cartography. It will problematize the assumption that cartographic knowledge is objective, arguing instead that any meanings achieved through this form of knowledge are done so through the practice of citation. The second part will deploy this problematization according to two examples of imperial mapping projects \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the mapping of colonial India, and cartographic representations of Cuba during the Spanish-American war. The concluding part will briefly explain the significance of critical cartography for postcolonial studies, and for the study of geography itself. Cartographic Cartesianism According to critical geographer Gear\u00C3\u00B3id Tuathail (Gerard Toal), Cartesian perspectivalism has deep roots in Western thought in the form of Ocularcentrism \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the privileging of the faculty of sight. \u00E2\u0080\u009CSight,\u00E2\u0080\u009D he says, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cis pre-eminently the sense of simultaneity. It is intrinsically less temporal than the other senses and has thus long been associated with intellectual pursuits that tend to elevate\u00E2\u0080\u00A6fixed essences over ephemeral appearances. An epistemology structured by vision tends to configure knowledge in terms of the simultaneous display and full apprehension of all the elements of a given configuration.\u00E2\u0080\u009D4 Later augmented in Western thought as Cartesian perspectivalism, this approach takes the world as a \u00E2\u0080\u009Creality that exists \u00E2\u0080\u0098out there,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 separate from the consciousness of the [observer].\u00E2\u0080\u009D5 4 Tuathail. 70. 5 Ibid. 23. 4 Cartesianism separates \u00E2\u0080\u009Can inner [mind] from an outer reality,\u00E2\u0080\u00A6an external world of objects.\u00E2\u0080\u009D This approach respectively positions a \u00E2\u0080\u0098viewing subject\u00E2\u0080\u0099 and a \u00E2\u0080\u0098viewed object,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 with the former \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwitnessing, not interpreting.\u00E2\u0080\u009D6 Thomas Edney confirms that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe dominant epistemology of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was strictly visual and mechanistic,\u00E2\u0080\u009D with the dominant model of vision defining the viewer as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cisolated, enclosed,\u00E2\u0080\u00A6autonomous\u00E2\u0080\u00A6and withdrawn from the world.\u00E2\u0080\u009D7 As with Tuathail\u00E2\u0080\u0099s description of occidental discourses of vision, Edney writes that the faculty of sight \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdepended on the pregiven world of independent truth\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u0093 an understanding \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthat was only reinforced by the use of artificial technologies of vision.\u00E2\u0080\u009D8 These \u00E2\u0080\u0098artificial technologies of vision\u00E2\u0080\u0099 were varied, including at various times cameras,9 cylindrical artistic panoramas,10 and maps. Tuathail describes how the function of maps had become increasingly central to the machinations of expanding and centralizing imperial powers that sought to \u00E2\u0080\u009C[organize]\u00E2\u0080\u00A6space around an intensified principle of\u00E2\u0080\u00A6absolutism.\u00E2\u0080\u009D11 Providing the example of England\u00E2\u0080\u0099s early imperial ambitions, he writes that sixteenth century military expansions \u00E2\u0080\u009Cprovoked new forms of knowledge that sought to address the problematic of\u00E2\u0080\u00A6conquest, delimitations, and mastery of space. A detailed cartography was essential in subjugating what were held to be \u00E2\u0080\u0098wild and untamed territories...\u00E2\u0080\u009D12 For England\u00E2\u0080\u0099s 6 Ibid. 24. 7 Thomas Edney. Mapping an Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 47. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Tuathail. 29. 11 Ibid. 1. 12 Ibid. 4. 5 armies, planners, and administrators who found foreign terrain \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdifficult and disorienting,\u00E2\u0080\u009D conquered land proved to be an \u00E2\u0080\u009Cillegible surface\u00E2\u0080\u00A6[and] a disorienting space that was not yet a territory\u00E2\u0080\u009D13 (emphasis added) because it was not yet rendered visible. In light of the \u00E2\u0080\u0098provocation\u00E2\u0080\u0099 of this new knowledge, Tuathail points out that \u00E2\u0080\u0098geography\u00E2\u0080\u0099 was not only a noun, but also a verb. \u00E2\u0080\u0098Geography\u00E2\u0080\u0099 involves \u00E2\u0080\u0098geo-graphing,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 or \u00E2\u0080\u0098earth-writing.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 Not something \u00E2\u0080\u009Cpossessed by the earth,\u00E2\u0080\u009D geography is in fact \u00E2\u0080\u009Can active writing of the earth,\u00E2\u0080\u009D the purpose of which is to organize and discipline space according to one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccultural visions and material interests.