Body/Nation/Map
In 1781, while writing his response to query IV on Mountains for Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson looked for inspiration to a map of colonial Virginia drawn by his father Peter and Joshua Fry. One eye on the map and the other on the page, Jefferson sketched out an image of the Blue Ridge mountains as providential territory. These mountains were not random or accidental features, "solitary and scattered confusedly over the face of the country," he wrote, but rather "disposed in ridges one after another, running nearly parallel with the sea-coast" (18). Jefferson described a self-evident, harmonious and well-ordered territory of reason. Most striking in the account of the mountains is the way Jefferson's point of view and references shifted seamlessly among map, mountaintop, and narrative. Although he began on the mapped ground of his father's survey, Jefferson easily ascended to a god's-eye view looking down from the heavens upon the land that he had indeed traversed and surveyed in parts, but whose extent he had no means to know. Yet lack of technological means did not stop the flight of Jefferson's imperial gaze. Positioned far above the scene, Jefferson's gaze erased indigenous as well as transplanted populations, depopulated the territory, and failed to recognize the traces of human culture implicated in its very viewing. Jefferson's god's eye view and the well-ordered and providential land it produced remind us of the technology of the map and survey, along side the technologies of narrative and the gaze as they combined in Notes on the State of Virginia to assert U.S. ownership of a territory he characterized as destined to be part of the nation.2

Two hundred and seventeen years since the Notes, the god's eye view of the earth and its implication in US imperial mapping remains dominating and effective, even while its technology has changed. Cartography based on either ground surveys and mathematical projection onto a flat map or globe have given way to ariel photography, satellite relay, and computerized graphics. While we might commonsensically allow that such technological advances have resulted in a truer map of the nation, ariel and satellite technologies do not so much fill in blank spaces on maps or provide more accuracy as they become operative within different cultural climates, producing new arrangements of power and meaning. For instance, Jefferson's real inability to traverse the entire Appalachian chain and the limits of his embodied vision in no way prevented his construction of a view from a handy mountaintop. Although we now can image what Jefferson referred to as the "spine of the country between the Atlantic . . . and the Mississippi" (19) with technology that actually can look down on the terrain, that terrain is not necessarily known more accurately now than it was to Jefferson, whose embodied vision marked the map as his culture constructed it as part of the nation. Regardless of the seeming technological innovation, then, mapping remains a representation of the relation between culture and space, a kind of "cultural cartography" that finds its limit less in the problem of physical embodiment than in the epistemological and ideological implications of bodies and space.3

I begin with the image of Jefferson's national body both hovering above the land and pushing up like the spine of the colonial map in order to extend the consideration of technologies of vision, embodiment, and empire to a relatively "new" post-national terrain: outer space. Focusing on the globe suspended in space as a mapped representation linked to US empire, this paper examines the relationship between the technological abstraction of the representation and deployment of the human body in extraterritorial exploration and that body's anxious reclamation for the nation's imperial profit. In this paper's second half, I focus on the contemporary moment of millennial celebration of the earth orbits and moon landings of the 1960s. In particular, I interrogate the role of our new old man in space, John Glenn, whose return to orbit in November 1998 works as an attempt to anchor a cultural cartography of extraterrestrial exploration that actually no longer needs the human body. The contradiction between the loss of the body's primacy for imperial exploration and the nation's continued ideological dependence on the human has resulted in the strange compulsion to repeat we witness in NASA's restaging of its former epochal achievements before an global audience created under quite distinct political and technological circumstances.

