11 - The Atlas as Travel Writing and as Postcolonial Critique: Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands

Summary

If we assume that people who never leave their neighborhoods don't really need maps, that assumption ignores the power of a globe or atlas for armchair travel, for dreaming about traveling or imagining other places.

—Nedra Reynolds, Maps of the Everyday, 82

An argument in favor of travel is that it increases awareness, not of exotic places but of home as a place.

—Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place, 411

JUDITH SCHALANSKY's AWARD-WINNING AND BEST-SELLING Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln: Fünfzig Inseln auf denen ich nie war und niemals sein werde (2009; Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will, 2010) tells of her experience growing up in the German Democratic Republic and gazing at atlases, marveling over faraway islands. It also tells of her growing awareness, particularly after reunification, of the politics of mapping. Her atlas rests at the intersection of creative non-fiction, geography, and cartography, which she combines to tell (hi)stories of what are, to her, remote locations. As Schalansky put it: “It is high time for cartography to take its place among the arts, and for the atlas to be recognized as literature, for it is more than worthy of its original name: theatrum orbis terrarum, the theatre of the world” (A, 13). My article explores, first, the atlas as travel writing. Second, it considers the (post-) colonial politics of mapmaking, with a particular focus on islands. Third, I discuss how Schalansky's atlas, which does not advocate travel and instead offers the opportunity for armchair travel, creates an opening for environmental justice in this era of climate change. Both through its maps and its essays Schalansky's atlas journeys into the relationships among travel writing and cartography, geography and (post) colonialism, and social and environmental justice, in order to reveal new aspects of islands.

The Atlas as Travel Writing

Atlas of Remote Islands, Schalansky states in her preface, is a literary text. If that is so, how are we to read it? That is, how does her atlas encourage us to reconsider maps as literary texts? How does it, inversely, encourage us to read literary texts as maps or as spatial representations?