What American?
During the second season of the television series The West Wing, one episode featured a Peters projection map of the world. The characters Toby Ziegler and C.J. Cregg met with an organization of cartographers who advocated social equality by lobbying for legislation that would support the use of a South-up map with the new projection in schools across the country instead of the standard Mercator projection. In the episode, the North-up Peters projection was simply turned over, because, at that time, there were no widely published South-up maps. In fact, the episode aired in 2001, a year before the release of the more accurate Hobo-Dyer[1] projection, the first of its kind to place the South at the top of the map.[2] From the public reaction to the “map episode,”[3] one can assume that visualizing a smaller United States at the bottom of the map is a challenging political statement for U.S. television audiences.
The novelty of the Peters (or Gall-Peters[4] projection) and other projections such as the Hobo-Dyer is that it is not focused in compass bearings like the obsolete Mercator projection.[5] Instead these projections represent countries and continents in far more accurate proportions and, by so doing, reduce the distorted visual dominance of the Northern Hemisphere. The Mercator projection dates from 1569, and its purpose was to provide navigational aid for nautical charts during the age of Europe’s explorations for alternative routes to Asia.[6] The map preceded the colonial developments of later centuries, yet it accurately illustrated a superiority bias which dominated relations between European empires and their colonial territories across the world.[7]
Nowadays, air travel and Global Positioning Systems have far surpassed the usefulness of the Mercator map. Yet, regardless of its inaccurate proportions—the mistaken visual dominance of “developed countries” in the Northern hemisphere and the fact that neither North nor South (or up or down) exist in the universe[8] (thus highlighting the arbitrariness of cardinal points and their placement)—one wonders why it continues to be the most widely used world map around the planet.
My first introduction to an inverted map was in the late ‘80s as an undergraduate in Buenos Aires. It was an image of an inverted South America by the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García. Being young and idealistic, I was mobilized by his image and later, his manifesto La Escuela del Sur (Southern School). América Invertida (Inverted America) visually synthesized the utopian pan-nationalistic ideas that dominated the political and cultural discussions at that time. After decades of bloody, foreign-influenced dictatorships, Torres García’s image and manifesto articulated our rebellious nationalistic stance in the first years of democracy. The Mercator projection map we had come to know was a clear example of an imported ideology written upon the landscape, imposed on the psyche. Maps entail enormous power, and any projection of an almost spherical body on a flat surface is always distorted and inevitably embodies biased political statements. In the inversion, our paradigm shifted: we no longer found ourselves “at the bottom” of the map and isolated from the rest of the world. By changing our point of view, Torres García’s map made it possible to imagine that our city, our work, our lives could become active participants in the larger cultural dialogues of the time rather than simple regurgitations of imported cultural influences.
Torres García inverted the map to decontextualize the dominant construct, question visual assumptions, and, by shifting its reading, provoke radically new connotations. He advocated a revolutionary and visual deterritorialization, creating a new location from where to confront power. In his manifesto, Torres García urged “Our North is the South. […]That is why we now turn the map upside down, and now we know what our true position is. […] From now on, the elongated tip of South America will point insistently at the South, our North.”[9] In an act of defiance, we embraced this new voyage of self-discovery that went in one huge, round circle made of fragmentary knowledge, disinformation, youthful exuberance, and a utopian fantasy. The political and economic situation of the country with its tentative and perhaps negative developments could no longer hold sway to our visions of the future. But, did we then know where we were? Or did we just grasp Torres García’s retroactive utopia as a facile tool for creating a new “identity myth”? Were we not, yet again, undertaking a voluntary internal exile—but this one fed by the fantasy of Torres García’s unrealized project rather than the self-fed amnesia of terror fomented by the trail of death that repeated coups left around us? In hindsight, I realize that in some ways we didn’t yet exist; we had all but disappeared: our bodies remained, but our voices were trained into silence by years of fear which held us in its muting fist.
Yet, Torres García’s revolutionary ideas were highly controversial in the heavily Parisian-influenced visual arts scene of 1946. Upon his return from Europe, he reclaimed his American roots by exhorting the juxtaposition of two distinct visual languages: European vanguardism and a mythic pre-conquest indigenous language. What was absent from his ideas was the history of the colonial past, which enveloped many other histories: colonial extermination of natives, slavery, whitening of culture, the criollos’ subjective identification with Europe, massive immigrations and formations of nations and states. In other words: his blindness towards his own colonial subjectivity.[10] The powerful foreign-focused oligarchs and dictators that ruled most of South America at this time, submerged previous generations’ struggles for self-definition and eradicated rebellious voices—those voices which spoke of singularities of experiences differing from the predominant stories fed by nation states. Modernity and progress were the guiding principles, and Torres García was a ‘modern’ man in a modern era who believed in historical and cultural ruptures rather than the smooth, evolutionary advancements of the past.