The Metageography of Globes
Globes are spherical maps operating on a logic of mimetic representation. In this they are distinct from flat map projections which sacrifice the seeming realism of the globe in order to obtain mathematical projections of terrestrial truths. Globes as maps are always maps of the world; there is no point in making a globe of a part of the world or of a particular nation. Mapped globes offer a fantasy of total global knowledge. They are by definition representations of the whole earth. Yet they escape neither partial-ness or partiality. As geographer John Agnew has argues, "in masking their selectivity behind empiricist claims to accurate representation [globes] provided a powerful means of picturing the world as a whole as if it existed independently or separately of all attempts to conquer, tame, or exploit it" (19). Globes as representations of knowledge about the world are always de-particularized; they promote relativization; they tend toward abstraction and less detail; their meaning often comes from contextualization. For example, renaissance portraits of powerful men often featured a richly painted and imposing globe to symbolize not only the gentleman's local power and imperial ambition but also his transcendence of the scope of that culture's knowledge and the frame of the painting itself. Because globes and flat maps are capable of representing quite distinct relations among territories, state regimes of information choose their maps strategically. Canadian anthropologist Bernard Saladin d'Anglure writes about the way that North American and European states continue to emphasize the use of flat maps and not globes for state-led agencies. During the Cold War, US generals favored a flat map polar projection which greatly exaggerated the size of the then Soviet Union, making it appear to loom over North America, creating an image of threat that globes could not as convincingly represent (King 100-101). While it can be argued that from the modern globe's mathematical projection of latitude and longitude to cover and measure the earth developed the notion that "anywhere is linked to everywhere" (Agnew), thus lending a metageographical naturalness to imperial territorial aggrandizement, globes could just as easily problematize practical territorial expansion. Globes are bulky and cannot easily be sectioned; opposed to flat maps, they are less subject to strategic cropping or framing; and they are limited by size in the detail they can functionally provide. Now that computer projection and digitized imaging are the representational modes of choice of geographers,4 the map as globe seems forever outmoded as an instrument for a scientific or technological function and more closely tied to the cultural.

To understand the globe's cultural function we need to back up for one moment. Remember that the globe emerged as a product of the pursuit of knowledge of the earth, to give representational coherence to the imperial ambition to plot all territories. Yet the visualization of the globe as a unified, knowable sphere lacked the technological accuracy to carry the old style agenda of local or nation-based imperialism forward. In fact, the globe subverted local power by being bulky and providing only vague details. The rise of digitized computer projection that has rendered the globe as a technology of mapped space hopelessly outdated explains in part the globe's "demotion" to the realm of the cultural. In excess of its technological attainment, this globe has become a familiar commodity. Especially for communications corporations, images of globes visually map for consumers a mystified, instantaneous transit between and among local spaces and limitless externalized sites.

The Intimate Sphere
The image of the globe in advertising is no longer the disorienting vision of a human territory distinct in the context of space yet unimaginable through other than extreme technological mediation. Now globes are domesticated, familiarized, personalized, even trivialized in countless images.

One major motif plays with the idea of the globe as the container of the very media and humans depicted and implicated in the message (be it for a truly global telecommunication corporation or a local limousine service hyperbolically boasting the wide range of its services) by inverting the relation between the globe and the earth-bound perspectives. Typically, the scene begins with a shot of the globe suspended in space. As the shot retreats and the context is revealed we see the globe refunctioned as the pupil of an eye belonging to a blue-eyed female, or as the dot in the company email address right before the "com" tag.

The effect of these images is an internalization of the global - into either the individual or corporate body. This is not merely an inversion or a deformation of spatial logic such as an image of a big fish being swallowed by a little fish. The globe is both an object external to human bodies and the mode - created from within human culture and long preceding the "realist" knowledge of the earth-as-globe - through which those bodies partake of a shared, communal location (planet earth). Bodies outside of space - or unplaced bodies - are very difficult to imagine, though that's exactly what is at stake in posthuman representation and technology. This internalization or insertion into locatable embodiment (or other forms) of human culture of the very mode of locating humanness results in a radical refiguring of the relation among human body, planet, and culture as a medium defining and explaining these. With individuals no longer organized as outside of the non-human but instead containing these spaces, the standard epistemological coordinates of national citizenship no longer operate. Rather, new forms of citizenship not predicated on a contract between an individual and the externalized state as location (which is comprised of the very individuals subject to its collective body) become imaginable.

