“Follow the Tree Flowers”: Fugitive Mapping in Beloved

This article attempts to analyse mapping practices at the intersection of geography, black studies and literary studies, in order to reassess the political and pedagogical possibilities of mapping under late capitalism. I turn to Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved to track black cartographic practices otherwise obscured or, as Katherine McKittrick writes, “rendered ungeographic”. The novel offers a hidden and unauthorised archive for the often clandestine geographic practices that make possible fugitivity from the mechanics of “slaveholding agro‐capitalism” and its ongoing legacy. As an unofficial archive of black geographic practice, Morrison’s novel might itself be thought of as a map: a contemporary mode of memorialising the depth of place, relation, and navigation—a depth no two‐dimensional map can accommodate. Finally, this article demonstrates the valuable interventions that black studies and black creative production can make within the subfields of critical cartography and critical geography.     

Carto-fiction: narrativising maps through creative writing

Abstract

This study reacts to the recent call for a narrativisation of maps’ life in post-representational cartography, proposing ‘cartographic fictional writing’ as a means to move geography’s ‘creative (re)turn’ from a place-centred to a ‘carto-centred’ perspective, and as an epistemological tool to go on rethinking maps from post-representational perspectives. First, ‘carto-fiction’ is defined as a self-reflexive (autoethnographic), ethnofictional, creative carto-centred product/practice of research. Second, by including the entire short story entitled ‘Unfolding Berlin’ and an autoethnographic account on how it emerged, this study strives to both theorise and perform carto-fictional writing as an embodied and trans-subjective mapping experience. My goal is to propose ‘carto-fiction’ as a prolific tool to let emotional, subjective cartographies emerge and to narrativise maps as mapping practices. The article further strives to focus on the mapping power of creative writing, and carto-fictional writing and reading will be interpreted as mapping performances, in which subjects are bodily and emotionally engaged. The inclusion of original illustrations aims to involve readers in a visual experience and to further stimulate their spatial imagination: each reader is asked to reflect on his/her own mapping experiences to interpret the fictional story and, thus, the paper itself attempts to unfold unpredicted creative cartographic practices.     

Marie Corelli and the Value of Literary Self-Consciouness: The Sorrows of Satan,Popular Fiction,and the Fin-de-Siècle Canon

Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) presents a paradoxical test case for the practice of academic literary criticism. The best-selling work of fiction of the nineteenth century, the book was demeaned by Victorian critics and has been long ignored by criticism since. In spite of Corelli's recent mini-revival, the formally self-conscious properties of this work deserve further examination: the text insistently foregrounds the act of literary criticism and demands that the reader's attention is focussed on not only the content of the narrative but also the nature of the procedure of reading. Such a strategy allows Corelli's romance to participate safely in the kinds of literary transgressions enacted in the work of her since-canonized contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. The narrative mode warns against the production of the wrong kinds of readings of the narrative, inoculating its consumer against the corruption suffered by many of Sorrows's characters – and by the readers of the kinds of contemporary fiction Corelli seeks to warn against. As a consequence, The Sorrows of Satan, while exiled from the canon, shows itself to be surprisingly representative of the image of fin-de-siècle literary culture constructed by its afterlife. Like so many 1890s fictions, it is a work of art about the work of art, and dramatizes such by now familiar late-Victorian tropes as: decadence, moral relativism, debates over literary taste, realism, post-Ibsen drama, the sexual double standard, the marriage market, the New Woman, motherhood, hysteria and female pathologies, degeneration anxiety, mesmerism. The Sorrows of Satan's status as forgotten best-seller, a ‘great bad book’, asks difficult questions about the relationship between literary criticism and literary pleasure.     

Teaching creative geovisualization: Imagining the creative in/of GIS

Creative geovisualization is situated at the intersection of geography, arts, and digital humanities with a particular emphasis on visualization and mapping that preserves, represents, and generates more authentic, contextual, and nuanced meanings of space and people with an artistic and humanistic perspective and approach. This is a creative expansion in critical GIS practices and a new alternative to traditionally science-rooted approaches to GIS and mapping. Reflecting the experience of teaching a “creative geovisualization” course in an interdisciplinary curriculum, I demonstrate how critical and creative scholarship with mapping and geovisualization is introduced in the classroom and is illuminated in the students' creative practices. The class encompasses key epistemological and methodological groundings of creative geovisualization—including non-representational theories; critical cartography and GIS; the convergence of geography, arts, and humanities; psychogeography; and qualitative and affective geovisualization. Empirical examples of students' works illustrate the blending of different modes of creative engagements with GIS and geovisualization and specific ways to work with various forms of embodied, relational, interpretive, and expressive geographies. GIS and mapping become creative as they continue evolving in process, and it is time that we deeply (re-)imagine “the creative” in/of GIS in critical GIS pedagogies.     

