Spectacle and Topophilia: Reading Early Modern and Postmodern Hispanic Cultures

5. "The Knowledge of This People": Mapping a Global Consciousness in Catalonia (1375-2009)

91 u 5 “The Knowledge of This People”: Mapping a Global Consciousness in Catalonia (1375–2009) Colleen P. Culleton There is a chronology to this project, although its final form more closely resembles a constellation. In 1375, a Jewish cartographer in Mallorca named Cresques Abraham composed a mappamundi at the request of his patron, King Pere III of Aragon. Shortly thereafter, it was sent to Paris as a gift to Charles V, and it can still be found there, in the Bibliothèque Nationale. In 1975, in honor of the six hundredth anniversary of what became known as the “Atles de Cresques,” Editorial Diáfora, in Barcelona, produced a limited edition volume , which included a complete reproduction of the atlas, with a good deal of supplementary content, celebrating the atlas as a masterpiece of Catalan culture .1 (In historical accounts, the 1375 work is sometimes called the “Atles de Cresques” and sometimes called the “Catalan Atlas.” For the sake of clarity, I will refer to the 1375 atlas with the descriptor “Atles de Cresques” and the 1975 volume as the “Catalan Atlas.”) In 1997, Catalan novelist and historian Alfred Bosch wrote a novel about the Atles de Cresques, relying on the Catalan Atlas for a good deal of historical material. In 2002, I read Bosch’s novel, and in 2008, I went to Paris to see the 1375 atlas and to Barcelona to see the homage that had been paid to it in 1975. One year later, again in Barcelona, I visited an apparently unrelated exhibit at the Museu d’Història de Barcelona called “Barcelona Connectada,” and everything fell into place. 92 COLLEEN P. CULLETON Spatial Imaginations Each of the texts presented here has something to say about space, but discovering the connections between them is an act of spatial imagination of a higher order. This essay briefly touches on several nodes in a network of cultural production , the navigation of which points to how spatial thought might open up a politics of inclusiveness that is portrayed as being rooted in a Catalan culture that predates the Spanish State, while at the same time, is projected as a model for the future. My understanding of spatial thought relies heavily on the ideas that Doreen Massey presents in For Space (2005). Massey proposes that “space” is heterogeneous, processual, and relational, a dynamic of people and events that resists closure, fixture, or stability. In this reimagining of space, social forces and groups are seen as “stories-so-far,” or “simultaneous trajectories” that should inform how we think about space, both as scholars and as global citizens . In sustaining its dynamic and changing nature, Massey refuses to allow space to be separated from time and, instead, adjusts her terminology for a treatment of “time-spaces,” characterized by a sense of “throwntogetherness” that opposes the reductiveness of static accounts of space. Massey’s theorization of space rescues it from a lifeless and staid way of thinking, and opens up academic and political discourses to heterogeneity and multiplicity: “Conceiving of space as a static slice through time, as representation, as a closed system and so forth are all ways of taming it. They enable us to ignore its real import: the coeval multiplicity of other trajectories and the necessary outward-lookingness of a spatialized subjectivity” (Massey 59). This proposal goes against common perceptions of space as fixed and transparent, and it also resists the project of cartography to pinpoint, locate, and place. Here, though, I propose to explore a network of cultural production that begins (in chronological terms) with an atlas, a text that seems to fix space in precisely the kind of representation that Massey wants to set aside. Reading this atlas through a novel, we will see the extent to which it is both the product and signifier of social, political, and cultural trajectories that can’t be contained by plotted points on a map. The Atles de Cresques, in fact, is portrayed as the impetus for a continuing movement of peoples and narratives (Massey’s “stories-so-far”) into the twenty-first century. The “stories-so-far” that characterize space for Massey find a graphic equivalent in the narrativity of some medieval and early modern maps. In a look at the location of Eden in early modern maps, Alessandro Scafi explains that “However picturesque mappaemundi may seem, they cannot be dismissed THE KNOWLEDGE OF THIS PEOPLE 93 as devoid...