The meaning of the image of the globe suspended in space thus oscillates between familiar, comforting icon of national power and a more disruptive, system-breaking mise-en-abyme that pulls the viewer into a hall of mirrors effect in which normative relations of size, scale, inside, outside, borders, center/periphery no longer underwrite visual logics of being. The globe as eye breaks with a modernist epistemology in which the human subject is able to contemplate the planet through a fantasy of extrojection. The internalized globe, rather, introjects or swallows the globe, splices discontinuous and unrelated modes of being and of comprehending in a postmodern pastiche that demonstrates the basic illegibility and fantasy of the naturalized image of the globe suspended in space and forces a new visualization of an inverse universe of unpredictable and irrational movement. This interplay among mapping, embodiment, and visuality is an effect I am tracing through these linked examples.

Jefferson's ability to launch himself above the earth's surface so to describe and order it had a flip side in which the body impeded the ability to see and to know the terrain. His description of the Natural Bridge is in almost all its details the very opposite of the disembodied, universal-scientific gaze produced to depict the Rocky Mountains. The view of the natural bridge posed a different sort of challenge for Jefferson, who notes ". . . few men have resolution to walk to [the fixed rock parapets] and look over into the abyss [below the bridge]. Disdaining the fear and ignorance of the locals, who he scorns for not making to effort to know this great work of nature, Jefferson describes the effects of ascending this bridge for a view: "You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to the parapet and peep over it. Looking down from this height about a minute, gave me a violent head ach." In this too embodied, local mode of seeing the terrain, Jefferson suffers a nausea and fear that disorients and threatens to interrupt his rational depiction of the land. This vignette of overwhelmed, embodied seeing is infixed within an overarching discourse of rational, ordered seeing which opens this essay. Jefferson constructs an interplay between a local view in which "piles of rock" signify "disrupture and avulsion" and a "distant finishing . . . of a very different character. It is a true contrast to the fore-ground. It is as placid and delightful, as that is wild and tremendous. For the mountain being cloven asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and tumult roaring around, to pass through the breach and participate of the calm below. Here the eye ultimately composes itself; and that way too the road happens actually to lead." (Notes On the State of Virginia). Jefferson's ability to fashion from that moment of overwhelmed, embodied seeing a vision of a masterful mapping eye of the nation and his moving from the one to the other represents a still constant dialectic between individual/ nation, local/national as well as a common sense understanding of the physiology of sight. Jefferson refers to the consolation of the "middle ground" as opposed to the horror of the cliff view or the safe indistinction of "distant finishing." The middle ground was the space of political action, argumentation, and science.

NASA has recently produced an internet film of the lift off and flight of Apollo 17 that interestingly recapitulates features of both Jefferson's gods-eye view mapping and his local embodied traumatic view of the land.

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/data/ev216/ev21611_apollo_320_sor.mov

Produced to commemorate the original Apollo flights, earth orbits, and moon landings, the 21 second animated film depicts the vertiginous ascent of a rocket from its launching pad on earth, through a tumultuous and disorienting ascent designed to cause nausea, to an ultimate calm in which we might say, after Jefferson, the "eye composes itself" in a vision of the distant earth suspended in space. The film begins with a point of view aimed downward, "back" to earth, moving suddenly to space as earth recedes from a flat map of cape Canaveral to ever wider landscapes of Florida, the Caribbean, the entire hemisphere, and finally to the by now familiar image of the blue marble earth suspended in space. The flight continues as earth spins in the distance as your line of sight further recedes over the moon. The film ends with a shot from the point of view from behind the gray surface of the moon as its horizon sets with a vivid blue earth. Accompanying text explains that while the entire sequence is an "artist's depiction" individual images are culled from actual satellite images produced through the Apollo program, which included the first manned orbits and the initial moon landings and walks. So, the image of the eye hurtling away from earth, to space, and to the dark side of the moon, all the while trained back toward the originating earth is meant to mimic an astronaut's seeing of earth from the original vantage point of his manned orbiting and from the later point of view of the astronauts who walked the moon. What is less obvious, despite the disclaimer, is the complete fictionality of this recreation of a supposed realist vision. For on, there is no reason that the point of view must be towards earth. The orbiting eye might have trained its vision on any number of sights; the stars, the equipment panel, empty, dark space. The mimetic effect of this point of view only works if the audience agrees to want only to see what the filmmaker wants one to see, or to allow that there might be nothing else worth seeing but earth as originator and space/ moon as destination. The creation of a narrative of events and sights using the stills produced by the Apollo program underscores the imposition of narrative strategies to produce meaning from static images which in themselves are no way free of ideological manipulation. All this aside, the view or ride is dizzying and in a strange way more than familiar: we indeed have seen these images and this narrative sequence countless times in the years before, during, and after the manned space program. Its arbitrary logics - Why doesn't the point of view shift? Why only look back at earth? What would one see if the sun was not backlighting the whole thing? - work to naturalize this view of the earth.