A Feminist Literary Cartography of the Canadian North: Women,writing and place in Aritha van Herk's Places Far From Ellesmere

This article examines the idea of North in Aritha van Herk's (1990) Places Far From Ellesmere, a feminist rereading of Anna Karenin that is also an exploration of place—Ellesmere Island—and of gender, identity and belonging. I situate my reading of Ellesmere firstly within feminist literary theory, focusing on the concept of intertextuality and on the implications of the concept, from the perspective of feminist theorists, for the acts of writing and reading. I further contextualise van Herk's work by outlining the growing sensitivity to the complexities of writing Canadian space in Canadian literary criticism. The focus then shifts to Ellesmere, beginning with an investigation of van Herk's representational practices and philosophies, which are organised around a critique of the relationship between writing, gender and power. I argue that van Herk's insistence upon the power of feminist textual rereadings, an insistence that results from her aversion to authority, critically shapes her geographical imaginary, and her understanding of North. By extending the text and thereby the practice of reading to geography, van Herk makes possible a feminist representation or rereading of the North that simultaneously contests the conventions of literature, of place and of gender. Ultimately, I argue that it is van Herk's commitment to investigate the processes of representation in which she is engaged that makes her representation of the North such a valuable text for feminist and literary geographers.     

At home in the city: everyday practices and distinction in international student mobility

International students have been overlooked in geographies of ‘home’, yet this paper demonstrates how international student mobility offers unique insights that can advance our understanding of ‘home’ and belonging in the city. Drawing on photo-elicitation and mid-point and return interviews with Canadian students, this paper explores the everyday home-making practices of exchange students in urban centres in the Global South. It focuses on the ways in which international students create a sense of ‘home’ and belonging in their host city and how insider knowledge gained through local everyday practices is converted into cultural capital. It contributes to the literature by considering how home-making practices are implicated in spatial and scalar boundary-making processes for distinction. By illustrating through participants’ photographs how students articulate ‘home’ using spatial and scalar markers, I examine how students tighten the spatial boundaries of ‘home’ to focalise and localise symbolic capital within the city. The findings further add to debates on im/mobility by demonstrating that students’ distinguish their relative immobility during the sojourn from the mobility of travellers and tourists to legitimise claims of belonging as ‘insiders’ and of place-specific capital. The paper then concludes by considering how students are ‘collecting homes’ for distinction.     

Author and Reader Perceptions of the Literary Map

There is a continuing need in cartographic communication for reserarch directed toward better understanding of the perceptual properties of maps, particularly as they interrelate between map author and map reader (percipient). This research explores that area by examining the perceptions of authors of maps utilized in science fiction and fantasy, and readers who encounter these maps in the literature.

The first phase of the research demonstrates that authors generally have a positive attitude toward the literary map and view them as critical to the formulation of a story and important to proper understanding of the narrative. By contrast, readers tested in the second part of the study view literary maps as superfluous and in general have a negative attitude toward them.

The literary maps employed in this research fail to communicate effectively with the reader. Poor cartographic communication and the negative attitude of readers toward the literary map is explained in terms of functional illiteracy.     

Not Just a Jesuit Atlas of China: Qing Imperial Cartography and Its European Connections

In the literature, the ‘Overview Maps of Imperial Territories’ or Huangyu quanlan tu 皇輿全覽圖, is mostly referred to as ‘the Jesuit atlas of China’. The reason is that this early eighteenth-century atlas of all Qing China’s territories plus Korea and Tibet is assumed to have resulted from European missionaries importing European cartographic practices. In this essay, I argue that this view is outdated and can no longer be sustained. By revisiting the background of the missionaries’ involvement in cartographic exchanges between Asia and Europe, the techniques used for surveying Qing territories and the production of the resulting atlases, I show that the mapping project behind the ‘Overview Maps of Imperial Territories’ is best understood as a creative answer to the unique needs of Qing frontier management and imperial control, made possible by the integration, in mensurational and in representational terms, of European and East Asian cartographic practices.     

Showing and telling science – the integrated use of literature and images in the works of Erasmus Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt

ABSTRACT

In recent years, both the fields of literature and science and visual culture of science have addressed the importance of different visual and literary elements and their roles in establishing meaning and communication in science. In this article, I explore how visual and textual elements work to establish a narrative of plants in Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791) and in Alexander von Humboldt’s Essai sur la géographie des plantes (1804). These two scientists employed literary and visual elements in order to construct their visions of the nature of plants in a time when the ideals of Enlightenment science gave way to a more holistic view of integrating the sciences and the arts. I, therefore, also discuss the analytical approach of integrated readings between the literary and visual elements of science.     

