Making Meaning Out of Power & Secret Spaces/Places
Making Meaning Out of Power & Secret Spaces/Places
1) While reading this week’s articles I kept thinking about how much mapping a landscape relies on a person’s connection to a space/place and how his or her experience there can play a role in how that landscape’s identity is defined in a national narrative and how that narrative shapes my perception of space and even time when thinking about that landscape. Paglen’s “Wastelands” chapter title’s use of double entendre illustrates how two different experiences can be mapped onto a Landscape, providing different meanings. Because the “settlers” traveling toward a grab for gold in California imagined the Shoshone land to be “synonymous with pestilence and death,” that image of the landscape was reified historically as such. However, the counter narrative from the experience of the Shoshone people describes a land that was/is capable of sustaining human life. The space that once belonged to the Shoshone includes the desert region known as the Death Valley, which was named by errant “settlers” in the 19th Century. Being a native of Southern California, I have taken many road trips from the Los Angeles area for a weekend getaway to Las Vegas. A portion of the road trip is through Death Valley. The name alone connotes a lifeless and barren landscape; I never imagined that people ever inhabited the region. Until reading Paglen this week I was unaware of how the “settler’s” disparaging reification of this particular space informed my understanding of it as a lifeless empty space. But I now understand it as a place that had/has meaning to the Shoshone tribe for thousands of years. An erasure of this meaning also erases the Shoshone people’s identity.
2) I too like Tatiana am trying to understand the significance of giving primacy of space over history. It would seem that when considering the lives of marginalized people in urban spaces, a fight for justice and political power work in tandem with the way their identities have been constructed historically. To fight against oppressive power, knowing its history is important. Couldn’t both be given equal importance?
3) Paglen’s discovery of blank spots on the map of the Nevada desert illustrates how power has the privilege to map and (un)map space and create open secrets. The secret is open because as Paglen states, “ you can’t make something disappear completely” (17). Reading this chapter gave me a better understanding of how mapping works in relation to power and exposed the unobvious ways that mapping can both hide and make space and place.