\u00E2\u0080\u009D14 Having set out this particular view of geography establishes a problematic that Tuathail terms \u00E2\u0080\u009Cgeo-power\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cfunctioning of geographical knowledge not as an innocent body of knowledge\u00E2\u0080\u00A6but as an ensemble of technologies of power\u00E2\u0080\u00A6\u00E2\u0080\u009D15 deployed for the function of writing meaning onto space. Here one can identify the source of the impulse to map newly seized/not-yet- territorialized conquests. Prior to any cartographic representation, conquered land was effectively opaque to the empire\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u0098gaze\u00E2\u0080\u0099 and therefore extremely difficult to administer. Moreover, in a culture immersed in Ocularcentrism, a lack of visual representation of territory made it difficult for that territorial object to acquire popular discursive meaning within society. It became necessary to deploy more conceptually tangible forms of 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 2. 15 Ibid. 7. 6 geographic description that would limit this incertitude. New territories had to be grasped in their \u00E2\u0080\u0098totality\u00E2\u0080\u0099 in order to allow for a workable management of foreign spaces. By what attitude, then, does this \u00E2\u0080\u0098cartographic impulse\u00E2\u0080\u0099 translate into a visible representation that allows imperial powers to visually and conceptually grasp the \u00E2\u0080\u0098realities\u00E2\u0080\u0099 of foreign lands? Present throughout this process is what Jean Baudrillard has noted be the original sense of the word \u00E2\u0080\u0098production.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 To \u00E2\u0080\u0098produce\u00E2\u0080\u0099 in this sense is not \u00E2\u0080\u009Cto materially manufacture but to render visible and make appear\u00E2\u0080\u00A6To set everything up in clear view so it can be read, can become real and visible.\u00E2\u0080\u009D16 To \u00E2\u0080\u0098render visible\u00E2\u0080\u0099 in this context implies that the ones doing the \u00E2\u0080\u0098reading\u00E2\u0080\u0099 are not implicated in the form or configuration. Rather, they \u00E2\u0080\u0098reveal\u00E2\u0080\u0099 the outcome, as if by excavation. \u00E2\u0080\u0098Production\u00E2\u0080\u0099 in this original sense is an ocularcentric and logocentric approach that becomes unsustainable, once viewed as an exercise of \u00E2\u0080\u0098citation.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 \u00E2\u0080\u0098Citation\u00E2\u0080\u0099 comes in response to the notion that language refers to already existing objects or ideas. In a sense, it reduces the differentiation between \u00E2\u0080\u0098referential\u00E2\u0080\u0099 speech- acts, which refer to already-existing words and concepts, and \u00E2\u0080\u0098performative\u00E2\u0080\u0099 speech-acts, which make something new come into existence, such as a new claim to sovereignty over a particular chunk of territory. The addition of \u00E2\u0080\u0098citation\u00E2\u0080\u0099, on the other hand, introduces the idea that any sort of communication achieves meaning only through sustained repetition (through citing) of previous uses of the same words, phrases, or ideas.17 If expanding empires were ever able to arrive at any form of geographic meaning or reality, 16 Ibid. 29. 17 Headnotes to Judith Butler`s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Leitch, Vincent B. New York: Norton & Company Inc., 2001. 2486. 7 it was only in accordance with their own discursive structures that repeated appeals to scientific privilege, to imperial destinies, or any other parochial idiosyncrasies that they sought to impose elsewhere. Elaborating on the significance of citation to geography, Tuathail writes how Cartesian perspectivalism (erroneously) reinforces \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe differentiation of the visual (sight) from the textual (cite), as Descartes assumed a divine congruence between language and the world of transparent objects (sites).\u00E2\u0080\u009D18 A traditional ocularcentric or Cartesian perspectivalism, then, assumes that through \u00E2\u0080\u0098sight\u00E2\u0080\u0099 a subject is able to discern transparent and inert spatial \u00E2\u0080\u0098sites.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 Put differently, Cartesianism is an ideological lense that assumes that there is no lense; one thinks \u00E2\u0080\u0098I see it, therefore it must be as I see it.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 Tuathail proposes, however that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe ocularcentric world of \u00E2\u0080\u0098sight\u00E2\u0080\u0099 is a world that is already infested with textual \u00E2\u0080\u0098cites.