“Between Japan and California”: Imaginative Pacific Geography and East Asian Culture in Penelope Aubin’s The Noble Slaves

Penelope Aubin’s mixed-up representation of Japan and the Pacific in The Noble Slaves (1722) has long been considered as an indication of the author’s insufficient geographical knowledge. In this essay, I reassess the East Asian setting of The Noble Slaves in the context of eighteenth-century geographical discourses. By examining Herman Moll’s maps as possible source materials, I argue that Aubin’s imaginative geography reflects not her personal ignorance but the limitations and uncertainties of contemporary cartographical knowledge about the North Pacific. Aubin uses the speculative nature of early Enlightenment geographical discourses for a narrative experiment and reimagining of East Asia. Aubin’s unique representation of East Asian cultures, such as Japanese Christian “Indians” and the ancient pagan temple, hinges on the emotions of wonder and curiosity, which can be read as a criticism of Robinson Crusoe’s hostile attitude toward the Far East in Daniel Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). This essay ultimately situates Aubin as a significant participant in early eighteenth-century knowledge production about the world.

The Global Indies

This book is a study of British imperialism's imaginative geography, exploring the pairing of India and the Atlantic world from literature to colonial policy. The book weaves a complex portrait of the imaginative geography of British imperialism. Contrary to most current scholarship, eighteenth-century Britons saw the empire not as separate Atlantic and Indian spheres but as an interconnected whole: the Indies. Crisscrossing the hemispheres, the book traces global histories of race, slavery, and class, from Boston to Bengal. It also reveals the empire to be pervasively present at home, in metropolitan scenes of fashionable sociability. The book reveals how the pairing of the two Indies in discourse helped produce colonial policies that linked them in practice. Combining the methods of literary studies and new imperial history, the book demonstrates how the imaginative geography of the Indies shaped the culture of British imperialism, which in turn changed the shape of the world.

Geographical image of the world in the London Psalter Maps from the 13th century

The subjects of this paper are two maps from the 13th century Psalter, found in London. These are the Psalter World Map and the Psalter List Map. Both maps are designed in the shape of a circular disk, modeled on medieval mappae mundi T-O type. The first is a pictorial map, the second is descriptive. The primary goal of these maps was not to objectively present geographical reality, but to express biblical symbolism and medieval Christian cosmology and thus serve as a reminder in devotional practice. By their deconstruction, we discover not only the religious Christian view of the world, but also the historical and cultural representations of medieval people projected on a geographical basis. Maps from the London Psalter have so far been viewed more as a "religious document" than as an objective "geographical image" and a "historical document". Therefore, they were rarely used as a historicalgeographical source. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct the text and context of the mentioned two maps and thus interpret their imaginative geography and geographical representations, the meaning of symbols and toponyms, which may be of interest to researchers dealing not only with historical cartography but also with historical and human geography.

Privatizing the production of settler colonial landscapes: ‘Authenticity’ and imaginative geography in Wadi Al-Salib, Haifa

This article explores how urban settler-colonial landscapes are produced in the neoliberal era. Adopting an anti-colonial approach, the article addresses practices of landscape production through the history of Wadi Al-Salib in Haifa after the driving out of its inhabitants in 1948. A micro geographical study of three Palestinian refugees’ houses, sold by the state to private real estate companies during the last two decades, constitutes the empirical mainstay of the article. Located in Wadi Al-Salib where rapid neoliberal urban renewal schemes hope to raise property values and enact demographic change, these houses are often marketed to upper-class Israeli Jews as “authentic”. Such branding indicates that the privatization of the Palestinian refugees' houses may also signify privatization of the colonial imagination, and a broader shift of the landscape into a collage of marketable images, echoing an ‘aesthetic violence’ that evokes past colonial landscapes. Such references create several hyper-realities in the same place, thus canonizing colonial landscapes’ imaginaries.

Colonizing islands

When Edward Said spoke of an ‘imaginative geography’, it was both to question the geographic positions adopted as part of colonial accounts and to posit the role of imagination itself in the construction of geographies. For Said, the ‘dramatic boundaries’ of imaginative geography are at once abstract and mobile, and yet might constitute ‘a form of radical realism’. The discourse is thus at once about perspective, position and the empirical (and imperial) imposition of that which is speculative, literary and fluid. But it is also about the unmediated engagements of radical realism and a form of geography we can only imagine. This article turns to the imaginative geography of islands and takes three islands as its departure point. The first is the island of Gilles Deleuze’s article ‘Desert islands’ (2004), an island ‘toward which one drifts’. The second is the island of absent subjectivity that is explored in Jean Baudrillard’s extended essay Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (2009). The third island upon which this article fixates is perhaps more archipelago than island. It is the spomeniki that are dotted over the landscape of the former Yugoslavia. These monuments were largely commissioned by Josip Broz Tito and built across the 1960s and 1970s and into the early 1980s to mark the places where the battles of the National Liberation War (Second World War) had occurred and where concentration camps had once stood. These monuments sit as odd and haunting gestures. Many sculptors and architects were involved. Some spomeniki are anchored and sit heavy on the landscape, as one might expect of memorials, and others appear to launch themselves towards elsewhere. Some are small and unimposing, and others at a scale well beyond the human body. Some are well tended, and others have faded into oblivion. This article turns specifically to the spomenik at the Valley of Heroes, Tjentište, designed by the sculptor Miodrag Živović and completed in 1971. Like all the spomeniki, this monument has endured further war since its erection. This magnificent fractal concrete form marks the Battle of Sutjeska, but rather than fixate upon a singular geo-historical moment, it appears more likely to take flight. I will argue that this magnificent sculpture is perhaps engaged in what Baudrillard calls ‘the art of disappearance’.

