Judith Butler poses this question in the book she co-authored with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State?. Here, Butler complicates the current synonymization of “states” with “nation-states” by pushing us to consider states more broadly as the “sets of conditions and dispositions in which we find ourselves” (2). In expanding this conception of “state,” Butler then also invites us to think of how alternative sets of conditions and dispositions bind or unbind nations as communities (Benedict Anderson). For example, in Other Asias, Spivak prompts us to interrogate the alternative conditions that (un)bind Asia as a continent. Pointing to the lack of an original unity to imaginative and geographic conceptions of “Asia,” and emphasizing the multiplicity of Asian histories and cultures, she asks “Why then should we train our imagination to allow ‘Asia’ to emerge as a continent?” (211).
Across history, maps have been used to affix a static world order that makes territory legible for (neo)colonial extraction and exploitation (see J. B. Harley, James R. Akerman, John Pickles, among others). On the other hand, decolonial cartographers (for example, Walter Mignolo, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Leila M. Harris, among others) resist this impulse by imagining new relationalities that are attentive to the plurality of places, people, and conditions of being in the world. Taking up cartography as this imaginative epistemic practice, this session features four panelists speaking from across a diverse range of personal, global, and epistemological positionalities, coming together to rethink existing relationalities between human, narrative, and physical geographies in pluriversal rather than static terms.
We will begin with “Making Native and National: Reading Naturalizing Cartographies in Postcolonial India” by Manasvini Rajan, which offers a re-reading of India’s National Forest Policy (1952), focusing on how it maps out new relationships between forests, the nation, and the body politic. By situating the text within the context of India’s newly-attained independence from colonial rule and its drive to develop, she argues that a contrapuntal reading of the policy reveals the emergent logic of naturalization – of forests, of citizens, and of the forests as citizens. Tracing how the policy exceeds the form and purpose of policy, she forwards a critical reading methodology that is attentive to the imaginative cartographies of the developmental state.
Leenu Sugathan’s “Counter-Cartography and Anti-Caste Epistemology in Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability” similarly engages with how narrative form is linked to cartographic logics in the context of India. She argues that the Gond aesthetics and visual strategies of the graphic narrative Bhimayana (2011) dismantle Brahminical logics of spatial organization. Through this reading, she contends that caste, like capitalism and colonialism, must be understood as a foundational logic of cartographic practices, i.e., as a structurally distinct and historically autonomous system of spatial domination. Against this, counter-cartographies that decenter Brahminism allow for the imagination of emancipatory possibilities grounded in anti-caste epistemologies.
In “‘How can you call yourself a country’: Recalling the Multivocal States of Alfian Sa’at’s Poetics,” Jade Yeen Onn begins by discussing dominant readings of Alfian Sa’at’s poem, “Singapore You Are Not My Country,” which frame both the text and poet as dissenters in opposition to the nation-state. Pushing back against these readings which reinforce the dominant assumption that the nation is, firstly or primarily, defined by the nation-state, Onn argues that the disruptive potential of this poem lies in its multivocal, polyphonic articulations of Singapore and the invitational rhetoric Alfian extends to readers through this poem. In this manner, the poem does not simply oppose the nation-state but enacts a dynamic and emergent counter-cartography of nationhood.
Finally, Maya Day will conclude this session with "Looking Away From the Page: Layli Long Soldier’s Quilts and the Responsibility of Reading Poetry ," which contemplates the function of distance and materiality in framing readerly relations to Long Soldier’s quilt poems. Resisting assumptions of transhistorical legibility, Day traces socio-geographic relations, poetry circulation practices, and reading practices to challenge presupposed access to any given poem. By foregrounding a reader’s distance from the physical installations of the quilt poems, Day emphasizes the denial of easy access to notions of constructed kinship, building on Long Soldier’s critiques of colonial (mis)appropriations of the concept of Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ, or “we are all related,” to illuminate a new geographically-informed methodology for lyric reading.