Martin W. Lewis

Kären Wigen

In a thoughtful and engaging critique, geographer Martin W. Lewis and historian Karen Wigen re-examine the basic geographical divisions we take for granted. Their up-to-the-minute study reflects both on the global scale and its relation to the specific continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa actually part of one contiguous landmass. Photos. maps.

A Critique of Metageography

The Myth of Continents

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[…] carried to its logical extreme, the world is again divided into two sections: the West and the non-West. As Bernard Cohn remarks, this maneuver entails "a neat ethnocentrism which defines nine-tenths of the people of the world in a single negative term”.

a key metahistorical concept: the notion that the West is coincident with modernity and that the non-West can enter the modern world only to the extent that it emulates the norms established in Europe and northern North America. […] J. M. Blaut labels these linked constructs "the colonizer's model of the world" and shows that they rest on a rarely acknowledged substrate of "geographical diffusionism" (where progress is seen as flowing endlessly out of the center [Europe] toward the otherwise sterile periphery).

; seldom is an independent political territory coterminous with the territory of a self-consciously united people. That we elect to call such internally divided countries as India, Nigeria, or even Switzerland nation-states shows a determined desire to will uniformity out of diversity.

The Myth of Continents quotes

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