My interest in such miniaturized and infixed discursive deployments of the globe arises from their ability to spacialize the organization of new imperial national consciousness by mediating for US subjects a specific form of global intimacy, one that works to anchor national subjects in a remapped understanding of the terrain and trajectories of a seemingly unified US imperial gaze. The imperial desire figured by the globe, like that of the globe in the renaissance portraits, allays fear of the impossibility of the very global knowledge and desire it conjures. It is precisely to counter fear of the limits of knowledge (and of capitalist expansion) that the national imaginary takes on global consciousness through a domesticated and intimate form of knowing the globe. In order to illustrate my point about the cultural and de-technologized use of the globe in relation to US national formation, I will discuss John Glenn's role in the history of a particularized human presence in space that has justified military build up and naturalized US hegemony into extraterrestrial realms. What follows explains the particular visual/ cultural history behind the production of a global aesthetic linked to US empire that I will call the Glenn-globe.

The "Glenn Globe" and Moon Landing Re-hearsals at the Millennium
John Glenn's 1962 orbit in a space ship around the earth provided a powerful narrative of human sight to anchor as natural (as opposed to "merely" technological) the now pervasive photographic image of the globe suspended in space. While this view of the earth as a global unity had been thinkable since before Archimedes used earth's axis as a fulcrum to gain a post-earth perspective on the globe, and while unmanned space exploration made it "realist" with photographic relay, it was not "available" as an embodied perspective until Glenn gained that vision for the nation. Glenn's seeing for all Americans - his embodied sight - unseated the priority of the robotic lens and in many ways distinguished that earth-as-globe from all previous ones. It also confirmed US sovereignty in the Cold War race against the Soviet Union. His sight thus brought into everyday familiarity one of our most taken for granted icons of Americanization and twentieth century technological progress. Because of this humanizing of technology, we can now have a connection to global consciousness that is seemingly unmediated, because based in the immediacy of human sight. But to what extent can Glenn's seeing be understood as unmediated? His sight was already after the fact, after technology had provided the ability to see the globe suspended in space.5 The globe we now see is a humanizing "un-mediation" of the visual technology of US empire, which is to say, an open eye encased within a mass of government-funded metal and space technology, hardly natural in its nationalized deployment, but confirming for the nation its heroic arrival at the new frontiers of global knowledge.

Considering the monumental contribution of the naturalized visual technology of John Glenn's body to US global mastery over the symbolic of a new space frontier and its role in conferring precedence to the US as sole super nation, we must wonder why this moment of his seeing had to be repeated in 1998, especially when space technology has long outmoded "man" as the primary mechanism or self conscious medium of imperialism. For those of you who have already forgotten this latest extraterrestrial imperial adventure, let me set the scene: Glenn, after having moved from the high orbit of space in the 1960s to the almost as high vantage point of Capitol Hill in the 1980s, is called back into action in a brilliant publicity move by a space program that had suffered public lack of interest, catastrophic failures, purposelessness, and defunding. In a highly publicized mission (or better, "remission"), the 77 year old Glenn returned on October 30th 1998 to orbit in a new breed of space shuttle. With communications technology providing the opportunity for instant interviews, Glenn's activities and thoughts were reported in the early days of November 1998. Predictably, Glenn reprised his role as the human 'eye' for a US-based omnipotent vision.

