Читать книгу The Politics of Mapping - Bernard Debarbieux - Страница 12

The emergence of an alternative research program with this type of reflection as its objective can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s. Referred to as “critical cartography”, it is largely in line with the French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish approaches to the “social and political uses of maps”. This program proposes a critical interpretation of cartographic production in history, highlighting the socially constructed dimension of the map and its capacity to support strategies and relationships of power/knowledge as conceptualized by Michel Foucault. The break with the hitherto dominant approaches is remarkable. The main innovation of the 1970s and 1980s involved breaking away from the modernist and evolutionist narrative to question that which had been largely left out of the field of reflection, namely the political, but also social and contextual dimensions of cartographic commissioning and production. The historian of cartography Brian Harley emerged as a leading figure in this breakthrough (Blakemore and Harley 1980; Harley 1988a, pp. 277–312, 1988b, 2001). The publication of his article “Deconstructing the Map” (1989) had a major influence on thought about the “power of maps”. His work has become a classic despite its theoretical and methodological shortcomings, which are noted by even Harley’s greatest advocates, as Reuben Rose-Redwood (2015) pointed out in the special issue of the journal Cartographica published in 2015: “Deconstructing the Map: 25 years on”.

This turning point is all the more significant because Harley was followed by many authors who produced a significant body of empirical or theoretical analysis. Even today, his proposals continue to inspire researchers. Indeed, referring to the idea of “critical cartography” quickly became a standard, particularly in the English-speaking academic world, at a time when geographical analyses in terms of power relations and domination were also multiplying. From that moment on, the political dimension of critical cartography has tended to be emphasized (Crampton and Krygier 2006, p. 11). This has resulted in considerable and exciting academic output. Initially, this focused primarily on the role of mapping both in the history of modern state-building in Europe (Buisseret 1992; Kain and Baigent 1992) and colonial empires (Kain and Baigent 1992; Edney 1997; Blais 2014) – leading, in the process, to the negation of Indigenous peoples, especially in the Americas (Harley 1990, 1992) – as well as in the process of decolonization (Akerman 2017). However, it has also looked at the diffusion of the modern state model outside European colonies (Winichakul 1994).

On the strength of these case studies and the constant enrichment of the field that has been made possible, critical cartography acquired significant visibility in the last two decades of the 20th century, thanks to a number of exhibitions² and critical works, including Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps (1992), Mark Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps (1991), and the ambitious collection of volumes, The History of Cartography, launched in 1987 by Harley and David Woodward (1987), to which we will return later. Critical cartography has also become globalized through the translation of some of Harley’s texts³ and the publication of analyses made by authors whose approaches were similar to his⁴ but who write in languages other than English (e.g. Jacob 1992; Gugerli and Speich 2002; Valerio 2007). This visibility has enabled maps and mapping to occupy an important place in the work of major authors on the issues of nationalism (Anderson 2006 [1983]) and the state (Scott 1998), despite them being outside the field of critical cartography itself.

However, this account of the critical and political turn taken by cartographic thinking, while bringing to light a very important moment in the history of mapping, which was stabilized by being endlessly revisited by academic production, is not fully satisfactory, nor is it complete. There are several reasons for this.