Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur
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and more the creative energies mobilized to rationalize plurality and dissent. Luyia ethnic architects grounded their patriotism within a distinct geographic vision. Lacking the consensus and consolidation of a more thoroughgoing culturalist agenda, they were left with a mapped outline from which to build a new form of demographically inclusive, politically plural community. For Luyia cosmopolitans, territorial nationalism provided a language, a form of argumentation capable of tapping into the geographic imaginations, multiple sites of identification, and histories of regional interdependence and interaction among their plural and irrepressibly diverse constituents.
GEOGRAPHIC IMAGINATIONS: MAPPING POWER, COUNTERMAPPING DISSENT
In an interview with the editors of the French Marxist geography journal Hérodote in 1976, Michel Foucault begins by defending his lack of interest in geography as a subject.74 When confronted with the profusion of spatial and geographic metaphors in his work—position, displacement, terrain, archipelago, landscape—Foucault defends these terms as reflecting more historical and political power structures rather than geographic ideas in and of themselves. By the end of this exchange, however, the editors prompt Foucault into an about-face: “I must admit . . . Geography acted as the support, the condition of possibility for the passage between a series of factors I tried to relate. . . . Geography must indeed necessarily lie at the heart of my concerns.”
Geography and the encounters between communities and the landscapes they inhabit have long produced sites of imagination and contestation through which African communities expressed their histories, their moral economies, and the limits of their political communities. And yet, as Foucault realized, despite a profusion of geographic metaphors, very little scholarly attention has interrogated the geographic imaginations behind these metaphors that made possible the variety and durability not only of knowledge production and power structures but also of subaltern political imaginations.75
The spatial turn in African history over the past few years has prompted a move away from restrictive, relatively recent, and colonially contingent national and ethnic units of analysis toward a focus on “regions”: geographic spaces defined by the extent of “networks of interaction, whether political, economic, social, or cultural.”76 This regional approach not only breaks away from colonial timelines and boundaries but also exposes the diverse and dissenting interactions and exchanges within these spaces. This is not to suggest, as some have, a simple replacing of an “ethnic” grammar with a “geographic” one; rather, this approach responds to Achille Mbembe’s call for an investigation into the “imaginaires and autochthonous practices of space.”77 These “imaginaires” revealed themselves in many forms: in the histories told; in the geographic work of language, customary practice, and demographic control; and in the spatial delimitation of land, movement, power, and belonging.
Social formations among the constituent communities of the Luyia reflected an “imbrication of multiple spaces” of belonging, exchange, and authority before colonial conquest.78 While this geographic imagination continued to inform the organization of political relations and strategies of resistance into the colonial period, the territorial outline drawn by imperial surveyors offered a new coherence, a framework from which new political thinkers could claim the right to speak for an enlarged ethnic constituency. Contrary to instrumentalist understandings of colonial boundaries constructing ready-made ethnic territories from which African politicians mobilized their constituents, colonial maps did not invent new identities wholesale but rather introduced new tools in the visual illustration of history and community.79 Mapmaking provided a way of “writing the world,” a way of making legible spatial relationships and territorial claims.80 And while geography constituted social practice, cartography, as introduced in the colonial era, became political action.
A recent historiographical trend has focused on the importance of mapping and strategies of territoriality to the imperial project. For Lord Curzon, boundaries represented “the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war or peace, of life or death to nations.”81 Geography made possible the possession of distant territories, bringing “light” to dark, unknown places and peoples: “To govern territories, one must know them . . . unless a region is first conceived of and named, it cannot become the specific subject of a map.”82 Historians have made great use of geographer Robert Sack’s theory of territoriality to reconstruct the links between territory and power, geography and governance, and mapmaking and identity. In Sack’s terms, ‘“ territoriality . . . forms the backcloth to human spatial relations and conceptions of space. . . . Territoriality is the primary spatial form power takes.”83 Territoriality was then a strategy of social interaction, of rule, and of state building.84
Taking inspiration from Benedict Anderson’s seminal text Imagined Communities, two pioneering studies in this young field, Thongchai Winichakul’s Siam Mapped and Christopher Gray’s Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa, both emphasized the instrumental role of imperial mapmaking in the formation of new ethnic and national communities.85 Both studies began by sketching the cognitive mapping of space that existed before the intervention of colonial geography.86 Winichakul explored the sacred topographies of Buddhist thought alongside the ancient maps of Southeast Asia to demonstrate the “coexistence of different concepts of space.”87 Gray, on the other hand, built on Jan Vansina’s theory of “cognitive landscapes” that spatialize ideology on an intimate scale.88 For Gray, the cognitive mapping of kinship and clan hierarchies among the stateless communities of South Gabon allowed for the development of a socially defined form of territoriality.89 For both Winichakul and Gray, the introduction of colonial mapmaking constrained local practices of space, imposed imperial understandings of geography, and encoded boundaries as the delimiters of new ethnic and national bodies.
Historians of colonial territoriality have investigated the use of mapping in the spatial organization of gender relations, the micropractices of power and governmentality, and the relations and identities formed on frontiers and across borderlands.90 Postcolonial studies have further looked at colonial boundaries variously as artificial barriers, as delimiters of citizenship, and as conduits of exchange and interaction.91 But the underlying argument remains virtually the same: the introduction of modern mapping technologies marked a radical break that displaced older forms of geographic knowledge and prompted new formulations of community and identity. By focusing too narrowly on imperial and “official” maps, these studies risk eliding the “cartographic anxiety” that such processes produced and occluding the ways Africans, or indeed subalterns across the colonized world, informed, contested, and appropriated these colonial impositions.92
The introduction of cartography reflected broader histories of scientific exchange and literacy in the colonial world. Imperial state builders, according to James Scott, required spatial ordering to make their power legible, but these “state fixations” were often frustrated—unmapped lands were not blank spaces waiting to be filled, and local populations did not “stand idly by when surveyors came into view.”93 Cartography represented a contested enterprise in which local communities, as much as European experts and scientists, worked to produce knowledge and constitute communities. In counterpoint to the work of Tim Mitchell and Scott, mapping was not the sole property of high-modernist imperial planners.94 Mapping, as a tool of power, imagination, and dissent, was much more broadly distributed and proved to be a useful political strategy for subaltern activists and ethnic patriots alike. Whether by the state or in the hands of local amateur surveyors, mapping obliged both cartographers and readers to understand themselves in relation to the map.
The colonial obsession with territorial ordering and cataloguing incentivized the development of cartographic literacy and produced distinct modes of competition in local moral economies. Mapping, as with all colonial strategies of rule, was a negotiated, historically contingent process. Africans, serving as guides, porters, and assistants in the work of mapping of western Kenya, quickly leaned lessons in reconnaissance, surveying, triangulation, and a whole host of cartographic techniques and languages. Missionary and later government schools held formal classes in geography. In the 1940s, District Social Welfare Officer Ryland reported that geography was among the most popular