[...]d of word puzzle which uses pictures to represent words or parts of words,
pictogram mobilizes wit
-a pictogram attached to the place that it both represents and remotivates
fragments of remembered writing
the labor of interpretation consists exactly in opening onto surprise
ideograms, mimetic figures, miming the objects
that disrupts and affirms the sate of things
a stenographic form that telescopes language and extends into space as it signals a point where memory and national identity are being schematized
a childhood experience
the subject uses the illusion of a given spatial and historical order to create an imaginary world of impressions that tie his or her body to a mobility of space and place
signature, affixed to the edges in the spandrels between a map and its borders, is both ungrounded and necessary
authenticating effect
a sense of self-distance and power are obtained in the enactment of a signature
Conley argues that
cartography
statecraft
(Iran, Germany, Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Times)
-Princess Bubblegum naturalized story
Princess Bubblegum
the cartographers create a “cultural entity” that, it is claimed, is only represented in the maps
(also) “it becomes increasingly difficult to find a stable signified to which the whole thesaurus of exotic signifiers may be referred”
topophilia
(i have been trying to reverse the movement of) transition from cosmography to topography
cartographic truth
motivation and demotivation of proper names and their implied referents
Allegories of the Continent
Persianisch, Persiae,
“Our” Dr. Livingstone was a grand nephew of the “real” Dr. Livingstone in Africa. English Canada was still colonial in the 1950s
The syllables wound through our lives, threading together by force of repetition things that were distant, discontinuous and unreal. Living stone. This is how empire makes the world meaningful to its subjects, how it weaves itself into the everyday.
...empire made us part of a history that was somewhere else made by people who were not us. At the same time, when it came to Africa, we knew who we were. Sunday school missionary stories built the color line into our imaginations. That was part of their job, to create us as subjects of empire, give us our place in the order.
The book aims to be both a study in genre and a critique of ideology. Its predominant theme is how travel books written by Europeans about non-European parts of the world created the imperial order for Europeans “at home” and gave them their place in it. I ask how travel writing made imperial expansion meaningful and desirable to the citizenries of the imperial countries, even though the material benefits of empire accrued mainly to the few. Travel books, I argue, gave European reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized. Travel books were very popular. They created a sense of curiosity, excitement, adventure, and even moral fervor about European expansionism. They were, I argue, one of the key instruments that made people “at home” in Europe feel part of a planetary project; a key instrument, in other words, in creating the “domestic subject” of empire.
the rise of natural history
These case studies are shaped by a number of shared questions. With what codes has travel and exploration writing produced “the rest of the world” for European readerships at particular points in Europe’s expansionist process?
codifications of reality
the emanating glow of the civilizing mission
the cash flow of development
(it habitually blinds itself to) the reverse dynamic
obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries
It becomes dependent on its others to know itself
important historical transitions alter the way people write, because they alter people’s experiences and the way people imagine, feel and think about the world they live in.
tourist propaganda
testimonio
oral history
If one studies only what the Europeans saw and said, one reproduces the monopoly on knowledge and interpretation that the imperial enterprise sought.
the passport
Transculturation is a phenomenon of the contact zone.
metropolitan modes of representation
creating (your own) autonomous decolonized cultures
dynamics of creole self-fashioning
“contact language”
“colonial frontier”
...the space and time where subjects previously separated by geography and history are co-present, the point at which their trajectories now intersect
a “contact” perspective emphasizes how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each other
in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power
two processes in Northern Europe (“planetary consc[...]