A November 2nd Los Angeles Times headline, for instance, read: "Adrift in Heavens, Glenn Reasserts Faith in God." While I might point out that Glenn was far from really being adrift since he was part of a highly structured if risky experiment whose major features of flight and orbit had been well tested, the term "adrift" plays well with the subject of Glenn's musing, which is all about asserting certainty on a cosmic and local level. Glenn went on to opine: "I pray every day, and I think everybody should. I don't think we [meaning the shuttle's crew] can look at Earth every day - to look out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is, to me impossible." Glenn's re-presence in space -- his particular body in space - has produced a nostalgic global consciousness; in this case, a white male framing of US empire. The specificity of this embodied gaze in the context of its unlikely resurrection of Cold war geopolitics onto the millennial moment is an apt symptom of the anxiety surrounding the white male body and the future of the nation in an era of not simply new global alliances and transnational capital flows, but of the end of socialism and the welfare state.

As the junction point between nation and the post-national territory of outer space, Glenn's body contains the contradictions in this ideological mapping of the future. Attempting to bridge the incommensurability of the national and the post national, reportage of Glenn's mission has flirted with post human imagery, seeming to acknowledge that the body is no longer the organizing location for knowledge. Referring to the many wires and monitors appended to his body, Glenn tells a group of on-line school children that he "looks like some kind of bug" - or a cyborg desperately trying to hold on to its humanizing aspects. Of course, scientists have long known that "space is a terrible environment for humans" (LA Times 7 Nov A14) and that consequently the future of space colonization rests on disembodied technologies of robots, computers, and satellite links. Yet our primary mediation for the technological future of space empire remains the body of the new old founding father John Glenn.

I want to shift attention from John Glenn's body to the effects of his embodied vision on the production of the globe as symbolic of US empire and on the mapping of new post-national territory in outer space. I want to shift, in other words, from the Glenn Globe to the "Glenn Moment." In particular, I want to emphasize another function of the imperative to repeat Glenn's orbiting of the earth: that through the performance of nationalist pageantry such as the one under discussion today, nations create a sense of origin. In this case, the creation of a US originary presence in space lays a claim for the territory of outer space. This claim attempts to create a recognizable territory in space based on colonialist models of inhabitation. This is a form of mapping outer space that goes beyond representations of the globe: it is a national territorialization based on time. The frontier is a spacialization of time: it represents the future of empire. Through repetition and pageantry the Glenn moment of first arrival in space places a temporal unity on space. In fact, the "original" Glenn gaze was itself a look back at earth from the future of space. To use language made available by Thomas Jefferson, Glenn's look back provided a "distant finishing" on a territory that from any other perspective but that of the god-ordered map would be uncontrollable, not destined to become incorporated within the nation.

Lost In Space: The Failure of Gore's Globe
Another way to understand the images of the globe in many advertisements is that the globe has come to represent travel as destination, or both the idea of travel and destination in one. Yet the globe as a destination implies a space somehow outside itself, an Archimedean access point not implicated in the globe as site of the human. Such an external "lever" into culture (as represented by the globe) is not possible under generally accepted philosophy or politics or ecology (there is no outside to ideology, society, or the ecosystem). Therefore, this implicit outside position, in its production of the globe, allows a fantasy on the part of the viewer of distancelessness and immediacy based on a utopic joining of modernity and postmodernity, inside and outside, consciousness and cosmos, and space and time.

This is the point at which might enter the new global citizen-subject, the individual hailed by the advertising and popular appeals to travel, global access, immediacy, connection, and simultaneity (Canclini, Hedetoft). Therefore, it would not have seemed like such a miscalculation in March of 1998 for then-presidential hopeful Al Gore to launch his own vision of the globe suspended in space. The headline announced the vision for an internet channel devoted to viewing the globe in real-time: "Gore's satellite would give you a constant global view" (www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9803/13/gore.satellite). With the announcement of his plan coming at his appearance at the aptly-named Earth Summit meeting, Gore, in a move calculated to play off of and rival the power and vision commanded by former astronauts such as Glenn, proposed his own signature emblem of his global concern as well as his global ambitions. A satellite would be poised to render continual and real time universally available images of the globe to its inhabitants. Gore seemed aware of the power of images of the earth for national meaning, "[n]oting that the last full-view pictures of earth came from the Apollo moon missions" (http://the-tech.mit.edu/V118/n13/cgore.13n.html) and that the time was ripe for a renewal, under his own sign, of these highly successful national icons. However, the plan was widely ridiculed and by the next year had been officially refused funding by Congress. While the plan was expensive and contained technical flaws and limited immediate use-value, the same - and worse - could be said for Glenn's widely hailed reorbit. Gore's globe might have been a technical innovation that would have taken a step toward developing real use and capitalist value for virtualization. The vision of a million computer screens framing a real-time earth suspended in space might have provided a material structure for the production of a global citizen-consumer making use of sustainable virtual technology. The failure of the vision has less to do with Gore's reputation as techno flake or with its expense to the public and everything to do with the nation's paradoxical reliance on a superseded representational politics of embodiment. The nation is not ready to embrace the state of postnationalism6 it has itself produced in which extranational space operates as uncommon ground to produce new, unpredictable and as yet unaccountable flows of bodies and ideas.

