| dc.description.abstract | In your mind’s eye, summon a map of the world—that famous text.
There, there is Africa. The familiar, highly visible bulge of head to horn
and curve, and the islands as you travel down to the continent’s southernmost point. It is likely that your imagination, like ours, has archived the
inherited template of a Mercator projection, the powerful sixteenth-century cartography which remains influential offline and e-nfluential on
Google Maps, even though it misleadingly distorts the size of continents.
The 30.2 million square kilometers of the African continent appear much
smaller than, say, the areas of the US (9.1 million square kilometers),
Russia (16.4 million square kilometers), or China (9.4 million square kilometers). In comparison, the corrective cartographic morphing of the GallPeters projection revises the habituated representational geography of the
world’s landmasses, showing the relational sizes of continents more
accurately.1
Such tensions are not surprising, for the map, we know, is not to be
equated with the territory and, in the context of our interest in this special issue in the textualities of the AutobiogrAfrical, divergent cartographies of the same space, drafted from different ideological perspectives,
remind us to ask questions about how life narratives might make Africa
intelligible. If, as Frances Stonor Saunders observes, “the self is an act of
cartography, and every life a study of borders,” then “[e]nvisioning new
acts of cartography that give substance and dynamism to the spaces
between borders … produces new selves—or, at the very least, new ways
of thinking about selfhood—and thus new objects of autobiographical
enquiry.”
2 Any map of Africa reflects assumptions about a collective
(“Africa”), as well as the political-geographical divisions of nation-states.
“Africa” implies degrees of commonality among the (possibly more than)
fifty-four countries that comprise the continent. Yet we know the dangers
of a single story. Africa is not, after all, a country. Bear in mind, too, that
our editorial team is located at the bottom end of the continent in South Africa | en_US |
