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Chapter 15 - Mapping Empire’s Horror

Literary GIS and Colonial Spatial Logic

from Part II - Developments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

By
Alexander Sherman
Edited by
Elizabeth Evans
Elizabeth Evans
Affiliation:
Wayne State University, Detroit
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Summary

Digital maps are horrifying. One source of these horrors is their basis in geographic information systems (GIS), a fundamental technology of colonial violence across space. Literary GIS – digital mapping of geographic data created from texts – is not separate from these horrors, yet work in this field has only intermittently attended to the coloniality of GIS. I lay out the theory of GIS and its historical ties to US military campaigns, drawing on the field of critical GIS. I then survey various projects in literary GIS to see whether and how GIS might still be salvageable as a method for analyzing texts. I propose that literary GIS can help defamiliarize colonial spatial logic, making the now-commonplace, unspoken dynamics that organize space and its representations easier to see. That possibility depends on literary GIS projects attending more to the process of mapping – the conditions that make it possible to turn texts into mappable geographic data – rather than the resulting maps. But I also conclude that literary GIS cannot articulate a position separate from empire but only make its workings more visible, and I thus suggest that this method has more value as a temporary beacon than a permanent path.

Keywords

digital humanities (DH)spatial humanitiesgeographic information systems (GIS)critical GISliterary GISCold Warcolonialism
Type
Chapter
Information
Space and Literary Studies , pp. 249 - 266
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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