For more than a century we have embodied the modernist ideas of vanguard discontinuities. My peers and I believed in the same historical misconception that informed Torrez Garcia’s thinking. Both at his time and ours, children continued to be educated from a European perspective which instilled us with a lack of identity, a limited sense of the past where traditions are devalued. We were colonized: hybrid of two different, competing cultural systems that blurred distinctions between what belong to us and what didn’t. We knew more of the history of France, Italy, and Spain than the combined history of all the countries in our continent. Our social conditioning was, after all, colonial. Colonial education, as Ngugi Wa Thiong’o asserts, “is a process that annihilates a people’s belief in their language, environment, heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacity and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as a wasteland of non-achievers.”[11] Unbeknown to me, my experience embodied the schizophrenic (neo) colonial subject’s split sense of self: on one hand, I was engaged in reclaiming a confrontational native cultural identity, and on the other, I was hallucinating of escape in the form of countless fellowships and study-abroad grants waved, like flags, from embassies.
These two impulses sought a reconceptualization of my experience of geography by questioning the power of representation and toying with emigration; either aimed for a future outside the established parameters of my world. In a contradictory gesture, while imbibing Torres García’s redemptory project, I would spend entire afternoons at the Lincoln Center in Calle Florida[12] trying to decode the art images I studied in the issues of Art in America and Artforum. I would admire the abstract work of artists from a culture and country that were completely alien to me. The images were fascinating; I was seeing them for the first time, since, after the military intervened in the national educational curriculum at every institutional level, our art history finished with the Impressionists. Later I would learn that what I was studying was the work of the Abstract Expressionists as it was advertised in the pages of the magazines, and later still I would learn that their view corresponded to the most individualist spirit of self-expression: American par excellence.
II
“American” is an attribute without a referent: in contemporary, colloquial language either the gentilic adjective bears no relation to a specific territory, or it maintains with this territory only ephemeral relations, acting at times as itself, at other times as the “gringo.”
“American” is a transcultural term, shifting and fluid, hybrid. Antelo conceives of “American” as a concept in a continual coming into being with a double articulation (both native and simultaneously self-created).[14] America is a continent, a mass of land from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, heterogeneous and transcultural. It is also a term with an exponential multiplicity of meanings, infinitely specific and singular in its definitions. All of America shares its colonial beginnings in subjugated indigenous populations whose cultures were devastated by the waves of European immigrants for whom their own displacement left no space for local identifications. Eventually territories transformed into independent nation-states for whose creation memory was erased from history. Later, another amalgamation that necessitated a second general amnesia was the professionalization of the first native-born generations with familiar ties that linked them directly to Europe. They unwittingly and further reinforced the colonial influences of nations across the continent.
So who are the Americans? They are not just from the North, nor do they live exclusively in the United States. What appear to be culturally consistent wholes—such as “Latin America” or the North, Central and South designations of the continent—are maintained in apparent unity only through an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization. What is constitutive of America, the other America, are hybridities that cannot be categorized according to land, language, or political borders as they currently are. The other Americans are clearly not “from” different continents: the other America does not start at the U.S.-Mexico border. If anything, it is already substantially inhabiting the United States. Yet the north continues to recreate itself in a mythical self-sustaining originality while the South is seen as a poor imitator of derivative, inauthentic copies. While the unnamable, repressed, devalued, and increasing silent majority—whose countries of origin are implicitly degraded as mere copies, limp imitations, failed attempts—are structurally written out of the ongoing paradigm, they are made virtually absent. Yet as we know, the margins constitute the text, thus it is the center who is repressing its dependency in relation to others. Majoritarian power depends on controlling a radically unstable reality, which words only approximate in their enunciation by will of convention. And, paraphrasing Edward Said, it is ultimately in acts of telling, narrating, and mapping that we guarantee actuality.
III
It is only by dislocation, and the consequent alienation, that we become aware of who we are, of our multiplicities. In the initial shock, the self refuses to stop the categorization process that makes dichotomies of all experience and compares the other only in the order of difference: “I am me because I am not you.” We naïvely follow the doomed Cartesian paradigm of binaries. However, I don’t have to negate you to inhabit the one I am.