\u00E2\u0080\u0099\u00E2\u0080\u009D19 Though the imperial activity of geo-graphing assumed otherwise, the maps they produced were \u00E2\u0080\u009Cconstructed from knowledge circumscribed by the numerous contingencies of knowledge acquisition. The [cartographic texts]\u00E2\u0080\u00A6did not present truth, nor [did] the maps constitute panopticons. The [imperial powers] simply believed that they did\u00E2\u0080\u009D20 in accordance with their own citational repetitions. Critical geography, according to Tuathail, must \u00E2\u0080\u009Cproblematize the relationship between subject, object, and text, or\u00E2\u0080\u00A6that between sight, sites, and cites.\u00E2\u0080\u009D21 18 Tuathail. 71. 19 Ibid. 20 Edney. 26. 21 Tuathail. 71. 8 The following historical examples of imperial cartographic practices in Asia and the Americas will show how cartographic descriptions grounded in Cartesian perspectivalism could not maintain their illusion of detachment and neutrality when examined according to the full equation of sight/sites/cites. Cartographic Negotiations: Mapping Colonial India Right at the turn of the eighteenth century, a young brigade major named William Lambton sent a proposal to the Indian colonial governor for the execution of a mathematical geographic survey of India extending from the Malabar coast in the south in order to determine \u00E2\u0080\u009Ckey geographical points\u00E2\u0080\u009D of the territory that had been conquered not long before.22 Having received the authorization to conduct the survey, he deployed a new method of mapping \u00E2\u0080\u0093 that of triangulation or trigonometrical survey. Though other surveyors were concurrently conducting mapping projects of colonial India, the cartographic drawings that Lambton produced using this technique were of such a high standard that, by the second decade of the nineteenth century, Lambton\u00E2\u0080\u0099s maps had become the authoritative geographic documents that served as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe backbone for all subsequent maps of the subcontinent.\u00E2\u0080\u009D23 As Andrew Tickell points out, the significance of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was not just in manufacturing maps that that were important for the military and political domination of the subcontinent. The survey was also a way of ideologically \u00E2\u0080\u009Cconstructing India as a domain of British cultural and political 22 Alex Tickell. \u00E2\u0080\u009CNegotiating the Landscape: Travel, Transaction, and the Mapping of Colonial India.\u00E2\u0080\u009D JSTOR (2004). 18. 23 Ibid. 19. 9 sovereignty,\u00E2\u0080\u009D and to present the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cposition of the colonial subject as fixed and unchangeable.\u00E2\u0080\u009D 24 This would rely on scientific mapping techniques that depicted the geography as it truly was. Lambton\u00E2\u0080\u0099s colleague George Everest wrote that: \u00E2\u0080\u009Ca complete topographical survey of India is perhaps\u00E2\u0080\u00A6the most Herculean undertaking of any government embarked. We must be sure that it is as free from error as instrumental means and human care can make it.\u00E2\u0080\u009D25 Tickell suggests that Everest\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u0098anxiety\u00E2\u0080\u0099 over the veracity of the survey betrays not merely his less-than-absolute confidence in the mapping techniques, but an (unreflective) ideological commitment to \u00E2\u0080\u009CEuropean moral and rational integrity\u00E2\u0080\u009D and the \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctriumph of Euclidean reason over the threatening landscape.\u00E2\u0080\u009D26 This brief introduction to the context of the Indian Trigonometrical Survey provides a glimpse of Britain\u00E2\u0080\u0099s geo-power to \u00E2\u0080\u0098produce\u00E2\u0080\u0099 its south Asian \u00E2\u0080\u0098possession.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 Despite their anxieties, Lambton and Everest\u00E2\u0080\u0099s project was \u00E2\u0080\u009Clegitimized by the technical demands of the mapping process,\u00E2\u0080\u009D27 which involved the overt usage of scientific instruments. British consumers of the maps could associate them with previous European expeditions and their attendant scientific prestige. Lambton and Everest, however, failed doubly in their aim of inscribing allegedly \u00E2\u0080\u0098fixed and unchangeable\u00E2\u0080\u0099 European geographical truths, as well as even sustaining a commitment to asserting the vision of \u00E2\u0080\u0098mapper\u00E2\u0080\u0099 over \u00E2\u0080\u0098mapped.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 These maps and other 24 Ibid. 20. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 19. 10 texts were not merely guilty of a \u00E2\u0080\u009Csystematic forgetfulness of antecedent spatial configurations\u00E2\u0080\u009D28 at a conscious level, but also of unconscious enmeshment with a series of indigenous citational responses to the \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00E2\u0080\u0098worlding\u00E2\u0080\u0099 of [the locals\u00E2\u0080\u0099] environment.\u00E2\u0080\u009D29 Alex Tickell and Matthew Edney emphasize the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cflexible quality of the imperial map,\u00E2\u0080\u009D and that the knowledge that it presented was more the result of an intercultural negotiation \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbetween the conquerors and the conquered than of some topographical reality.