This page was created by Collin Hardwick.
Mapping
Mapping as a tool, a technology, and an art form is a natural point of convergence for studies in geography and colonialism.
As Benedict Anderson explains in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, the threefold colonial "grammars" of the census, the map, and the museum changed how the colonial state "imagined its dominion--the nature of human beings it rules, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry" (163-164). Key to the idea of colonization, then, the map provides a way for the colonial power to rename and remake land according to its view. Like the landscape metaphor itself, the map provides a visual framework which acts as a kind of justification.The map also importantly acts upon local relationships of Native communities to the land: as one example, Anderson shows how the Mercatorian Map, brought into Southeast Asia by European colonizers, used the relatively new medium of print to bring a birds-eye view of the land to Native inhabitants of Siam. Such maps and their viewpoints, from above, were wholly foreign to Native ways of viewing the space and relationships between important points of interest; the Mercatorian Map caused such traditional understandings to be replaced with nationalistic language (173).
The visual character of such maps was part and parcel of their function as a colonial tool. Colonial maps classified and divided the land; in this way they were linked to the census, which reimagined the land's inhabitants and their relationships to one another in new, racialized terms (173). Back in the hearts of empire, those major cities such as London, the work of "filling in" colonial maps was also very visual: Anderson refers to "logo maps" which used color to attribute different parts of the colonized space to each colonial power. As time went on, these maps became a patchwork of different hues, communicating a seeming inevitability to the eventual dominion of colonial powers over each and every corner of the land they described (173). As this kind of work proceeded in the visual imagination of colonizers and colonial subjects, the "alignment of map and power" became increasingly apparent; the map was, as Anderson so aptly describes it, "a real instrument to conretize projections on the earth's surface" (173).
Within the logic of the map and the metaphor of the landscape painting, there was no room for ownership outside of colonial paradigms; those spaces not painted with one of the major colors of the colonial powers were only waiting to be so decorated, and otherwise left uncolored to indicate vacancy. Of course, rarely were any such areas vacant. Jodi Byrd has shown that colonial maps "served to survey a world into European possession by transforming indigenous peoples in to the homo nullius inhabitants of lands emptied and awaiting arrival" (xxi). Colonial maps could only be filled in if Native and Indigenous populations' holdings and uses of land were not visualized, and thus the space left blank.
The visual work of mapping ultimately uses what Ralph Cintron has called "discourses of measurement" in order to accomplish this subdivision and oversight of stolen land. Cintron states in the ethnographic work Angels’ Town that mapping expresses control and a “desire to colonize” linked to such “discourses of measurement” (35). These modern discourses are the “ways by which a precise order (or the fiction of a precise order) gets made” (210). In the book, Cintron explores a map of “Angelstown” and tracks a change from “islands in a river and nearby forests” to personal property given legitimacy through such a discourse of measurement, ultimately arguing that through their use of such systemic discourses, maps are always colonial (37).