Book contents
- Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa
- African Studies Series
- Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Centring the Margins
- Part I From Frontiers to Boundaries
- Part II States and Taxes, Land and Mobility
- Part III Decolonization and Boundary Closure, c.1939–1969
- Part IV States, Social Contracts and Respacing from Below, c.1970–2010
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- African Studies Series
1 - Centring the Margins
States, Borderlands and Communities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 June 2019
- Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa
- African Studies Series
- Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Centring the Margins
- Part I From Frontiers to Boundaries
- Part II States and Taxes, Land and Mobility
- Part III Decolonization and Boundary Closure, c.1939–1969
- Part IV States, Social Contracts and Respacing from Below, c.1970–2010
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- African Studies Series
Summary
For all their apparent simplicity, maps make evocative statements about the way the world is – embellished, as they are with textual detail, colours, shading and the like. The maps of Africa that European merchants and explorers generated in previous centuries are so captivating to modern eyes precisely because they obviously distort size and shape – and famously fill in the empty spaces in inventive ways.1 Contemporary cartography is less obviously idiosyncratic, but it harbours its own blind spots and pointed omissions – which becomes painfully obvious when actors are first confronted with the puzzling unfamiliarity of a map depicting a place they know intimately. As others have noted, maps are not innocent things, but have historically been associated with projects of state-making and enclosure in different parts of the world – including those bound up with empire.2 The seductive power of maps resides in their normalizing character, which serves to close down alternative ways of seeing while authorizing particular modes of doing. In that sense, maps have been constitutive of power relations in their own right.
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- Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West AfricaThe Centrality of the Margins, pp. 1 - 46Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019