\u00E2\u0080\u009D30 Indeed, as Tuathail suspected, the Europeans\u00E2\u0080\u0099 world of sight cannot discern inert sites outside of repetitive citations (including those of the indigenous people, in this case) that produce meaning. A closer look at challenges to British geo-power in colonial India will show the unsustainability of Cartesian perspectivalism. Returning to Lambton\u00E2\u0080\u0099s survey expedition, one finds a sort of \u00E2\u0080\u0098entanglement\u00E2\u0080\u0099 of spatial meaning as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cexisting religio-cultural inscriptions\u00E2\u0080\u00A6enmesh[ed] with, and inform[ed], the colonial cartographic text.\u00E2\u0080\u009D31 These \u00E2\u0080\u0098textual knots\u00E2\u0080\u0099 came initially from Lambton\u00E2\u0080\u0099s challenge of finding elevated trig-points in the flat regions of southern India. The search led him naturally to temple locations that had a \u00E2\u0080\u0098commanding\u00E2\u0080\u0099 view of the landscape. Although these sighting points were only visible as geometric angles on the survey map, Tickell explains that they \u00E2\u0080\u009Creveal a correspondence between an older, puranic32 narrative of landscape\u00E2\u0080\u009D33 \u00E2\u0080\u0093 according to which these points indicated a network 28 Ibid. 21. 29 Ibid. 30 Edney. 25., Tickell, 22. 31 Tickell. 22. 32 Referring to ancient religious Hindu texts. 33 Tickell. 23. 11 of pilgrimage sites \u00E2\u0080\u0093 and Lambton\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own presumptions of narrating previously \u00E2\u0080\u0098uninscribed\u00E2\u0080\u0099 space. The fact that Lambton\u00E2\u0080\u0099s trigonometrical measurements were taken from geographical positions that were previously associated with local religious culture meant that the surveyors\u00E2\u0080\u0099 activities as well as any cartographic images made available to locals would have been associated with the latter\u00E2\u0080\u0099s knowledge of sacred places and spaces. Though locals might have even assumed that the British surveyors were ignorant of the local geographies, the spatial representations presented by the maps would have been seen as an aggregation of visual projections from holy sites and their attendant citations of meaning \u00E2\u0080\u0093 a kind of \u00E2\u0080\u0098cartographic pilgrimage.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 Rather than a quashing out of local geographies by foreign and power-seeking \u00E2\u0080\u0098others,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 the activities of the surveyors and the actual cartographic productions of the topography may very well have been seen as the foreigners\u00E2\u0080\u0099 confirmation of local geographical knowledge. A similar example highlights a more active re-interpretation of the activities of the European cartographers \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwhich slyly compromises the authority of the colonial presence.\u00E2\u0080\u009D34 Tickell\u00E2\u0080\u0099s look at Everest\u00E2\u0080\u0099s journal accounts of encounters with locals reveals \u00E2\u0080\u009Ca form of indigenous translation of the colonial, and\u00E2\u0080\u00A6a non-mimicking, transforming acceptance of the authority of an alien presence.\u00E2\u0080\u009D35 A certain \u00E2\u0080\u0098cultural curiosity\u00E2\u0080\u0099 engaged with Everest\u00E2\u0080\u0099s surveying equipment, as locals developed the habit of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cattributing miraculous powers to [the] instruments and the sites which had been occupied by 34 Ibid. 27. 35 Ibid. 12 them.\u00E2\u0080\u009D36 Everest explained in his notes that people came to \u00E2\u0080\u009Centreat permission to bow down before the\u00E2\u0080\u00A6telescope.\u00E2\u0080\u009D In fact, rather than viewing this act of genuflection as a sign of indigenous subservience to the colonial master and his activities, Tickell interprets this action as a form of appropriation of cartographic meaning that nevertheless \u00E2\u0080\u009Cfall[s] outside the conceptual range of English terms such as \u00E2\u0080\u0098resistance\u00E2\u0080\u0099 or \u00E2\u0080\u0098rebellion.\u00E2\u0080\u0099\u00E2\u0080\u009D37 Here one sees an indigenous resistance to English geo-power, as Everest\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccartographic overlay\u00E2\u0080\u00A6is revised and absorbed back into the syncretic geographies of rural South Indian culture.\u00E2\u0080\u009D38 As stories of the surveyors\u00E2\u0080\u0099 activities would proliferate and be repeated, local geographic discourses would take on different formations than those of the British. The indigenous \u00E2\u0080\u0098reading-in\u00E2\u0080\u0099 of cartographic text might have even been amplified in cases where European surveyors relied on local guides and their knowledge of the topography, and this may very well have affected the actual maps produced. A third example comes in the form of a more concerted indigenous recalcitrance to revealing local geographical knowledge to the European surveyors. This particular example highlights \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe impossibility of a cultural cartographic translation of the geographies of the rivers in Bengal\u00E2\u0080\u009D39 in terms of signification. While the courses of the rivers in Bengal change, carving out new channels over time, the problem for the British cartographers relying on local knowledge of the river geographies was that the \u00E2\u0080\u009Clocal 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 24. