A few words about the role of the Cartographers

Abstract

In the context of the settler colonization of what Stephen Slemon has usefully termed the ‘second world’ (1990, p. 30), the map and concomitant appropriative strategies devised and implemented by the colonizing agency tend to embody those cartographic constructions which Graham Huggan characterizes as ‘inevitably distortive … they can neither contain nor explain the reality that they purport to represent’ (1996, p. 34). The maps of the colonizer, although ‘invested with the generative power of originary myth’ (ibid., p. 34), are incapable of dispersing the sense of inauthenticity and inappropriateness of the settler enterprise. Huggan sees the postcolonial involvement with mapping as rejecting ‘cartographic enclosure and the imposed cultural limits that notion implies’ (1990, p. 131). By contesting the authority of the map — by exposing the brutality and arbitrariness of the processes by which it is constructed, and by rejecting the appropriative strategy of (re-)naming space — there is an increasing tendency within postcolonial writing to resist the enclosed, static and hierarchized perspective of the colonial agency and instead look towards the transformational possibilities of hybridity, a new discourse which, in Huggan’s terms:

emphasises the provisionality of all cultures and which celebrates the particular diversity of formerly colonised cultures … The reassessment of cartography … indicates a shift of emphasis away from the desire for homogeneity towards an acceptance of diversity reflected in the interpretation of the map, not as a means of spatial containment or systematic organisation, but as a medium of spatial perception which allows for the formulation of links both between and within cultures.