About 'American Historiography (1650)'
Maps are subjective records of our movement through the world; they are images that represent our memory--selective and selected--of these journeys. I believe that the unquestioned authority we tend to attribute to maps is due to two fundamental confusions. First, a map is not the territory it represents. When we point to a spot on a map and say, "This is where we are," we rarely acknowledge that we are speaking in metaphors. Second, maps are made by specific people who have selected, discarded, and prioritized the information they wish to present and who have then used a particular perspective to present this information. Which is to say, there is no such thing as an "objective" map. A map is only accurate insofar as it accurately represents a particular perspective or experience of the world.
I made "American Historiography (1650)" in an attempt to create a map that might have been made in that year that showed not the mathematical measurement of distances between points in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, but the lived experience of closeness and contact between the inhabitants of these lands. By 1650, due to Europe's colonization of the Americas and its transportation of enslaved Africans to the "West Indies" (whose misnaming corresponded to the pre-Columbian map of the world as European potentates and merchants wished it to be), Europeans, indigenous Americans, and Africans already lived and died together as inhabitants of the same land. What might a map have looked like that showed how close these people-- these three 'distant' continents-- had actually become? Remapping "American" history in this way requires, I think, a tectonic shift in our imagination-- which is precisely what happens in my map. What do you think?
Mark Schafer, artist
Cambridge, MA, USA
MSMexico@aol.com
www.imapgination.com