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 25. 13 inhabitants continued to call old channels by their original names.\u00E2\u0080\u009D40 The surveyor Francis Buchanan described that: \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe geographers of Europe are apt to be enraged, when in tracing a river they find that an inconsiderable stream falling into their grand channel changes [the channel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s] name, and that the sources of this smaller stream is obstinately considered by the natives as the source of the river, either having been the first to which they had access, or having at one time been the largest.\u00E2\u0080\u009D41 The unwillingness on the part of locals to dispense knowledge of the complex past of the streams and tributaries to \u00E2\u0080\u0098alien\u00E2\u0080\u0099 others created a \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccross-cultural impasse\u00E2\u0080\u009D42 that, in the eyes of locals, emerged in British maps as a crude representation of European geographical meaning that was citationally inconsistent with local knowledge and cultural significance. Seen here is another indication of the resilience of indigenous ability to re-inscribe British knowledge and geo-power. In this case, British imperial powers stumbled in their project of imposing universal geographical meaning. Via a process involving the entanglement of European and indigenous citations of sites, the cartographic \u00E2\u0080\u0098production\u00E2\u0080\u0099 of Bengal\u00E2\u0080\u0099s river geographies would have had a wholly different meaning to locals. Cartographic Manifestation: Peripheral Vision and the Spanish-American War The second instance of imperial geo-power presented in this essay is that of cartographic productions of Cuba during the 1898 Spanish-American war. Though diminished to a great extent in America\u00E2\u0080\u0099s popular memory, the relatively brief war was a 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 26. 14 pivotal shift of U.S. national/imperial identity at the end of the nineteenth century. The 113-day conflict resulted in the territorial acquisition by the U.S. of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam, and in the relinquishment by Spain of sovereign claims over Cuba. The outcome of the war affirmed to the U.S. a vision of itself as a new imperial power in the western hemisphere. Raymond Craib and Graham Brunett\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photo essay examines the wax of U.S. imperial ambitions prior to and during the war. Old discourses of hemispherical geo-power were inserted into the maps of insular territories made at the time of the war, and these maps served to entrench the geographies already aligned with the nineteenth century notion of Manifest Destiny \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the belief that the United States would inevitably come to dominate key Caribbean, Central- and South American locations. In order to permit more depth in terms of my own examination, I will focus only on Cuba. The analysis of pre- and post-war maps of the island has a different focus as compared to the example of the British geographic production of India. Rather than looking at the survey process as a kind of \u00E2\u0080\u0098cartographic negotiation,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 I will instead focus on these maps\u00E2\u0080\u0099 function as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cvisual instruments to domesticate and incorporate the foreign.\u00E2\u0080\u009D43 (Emphasis added). Through reviewing Craib and Brunett\u00E2\u0080\u0099s essay Insular Visions, which argues that American cartographic representations of the islands were informed by, and served to reinforce the U.S.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 already-established imperial aspirations over its \u00E2\u0080\u0098backyard,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 I will attempt to add that the maps (of Cuba) can be viewed as citational repetitions of U.S. geo-power in the western hemisphere. 43 Graham Burnett and Raymond B. Craib. \u00E2\u0080\u009CInsular Visions: Cartographic Imagery and the Spanish- American Civil War.\u00E2\u0080\u009D The Historian, Vol. 61: Fall, 1998. 101. 15 The U.S. has had a long history of geo-graphing itself as the sole hegemon in the western hemisphere. Alan Henrikson explains that for 200 years of America\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own colonial past, \u00E2\u0080\u009Csettlers in North America were regulated by the mercantilist policies of distant London.