“Taken together, Looking Backward and King Solomon’s Mines comprise the complementary halves of what we can call a collective cartography. If the mapping of social space into tightly controlled regularities in Bellamy’s Boston finds its counterpart in the mapping of the African interior as the repository of hidden treasure in Haggard’s fantasy, the figure of the map here is more than just a metaphor.”
“One of the most extensive and significant scientific projects in history, it could be argued, was the British empire’s mapping of the world in the 19th century — a project that not only surveyed the coasts and then the interiors of the non-European world for military and commercial purposes, but also yielded the theory of natural selection, independently arrived at by both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace via the evidence provided by its mapping of the distribution of species. It is against the contours of this cartographic project, including not just scientific mapping of the world but capitalist management of social space and the imaginary representation of the world’s availability to colonial expropriation, that Siobhan Carroll’s An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination 1750-1850 takes shape.”
“Carroll’s subject is what she calls “atopia,” which she defines as “natural regions […] which, because of their intangibility, inhospitality, or inaccessibility, cannot be converted into the locations of affective habitation known as ‘place.’” Carroll is interested, then, in an endemic and unavoidable failure of cartography that supplements and haunts the project, where intangible elements and unmappable spaces provide both imaginary and real sites of resistance to capitalist, colonial, national, and imperial control.”
“The four atopic regions Carroll identifies are the poles, the ocean, the atmosphere, and the underground.”
“Fredric Jameson has argued over the last 30 years that we at present reside in a postmodernity structured by the cultural logic of late capitalism. Our most cogent resource in the state of disconnected affect and spatial disorientation that goes under the name of globalization, according to Jameson, is the exercise of “cognitive mapping.” While Carroll never invokes Jameson or the theory of cognitive mapping, her project is indeed an attempt to trace the genealogy and articulate the contours of the present crisis by undertaking a precise and original analysis of Western mapping in its broadest sense.”
“In the first pages of the book she shows us a 16th-century map, Giacomo Gastaldi’s Il disegno della geografia moderna de tutta la parte dell Africa, in which the interior of the continent is densely filled in with sites derived not only from travelers’ accounts but also and more abundantly from myth and legend. On the next page she then displays Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville’s 1749 Afrique where the interior has been wiped clean of secondary and fictional accounts, arguing that d’Anville’s map represents “a seminal moment in the history of European spatial thought” that testifies to the onset of “a new phase of state-sponsored exploration and cartographical representation [of] geo-imaginary spaces.” This surprising and engaging exposition leads quickly into her definition of atopia and inaugurates her engagement with four ongoing scholarly conversations. The first two involve quite broad, widely influential currents of 20th-century thought: first, the discourse of cultural geography, from which she singles out the contributions of Martin Heidegger on the concept of “dwelling” and of Henri Lefebvre on the spatial practices of everyday life; and second, the inquiry into colonialism and the formation of modern national identities issuing from the work of Edward Said on orientalism, Benedict Anderson on the “imagined communities” of national identities in general, and Linda Colley on the formation of British national identity.”