Conclusion: Narrative and Other Technologies of Global Mapping

Abstract

The conclusion provides a brief overview of the history of alternative mapping strategies, arguing that we might understand narrative fiction as itself an alternative cartographical mode of representation. I begin with the first globes of the fifteenth century, which maintained an uneasy tension between rational and poetic cartographic strategies, before turning to the work of William De Brahm, whose controversial theories jarred with the imperialist cartographic imaginary. I conclude with a discussion of Henri Lefebvre’s influence on the fields of human and cultural geography today, exploring the ways in which contemporary geographers have attempted to incorporate time and human rhythm into the ways in which space is conceptualized and charted. I argue that narrative plays a central and inescapable role in all such cartographical innovations.