\u00E2\u0080\u009D44 Not surprisingly, the earliest maps of the continent, drafted \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbefore the full expanse of the globe was finally appreciated\u00E2\u0080\u00A6\u00E2\u0080\u009D45 represented North America as an eastern extension of Asia, and as a periphery of the imperial core. Only later on were the American continents \u00E2\u0080\u009Cplaced on the left side of joined-hemisphere maps\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u0093 such as the one in figure 1 \u00E2\u0080\u0093 allowing Eurasia to retain its position as a geographical \u00E2\u0080\u0098core,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 but simultaneously \u00E2\u0080\u009C[making] America central as well.\u00E2\u0080\u009D46 After the American Revolution, when the U.S. was newly equipped with the authority to make its own official maps, further expressions of nascent America-centrism were made through acts such as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cplacing the prime meridian of longitude within the American orbit\u00E2\u0080\u009D47 \u00E2\u0080\u0093 an act which John Harley agrees, expresses a sustained ethno-centrism.48 Thus, through a slow process of citational cartographic repetition and re-vision, the United States attained the geo- power to locate itself geographically without the need to \u00E2\u0080\u009C[ask] of England [North America\u00E2\u0080\u0099s] relative position.\u00E2\u0080\u009D49 Only under these conditions was the United States able to site/cite itself fully as a geographical core. In turn, this allowed the U.S. to see Cuba and 44 Allen K. Henrikson. Political Geography: A Reader. Agnew, John, ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997. 100. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 101. 48 Andrews. 13. 49 Henrikson. 101. 16 other insular and South American territories as peripheral to the continent and as components \u00E2\u0080\u009Cto which the Laws of Nature\u00E2\u0080\u00A6entitled [the United States].\u00E2\u0080\u009D50 Even as early as one century before the Spanish-American war, this geographic discourse informed the U.S.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 expansionist policy that had been \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnibbl[ing] away\u00E2\u0080\u009D51 at Spanish acquisitions in the New World in a bid to consolidate the nation\u00E2\u0080\u0099s relatively newfound national and geopolitical domain. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine declared America\u00E2\u0080\u0099s intolerance of any intrusion into the Western hemisphere by other imperial powers, thus expressing a geographic vision of itself as a local power that should seek to repel others within what it deemed to be \u00E2\u0080\u0098its space.\u00E2\u0080\u009952 John Quincy Adams, one of the Doctrine\u00E2\u0080\u0099s principle authors, added that Cuba and Puerto Rico were \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnatural appendages to the north American continent,\u00E2\u0080\u009D which assumed that the islands would \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnaturally fall into the orbit of the United States once the right conditions prevailed.\u00E2\u0080\u009D53 Adams\u00E2\u0080\u0099 positivist geography and the vision expressed in the Monroe Doctrine \u00E2\u0080\u009Cequated proximity with destiny.\u00E2\u0080\u009D54 Through the following examples of cartographic depictions of Spanish territories during the war, I will attempt to show how previous U.S. imperial visions of itself manifested citationally in how cartographers \u00E2\u0080\u0098saw\u00E2\u0080\u0099 these territories. 50 Ibid. 100. 51 Burnett. 101. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 102. 54 Ibid. 17 The map of Cuba presented in Figure 2 was published in 1897, and is thus antecedent to the war. Craib and Burnett explain the text\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009C[emphasis on] the multiple links between the \u00E2\u0080\u0098Gem of the Antilles\u00E2\u0080\u009D55 and the continent of North America. Enhancing the written text is the visual presence of Florida\u00E2\u0080\u0099s extremity, which can be seen at the top of the document, extending from beyond the map\u00E2\u0080\u0099s limits, crossing its frame, \u00E2\u0080\u0098reaching out\u00E2\u0080\u0099 to the island neighbour. Considering that this map otherwise appears to be constructed according to systematic cartographic techniques, there seems to be undue insistence on Florida\u00E2\u0080\u0099s presence, as if the map is incomplete without it. Though the U.S. supported independence movements throughout Latin America that would chip away at foreign imperial presences within the western hemisphere, there was opposition to independence for Spain\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Caribbean possessions for numerous geopolitical, social, and economic reasons (such as anxiety over the abolition of slavery in an independent Cuba, which would compromise commercial interactions with the island, a large part of which involved trade in sugar). Regardless of the specific reasons for resisting an independent Cuba, the U.S.