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Precis: "Cartographies of Connection: Ocean Maps as Metaphors for Inter-Area History" (2005) by Kären Wigen

In Kären Wigen’s “Cartographies of Connection: Ocean Maps as Metaphors for Inter-Area History” (2005), she contests that each of the four ocean schemes (national seas, maritime arcs, bounded basins, and a single global ocean – as experimented by previous Western cartographers) constitutes a useful metaphor for a specific paradigm in the emerging field of inter-area history, specifically as part of the inter-area studies must be a critical analysis of location from many different perspectives. She does this by discussing in detail about National Seas as means of depicting transnational entanglements framed in national terms, thus a useful metaphor for diplomatic and imperial history; Ocean Arcs as means to mark pathways of interactions, thus metaphorical to the study of transnational networks and diaspora; Ocean Basins as being concretely defined as a bounded body of water that extends right up to the shoreline, thus a metaphor for the study of contact zones, frontiers, and borderlands; and the Global Ocean as the approach to examine the movement of things through tracking specific flows, analyzing responses to flows, taking a slice of time, and narrating successive modalities of globalization, thus a metaphor to inter-area study of the global approach. An important takeaway from this reading, as Wigen explains by taking into consideration the DK Atlas map, is that while the map reveals locations on the globe that endure, the human configurations that are called “places” effectively come and go, thus inter-area history raises challenges for historical practices. A section in the reading addresses the application of inter-area history for school curriculum, as well as being a chapter in the book “The Nation, Europe, and the World: Textbooks and Curricula in Transition", thus, this reading may have been intended for audiences like researchers, teachers, curricula surveyors and for higher education students.

(May 4, 2019)

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