Abstract
This volume seeks to understand the cartographical imperative inherent in exile, investigating the relationship between exile - understood broadly to include external and internal exile, diaspora, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, expatriation, migrants, refugees, nomads, and the forcibly 'disappeared' - and map-making. Mapping is a certain science that enables emplacement and facilitates movement; yet it is also an aesthetic project that draws on a heightened awareness of space and place, memory, and political and historical imaginaries.
This collection explores a number of key questions, such as: what kind of maps do exiles make, and how are they conceived? How do maps provide new ways of thinking about the experience of exile and our changing reading practices? How do authors writing in or about exile represent the doubly ontological and epistemological exercise of map-making? How might a cartographical necessity of exile challenge how we conceive of mapping, its history and future, its function, tools, and media?
This book's contributors come from a wide variety of interdisciplinary backgrounds, including literary and cultural studies, art history and architecture, the plastic arts, film and visual studies, and the digital humanities. The Cartographical Necessity of Exile reveals the overwhelming importance of agency in exile that map-making facilitates, and the epistemological displacement that map-making depends upon, to build the known world.