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 ambitions of incorporating the island into its own domain can be inferred from the (same) map\u00E2\u0080\u0099s overt identification of Spanish outposts. Represented as discrete points by the small circles \u00E2\u0080\u0093 like bubbles ready to pop \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the outposts sit in contrast to the rest of the island, which is shown to be already liberated by Cuban revolutionary forces engaged in an insurgency at the time. By showing that Spain was barely clinging to the island, the map suggests that Cuba was a \u00E2\u0080\u009Cripe[ening] apple\u00E2\u0080\u009D that was ready to fall into America\u00E2\u0080\u0099s possession.56 All of this suggests that what 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 103-104. 18 one could \u00E2\u0080\u0098see\u00E2\u0080\u0099 on the map was not a neutral depiction of innocent facts. Rather, the representations reflect a series of citational meanings that placed Cuba\u00E2\u0080\u0099s destiny imminently within the U.S.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 geographic gaze. Once the war began, American newspapers started to play a more dynamic role in U.S. citizens\u00E2\u0080\u0099 contact with the events of the conflict. American newspapers printed maps as inserts, such as the ones in figure 3, which emphasizes the spatial proximity of the conflict to North America in contrast to its distance from Spain by means of positioning the site of conflict with drawn lines. Included along with this particular map is a \u00E2\u0080\u0098scorecard\u00E2\u0080\u0099 of the U.S.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 and Spain\u00E2\u0080\u0099s respective military strengths, allowing the curious American populous \u00E2\u0080\u009Cto become armchair strategist[s], plotting troop movements and naval battles on their parlor wall.\u00E2\u0080\u009D57 Such maps were used to follow the events of the war as they unfolded, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cserving as visual accompaniments to lead articles, and as up-to-date teaching tools in the country\u00E2\u0080\u0099s classrooms.\u00E2\u0080\u009D58 U.S. citizens continued to consume information about the war and about the military\u00E2\u0080\u0099s territorial acquisitions. These newspapers provided the public not only with stories of heroic exploits of U.S. soldiers, but also with reliable geographical, historical, and economic information that became increasingly diffused as popular knowledge.59 The jingoism that, for decades, (re)produced geographic visions of the U.S. as the ultimate hegemon of its own hemisphere has already been identified. In light of this, one should appreciate that the information provided in these news reports, though factual, was 57 Ibid. 112. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 19 not inert and innocent knowledge meant merely to satisfy people\u00E2\u0080\u0099s curiosity. The foreign imperial powers that had previously checked the fulfillment of America\u00E2\u0080\u0099s hemispherical supremacy were finally in the process of being overcome, and the past envisioning of Manifest Destiny could be expressed with even more confidence and vigour. Americans thus had to come to know their new possessions. The geographical site of the Monroe Doctrine had long been established. As Americans came to see their achievements cartographically, these visual instruments, whose purpose it was to \u00C2\u00B4domesticate the foreign,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 attained meaning through repetitive, decades-old geographical citations. Arguably, the practice of augmenting this geo-power became even more aggressive after the war. For example, whereas Figure 2 \u00E2\u0080\u0093 a map published just before the war \u00E2\u0080\u0093 shows just the tip of Florida \u00E2\u0080\u0098reaching down\u00E2\u0080\u0099 to touch Cuba, Figure 4 \u00E2\u0080\u0093 a pedagogical document for use in the classroom \u00E2\u0080\u0093 juxtaposes Cuba with a map of the United States in the upper right corner, at two wildly different scales. Though in actual geographic terms the island and the continent remained at the same distance, one can observe how, in terms of American spatial imagination, the continent had \u00E2\u0080\u0098slid\u00E2\u0080\u0099 further down the map to the point that it \u00E2\u0080\u0098loomed\u00E2\u0080\u0099 over its long-awaited conquest. Not for the first time, one sees imperial geo-power working to locate the (potentially) \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnew territorial [acquisition] within the broader trajectory of U.S. history and geography\u00E2\u0080\u009D60 through the citation of cultural understandings of America\u00E2\u0080\u0099s hemispherical destiny, expressed visually in maps. As such, the site/cite of Cuba (as well 60 Ibid. 20 as other island territories not examined in this essay) was placed more firmly within American geographical and imperial discourses. Conclusion Only two examples of imperial cartography have been examined in this essay, and only one critical perspective has been used in the attempt to problematize imperial cartographic practices. