"The colonial map vividly embodies the contradictions of colonial discourse. Map-making became the servant of colonial plunder, for the knowledge constituted by the map both preceded and legitimized the conquest of territory. The map is a technology of knowledge that professes to capture the truth about a place in pure, scientific form operating under the guise of scientific exactitude and promising to retrieve and reproduce nature exactly as it is. As such, it is also a technology of possession, promising that those with the capacity to make such perfect representations must also have the right of territorial control.
Yet the edges and blank spaces of colonial maps are typically marked with vivid reminders of the failure of knowledge and hence the tenuousness of possession. The failure of European knowledge appears in the margins and gaps of these maps in the forms of cannibals, mermaids and monsters, threshold figures eloquent of the resurgent relations between gender, race and imperialism. The map is a liminal thing, associated with thresholds and marginal zones, burdened with dangerous powers. As an exemplary icon of imperial "truth", the map, like the compass and the mirror, is what Hulme aptly calls a 'magic technology', a potent fetish helping colonials negotiate the perils of margins and thresholds in a world of terrifying ambiguities.
It seems crucial, therefore, to stress from the outset that the feminizing of the land is both a poetics of ambivalence and a politics of violence. The "discoverers" -- filthy, ravenous, unhealthy and evil-smelling as they most likely were, scavenging along the edges of their known world and breaching on the fatal shores of their 'new' worlds, their limbs pocked with abscess and ulcers, their mind infested by fantasies of the unknown-- had stepped far beyond any sanctioned guarantees. Their unsavory rages, their massacres and rapes, their atrocious rituals of militarized masculinity sprang not only from the economic lust for spices, silver and gold, but also from the implacable rage of paranoia."