Book contents
- Space and Literary Studies
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Space and Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Origins Revisited
- Part II Developments
- Chapter 6 Gender, Space, and Feminist Geography
- Chapter 7 Plantation
- Chapter 8 Empire, Nation, and the Question of Space
- Chapter 9 Postcolonial Space
- Chapter 10 Borders and the Liminal
- Chapter 11 Encountering the Community in Third Space
- Chapter 12 Literary Mobilities and the Mobilisation of Space
- Chapter 13 Translocality and Translocalism
- Chapter 14 Psychogeography
- Chapter 15 Mapping Empire’s Horror
- Part III Applications and Extensions
- Index
- References
Chapter 15 - Mapping Empire’s Horror
Literary GIS and Colonial Spatial Logic
from Part II - Developments
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Edited by
Book contents
- Space and Literary Studies
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Space and Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Origins Revisited
- Part II Developments
- Chapter 6 Gender, Space, and Feminist Geography
- Chapter 7 Plantation
- Chapter 8 Empire, Nation, and the Question of Space
- Chapter 9 Postcolonial Space
- Chapter 10 Borders and the Liminal
- Chapter 11 Encountering the Community in Third Space
- Chapter 12 Literary Mobilities and the Mobilisation of Space
- Chapter 13 Translocality and Translocalism
- Chapter 14 Psychogeography
- Chapter 15 Mapping Empire’s Horror
- Part III Applications and Extensions
- Index
- References
Summary
Digital maps are horrifying. One source of these horrors is their basis in geographic information systems (GIS), a fundamental technology of colonial violence across space. Literary GIS – digital mapping of geographic data created from texts – is not separate from these horrors, yet work in this field has only intermittently attended to the coloniality of GIS. I lay out the theory of GIS and its historical ties to US military campaigns, drawing on the field of critical GIS. I then survey various projects in literary GIS to see whether and how GIS might still be salvageable as a method for analyzing texts. I propose that literary GIS can help defamiliarize colonial spatial logic, making the now-commonplace, unspoken dynamics that organize space and its representations easier to see. That possibility depends on literary GIS projects attending more to the process of mapping – the conditions that make it possible to turn texts into mappable geographic data – rather than the resulting maps. But I also conclude that literary GIS cannot articulate a position separate from empire but only make its workings more visible, and I thus suggest that this method has more value as a temporary beacon than a permanent path.
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- Space and Literary Studies , pp. 249 - 266Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
References
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