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of specific examples that could be studied, as everywhere that imperial powers have gone and mapped is a potential site for critical examination. Nor is Tuathail\u00E2\u0080\u0099s problematization of the relationship between sight, sites, and cites the only fashion through which to deconstruct western cartography. No matter where attention is focused, the overlapping fields of critical geography and - cartography provide the potential for fruitful insight in at least two avenues: the first being postcolonial studies, and the second being the field of geography itself. \u00E2\u0080\u009CIt now seems obvious,\u00E2\u0080\u009D writes Daniel Clayton, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthat cartography played a crucial role in the imperialists\u00E2\u0080\u0099 self-legitimizing construction of space as universal, measurable, and divisible\u00E2\u0080\u009D that provided \u00E2\u0080\u009Ca stage for dramatic imperial gestures.\u00E2\u0080\u009D 61 Though not an exhaustive list, these \u00E2\u0080\u0098imperial gestures\u00E2\u0080\u0099 may have been anything from territorializing populations and their identities, incorporating those territories into an administrative framework and into popular knowledge, (in)stating these territories into a European system of spatial organization based on nation-states, and so on. Clayton suggests that students of postcolonialism may \u00E2\u0080\u009Cprobe the local knowledges that western travellers used and erased, and delve into the fraught physical and cross-cultural circumstances in which 61 Clayton. 360. 21 cartographic knowledges were made.\u00E2\u0080\u009D62 Additionally, he points out that there is currently an effort to produce \u00E2\u0080\u009Caboriginal and postcolonial mappings\u00E2\u0080\u00A6that are based on different cultural and epistemological premises\u00E2\u0080\u009D than those \u00E2\u0080\u009Cabstract projective, co-ordinate geometries of western cartography.\u00E2\u0080\u009D63 Clayton also suggests that: \u00E2\u0080\u009Cgeographers have become interested in the imperial genealogy of their discipline.\u00E2\u0080\u009D64 Combined with a fresh sensitivity \u00E2\u0080\u009Cto the Eurocentric assumptions embedded in [geographers\u00E2\u0080\u0099] disciplinary visions,\u00E2\u0080\u009D65 critical cartography may play a part in showing how, within the discipline of geography, archaic epistemological frameworks have historically become manifested visually and discursively. A historical awareness of cartographic Cartesianism may invigorate an anti-essentialist preference among contemporary geographers who seek insights into \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe machinations of [geographic] knowledge and power.\u00E2\u0080\u009D66 Hopefully, such an approach will help to promote the interrelated disciplines of geography and cartography as modes of knowledge production that take fewer things for granted, are more willing to readjust their concepts, and remain constantly on their toes. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 355. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 22 Appendix Figure 1. Source: Henrikson, Allen K. Political Geography: A Reader. Agnew, John, ed.. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997. Figure 2. Source: Burnett, Graham and Craib, Raymond B. \u00E2\u0080\u009CInsular Visions: Cartographic Imagery and the Spanish-American War.\u00E2\u0080\u009D . 1998. 103. 23 Figure 3. Source: Ibid. 111. Figure 4. Source: Ibid. 114. 24 Works Cited Andrews, J.H. and Harley, John B. The New Nature of Maps. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2001. Print. Burnett, Graham and Craib, Raymond B. \u00E2\u0080\u009CInsular Visions: Cartographic Imagery and the Spanish-American War.\u00E2\u0080\u009D . 1998. Web. Clayton, Daniel. Handbook of Cultural Geography. Anderson, Kay et al, eds. California: SAGE Publications Ltd., 2003. Print. Cosgrove, David. Apollo`s Eye. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2001. Print. Edney, Thomas. Mapping an Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Print. Henrikson, Allen K. Political Geography: A Reader. Agnew, John, ed.. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997. Print. Tickell, Alex. \u00E2\u0080\u009CNegotiating the Landscape: Travel, Transaction, and the Mapping of Colonial India.\u00E2\u0080\u009D JSTOR (2004). Web. 09/02/2010. Tuathail, Gear\u00C3\u00B3id. Critical Geopolitics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Print. Headnotes to Judith Butler`s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Leitch, Vincent B. New York: Norton & Company Inc., 2001. Print. "@en . "Report"@en . "10.14288/1.0041769"@en . "eng"@en . "Unreviewed"@en . "Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library"@en . "Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International"@en . "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"@en . "Undergraduate"@en . "University of British Columbia. ASTU 400J"@en . "Putting it on the Map: Imperial Gazing and Cartographic Meaning"@en . "Text"@en . "http://hdl.handle.net/2429/25508"@en .