Literary geographies and alternative atlas forms in Rebecca Solnit’s trilogy of atlases
Résumé
This paper examines a trilogy of imaginative atlases of San Francisco, New York and New Orleans written by American writer Rebecca Solnit in collaboration with a collective of authors, artists and historians: Infinite City. A San Francisco Atlas (2010), Unfathomable City. A New Orleans Atlas (with Rebecca Snedeker, 2013) and Nonstop Metropolis. A New York City Atlas (with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, 2016), published by the University of California Press. While it is generally accepted that literature has transposed cartography to its medium, we can ask ourselves if cartography has been influenced or hybridized by literary expression. My paper will address this question by examining Solnit’s atlases as alternative explorations of cities shaped by Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Borges’s short stories, Benjamin’s texts, and Thoreau’s invitation to map familiar places. These atlases combine cartographic representations, photographs, essays and interviews. They revisit the traditional atlas genre from subjective, critical and marginal perspectives. The atlas is reasserted as a method of democratic cultural investigation in which discourses are as relevant as maps, and cartography is no longer the exclusive domain of specialists. Topics such as riots, capital, water, climate change, ‘city of women,’ trash, walking, wildlife, the suburbs and multilingualism offer versions of cities illustrated by maps and stories. Inspired by literature, critical cartography, countermapping and participatory mapping, these atlases propose new urban reconfigurations that play with the codified forms of the atlas.