Crossing the Date Line: Global Mapping and Temporal Allochrony

Abstract

In this chapter, I consider the significance of what we today call the International Date Line in the imaginative literature of the nineteenth-century. Impossible to conceptualize in the West, the anti-meridian was projected cartographically onto the Pacific Far East, where a “savage” population was considered to be ignorant of calendrical sophistication. In this way, the temporal dissonance and disjunction integral to every space was cartographically exiled, purging anachronism and allochrony from modernity in a characteristically Orientalist gesture. Sending their characters across what we today call the Date Line, authors like Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, and Rudyard Kipling refuse standard time’s imperative to cartographically project temporal dissonance onto oceanic Otherness, instead bringing it back home to the spaces of modernity.