Toby Yuen-Gen Liang: "Blank Space, Orthogonal Views, and the World-Making of Maps: European Representations of Northwest Africa in the Age of Exploration”

Abstract:

Battista Agnese, a prolific producer of portolan atlases in sixteenth-century Venice, blanked the space of northwest Africa in almost all the Indian Ocean world charts in his works. Blankness was a trope that was also deployed by authors describing Portuguese explorations along northwest Africa’s Atlantic coast, including Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s 1453 Chronicle of the Discovery of Guinea. This talk juxtaposes the two forms of media in order to query the “location” of northwest Africa in European epistemology. It is by pairing the orthographic views in Agnese’s portolan charts and eye-level encounters between Portuguese sailors and local Africans related in Zurara’s account that my talk teases out the significance of the cartographic blanking, one whose paradoxically synoptical nature reveals the role northwest Africa played in a European conception of the world.

About the speaker: Toby Yuen-Gen Liang is an Associate Research Professor at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan; in 2025–2026, he is also a global dis:connect Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany. Liang studies European visual media and representations of northwest Africa in the Age of Exploration. He is the author of Family and Empire: The Fernández de Córdoba and the Spanish Realm (University of Pennsylvania Press) and the co-editor of three collections of essays (Routledge and Brill). Liang is the founder of the Spain-North Africa Project, a co-founder of the Wheaton Institute for the Interdisciplinary Humanities, a founding board member of the Medieval Globe journal, as well as a founding member and former president of the Asian Federation of Mediterranean Studies Institutes. Liang’s work has been supported by Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council, the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and by a long list of US institutes and agencies including the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Newberry Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Getty Research Institute Library, the MacLean Collection, and the University of California. Liang has lived long years in Syria, Spain, the United States, and Taiwan.