I wrote this book in transit, over several years, in many countries, during several research projects, learning from many colleagues and friends, and with the aid of many institutions. I developed the original idea as a research project financed by the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET, Argentina). During the first stage, my work benefited from a Hermès Program grant from the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, el Ministère des affaires etrangères y el Centre national de la recherche scientifique, to work Équipe d’épistémologie et histoire de la géographie (CNRS—Sorbonne Paris 1). I then had the privilege of conducting research at the Institute for Research in the Humanities of the University of Wisconsin (Madison), with the aid of a Woodward Memorial Fellowship. Later, during my stay in Leven with the support of a fellowship at the Program for Young Professors and Researchers of Latin American Universities (Coimbra Group Scholarship), I began writing this book while being based at the Faculty of Arts of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Aided by a grant by the Smith Center for the History of Cartography at Newberry Library (Chicago), I continued to search for materials and to write. Finally, a preliminary version of this book became possible thanks to a stay at Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio), financed by a Fulbright-CONICET scholarship.
If I have reached this point after a long, winding road, it is because a valuable network of friends and colleagues have sustained me along the way. I want to express my heartfelt thanks to Luis Quevedo, Matthew Edney, Gastón Burucúa, Carlos Reboratti, Claudia Troncoso, Teresa Zweifel, Marta Penhos, Perla Zusman, Pete Nekola, Jim Akerman, Jordana Dym, Marina Rieznik, María José Doiny, David Lasnik, Luis y María Conti, Anne-Sophie Perrot, Javier Moscoso, Rafael Giménez Capdevila, Francesc Nadal, Carmen Montaner, Luis Urteaga, Horacio Capel, Tony Campbell, Bernard Bailyn, Catherine Delano-Smith, Joost Depuydt, Floria Benavídez Romero, Andrea Doré, José de la Puente-Burke, Domingo Ledezma, Heidi Scott, Thomas Werner, César Manrique, Guadalupe Pinzón, Rodolfo Bertoncello, Luciano de Privitellio, Nicolas Verdier, Catherine Hofmann, Ricardo Padrón, Pedro Saccaggio, Catherine Akeroyd, Karen Barzman, Flor Trejo Rivera, Martín Ríos, Pocas Pascoal, Matthias Meirlaen, Malena Mazzitelli Mastricchio, Leoncio López-Ocón Cabrera, Alain Musset, Patricia Piccolini, Marcelo Escolar, Iris Kantor, Jean-Marc Besse, and Roger Baskes. I am also in debt to the students of the post-graduate courses I taught in those years, because the reflections I shared with them served to catalyze ideas that would eventually end up here. I am grateful for my time at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Buenos Aires; the Facultad de
It would be ungrateful to omit the fact that, while writing this book, I regularly went to nearly empty theaters to watch marathons of European cinema, and took shelter in the labyrinths of literature. It is obviously impossible to mention everyone who reside between the lines of my writing, but they include Sándor Márai, Paul Auster, Elena Poniatowska, Clarice Lispector, Irène Némirovsky, Philip Roth, Franz Kafka, Alfred Hayes, and Julian Barnes, and also Woody Allen’s repetitive scenes, Abbas Kiarostami’s Copie conforme, François Ozon’s dramas, the nouvelle vague, and the German, Czech, Nordic, and Eastern European films whose titles I cannot pronounce, and which gave me scenes and landscapes that profoundly inspired my ways of asking questions about the unknown.
I should also mention that this project became a book thanks to Chet Van Duzer’s tireless support. He not only read with great patience nearly every version of the manuscript, but also helped me solve countless practical problems that came up in the process of writing and editing. I am also thankful for the generosity of institutions and collectors that allowed me to reproduce maps and other images, for without them it would have been impossible to sustain the book’s argument in a way that readers could understand.
I wish to thank Marta Sierra for her hospitality during my long confinement in her basement in Gahanna. Thanks go also to my editor, Esteban Lo Presti, for his trust in the original manuscript of this book. And thank you also, of course, my children, Carolina and Lucas, because they are true beacons in the unknown lands of every day.