Abstract :
Cartouches – as nonverbal sign systems- can be understood as socially constructed, laden with meanings and historical impositions over physical spaces, peoples, and geographic events. Cartouches are never neutral or free from politics of power in the position of constructing and formulating physical and imagined topographies. Cartouches are embedded with rhetorical images so that others (not ‘us’) can be described, pictured, or created. Therefore, cartouche making was never independently (value-free) ornamented nor objectively and purely implicated activities.In this paper, I investigate decorative art of early maps especially cartouches from the vantage point in which cartouches are considered as cultural texts to be decoded. From this departure, I will try to apply the descriptive methodology to make my point, which is to establish a bridge between cartouche makers’ minds and the geographic imagination. In doing so, I will bring 1700s’ English cartouches on the stage of my critical investigation and discursive analysis to scrutinize their creative geographic imagination of colonized North America and Amerindians. To accomplish this quest I will travel through the history of cartouche making in time and space to understand the driving force behind this discursive social register.
NaturalLanguageKeyword :
Cartouches , Britannic Maps , Imagined Geographies , Amerindians
