The power of cartography – Judith Schalansky’s atlas of remote islands

Abstract

This paper addresses the construction of insularity - here considered as remoteness and seclusion - in Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands (2009; English edition 2010). It starts with an exploration of the fascination of maps in connection with their sign character and discusses the gap between cartographic representation and actually lived spatial practices. Due to their social constructedness, maps are an expression and exercise of power depending on the originator's objectives; therefore, they may also have a colonialist effect. The paper analyses to which extent Schalansky, through her depiction of islands and the so called 'paramap', shifts islands even more from the centre to the periphery of attention. This is linked to an ambivalent construction of the insular between imaginations of centre and periphery, smallness and relative significance. Schalansky's literary Atlas is shown to engage with the power of cartography exerting aesthetic fascination on the one hand and enacting a discursive colonisation on the other.