The power of maps

The black feminist geographer Hortense Spillers once famously declared that geography is colonial conquest, and maps the tool, and the cartographic practice of drawing lines and representing them are instrumental in colonial conquest. Maps don't only represent reality, they create reality. Geography is not just an objective science. It's how we come to view people and places, and how those opinions and views get crystallized over time and create their own subjectivities and realities.

To take one example of how these political realities are created, we can turn to Afghanistan. In 1893, a British imperial administrator, Mortimer Durand, decided to carve out a line between what became Pakistan but was then India and Afghanistan. The line was to protect British India, the jewel of its crown, from Russian imperial aggression the way Britain saw it. This meant immense upheaval. It bisected the land of 3 million pastoralists called the Pashtun belt, and it created two very different states.

The partition of India in 1947 by the British when they were leaving is another example. For me very personally, my grandmother was born on the other side of the divide in what is now called Pakistan, but had to be uprooted and moved to India. Millions of people were displaced. There was a lot of what is now called ethnic strife, but this was created by the drawing of this border and this boundary. And we still live with the consequences. We have two essentially warring states because of the power of maps, because of the imperial discipline of geography.

We can also see the power of maps at play in Africa. The so-called scramble for Africa at the Berlin conference, where European powers decided to carve up most of Africa, is a very painful instantiation of the ways in which maps divide, but also sediment what W.E. Du Bois has called the global color line. Maps became the visual representation of the white man's burden, as it was called, which has led to the racialization of people in Africa, of black people, of Muslims.

When I say that maps produce race, I'm talking about the ways in which maps do create realities. So for instance, like in the scramble for Africa, we have decided that most African states are failed states or failing states, and what that means is that we think of them as less developed. So the personal racialization of people gets literally mapped onto continents, countries, places, and maps are very, very crucial in this ongoing racialization of people and places.

Borders exist within countries as much as they do without. The concept of interior frontiers, first written about by Hubert Fichte and Étienne Balibar, has been recently deployed by Ann Laura Stoler. She says that interior frontiers are borders within countries that are usually demarcated by questions of race, of gender, of class, etc. So even if you are a citizen of a country, you might be a sub citizen rather than a non-citizen. So these are gradations of belonging.

The interior frontiers of Delhi and in other places, for instance in South Africa or Brazil, are very, very tied to the way in which the city is both a racialized space and a class space, by which I mean that you could have a high rise, a five star hotel next to a slum. The slum usually has people that have moved from poorer villages, but it also has people who are seeking refuge from Bangladesh, from Myanmar, from other parts of South Asia and beyond. And they all kind of live together. Some of them are citizens, some of them are non-citizens, but all of them are created as what Ann Laura Stoler calls sub citizens. That's the interior frontier again in action.

Borders are obviously lines on the ground and therefore lines on a map. But they are so much more than that. They are mobile architectures or infrastructures. We encounter borders all the time, not just at airports. For instance, the US declared a border anywhere within 100 miles of the actual border of the United States, which meant that New York City becomes a border. So borders are mobile, they're fluid, and they are everywhere. And unfortunately, as they are getting loosened and they're spreading, they are also hardening. By which I mean people who are supposed to be outside of borders are castigated, they are scapegoated, and they are never fully part of society. They are cast out even when they are within the borders of a nation state.

Refugee camps, digital borders, visa regimes, they are all examples of how borders proliferate and can be everywhere. You can see that in the slums in Delhi, in Rio. We don't think of them as border spaces, but they absolutely are. And because of climate change, there's going to be more of this. And that is a problem both of the border moving and of the world in which borders are so important.

The territorial trap is a term coined by John Agnew, a geographer, to describe the ways in which, when we focus simply on territory or the immediate land that the border carves, we lose sight of the material and ideational structures that borders create. So to take an example, when we think about climate change, on the one hand we think of it as a global problem. On the other hand, we think of how a country pollutes as a national and therefore a border question.