Fifty years after Derrida’s annus mirabilis (the publication of Writing and Difference, Speech and
Phenomena, and Of Grammatology in 1967) we can still remember
Brian Harley’s affirmation in Deconstructing
the Map: “I do not accept some of the more extreme positions attributed to
Derrida [...] it would be unacceptable for a social history of cartography that
to adopt the view that nothing lies outside the text”. However, if we note that
what Harley called “Derrida’s notion of the rethoricity” was not a defense of
indeterminacy but of undecidability, and that the famous phrase “nothing lies
outside the text” should be comprehended as “there is nothing outside the context”,
could we realign Brian Harley’s ideas on a post-structuralist
trail?
Perhaps we need to rethink Harley’s rejection of the
neutrality of maps to favor an approach in which the representational value of
the maps is not inquired in terms of the intentions of the cartographers but on
the investigation of the logics of the cartographic transformation and its
relation with the politics and the society.
In this
sense, for example, cartographic concepts such as the meridians can govern the
cartographic representations, but despite their mathematical value the
interpretation of these representations could be transformed, it was the case
of Tordesillas meridian in Brazilian maps.
In 1854 was published História Geral
do Brazil, the first compendium of Brazilian history, written by Francisco
Varnhagen, a historian and diplomat. At the beginning of the book we can find a map in which the Tordesillas
meridian presents the
division of the world between Portugal and Castella “as conceived by the Pope”.
This map is a globular projection centered in the Tordesillas
meridian, probably the only of its kind, and the first Brazilian map where the meridian was drawn at the
longitude that is actually depicted in the school books (48º 35’ W).
One hundred years later, in 1959, was published the
first edition of Atlas Histórico Escolar,
a school atlas that sold more than one million copies and in which were
presented contents and theses developed by Jaime Cortesão at the Ministry of
Foreign Relations since the 40’s. At the very beginning of the Atlas a modern
cartographic representation of Varnhagen’s meridian was paired with an old map to
explains that the first was mathematically correct but nobody really knew where
the Tordesillas meridian stands.
Each representation of the Meridian posed an aporia that can only be explained
if we consider why cartography was metalogic to Brazilian historians and
geographers and how their maps tried to answer the defies of their political
and social metagames. This paper comprises a comparative analysis of História Geral do Brazil and Atlas Histórico Escolar maps to propose that the representational value of its Tordesillas maps can be evaluated in the terms of undecidability and metagame.
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