Cartography and orientalism in late imperial China
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Cartography and orientalism in late imperial China Angelo Maria Cimino1
Received: 27 April 2018 / Revised: 5 February 2020 / Accepted: 5 August 2020 / Published online: 13 August 2020 © Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture 2020
Abstract The Opium wars epitomize a crucial moment in Chinese history, a turning point that globally affected all countries involved, the Qing dynasty and the Western powers, which witnessed radical political, economic and social changes both internally and in their international relations. Recognizing that orientalism with its corollary of studies, researches, travel impressions, beliefs, stories, and popular gossips about China and the Orient in general, is a pervasive form of knowledge which has a political nature, means agreeing on the fact that the Western knowledge upon the Orient has been an agency for the action that has followed, namely imperialism and colonialism, which in turn led to the Opium wars. Geography became the scientific side of such knowledge. As a matter of fact, the moment in which geography embraced the cold geometries of cartography, it turned into a tremendous support to the knowledge process pertaining to the Orientalism. A process driven by mere political and commercial interests, and deceitfully expressed in the popular culture of those Western societies and countries which supported and had colonies in the Far East. Keywords Cartography · Orientalism · Opium War · Colonialism · Space
Introduction This paper’s objective is to show and theoretically describe a correspondence and correlation between cartography and orientalism, in late imperial China, as two epistemological stances that sustain each other. Beyond their apparent different cultural * Angelo Maria Cimino [email protected] 1
Hainan University, Hainan University-Arizona State University Joint International Tourism College (HAITC), Haikou, China
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and social relevance and employment, cartography and orientalism emerge from the same dominant discursive formation in that they express the same patterns of concerns, perspectives, concepts and themes. The socio-political circumstances in which the Qing dynasty found itself at the end of the eighteenth century, are not, as someone might still believe, the result of accidental historical events, but are rather the expression of the actions of diverse physical, intellectual, and material energies put in place and organized not only within the territories of the Chinese empire, and thus exclusively promoted by the indigenous, but instead arranged and managed by some of the European powers of that time, and in those far territories: England first, but also France, USA, Portugal, Spain, Germany and even Italy. Orientalism, as the generalization term of some of the actions that took place and spread towards homologous directions, serves to identify the ways through which the Orient, as a set of concepts and ideas, has been imagined, organized and managed by Western thought and practice. C
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