Iron, Indios, and Iberian Science in Dialogue

Of the four major metals that circulated within the interconnected economies of the Old World – gold, silver, copper, and iron – only iron was not used as money. Iberian texts about iron thus look quite different from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century narrative treatments of gold, silver, and copper. This chapter analyzes imperial ideologies about the Indies, an imaginative geography and administrative framework that connected Asia and the Americas, by comparing Iberian medical dialogues about iron. This comparison suggests how studies of colonial technologies overlap and diverge with approaches in the history of medicine, and how Portuguese- and Spanish-language sources circulated in different ways throughout early modern reading publics, even when they are now collapsed into a common category of Iberian scientific writing.

STUDI GEOGRAFI IMAGINATIF DALAM PROSES PEMBELAJARAN BIPA

Abstrak Hubungan ideologis pada proses pembelajaran bahasa Indonesia untuk penutur asing (BIPA) tidak dapat dielakkan, karena program BIPA adalah sebuah program yang berelasi dengan banyak pembauran budaya di dalamnya. Bentuk bahasa (kata, kalimat, dan variasi bahasa) adalah bagian dari faktor keberhasilan pengetahuan bagi pembelajarnya sebagai penerima konvensi. Bahasa tanpa karakteristik budaya sama artinya dengan mempelajari bentuk gramatikal semata tanpa memperhatikan makna. Sementara, inti dari berbahasa ialah apabila komunikasi yang terjalin dipahami karena adanya makna dari bahasa itu sendiri. Artikel ini menjelaskan kemungkinan pola belajar dari titik geografi imajinatif untuk menyoroti dan membangun identitas bahasa Indonesia yang dipelajari melalui pendekatan Orientalisme Edward Said. Persepsi persoalan bahasa yang dipelajari dan konstuksi identitas penutur yang mempelajarinya menjadi sebuah fenomena, hingga peran geografi imajinatif menjadi penting. Ide dasar dalam artikel ini adalah mendesposisikan pengalaman belajar dan mengajar menjadi strategi yang terpolakan sebagai langkah awal dalam memahami karakteristik pembelajaran BIPA melalui dasar-dasar pengenalan dan pengetahuan geografi imajinatif dalam prosesnya. Dalam hal ini, ide belajar bahasa biasanya mempertimbangkan kekuatan kelas serta tingkat kebutuhan terhadap bahasa yang dipelajari. Studi tentang otoritas kelinguistikan dibahas dengan menggunakan metode referensial, di dalamnya pembelajar bahasa asing menghadapi genre teks budaya secara umum. Dua instrumen metodologis digunakan untuk menelaah lebih jauh, yaitu memperhatikan karakateristik pembelajar BIPA dengan menggunakan perangkat formasi strategis dan posisi strategis. Kata Kunci: Geografi imajinatif, Pembelajaran BIPA, Metode Formasi Strategis, Metode Posisi Strategis Abstract The ideological relationship in the Indonesian language learning process for foreign learning (BIPA) is inevitable, because the BIPA program is a program related to much cultural assimilation there. The form of language (sentences, sentences, and variations of language) is part of the success factors of knowledge for students as convention recipients. Language without cultural characteristics is synonymous with grammatical form features only without regard to meaning. Meanwhile, the core of the conversation about communication is intertwined because of the meaning of the language itself. This article explains about learning patterns from the point of imaginative geography to discuss and build Indonesian language identity which is learned through the discussion of Edward Said's Orientalism. The perspective of the language learned and the construction of the identity of the speakers who study it become a phenomenon, so the role of imaginative geography becomes important. The basic idea in this article exposes the experience of learning and teaching into a strategy that is thought of as a first step in understanding the characteristics of BIPA through the basics of knowledge and knowledge imaginative geography in the process. In this case, the idea of ​​learning a language usually considers class and the level of need for the language being studied. The study of linguistics authority is discussed using referential methods, in which language expenditures translate cultural texts in general. Two methodological instruments are used to explore further, namely paying attention to the characteristics of BIPA spending using strategic formation and strategic positions tools. Keywords: Imaginative Geography, BIPA Learning, Strategic Formation Methods, Strategic Position Methods