Imaginative Geographies

Imaginative geographies, the images of the world and its diverse people that help a group to define its identity, are cultural representations that carry both emotional and ideological weight. Within human geography, the study of imaginative geographies takes such representations seriously; images, as shapers of people's identities and understandings of the world, also shape the world itself. Thus, imaginative geographies blur distinctions between the “real” world and the “fictional” world. That is, they are real not because imaginative geographies accurately depict the world but rather because they have reflected and reinforced people's imagination of the world in tangible and concrete ways.

Human geographers often have looked to literature as a way in which to understand how a novelist such as William Faulkner uses geographic facts of a region and converts those facts into fiction. Such an approach, although interesting, is rather different from how cultural and historical geographers during recent years have used the concept of imaginative geographies, which was first proposed by Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said. In his influential 1978 book Orientalism, Said put forth a powerful argument about the ways in which Western colonial powers came to understand non-Western cultures in general—and the “Orient” in particular—as unchanging and primitive. Crucially and related, by casting non-European peoples in such a derogatory light, colonial powers were then able to define their own identities in relation to what the “others” supposedly were not—advanced, dynamic, and sophisticated. This essential opposition between the civilized American or European and the savage native became an essential element in the struggles for domination during the colonial era, vestiges of which remain evident today. Such imaginative geographies, Said posited, clearly are linked to political–economic power and to the asymmetrical social relations that are at the heart of racism.

[Page 245]Imaginative geographies are based, to a very large degree, on the circulation of textual and visual materials that give substance and meaning to such images. Intelligence reports, maps, and popular travel writing became extremely influential means by which people learned about distant places and people. During the 19th century, readers pored over the travel accounts of famous writers, such as Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert, to discover the ruins of Egypt. Imperial Britain employed sophisticated mapping techniques not only to create the spatial image of its Indian empire but also to legitimate its colonialist activities as triumphs of rational science bringing “civilization” to allegedly irrational and despotic Indians. And from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century—during the “age of empire”—photographs played a decisive role in constructing imaginative geographies. With its heightened sense of realism, its ability to produce a feeling of “being there,” and its widespread dissemination, the photograph became an active instrument in producing geographic knowledge of distant places, including those that came under colonial rule (Figure 1). Travel writing, maps, and photography remain important vehicles for producing and consuming imaginative geographies, but they have been supplemented by newer media such as television, movies, popular magazines, advertising, and mass tourism.

Figure 1 “The Geography Lesson” Showing the Merging of Maps, Literature, Art, and Photography in the Construction of Imaginative Geographies

Stereographic daguerreotype by Antoine Claudet, 1851.

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