| Summary |
The purpose of this thesis is to assess in-depth how a particular series of cartographic representations of the eastern Carolina region served colonial projects in the area, via the spatial "ordering" of New World peoples and things. The imposition of an "order" in the New World was the restructuring of a given reality into one that could be understood and controlled by the colonials. This new spatial order directly affected those indigenous groups that came into contact with the European colonials, in that not only were such groups rendered "locatable" through such maps, but also their place in the historical record has been shaped by the character of those same representations. Via an examination of the products of colonial cartography, I show how European ethnocentric conceptions of a proper order required the indigenous inhabitants of the region to be "fixed in space," and how the map design itself played a central role in characterizing both colonial and indigenous groups alike, to the detriment of the latter. Using methodology from a critical cartographic perspective, individual maps are analyzed with a focus on assessing the ideological content within the maps, particularly with regard to the representation of the Tuscarora. This thesis demonstrates how colonial cartographies record not only images of portions of the earth's surface, but also reveal deeper cultural assumptions concerning their own place in the world and that of their "other." |
