Objects in Review

minorities from applying for citizenship, ed.]. The anti-CAA movement refused and said, “Hum kagaz nahi dikhayenge (We won’t show the papers).” We might want to think about not simply alternate cartographies but also the long life of slavery and the national-modern on these maps. If tomorrow i consider moving cities, because of the difficulty of existing [as trans] within my ID cards, it is an impossibility. It’s not a queer impossibility; it’s a national impossibility. We strike against the limits of a bureaucratic and cartographic imagination once we think about ways that maps create this flat world. Some of these worlds cannot be queered. Sinking boats in the middle of the Mediterranean tell us that escape from the national modern and its cartography is a plunge into death. This is not social death: this is families dying in the water. We must think about the limits of queering, as much as we might want to think about an alternative to map-making and world-making. Adam With maps there is that aggressive desire to define things. But before the invention of the nation state, things were pretty much all gradients. The boundaries between ethnicities, the boundaries between cultures, were constantly shifting. There were blurred edges. Then the borders started going up, the national myth started to be created, narratives of the Other, the outsider, the gypsies, the Jews, the homosexuals. In order to create that resilience of definition, you have to decide who’s outside of it. I’m very comfortable in those in-between spaces. I am a child of genocide and multiple diasporas. As Vikramaditya mentioned, the beginning of modernity was the violence of extraction, removal, separation, exploitation, and the creation of this permanent sense of loss and longing for those who have been moved around the world and don’t have an origin. Even that word, “map”, is difficult because it’s got that Roman idea of carving the world up into grids. How can we start to ascribe those blurred edges? How can we describe those gradients? KNeo This conversation about maps made me think about the short story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ by Jorge Luis Borges. The story goes that there were these cartographers looking to make a faithful map of an empire. They’re going about drafting and find that the only scale that will satisfy them is a scale of one to one. Then the map and the Empire start blurring – where the map was torn, the shape of the Empire was dishevelled. I take so many different things from that story when I reflect on it, but today I’m reflecting on how those historically Western binary impulses and desires to have a depth of exactitude and determination also have a limit. If they are achieved, it is just as awful as having a more ambiguous identity described here in this conversation. END

Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories, edited by Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell, is pubished by RIBA Publishing, RRP £40.

Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories.