Women‟s Movement: The Politics of Migration in Contemporary Women‟s Writing

ing particular places, people and events into generalized categories, laws and policies is fundamental to any form of ruling. It is in this very process of abstraction that the colonial state legislates racial, sexual, and class/caste ideologies‖. Extremely small scale maps such as colonial maps of the world were abstractions which unified what is various, glossing over landscape details, rendering people‘s individual and communal experiences of land irrelevant, and categorising land into what ―belonged‖ to the Empire and what did not. The maps themselves emphasised the power of imperial Britain. Maps not only impose authority by claiming objectivity and thereby precluding or excluding other ways of perceiving or representing the world; some critics also claim that they impose both order and hence, discipline. Blunt and Rose write that colonial maps were themselves ―graphic tools of colonization, themselves colonizing spaces perceived as empty and uninscribed... The supposedly scientific ̳space discipline‘ imposed by mapping legitimized colonization, enhanced the possibilities for surveillance, and facilitated imperial rule by helping to distance those exercising power from its consequences... Imperialist maps not only describe colonies; they also discipline them through the discursive grids of Western 292 Blunt and Rose, eds., 1994, p. 8. 293 Ibid., p. 5. 294 Cited in Mohanty, Russo and Torres 1991, p. 16.