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The second chapter of Wilson Harris’s phantasmagorical novel Palace of the Peacock opens with an arresting passage that foregrounds the narrator’s sense of the tensions inherent in the way place has been inscribed on the space that is familiar to him. He writes, ‘The map of the savannahs was a dream. The names Brazil and Guiana were colonial conventions I had known from childhood’ (Harris 1968, p. 20) and he goes on to expand on the role played by colonial cartographies by saying

The 1884 Prime Meridian Conference was a signal moment in the history of modernity, establishing a seamless space-time map and rendering the Greenwich Royal Observatory an international symbol of British imperial power. In this essay, I consider the representation of Greenwich Time at key moments in three canonical modernist texts: Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent , James Joyce’s Ulysses , and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway . Exposing the linkage of Greenwich Mean Time to regimes of power, knowledge, and commerce, these modernists sought to dislocate narrative temporality from its enlistment in the imperial project of world standard time.

This article questions the notion of European identity and shows how the concept of translation is the basic principle of Europe. As a mythological figure, Europe was — literally — `translated' from the Orient to the Occident by a divine bull. The author demonstrates how Europe is conceived of as a performative that produces intermedial transcriptions in three ways: mythographically, in the version of the Epyllion by Moschos; cartographically, with respect to the prime meridian; and graphically, based on the frescos by Tiepolo in the grand staircase of the Prince-Archbishop's palace in Würzburg, Germany.

This paper covers a small section of the historical research on the Cartography and Geodesy of Brazil which is undertaken by GeoCart, the Laboratory of Cartography of the Department of Geography at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.