Beyond Counter-Mapping? Unmapping, Remapping, Emergence, Disenchantment

For some scholars, counter-mapping falls short of affecting the kind of change it is often intended to ignite, raising questions about the extent to which decolonial or anti-colonial objectives might be achieved. These critiques do not mean counter-mapping projects are not worthwhile pursuits; even those that draw on colonial geospatial tools and languages have shown to disrupt, subvert, or rebalance harmful power dynamics. Furthermore, the effect of cultural revitalization through collaborative, community-based mapping should not be underestimated. However, critical questions about counter-mapping have also led to alternative approaches that address and perhaps mitigate some of the challenges identified in the previous section.

Elspeth Iralu’s (2021) work on Indigenous feminist spatial practices, which she links to Indigenous nation-building, provides an excellent overview of how Indigenous feminist approaches like unmapping, remapping, and emergence offer different ways of enacting spatial justice. Drawing on Sherene Razack’s (2002) notion of unmapping, Iralu explains that instead of further legitimizing colonial narratives through mapping, unmapping is a process that “denaturalises settler cartographies and exposes colonial logics of conquest and oppression while (re)mapping privileges Indigenous spatial practices to mediate colonial maps and assert sovereignty, self-determination, and nationhood” (1500). Remapping, a term Iralu attributes to Mishuana Goeman, rejects colonial cartographic methods entirely. Instead, this practice centres Indigenous spatial practices and spaces “that are too often disavowed, appropriated, or co-opted by the settler state through writing, imagining, law, politics, and the terrains of culture” (Goeman, 2013: 23).

Both practices (unmapping and remapping) repoliticize what has been inaccurately represented as apolitical, innocent, and universal. For a third approach informing Indigenous spatial justice, Iralu turns to Laura Harjo’s writing on Mvskoke geographies as emergence geographies:

…Harjo suggests that emergence geographies can be concrete geographies, as in a specific town or built environment, ephemeral geographies, such as an event that occurs seasonally or intermittently like a festival or family tradition, metaphysical geographies, such as a sacred site through which people connect to a spiritual realm, and virtual geographies, which are shaped and mediated by technologies and exist in virtual space rather than traced onto a map of a landscape. (Iralu, 1492-93)

This work is worthy of much greater discussion than we can provide in this module. However, we invite students to consider how Harjo’s notion of emergence geographies might intersect with the approaches in the digital humanities, particularly the methods required to create, imagine, or reflect the above geographies.

Finally, Nalini Mohabir’s aforementioned account of Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann’s photomedia practice, which includes ‘speculative photomontage’ through a reimagining of archival photographs, provides another way of thinking about the emergent spaces produced through counter-mapping. Specifically, she highlights the interplay between enchantment and disenchantment afforded by counter-mapping and other digital arts methods, as summarized in the following passage:

“Archival photographs that are enticing or enchanting to some, and awkward or disenchanting to others points us to an acknowledgement of the intimacies of knowing and seeing, dependent on our relationship and perspective. While enchantment may obscure vision, disenchantment in its opening up of suspended spaces, and creation of sideway angles to enter images, expands our vision. Disenchantment may lead one to ask, how can we explode colonial enchantment with its coherent narratives of progress (geographical knowledge towards technical and administrative efficiencies, leading to material and/or social progress) and expose other dimensions?” (Mohabir, 2019: 272-273; see also this New York Times article on the Picturing Power project)

Digital spatial storytelling, particularly through its capacity for participatory and creative (re-)engagements with place, presents an opportunity to both study and experiment with this complex interplay between enchantment and disenchantment.