National ways of knowing are always temporalized and spacialized. Without the control of national formation, space knowledge -- that is, knowledge detached from location, from the real, the human body, and from history -- would seriously undermine the operations of the state as it moves from frontiers within and between nations to a so-called "global frontier" that covers for US imperialism, and that translates the futurity of the concept of frontier into the intimate interior of consumer subjectivities that can now mobilize post-citizens and reconstitute national belongings beyond the limits of knowledge and humanity. The nation, in short, cannot let go of human inhabitation and the colonial model which spawned its usefulness. The distant finishing of the globe suspended in space will remain the image through which the US attempts to unify outer space under one gaze and under one nation. But in its details, its close-up particularity, the plan of that map of empire fails to hold the contradictions of futurity and humanity within the scope of nation. John Glenn's space odyssey is as we already know, old news.

Works Cited

Agnew, John. Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities.

Aravamuden, Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency 1688-1804. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. [For 18th visions of trope of globe suspended in space as knowledge/power nexus]

Baudrillard. Simulations.

Bruckner, Martin. "Lessons in Geography: Maps, Spellers, and Other Grammars of Nationalism in the Early Republic." American Quarterly 51.2 (June 1999): 311-43.

Bruckner discusses "geoliteracy," a concept that explains the promulgation of nationalism in the printing and representational practices of the early republic. He begins with landscape portraiture in which maps and globes are displayed, arguing the familiar point that landowners sought to extend their purchase on the land through such representational practices. The portraits of Ralph Earl in the 1780s and 90s demonstrate how "globes and atlases entered the intimate spaces of boh sexes..." (311-12) and thus how "print discourse of geography [is] the literary container of a socially unified but spatially divided citizenry" (313). Webster's spellers and Morse's geographies as specific forms of print culture operating to unify a proto national culture in an imaginary print spatiality. Morse was first to provide maps based on an "America-centric perspective" (326). Map as ideal reading material for comprehending the nation as a print form." (328); Morse's perspective offered the "promise that both American lands and political territories become commensurate spaces" (328). "[Morse's] lessons in map-literacy in the end point to the iconolgy of the map image as a printed logo, as a universal sign that is as easily recognizable as the logo of Coca Cola is today, through which to insert the subject "America" into the daily reading fabric of the new citizens. The printed map rather than the word has become the nation's territory and the representational source of national identity" (330).

While Bruckner describes the cultural use (and circulation) of the mapped image of America, I want to focus on the production of that map from Jefferson's word-map of the territory to other spatial flights of (embodied) projection, unification, and strategic generalization to 20th century images of the globe from space......

Jefferson as a "geographic author" (333). Bruckner describes Morse's concept of a textbook as a "'Master-text' that formally dictated the interpretation of the visual and the verbal 'lines' offered by the maps and book entries [in the geography textbooks and primers he designed]" (333).

The larger project that the geography texts contributed to was the proleptic function of typing localities organized horizontally into a national rhetoric that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. "As maps and geographic narratives simultaneously maintain and reconcile the gap between the local and the national, they inculcate as a reading strategy the paradoxical notion that there is unity in diversity" (333). A "geographic reading strategy" which articulates literary and spatial visual representation into a "national grammar" then, correlates to the broad oscillation of ideology as it operates on the level of the quotidian and the deeply symbolic to naturalize a nationalized unity among geographically and culturally distinct regions and peoples.

