Imagined Geographies in the Mediterranean, Middle East and Beyond, University of St Andrews, May 11–12, 2018
As is well known from the work of Edward Said and other authors, ‘the rise of academic geography in the nineteenth century… was largely complicit with European colonial expansion, to which it contributed through the production of cartographic knowledge, but also by generating “imagined geographies” that mediated the spatial appropriation and colonial subjection of other cultures’ (Bazzaz, Batsaki and Angelov, Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space, Harvard CHS 2013). Such a connection is clear in the case of the modern Middle East, a term invented in the nineteenth century with a shifting meaning that still remains vague to the present day. However, there are still many aspects of colonial imagined geography that remain largely unexplored. Even less understood is the geographical imagination of other cultures and historical periods. It is well known that Byzantine authors tended to conceive of the world in ancient geographical terms, which they applied to peoples living at their own time; but the precise details of how this was done by different authors is still the subject of ongoing study. As for the Ottoman Empire, it is clear that along with Byzantine territory it also took over from Byzantium the concept of an eastern Roman space (Rum); but the specifics are still largely unclear, as are shifting Ottoman views of the larger world in the early modern and modern period. Finally, East Asia and other regions of the world had their own conceptions of geographical space, which especially in premodern times were radically different from those held by Mediterranean and western European civilizations.
This workshop aims to explore the concept of imagined geographies through an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together specialists in historical and literary studies with expertise in different time periods and regions of the world. Specific themes to be discussed include human migration, which carries with it specific notions of geographical space; political and cultural geography in different periods of Byzantine, Ottoman, and European history; and finally, supernatural and eschatological conceptions of space, which especially in premodern times were often associated with distant and unexplored parts of the world.