Unmasking Maps, Unmaking Empire: Towards an Archipelagic Cartography

Abstract

What Joseph Campbell in his classical study calls the “monomyth” is, as psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés notes, a meta-narrative that “informs and [… ] spiritually grows the cultures, and the peoples within those cultures, through its universal cache of idioms and images.” 1 Acknowledging that human placemaking, meaning-making, and storytelling rely on mental mapping and mapmaking, this essay expands the scrutiny of narrative structures of placemaking towards the realms of spatial imaginations, human geographies, and transnational cartographic practices of mobility. Tracing both colonial and anti-colonial nodes of these practices across oceanic circuits makes visible what Albert Wendt described as “so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nation s, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature.” 2 What emerges is, I suggest, an archipelagic cartography that opens new venues for critical reconceptualizations of islands, mainlands, centers, peripheries, colonial histories, and transnational future trajectories.