1. Lecture Code: PS_L.12
ENGL 559: Postcolonial Studies UNIT 2: Multi-Disciplinarity “Cartographies and Visualization” by David Howard
Min Pun, PhD, Associate Professor
Dept of English, PN Campus
Pokhara
26 November 2018

2. Introduction
In this chapter, David Howard discusses the use of maps and visual images to gain power during the colonial rule around the world.
For postcolonial theorists, cartography is primarily “a form of political discourse concerned with the acquisition and maintenance of power”.
In other words, by using cartographies and visual narratives, the colonizers could possess and control over territories, peoples, and resources.
So mapping became an important tool to make connections between maps, cartographic visualization, colonial knowledge and postcolonial analysis.

3. What Is Cartography?
Cartography is the study or practice of drawing maps and geographical charts that is associated with the spatially-based knowledge.
Thus, cartography is not only drawing maps, it is also concerned with data manipulation, data capture, image processing and visual display.
Now, the traditional analog methods of map making have been replaced by digital systems capable of producing dynamic interactive maps that can be manipulated digitally.
For instance, modern cartography like many other fields of “information technology” has undergone rapid changes in the last decade.

4. Postcolonialism and Cartographic Debates
The interconnection between postcolonialism and cartography offers a debate on the colonial discourse in terms of geographical or spatially- based knowledge.
For instance, as Foucault considered knowledge as power, maps as visual forms of knowledge must include an aspect of that power.
Colonizers thus used maps to gain power because they had the knowledge of geography and social context of other places.
In this way, cartography has not only been a tool of conquest but also a weapon employed with vigour and purpose.

5. From Colonial to Postcolonial Mapping Techniques
The colonial project was rooted not only in the geographical imagining of the globe’s surface but relied heavily on the science of mapping.
For instance, the introduction of a single European currency (Euro) in 1999 is one example of cartographic design for colonial unity. They used the bank note that carries the map of Europe, which can be considered a challenging job for postcolonial theorists.
Thus, postcolonial analysis of mapping question the political and social evolution of map-making.

6. An Example from Greater Nepal
The unification of Nepal by Prithvi Narayan Shah, followed by the conquer of Kumaon, Garhwal, Kangra, Sikkim and Darjeeling, the Gorkha army was defeated in the war with the British East India Company and signed the Sugauli Treaty in 1815, losing most of its Terai including the newly conquered lands. This map sketched by British rulers is still in use for Nepal.

7. Geovisual Processes and the Renewed Politics of Maps
Whereas the colonial rule used the cartography as their tool to control over other territories, peoples and resources, the postcolonial theorists have now challenged the conditions of colonialism by using the geovisual process called “cartogram”.
Cartogram is a computer-generated geovisual process that creates a map on which statistical information with geographic location. One example of this is GIS (Geographical Information System) and free access to Google Maps.
This new technique has revolutionized the concept of what constitutes mapping, in a democratic way, rejecting the idea that the map only belongs to the cartographic skills embedded in the colonial rulers.

10. Devolving (Transferring) Cartographic Power
In the postcolonial era, the theorists started discussing the democratization of cartography (here, postcolonial theorists considered cartography as a colonial tool ).
In 1973, the Peters map projection proposed a new spatial order for the world atlas (promoted by UN).
The Peters projection claimed an equal-area projection that did not distort the mapping, promoting a new way for the world population to rethink about the colonial and imperial contexts of the past.
Again in the 1990s, the Amerindian Peoples’ Association in Guyana used new mapping technologies to clarify ancestral territorial claims.

11. Conclusion: Postcolonial as Human
Postcolonial theorists focus on treating all people as human, considering a person as central that remains central to cartographic analysis.
The following is the central idea of mapping for postcolonial theorists, that is, a human element:
For all the power they contain, maps are just pieces of paper or merely ephemeral pixels a computer screen. It is people who order, draw, purchase, use, and learn from maps. And it is people who will improve them – not necessarily by making them more accurate or objective but, for a start, by being more honest about how and why they are made and by reaching more carefully about how to read them. (Dorling 1998: 279)

12. Associate Professor, Dept of English Tribhuvan University
Min Pun, PhD
Associate Professor, Dept of English
Tribhuvan University
Prithvi Narayan Campus, Pokhara
Website: