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Cartography Seminar Series, Mahindra Humanities Center
http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/content/mapping-margins-regionalism-early-arabic-atlases
This talk explores two major models for mapping regions in Arabic manuscripts dating from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries CE. A comparison of maps from the “Atlas of Islam” tradition and the geographical works of al-Sharif al-Idrisi illuminates different strategies for producing regions as both bounded and connective. I pay particular attention to the margins of maps, and to what might be considered marginal places, in arguing that regions were imagined intertextually as meaningful, if flexible, categories of belonging in this period. In related ways, these two sets of atlases made margins generative cartographical spaces and defied their enclosures