Racial Mapping

Racial Mapping is the use of cartography to identify and situate distinct racial groups [Winlow (forthcoming)] . By using maps to highlight, perpetuate, and naturalize the differences of race through both literal and metaphorical means [Kobayashi and Peake 1994] [Kobayashi 2003] , mapmakers create a common knowledge by displaying specific data as representative the real world, and construct racial identity by framing, situating, and defining what race is [Wood 1992] [Harley 2001] . As a result, there is a long tradition of cartography being used as a tool to support social Darwinism, physical anthropology, and evolution theories, which seek to promote specific people as superior to others [Winlow 2001] [Winlow 2006] [Winlow (forthcoming)] .

Racism, as it is understood today in western thought, originates in the late 15th century as an expression of European superiority [Goldberg 2006] . However, the basis for racial mapping, at least in the western world, goes back to the Hellenistic tradition of mapping, where exotic “other” people were purported to live in far off lands [Winlow (forthcoming)] . These “others” were usually based upon the writings of Herodotus, and later Greek cartographers spatially situated these groups in their maps. The use of maps to identify otherness was also present Medieval Europe through the use of "mappaemundi". These maps displayed “monstrous races” along the periphery to denote the separation between the settled (Europe) and the unknown [Winlow 200] . While these old maps are originally seen as representation of Christian proselytizing influence, they also exude an ideal of European supremacy. European mapmakers continued this tradition into the colonial era, using the maps to replace indigenous ideas of identity and spatial distribution. These maps, and others, were used to legitimize European imperialism through the use of racial delineation. Europeans were bringing their supposedly superior race, and the knowledge that went with that, to the world through their empires, and those empires were situated along a spatial understanding made possible through maps [Winlow 2006] [Wood 1992] [Harley 2001] [Goldberg 2006] .

Racial ideology is not to be found entirely in maps of colonialization, it is also seen within the biopolitics of the early 19th century with the rise of the “population” as a unit of analysis, and a governmental concern with health and crime that led attempts to understand, and categorize, the population [Foucault 2003] [Crampton 2007] [Burchell 1991] . The effects of grouping individuals into populations and having identities for the population, as opposed to the individual, presents the ability of a government to categorize people based upon knowledge. Many times this knowledge, and the categorization was done using cartography [Crampton 2007] .Following the end of World War I, many of Europe’s borders were redrawn, often influenced by racial and eugenic ideologies [Crampton 2007 The decision behind this was that, “…territories remain stable and peace be guaranteed,” [Crampton 2007, p. 225] . The AGS assisted in the redrawing of Europe's map through the project known as the Inquiry, and in doing so helped to determine what the territory and identity of people in Europe would be. Consequently, the redrawing of Europe’s map after World War I was directly influenced by the knowledge of racial purity.

Notes

References

(1) Winlow, Heather. (forthcoming). Mapping Race and Ethnicity. In The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, edited by N. T. a. R. Kitchen. Oxford: Elsevier.

(2) Kobayashi, A., and L. Peake. 1994. Unnatural discourse. "Race' and gender in geography. Gender, Place & Culture 1 (2):225-243.

(3) Kobayashi, A. 2003. The Construction of Geographic Knowledge: Racialization, Spatialization. In Handbook of Cultural Geography, edited by e. a. Kay Anderson. London: Sage Publications.

(4) Wood, Denis. 1992. The Power of Maps. New York: The Guilford Press.

(5) Harley, J.B. 2001. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Edited by P. Laxton. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

(6) Winlow, Heather. 2001. Anthropometric cartography: constructing Scottish racial identity in the early twentieth century. Journal of Historical Geography 27 (4):507-528.

(7) Winlow, Heather. 2006. Mapping moral geographies: W. Z. Ripley's races of Europe and the United States. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96 (1):119-141.

(8) Goldberg, David Theo. 2006. Racial Europeanization. Ethnic and Racial Studies 29 (2):331-364.

(9)Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76. New York: Picador.

(10) Crampton, Jeremy. 2007. Maps, Race, and Foucault: Eugenics and Territorialization Following WWI. In Space, knowledge and power : Foucault and geography, edited by J. C. a. S. Elden: Burlington.

(11) Burchell, Graham and Colin Gordon and Peter Miller. 1991. The Foucault effect : studies in governmentality : with two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault: University of Chicago Press.