Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity by Simon Ferdinand

Author:Simon Ferdinand
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2019-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

Fig. 44. Frontispiece of Thomas More, On the Best Condition of a Republic and the New Island Utopia. 1516. Woodcut engraving. Wikimedia Commons.

The link between these utopian islands and the onset of modern state formation is reinforced by the cultural history of islands in the early modern imagination. Even beyond utopian discourse, as Angus Cameron has demonstrated, the enclosed form of the island provided a “powerful metaphoric figure” through which the radical new spatiality of “the bounded, inward-looking territorial state” was imagined and given substance.18 Especially revealing, in this connection, is Philip E. Steinberg’s work, which traces the “association of ‘islandness’ with territorial unity” in Mediterranean portolan charts (early maritime maps) as far back as the fourteenth century.19 Steinberg argues not only that “the modern, or Westphalian, ideal of the state as territorially bounded, unambiguously governed by a sole authority and culturally homogeneous is a profoundly insular vision,” but further that cultural representations of islands “inadvertently established a grammar for the imagining and mapping of the territorial state that was to emerge in later years.”20 Telling in this regard are portolan charts on which different realms, like Scotland and England, were depicted as separate islands even where they were known to occupy a continuous landmass (for an example, see fig. 45).21 Depicting even contiguous nation-states as islands in this manner not only served to naturalize thoroughly conventional demarcations of national territory by giving them the appearance of physical geography (comparable instances exist of mapmakers plotting imaginary mountain ranges along borderlines); it also offered a model through which the then startlingly novel, perhaps even inconceivable form of the modern nation-state could be grasped and disseminated. Imaginations of islands, as Wegner puts it, provide the “conceptual framework or representation of space of “nationness” within which the particularity of each individual nation can then be represented.”22

My analysis of Matoba’s map art takes forward the idea that, historically, insular form did not simply resonate with statehood, nor was it used to represent preexisting states. Rather, the mapped form of islands participated performatively in a far-reaching reconfiguration of political space, providing the template in whose image the emergent modern state was conceived and constructed. But before examining how Matoba reworks the image of the island state, I want to specify the political implications of insular statehood more fully, for it is the politics implied by insular form that Utopia contests most centrally.

The forms of political community conditioned by the image of the island come to the fore when considering two mutually entailing formal characteristics of insular mapping: borders and bodies. Mapping’s performative capacity to define the shape of statehood is nowhere more evident than in the delineation of national borders. The cartographic drawing of lines, writes John Pickles, represents a performative “spatial and geographical act” in which cultural conceptions of identity and difference are “literally written onto the surface of the earth and coded by layer upon layer of lines drawn on paper.”23 Borderlines figure “a spatial ‘not’—a differentiation and/or negation of all that lies beyond it.

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