The Politics of Mapping. Bernard Debarbieux

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СКАЧАТЬ social history of maps, unlike that of literature, art, or music, appears to have few genuinely popular, alternative, or subversive modes of expression. Maps are pre-eminently a language of power, not of protest” (p. 301). But perhaps Harley died too soon (1991) to observe the proliferation of protest mapping practices, which, although existing for several decades, only really took off in the 1990s. As a historian, moreover, observing social reality “in the making” was not his primary object of study.

Some of the first expressions of “cartographic resistance” came from intellectuals or artists who wanted to challenge Eurocentric worldviews. The famous controversy launched by the German historian Arno Peters is emblematic of this resistance. Very critical of the so-called Mercator projection, which over-represents the rich countries of the “North” by exaggerating their surface, in 1973 Peters proposed a projection that respects the correct size of the continents relative to each other (but not their shapes)⁸. Giving more weight to the countries of the “South” in the representation of the planet, this projection was used worldwide, and was quickly adopted by Third Worldists fighting against inequalities between countries, by church and development aid organizations, by UN agencies and schools. The cover page of the Report of the Independent Commission on International Development, chaired by Willie Brandt (Figure I.1), is an example of the institutional use of the Peters projection. A North-South dividing line has been added to the map to emphasize the surface importance of the “South”. As Jean-François Staszak, Juliet Fall, and Frédéric Giraut point out, however, “the designations north and south are partly metaphorical since much of Oceania is in the north while the Manchu confines are in the south” (Staszak et al. 2017, p. 163, author’s translation).

Figure I.1. Cover page of the report, “North-South. A Programme for Survival” (source: Brandt and Independent Commission on International Development Issues (1980)). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/debarbieux/mapping.zip

As Timothy Barney has pointed out, in the tumultuous decolonization and Cold War context of the 1970s, this projection was more a rhetorical event than a technical innovation, presenting the map as a powerful medium for change, rather than a neutral representation of space (Barney 2014, p. 104). Barney has suggested, however, that despite the radical nature of its project, this projection nonetheless also contributed to a “recolonization” of the world, supporting the logics of Western liberal development in the so-called “Third World” (Barney 2014).

Long before Peters, the field of art had appropriated the map as an iconographic medium for an openly ideological discourse of decolonization of knowledge and representations of the world. América Invertida, drawn in 1943 by Joaquín Torres García (1874–1949), a Uruguayan and Catalan artist who created the “universal constructivism” movement, presents South America in reverse of the conventions orienting maps toward the North (Figure I.2). In addition to the Earth’s equator marking the separation between the northern and southern hemispheres, Torres García added the latitude and longitude of the city of Montevideo (marked with a cross) where he was born and lived for part of his life, making the drawing a deliberately situated representation. Seeking to inaugurate an artistic movement rooted in South America and which would come as a counterpoint to European influences, the artist denounced the domination of the countries of the North over those of the South: “[…] There should be no North for us, except in opposition to our South. […]. This is a necessary rectification; so that now we know where we are⁹” (Rommens 2018, p. 36).

Figure I.2. “América invertida” (Inverted America), 1943 (Museo Juan Manuel Blanes, Montevideo). Drawing (ink on paper, 19.5 x 15.5 cm) (source: Joaquín Torres García)

While Torres García’s cultural and artistic intentions and influences are debated¹⁰, the effects of this image and the extent of its circulation are interesting in the context of a critical cartographic analysis that deciphers the power of maps to forge worldviews. The drawing is now known more for its political impacts than for its artistic or aesthetic qualities; it still continues to forge an imagining of Latin America and its identity today, asserting the idea of Latin American cultural and political independence and challenging the hegemonic “center-periphery” or “North/South” model of the world (Rommens 2018). In addition to the fact that the drawing is mobilized in Latin American academic circles that develop decolonial or postcolonial approaches (conference posters or seminars), it is very popular on the continent, reproduced on T-shirts, tourist souvenirs of Uruguay, posters and postcards, including on tattooed bodies, as a quick search on Google images shows (Figure I.3). Each of these mobilizations gives rise to new meanings and uses (Monteiro Sales 2016).

Figure I.3. Screenshot taken from Google images with the keywords “América invertida tattoo” on February 4, 2021. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/debarbieux/mapping.zip

      The same spirit can be found in the comic book writer Joaquín Salvador Lavado’s work, known as “QUINO”: his main character Mafalda, who became a cult in Argentina, and whose stories were published between 1963 and 1974, has a very critical and pessimistic view of society and the state of the world. In an excerpt from the comic strip, the little girl looks at a globe with astonishment, discovering that the inhabitants of the Southern Hemisphere live upside down. Drawing parallels between cartographic representations and the epistemological domination of the South by the North, she concludes that “Since we are living upside-down, the ideas fall off of us” (Lavado 2018 [1964], pp. 99–100).

      In a way, these manipulations of the constitutive principles of maps (projection, orientation and graphic language) for ideological purposes or cultural decentering are an extension of Harley’s own reflections in Deconstructing the Map on the “rule of ethnocentricity” of world maps (Harley 1989, p. 6). These diversions were innovative and powerfully evocative during the Cold War period, when questioning a Western-centric view of the world was not self-evident. Today they have become common practice. However, their pedagogical effectiveness continues to be proven today, leading students to question the conventionality of their worldview.

      As for marginalized social groups or social movements seeking to make their voices heard on the political scene (be it national, regional or international), their mobilization of “protest maps” (Wood et al. 2010) is aimed, above all, at influencing public policies on land use planning, land tenure or the management of natural resources, which are deemed to be unjust. This specific use of maps led Nancy Peluso (1995) to coin the neologism “counter-mapping”. As Irène Hirt explains in Chapter 7, Indigenous peoples were among the first social groups to make use of state language, techniques and modes of representation, as early as the 1950s and 1960s, with all the ambiguities that this implies for groups claiming to have a world view distinct from that of the state. Since then, other social and political actors have resorted to this strategy (see (Kollektiv Orangotango 2018) for a range of such practices). Indeed, the term has been so successful СКАЧАТЬ