Topoiesis del espacio textual

ABSTRACT

The concept of topoiesis of textual space addresses an analysis of the spatial elements that tend to provide a meaning to the literary text. Based on textual semiotics where there is an organized relational system of meanings, in this article we propose that it is possible to determine the function of space as a meaning issue from three different literary text instances (event or motive; character; and object). This distinction will permit a deeper interpretation of the sense of space in the literary text.     

基于行为空间视角的大观园空间解读

对微观个体行为空间研究已经成为人文地理学空间研究的重要内容。本文以曹雪芹《红楼梦》中核心人物的活动信息和空间信息为资料依据,在国内首次从地理学微观个体行为的视角,在理论和方法论上对小说核心人物行为空间进行思考和研究,尝试将行为地理学研究方法引入文学文本研究领域。研究认为:从地理学视角对小说核心人物的空间信息、活动信息进行统计,以此作为人物微观个体行为空间信息要素是可行的;从地理学行为空间视角思考作者对小说文本内容设计意图,有利于对小说文本进行理性的解读与思考,避免文本被意识形态化。     

Chopsticks,phone bells and farms: Fuyuko Taira's diasporic spatial practice

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira's senryu poetry. Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of socio-historical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira's senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way.     

The Humanism of André Malraux

In this essay, I explore the influence of Byzantine literature in the New World from a transatlantic perspective. Specifically, I examine the Scala paradisi of Juan Clímaco (570–649) as it is found in the Peregrinación de Bartolomé Lorenzo (1586) by the Jesuit José de Acosta (1539–1600), a text from the colonial period. Surprisingly, this text has received almost no critical attention. I focus on the study of the text (and the context in which it was produced and received), basing my analysis on a comparison of Acosta's text with other similar works. By using a comparative method, I explore the ideological and aesthetic tensions that underlie Acosta's work. Moreover, this analysis makes manifest the cultural and literary continuities (or traditions) and ruptures which, coming as much from the East as from the West of Europe, arrived in the Vice-regency of Peru in the second half of the sixteenth century.     

Critical spatial learning: participatory mapping,spatial histories,and youth civic engagement

As digital technologies become ubiquitous in many places, scholars of civic engagement, youth and political life, and geographic education have explored the potential of teaching critical and spatial thinking through digital technologies. This paper examines interactive digital mapping as a technology environment for teaching and practicing critical spatial thinking, in relation to civic engagement. From this participatory and dialogic mapping project with teenage girls in Seattle, Washington, we develop a conceptualization of critical spatial thinking that emphasizes how social and spatial processes intertwine to generate societal inequalities and show how this learning informs students’ social and spatial civic responses. We show how interactive digital mapping pedagogies offer students an opportunity to develop awareness of what happens in their urban geographies, but also how and what they might do to intervene.     

A Zoroastrian Dispute in the Caliph’s Court: The Gizistag Abāliš in its Early Islamic Context

The Gizistag Abāli? is a ninth- or tenth-century Pahlavi text, recording a debate which took place at the court of al-Ma?mūn between a Zoroastrian priest and a heretical dualist. This article, the first in-depth study of this important work, examines the text in its broader Islamicate environment. It argues that the narrative itself is probably fictional, but reflects a real historical phenomenon, namely the interreligious debates which took place among Zoroastrians, Muslims, Christians, and Jews during the ?Abbasid period. It argues that the text is a unique Zoroastrian example of a literary genre that was common among Christians at the time, namely, “the monk in the emir’s majlis.” By comparing the Gizistag Abāli? to these Christian texts, it explores why Zoroastrians generally did not launch explicit polemics against Islam, comparable to those of other non-Muslim communities. It seems that Zoroastrian authors were more concerned with explaining their own doctrines than critiquing the beliefs of others. This is curious considering the large numbers of Zoroastrians who were converting to Islam at the time. Finally, the article proposes new ways of refining the way we read Pahlavi texts, by analyzing them alongside the literatures of other religious communities in the early Islamic empire.     

Thomas Carlyle's Calvinist dialogue with the nineteenth-century periodical press

This article signals at a dearth of critical engagement with Thomas Carlyle's Presbyterian heritage resulting from the received whiggish narrative of his Calvinism as unenlightened, anachronistic, and backward-looking. It proceeds to challenge this view by examining closely Carlyle's creative use of key Calvinist concepts in his cosmopolitan and enlightened dialogue with the contemporary periodical press over British and European cultures. Carlyle is shown to be an adept purveyor both of the Edinburgh Magazine's enlightened idiom and of Blackwood's morally conservative and artistically cosmopolitan agendas, while also making creative capital of the Anti-Jacobin's powerful Gothic imagery and of the critical verve of the Westminster Review. The main addressees of Carlyle's reading of the signs of the times, I argue, are contemporary Whigs. Carlyle's depiction of Macaulay as a ‘spiritual hippopotamus’ spells Carlyle's broader critique of the modern lack of imagination of the spiritual which sponsors deterministic religious and secular readings of reality. Carlyle displays his enlightened Calvinist perspective in discussing the French Revolution through such key Scottish Enlightenment concepts as free will, conscience, civilisational and moral progress, and divine providence. Insightful and creative use of his inherited Scottish Calvinist heritage characterises Carlyle's open, cosmopolitan reading of the signs of the times.     

