EN:

This study concerns the history of Italian prisoners of war in the United States during World War II through an analysis of the art and architecture they created. These crafted expressions highlight how Italian culture was transported and reshaped during the war and suggest alternate understandings of Italian diasporic culture and wartime experiences. They reinforced cultural heritage, mediated personal and community identities, and negotiated some of the atrocities of war. As a cultural studies scholar engaging with Italian transnational concerns, my approach emerges from an interest in the use of space, place-making, and the meanings ascribed to the material world.

EN:

Found on the walls of ancient caves in northern France, the earliest known maps do not depict the earth but the brightest stars of the milky way. Although we know little about the people who painted these maps, we know that they, like us, looked for answers and meaning. Mapping as material testimony of this desire signals a basic function of human placemaking. Discarding the biographical shallowness of cartography, this paper investigates how maps might assume social agency. Since spaces are (socially) constructed not only of sight but also of memories, affect, or tactile experiences, I investigate how maps enter spatiotemporal relationships and become agents of social critique by asking: When do maps exceed their role as material artifacts by interfacing with mental geographies of individuals or societal structures? Unfolding the social lives of maps, the paper proposes, demonstrates their ability to exceed traditionally assumed utilitarian roles as lifeless transmitters of ‘objective’ facts, instead revealing cartographic assemblages of identity, memory, trauma, and protest.

EN:

The floor of the entrance to the Mitchell Library vestibule, which is part of the State Library of New South Wales, displays a stunning mosaic 1939-1941 reproduction of a seventeenth century map recording Abel Tasman’s two journeys of 1642 and 1644. It charts the west, north and southern coasts of the Australian continent, but is incomplete, thus representing the historical moment between an imagined Terra Australis Incognita, and the final survey of the east coast which presaged British colonisation. The original Tasman map, also held by the Mitchell library and currently undergoing restoration, has a strange and chequered biography. This paper explores the myths associated with what is known colloquially as the Bonaparte Tasman map, in honour of its last owner Prince Roland Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon. We examine its contested origins and role as an agent of Dutch East India Company imperial ambitions, relegation to forgotten cast-off when that empire collapsed, Bonaparte’s desire to gift it to the nascent Australian Commonwealth as a symbol of new nationhood, and the international subterfuge involved in its acquisition by not by the nation, but the State Library of NSW. Analysis of what was known of the map in the decades prior to its arrival in Australia challenges the conventional narratives, and we propose the biography of the Tasman map (and its embodiment in the Mitchell Library vestibule mosaic) is a study in imperialism, colonialism, federation, and power.

EN:

Scholars have long since demonstrated that no such occupation as “cartographer” existed in early modern Europe. Instead, the skills needed to produce maps often combined those of manuscript illuminators, scribes, mathematicians, letterpress operators, and engravers - to name only a few. Though it is common to speak of maps as offering insight into “world views,” we often assume these to be those of patrons and viewers rather than of the craftspeople who produced them. These artisans relied upon a host of tools, skills, and materials which varied tremendously from city to city even within discrete geographic regions. Moreover, though many early modern maps were only marginally related to the practical activity of way-Dinding, those who labored to create them were often themselves itinerant artisans moving across the Alps and beyond. In this essay, I chart the training, experiences, and know-how of the engineers, printers, painters, and woodworkers who made maps. I explore the ways in which the trans-national and often multilingual social-lives of these makers informed the material fabric of their maps and, in turn, shed light upon the sometimes unexpected interpenetration of biography, world view, and object that characterizes cartographic cultures between the Difteenth and seventeenth centuries. My approach thus seeks to bridge recent insights on the “artisanal epistemology” of makers with a critical approach to the agency of objects, informed both by anthropological theory and a renewed focus on materiality which has come to characterize studies of visual culture.