What is it about?
Here is a short passage from the review to give an idea of the book’s content. Contemporary maps […] easily deceive users into considering them as more or less objectively mirroring the world’s ‘territories’. Since these territories are equated with nation-states, maps illustrating, for instance, the migration of undocumented people typically do so by large, uninterrupted arrows. ‘Cartography thereby risks allowing itself to be misused for political propaganda’ (p. 21). Free the Map exposes the myth of value-free maps by showing what conventional cartography hides and providing alternative ways in which the world can be charted.
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Photo by Afif Ramdhasuma on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The map reprinted below, for instance, tendentiously depicts immigration as danger-signaling red arrows, whose smoothness and directionality belies the irregular trajectory immigrants follow, their travelling often taking many detours, and covering months, sometimes years.
Perspectives
Van Houtum's book is important because he persuasively shows that maps are far from neutral and often have political implications that people who are not highly visually literate may not be aware of. For this reason, studying maps, and "countermaps" is a worthwhile topic of research for visual and multimodality scholars.
Dr Charles Forceville
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Book review: Free the Map: From Atlas to Hermes – A New Cartography of Borders and Migration, Visual Communication, October 2024, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/14703572241269633.
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