Territorial Imaginaries
Beyond the Sovereign Map
Format:Hardback
Publisher:The University of Chicago Press
Published:25th Apr '25
Should be back in stock very soon
Fresh offerings on world mapping beyond Western conventions.
This strikingly colorful volume contends that modern mapping has never been sufficient to illustrate the complex reality of territory and political sovereignty, whether past or present. For Territorial Imaginaries, editor Kären Wigen has assembled an impressive slate of experts, spanning disciplines from political science to art history, to contribute perspectives and case studies covering three main themes: mapping before the nation-state, rethinking and critiquing mapping practices, and robust traditions of counter-cartography.
Each contributor proposes alternative ways to think about mapping, and the essays are supported with rich archival documentation. Among the far-reaching case studies are Barbara Mundy’s cartographic history of Indigenous dispossession in the Americas, Peter Bol’s examination of two Chinese maps created five hundred years apart, and Ali Yaycıoğlu’s exploration of tensions between top-down and bottom-up mapping of Habsburg and Ottoman border claims.
"What is sovereignty? And what should we do with it? Territorial Imaginaries brilliantly exposes the myths of jigsaw-puzzle territoriality and tears apart the familiar pastel-colored map. With essays that span almost a thousand years and reach across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, this volume offers a remarkable conversation between history, critique, and productive alternatives for understanding political geography and spatial imagination in new ways. The result not only showcases the diversity and malleability of territory over time, space, and culture but also asks us to rethink how maps and other visual material can stabilize—or destabilize—the relationship between peoples, states, and space. Every contribution is packed with insight and speaks convincingly across fields." -- Bill Rankin,Yale University
"Ranging across disciplines, the authors in this edited volume ask how claims to territorial sovereignty been both made and challenged by maps. The answers—offered by scholars of political science, history, geography, art history, and anthropology—illuminate the varied roles that maps have had across human history. Even more intriguing is the way each essay widens the very definition of a map, and connects the past to current problems of political sovereignty." -- Susan Schulten, University of Denver
ISBN: 9780226839004
Dimensions: 254mm x 210mm x 28mm
Weight: 1247g
280 pages