This is a blog for the community of Geography 170: "Geographies of Violence in the Age of Empire" in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. This course explores a range of answers to the question: How might geographical thinking be used to critically explore new forms of violence and empire?
Week 3 ~ Cartographies of War & Empire
2 comments:
I once used a map like this - a South oriented map - for a cartography assignment and I was surprised at how initially my mind fought the challenge of viewing the world with the Northern Hemisphere at the bottom. It sort of plays with your mind. But after a while it was more like how beautiful to see the world, to study the details of a world map, from this perspective!
It makes me wonder what if we saw the world sideways, at a diagonal, split in half either horizontally, or vertically. How does map orientation allow for the spread of colonization and domination? I think that even the orientation of the map allows political agendas to become material consequences. it allows for the physical location of a place to be associated with different meanings such as third world countries as a isolated in a region, as a civilization all on its own, such as viewing Africa from the normalized way it isolates it but upside down it looks like southern africa could be northern europe and northern europe looks like it could be southern africa.
It's interesting how we categorize and label nations and continents and create separations that we associate with power relations and dominance, even words such as South America and North America, invokes a hierarchy not just physical but also socially and politically.
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