Book Review: Maps and politics, Maps and history: constructing images of the past

Abstract

Armand Mattelart with reference to the concept of the ‘network’, and by James Corner with reference to the ideas of (among others) Buckminster Fuller and Raoul Bunschoten. The history of vision is a major theme in Lucia Nuti’s study of Renaissance chorography, as it is in Wystan Curnow’s essay on the relation between maps and art (including photographs, ‘installations’ and performance art) since what he describes as the ‘spatial turn’ of the late 1960s. As might have been expected, most of the contributors both use and discuss social and cultural theory. There are references to communication theories, from Norbert Wiener to Roland Barthes and Marshall McLuhan. There are frequent but brief and somewhat tantalizing references to the psychology of mapping, from Freud and Winnicott to Lacan, with a somewhat more sustained discussion of Deleuze. However, the principal theoretical presence in the volume (despite his absence from the index) is surely Foucault, notably in the chapters by Christian Jacob, Michael Charlesworth (on the eighteenthcentury chorography of Kent) and David Matless (on ‘power-knowledge’ in midtwentieth-century Britain). Despite this diversity of theoretical inspiration, Mappings is a coherent volume which achieves its editor’s aim of taking the discussion of the opacity and transparency of maps a stage further and presents its conclusions in a manner accessible to students as well as their teachers in a number of disciplines. The essays by Jacob and Carter in particular are likely to be cited and discussed a great deal in the years to come.