Between Demythologizing and Deconstructing the Map: Shawnadithit's New-found-land and the Alienation of Canada
Understood as the product of an agent of knowledge, the cartographic work of Shawnadithit (the last known Beothuk survivor in Newfoundland) questions a whole set of essential and Eurocentric notions of identity, space and history. Geographically, it displaces the 'new'-ness and emptiness o...
| Published in: | Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
1995
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/ww47-6x0n-475q-7231 https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/WW47-6X0N-475Q-7231 |
| Summary: | Understood as the product of an agent of knowledge, the cartographic work of Shawnadithit (the last known Beothuk survivor in Newfoundland) questions a whole set of essential and Eurocentric notions of identity, space and history. Geographically, it displaces the 'new'-ness and emptiness of the Europeans' Newfoundland. Historically, it disrupts a traditional treatment of native people as at once sacrificial victims and heroic proxies in Canadian national history. And epistemologically, it serves to put into question some of the dominant modes of classifying 'indigenous cartography' within cartographic history. In order for such disruptive effects to be realized, it is necessary to shuttle between demythologizing and deconstructing the map—two modes of analysis that need to be better distinguished in scholarship that addresses maps as technologies of power/knowledge. [Colonial boundaries drawn on maps] provide perhaps the most spectacular illustrations of how an anticipatory geography served to frame colonial territories in the minds of statesmen and territorial speculators back in Europe. Maps were the first step in the appropriation of territory. Such visualizations from a distance became critical in choreographing the colonial expansion of early modern Europe. [However the map as] an instrument of colonial power could be reappropriated by colonized people. —Brian Harley1 [T]he look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, [a process in which] the observer becomes the observed and the partial representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence. —Homi Bhabha2 |
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