ABSTRACT
In August 1990, the first Gulf War began between Iraq and a United Nations coalition of forces led by the United States. This moment witnessed a profusion of geographic writing about mapping in the service of empire. Some of these studies documented the relations of cartography to propaganda with a view to unpacking the politics (Pickles 1992), while others revelled with some trepidation in the orthodoxy of so-called ‘scientific’ mapmaking (Black 1997), and still others sought to demolish that orthodoxy (Wood 1992). With the Gulf War, and the advent of yet more U.S. imperial desire in the Middle East, some geographers took on the new geographic technologies as part of America’s superior mapping capabilities to argue the problematic relevance of academic geographers to warfare and imperialism. Neil Smith (1992), perhaps most famously, argued for a moral stance against the Gulf War, and begged geographers to acknowledge the discipline’s ties to imperialism. He suggested that GIS developers should accept some degree of responsibility for mapping technologies that are used in the service of warfare. Smith’s recriminations are countered by arguments against seemingly divisive polemics and for a more nuanced appreciation of the complex relations between science, civilian mapping, secrecy and classified research (Cloud and Clarke 1999; Goodchild 2006). This is not a new debate. Concern about the use of maps and cartographic technologies as mechanistic tools of war and empire goes back several centuries. The vitriolic debates often miss another form of mapping, one that is used to counter imperial logic and to elicit different, but equally valid, kinds of emotions. Indeed, Guiliana Bruno (2002) creates the beginnings of a revisionist history of mapping that turns the voyeur into the voyageur, and by so doing moves cartographic emphasis away from sight, site and what Donna Haraway (1991: 189-91) famously calls the god trick, to an appreciation of motion and emotion and the pleasures of cartographic embeddedness. The ‘trick’ that Haraway draws our attention
to is embellished with technical and instrumental discourses that do not necessarily serve local needs. The dilemma of the ‘infinite vision’, she argues, and the ‘promising vision from everywhere and nowhere equally and fully’ are problematic representations of ‘Science’ as ‘an illusion’.
