Radical Cartography: How Changing Our Maps Can Change Our World

This striking study from cartographer and historian Rankin (After the Map) explores the politics of mapmaking. “Maps aren’t just collections of facts,” Rankin writes, but are “profoundly cultural.” What may seem like simple lines on paper can be “forms of social othering” and “the preferred tools of top-down management and control” (think redlining, gerrymandering, and “colonial partition”). Each chapter examines the politics and history behind a certain convention. In a chapter on boundaries, for instance, Rankin casts a critical eye on the 1920s University of Chicago sociologists who, seeking to “nudge their young field away” from the humanities “toward the prestige and influence of science,” ended up creating an influential cartographic study of Chicago’s racial segregation that had the effect, Rankin asserts, of “naturalizing” segregation as organic. In a chapter on layering in mapmaking, he examines how the reuse of the same printing plates to create the backgrounds for different maps reinforced certain political realities (like Indigenous dispossession, with “the background for precolonial Indigenous groups” showing “only rivers” rather than political boundaries). Rankin argues for a “radical” approach to cartography that not only spotlights marginalized groups but also is “less well-behaved,” embracing noise and messiness; he includes several examples, among them an eye-catching one of his own design that depicts a white globe encircled in the red grip of its most prominent trade routes. Lavishly illustrated with maps and photographs, this stuns. (Nov.)