Memory Mapping: Affect,Place, and Testimony in El Lugar Más Pequeño (2011)

This article examines the Salvadoran documentary El Lugar Más Pequeño (The Tiniest Place, 2011) and argues that the film gives new insight into the complicated spaces and practices of memory post-transition and post-conflict through a process I call ‘memory mapping,’ which I define as the aesthetic process of representing the affective, polyvocal, layered relationship between past, present, and place as experienced by individuals and the communities in which they live. Engaging primarily with affect and memory theory, I contend that the film maps post-conflict memory in two specific ways: first, through testimony, and second, through an exploration of the relationship between memory and place. Ultimately, I argue that memory mapping sheds new light on how the aftermath of conflict – the physical, but also the emotional ruination caused by violence – is negotiated in the everyday of human life.     

OpenStreetMap in Israel and Palestine – ‘Game changer’ or reproducer of contested cartographies?

In Israel and Palestine, map-making practices were always entangled with contradictive spatial identities and imbalanced power resources. Although an Israeli narrative has largely dominated the ‘cartographic battlefield’, the latest chapter of this story has not been written yet: collaborative forms of web 2.0 cartographies have restructured power relations in mapping practices and challenged traditional monopolies on map and spatial data production. Thus, we can expect web 2.0 cartographies to be a ‘game changer’ for cartography in Palestine and Israel. In this paper, I review this assumption with the popular example of OpenStreetMap (OSM). Following a mixed methods approach, I comparatively analyze the genesis of OSM in Israel and Palestine. Although nationalist motives do not play a significant role on either side, it turns out that the project is dominated by Israeli and international mappers, whereas Palestinians have hardly contributed to OSM. As a result, social fragmentations and imbalances between Israel and Palestine are largely reproduced through OSM data. Discussing the low involvement of Palestinians, I argue that OSM's ground truth paradigm might be a watershed for participation. Presumably, the project's data are less meaningful in some local contexts than in others. Moreover, the seemingly apolitical approach to map only ‘facts on the ground’ reaffirms present spatio-social order and thus the power relations behind it. Within a Palestinian narrative, however, many aspects of the factual material space might appear not as neutral physical objects but as results of suppression, in which case, any ‘accurate’ spatial representation, such as OSM, becomes objectionable.     

Literary geography: setting and narrative space

This paper explores some of the ways in which analytical strategies developed within narrative theory might be combined with recent developments in literary geography in the study of setting and narrative space. It suggests that despite narrative theory's urge toward categorization and its associated tendency to conceive of space as relatively stable and fixed, the technical vocabulary developed within the discipline has much to offer the literary geographer. The first section of the paper reviews some of the areas of potential collaboration in this cross-disciplinary overlap, while the second section offers three brief case study readings designed to suggest the potential of a combination of the analytical specificity of narrative studies with the imaginative stretch of spatial theory. The case studies look at setting and narrative space as they emerge in relation to narrative voices and multiple audiences in three case study texts: P.K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962), J.A. Mitchell's The Last American (1889), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925).     

Gendered politics of empire: the female explorateur and natural histories of the Amazon basin 1899–1901

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Brazilian Amazon was experiencing a moment of heightened exploration, mapping, border creation, and contestation. This article examines the production of the French explorateur and geographer Octavie Coudreau through analysis of the natural history/travel narrative, Voyage au Trombetas (1899), and her subsequent narrative Voyage au Cuminá (1901). Octavie Coudreau initially went to Amazonia to travel with her husband, Henri Coudreau, already a renowned explorer of the French and Brazilian Amazon. After Henri Coudreau’s death on their first voyage, Octavie Coudreau continued working under contract for the Brazilian state and published natural history narratives after each of her four exploratory and mapping missions. These travel narratives include suggestions for increased colonization along with observation of local populaces, supported by a multitude of maps and photographs. Using feminist approaches to the historiography of travel, empire, and geographical work, I look at the female European explorer’s view of imperialism during this significant period in Amazonian history and development. I examine the unfixing of gender identity as it relates to movement within a liminal space. I think of this as the in-between place in which Octavie finds herself – as a grieving widow, thrust into a position of power abroad, while still dealing with the limitations of her gender during this time period, and the space of the Amazon itself, a region in flux where multiple races and imperial powers interact in a contact zone.