Pacific FuturesPub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.1515/9780824877422-008
Bronwen Douglas
{"title":"6. Imagined Futures in the Past: Empire, Place, Race, and Nation in the Mapping of Oceania","authors":"Bronwen Douglas","doi":"10.1515/9780824877422-008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824877422-008","url":null,"abstract":"Since 1511, recurrent couplings of fact and fantasy, the familiar and the imagined, have driven the European invention, naming, mapping and regionalization of the fifth part of the world, known as Oceania after 1815. Using comparative critique of maps as historical texts, this chapter investigates the relationships of experience, expectation and hope in cartography’s varied graphic realization or anticipation of religious, imperial, scientific, racial, colonial, national and digital visions. I outline successive vignettes of the spatial framing of the fifth part of the world or Oceania as mapped and named from the sixteenth century—in early modern geopolitics, in shifting global visions from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century, and in regional cartography from the mid-eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The vignettes conjoin to show how uneasy liaisons of empirical observation, imagination, desire and deductive reasoning generated Euro-American maps, culminating in the appropriated colonial palimpsest that underlies modern maps of Oceania’s states. I conclude by reflecting briefly on the present and future implications of digitization, with its paradoxical blend of democratization and dehumanization, for cartography, its history and its audiences.","PeriodicalId":174825,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Futures","volume":"285 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115764803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}