Eventually I left Buenos Aires and landed in the middle of the United States: Kansas. I arrived in a small city whose inhabitants would greet every stranger in the street. Who were these people who, with a “hi,” would lift their hands in salutation—a fingers-together, palm-out gesture with which I was completely unfamiliar and that reminded me vaguely of the Hitler salute? More importantly, who was I? What and how do I constitute myself against the need to belong and the safety that emanates from the group mentality? I became a Hispanic, Latino, South American, Sudaca, Argentine, Westerner, Argie, American…all of them and their interstices, their in-betweens. The terms vary depending on the interlocutor. “American” is progress, a continent, an attitude, an identity, the enemy, open to interpretations. It is a margin no longer on the outside, but an integral, if minor, language. And having spent exactly half of my life in the U.S. and the other half in Argentina, I continue to make peace with being both from here and elsewhere and anywhere at all.
In the meantime, for his birthday, my 12-year-old Argentinean nephew got a copy of the South-Up Hobo-Dyer projection map. He loves it.
[1] The Hobo-Dyer projection is derived from a 1910 Behrmann projection.
[2]Note of Interest: Stuart McArthur of Melbourne, Australia drew his first South-up map when he was 12 years old (1970). His geography teacher told him to re-do his assignment with the “correct” way up if he wanted to pass. Three years later he was an exchange student in Japan. He was taunted by his exchange student-friends from the USA for coming from “the bottom of the world.” It was then, at age 15, he resolved one day to publish a map with Australia at the top. Six years later, while at Melbourne University, he produced the world’s first “modern” South-up map and launched it on Australia Day in 1979.
[3] This segment of the episode has been quoted on BBC news http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5413010.stm, Los Angeles Times, Susan Spano’s “What in the World Is up with These Radical Maps?” March 23, 2003, New York Times, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/what-were-reading-world-changing-maps and Roberta Smith’s “The Shape of the World As Mapmakers Saw It”, Art/Design Section, April 26, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/26/arts/design-review-the-shape-of-the-world-as-mapmakers-saw-it.html. It has also appeared in the “Fresnobee,” “San Diego Union-Tribune”, “The Register-Guard”, “The Charlotte Observer”, “St. Paul Pioneer Press”, “Newsday”, “Orlando Sentinel”, “Grand Forks Herald”, “Hartford Courant” among others. It has almost 70.000 Google hits, appearing in blogs and forums.
[4] The Gall–Peters projection was first published in 1885 by clergyman James Gall, and again in 1974 by the German-born Arno Peters. No longer focused on compass bearings, the Gall-Peters projection shows countries and continents in their accurate surface-area proportions. With Peters’ new issue of the Gall projection a large debate within cartographic societies ensued, creating the emergent discipline of “critical cartography” and an overall awareness of the political and social implications of maps.
[5] Both the Peters and Hobo-Dyer Projections are “area accurate” maps. The www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/mapping/a_projections.html site states that “Equal-area [is a] map projection where every part, as well as the whole, has the same area as the corresponding part on the Earth, at the same reduced scale.” The Hobo-Dyer Projection is a cylindrical equal-area projection.
[6] Online sources: Wikipedia—Mercator Projection and http://science.nasa.gov/realtime/rocket_sci/orbmech/mercator.html.
[7] Please see “The Imperial Archive: Cartography” from the Queen’s University of Belfast UK at the following site: http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/imperial/key-concepts/Cartography.htm.
[8] See Mietzner and Pasch “Expressions of Cardinal directions in Nilotic and in Ubangian Languages” from SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, Volume 4 – 2007 No. 3 as an example of conceptual variations of space orientation across cultures, and Wikipedia—Cardinal Directions, sections 3, 5 and 6. From the field of theoretical physics, see Brian Greene’s “The Elegant Universe.”
[9] Andrea Giunta’s “Strategies of Modernity in Latin America from Beyond the Fantastic, edited by Gerardo Mosquera.
[10] Raul Antelo, “The Double American” in American Visions: Visiones de las Américas.
[11] From “Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature.” Portsmith, NH: Heinemann, 1986.
[12] An unofficial U.S. cultural and information center located at the core of downtown Buenos Aires.
[13] Authors: Tomassi and Jacob, Mesquita: editors. Allworth Press, 1994.
[14] Ibid.
Images:
1. Stuart McArthur’s 1979 map of Australia at the top of the world.
2. The Hobo-Dyer Projection.
3. Joaquín Torres García. América Invertida (Inverted America).
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