![]() I outline successive vignettes of the spatial framing of the fifth part of the world or Oceania as mapped and named from the sixteenth century-in early modern geopolitics, in shifting global visions from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century, and in regional cartography from the mid-eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Using comparative critique of maps as historical texts, this chapter investigates the relationships of experience, expectation and hope in cartography's varied graphic realization or anticipation of religious, imperial, scientific, racial, colonial, national and digital visions. Since 1511, recurrent couplings of fact and fantasy, the familiar and the imagined, have driven the European invention, naming, mapping and regionalization of the fifth part of the world, known as Oceania after 1815. Furthermore, present study argues that maps depicting territorial conflict zones are sometimes influenced and deteriorated in such a grade that it questions the primer function of a map, namely to help the orientation. By analyzing various tourist and road maps, present study shows how the parallel existing narratives are displayed on maps, resulting in exclusionary cartographies. Based on examples from Cyprus and Karabakh, we present how the power-rhetoric, territorial and political claims influence mapping and how maps justify these claims by applying various cartographic tools and manipulations. ![]() This is especially true in contested geographical spaces where contrasting parties are interested in not only justifying their standpoint but at the same time denying or silencing the opponent's similar wish. Although maps' basic function is to help the orientation, this is sometimes challenged due to social, historic, and most of all political reasons. In the past decades geographers and cartographers have been witnessed the inspiring and multilayered scientific discovery of the second text and power-rhetoric transmitted by maps. Studying old maps leads to questions not only about the past state of the geographical knowledge, but also about the reliability of the cartographic images, changing relation between the hidden and the visible and the mechanisms of perceiving, understanding and representing the world. This sampling of the visual examples demonstrates how the content of both intentional (as a result of censorship) and – possibly even more challenging when studying cultural phenomena – unintentional (epistemological) silences can vary depending on cultural and intellectual environment in which authors and users of the maps function. Comparison of artefacts from different periods and belonging to different cartographic traditions (medieval maps of Oikumene and early modern portolans and Ptolemaic maps) shows differences in the way of selecting elements to picture on the maps. The main part of the text consists of the analysis of the source material in form of the old maps of the world. Assuming that maps are visual statements of the mental image of the world, the empty space (background, gaps between the objects, blank spaces, omissions) appears to be equivalent to silence in a graphic message. The paper deals with the concept of cartographic silence invented by John Brian Harley. ![]()
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