Unmasking Maps, Unmaking Empire: Towards an Archipelagic Cartography

Abstract

On the surface, maps enable the planning and development of human dwelling, the visualization of connections, and drawing of boundaries. Throughout human history, however, maps have also acted as antidotes to chaos by generating spatial imaginations as pathways to meaning, belonging, and yearning. Exploring both theoretical and practical trajectories of transnational mappings, this article traces cartographies through the spatio-cultural nodes of the mainland United States, Hawaiʻi, and Micronesia. By revealing hidden connections, interstices, mobilities, memories, flows, and polysemic knowledges, it argues that an archipelagic approach to cartographic creation and interpretation reveals the significance of ‘minor’ spatial imaginations, mobilities, and historical practices. Although these may appear interspersed, fragmented, or insular, I suggest that they form nodes in archipelagic networks of resistance against colonizing cartographic regimes that aim to homogenize, police, and commodify spaces according to imperial logics—thus casting doubts on the authority of continental, national, and imperial/colonial geographic vocabularies. The article’s findings make apparent the need for a methodological turn that takes into account the methodological relationality and social agency of maps as actors in the generation and interpretation of discursive networks of spatial imaginations. Engaging with these imaginations, it becomes clear, means reevaluating and redefining conventional understandings of oceans, islands, continents, archipelagos, as well as those yet unnamed, unmapped, and unwritten places that exist between or submerged below these categories.