Map as a "material form" for abstract ideology of nationalism (334).

Canclini, Nestor Garcia. Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 2001.

Clary, Mike. "Adrift in the Heavens, Glenn Reasserts Faith in God." Los Angeles Times 2 November, 1998: A12

------. "Keeping the Glenn Glow is NASA's Daunting Task." LA Times 7 Nov, 1998: A1; 14.

Cosgrove, Denis. Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Geneaology of the Earth in the Western Imagination. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 2001.

Hall, Stephen S. Mapping the Next Millennium: How Computer-Driven Cartography is Revolutionizing the Face of Science. New York: Random House (Vintage), 1992.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes the State of Virginia. Edited by William Peden. Originally pub. 1781. New York: W. W. Norton, 1954, 1983.

King, Geoff. Mapping Reality: An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.

Hedetoft, Ulf and Mette Hjort, eds. The Postnational Self: Belonging and Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2002.

Saladin d'Anglure, Bernard. "The Route to China: Northern Europe's Arctic Delusion" Arctic Vol 37, No. 4 (Dec 1984): 448-452.

Notes

1. Denis Cosgrove in his introduction notes the connection between images of globes and the process of globalization that"it is from images of the spherical earth that ideas of globalization draw their expressive force. The fascination that global images exercise over the millennial imagination is apparent from even the most casual glance at newspapers and magazines, television, and advertising" (ix).

2. Srinivas Aravamuden in Tropicopolitans and Denis Cosgrove in Apollo's Eye both discuss early modern and 18th Century European traditions of writers who position themselves imaginatively above the surface of the earth, and as Aravamuden writes, achieve "agency" as a "detached, omnivoyant spectator" (Aravamuden 291).

3. The literature on mapping and its relation to culture and specifically nation formation has a long lineage. Most recent criticism stems from Benedict Anderson's demonstration of the significance of the map in the creation of East Asian modern nations in Imagined Communities. Mark Monmonier has published a series of works on the politics and techniques of mapping under modernity. Richard King's Mapping Reality combines analyses of literature, film, and politics to underscore the way that mapping, or what he calls the process of "cultural cartography" is composed of an array of functions that produce real situations. Jean Baudrillard's concept of simulation in which the "territory no longer precedes the map" but rather, the map produces the territory, outlined in Simulations, in some ways has been foundational for contemporary cultural study of mapping.

4. Geographers have made use of new technologies to create maps of traditional objects such as geomorphic surfaces, even as the concept of mapping has expanded into other fields as both technique and as metaphor and onto less traditional objects, such as the human genome. This state of contemporary knowledge production is rendered with clear examples in Mapping the Millennium.

5. King makes a similar point about the cultural mediation and technological production of the image of the globe in space in the case of the astronauts for whom the experience of flight and the vision of the earth from space had been "exhaustively preconditioned or preceded by a welter of imagery" (92) produced by NASA training. In this case, to paraphrase Jean Baudrillard, the map truly preceded the territory.

6. Postnational, like the postmodern, references a shift in the conceptual and temporal understanding of nation. Features of the postnational - such as flexible borders, multiple citizenship and identification, the growth of non-governmental organizations (NATO, Greenpeace) and issues (immigration, pollution, trade agreements) - do not necessarily mark originary or new developments; similar features have long permeated traditional national rubrics. Instead, the "post" marks a shift in the politics of the possible, not necessarily in the daily effects of nationalist governments. It is not that the present moment is somehow quantitatively more post-national than the period in which nationalism established itself as the dominant, if not only recognizable, political form of organization on earth. The post of postnational registers only the limits of nationalism, not its demise. One of its features is the self-conscious coterminity of governmental and cultural arrangements of population and territory such that hard, militarized borders coexist with redrawn, contested, or permeable ones; strict citizenship exclusions coexist with revolving and extralegal forms of immigration; and, blockades operate contrary to free market trade agreements. In terms of territory, the nationalization of borders of the major landmasses and habitable areas of the earth has never spread to the deep oceans, the continent of Antarctica, and outer space. These never-nationalized territories are difficult to categorize under national or postnational rubrics.