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The ambivalence of borders: Map art through the lens of North-East Indian artists

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Abstract

Borders and maps came under scrutiny in the last few decades. Accentuating the gap between the map and the territory, critical cartography attempts to unmask the assumed scientific objectivity of maps and to reveal their entanglement with power. Postcolonial theory adopts a similar critical approach towards cartography which replaces the earlier attitude of the anticolonial struggles towards maps and borders. This shift is characteristic of postcolonial theories that focus on signifying practices and presuppose that the coloniser’s power lies in the ability to represent colonised histories, customs, cultures, and territories. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam question the deconstructionist tendencies within postcolonial theory and juxtapose them to the discourse of indigenous thinkers who underscore ‘rootedness’ and ‘affirm borders’. In my article, I examine A-PART—Stories of Lands and Lines (23 July–16 August 2019, New Delhi), a group exhibition that explored borders through the perspectives of artists from North-East India. Curated by Pranamita Borgohain and Vikash Nand Kumar of Zero Gravity Collective, the exhibition featured artists whose voices are not always heard within the mainstream of Indian art. While the exhibition questioned, undermined, and challenged borders, it also foregrounded their productive functions. In my article, I underscore and analyse this ambivalent attitude towards borders.

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Notes

  1. https://www.facebook.com/ZeroGravityCollective/. Accessed 09 February 2021.

  2. The exhibition featured the artworks of Dharmendra Prasad, Gopa Roy, Kompi Riba, Sisir Thapa, Thlana Bazik, Treibor Mawlong, Victor Hazra, and Wahida Ahmed.

  3. https://akarprakar.com/shows/a-part-stories-of-lands-lines/. Accessed 09 February 2021.

  4. Jigisha Bhattacharya underscores the peripheralisation of the North-East: ‘..the North-Eastern states of India have always been bordering on the fringes—geopolitically, socially and culturally as far as the narrative arc of the mainland India represents itself.’ Jigisha Bhattacharya, ‘Sentinels of Belonging—Tales from Our Lands’ (Akar Prakar, 3 August 2019). https://akarprakar.com/sentinels-of-belonging-tales-from-our-lands/. Accessed 28 December 2020.

  5. Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’ in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge 2005) 442. Hall discerns a ‘shift’ in black cultural politics in the UK ‘from a struggle over the relations of representation to a politics of representation itself’ (p. 444). In the first moment the struggle was directed against the seclusion of black artists and ‘the stereotypical quality and the fetishized nature of images of blacks’ (p. 443). The second moment is characterised by the problematisation and politicisation of representation and ‘the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject’ (p. 444).

  6. https://akarprakar.com/about/. Accessed 01 February 2021.

  7. The curatorial note was provided to the author by the gallery via email.

  8. Bhattacharya, ‘Sentinels of Belonging’ (n 4).

  9. Denis Wood, ‘Map Art’ (2006) 53 Cartographic Perspectives 5.

  10. Ibid. 5.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid. 9–10.

  13. https://www.britannica.com/biography/al-Sharif-al-Idrisi. Accessed 09 February 2021.

  14. Itinerarium is an ancient Roman road map.

  15. Alfred Korzybski argues that ‘a map is not the territory.’ Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (Institute of General Semantics 2000) 58.

  16. https://shilpagupta.com/100-hand-drawn-maps-carbon-tracings/. Accessed 07 February 2021.

  17. https://emergentartspace.org/gopa-roy-native-land/. Accessed 09 February 2021.

  18. Artist note provided to the author by the curator via email.

  19. Press release, A-PART: Stories of Lands and Lines. https://www.artforum.com/uploads/guide.005/id09956/press_release.pdf. Accessed 09 February 2021.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Translated by Syed Ahmed Shah. Artist’s note received from the curator via email.

  22. Mireille Rosello and Stephen F Wolfe, ‘Introduction’ in Johan Schimanski and Stephen F Wolfe (eds), Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections (Berghahn Books 2017) 1, 3.

  23. Ibid. 7.

  24. Ibid. 11.

  25. Ibid. 7.

  26. Homi K Bhabha, ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha’ in Jonathan Rutherford (ed), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (Lawrence and Wishart 1990) 207, 210. Cited in Rosello and Wolfe, ‘Introduction’ (n 22) 11.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Walter D Mignolo repeatedly underscores the impact of geopolitics on epistemology and the conception of politics. See, for example, Walter D Mignolo, ‘The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference’ (2002) 101(1) South Atlantic Quarterly 57.

  29. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, ‘Whence and Whither Postcolonial Theory?’ (2012) 43(2) New Literary History 371, 374–375.

  30. https://reenakallat.com/leakinglines2020. Accessed 09 February 2021.

  31. Reena Saini Kallat, ‘Woven Chronicle’ (Medium.com, 17 November 2016). https://medium.com/insecurities/woven-chronicle-e494ea66e782. Accessed 28 December 2020.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Based on the author’s personal interview with the artist.

  36. https://ficart.org/eaa-2019-d-p. Accessed 09 February 2021.

  37. Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge 2004).

  38. Rosello and Wolfe, ‘Introduction’ (n 22).

  39. Graham Huggan, ‘Decolonizing the Map: Postcolonialism, Poststructuralism and the Cartographic Connection’ in Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies (Oxford University Press 2008) 24.

  40. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (n 37) 4–5.

  41. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/4543/installation_images/37868. Accessed 08 February 2021.

  42. Rosello and Wolfe, ‘Introduction’ (n 22) 3; Huggan, ‘Decolonizing the Map’ (n 39) 24.

  43. For example, while the curators of A-PART engage with the relations of representation, as argued above, Bhabha and Green are concerned with what Hall calls the ‘politics of representation’. Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’ (n 5) 444. Bhabha cites Green, ‘Even then, it’s still a struggle for power between various groups within ethnic groups about what’s being said and who’s saying what, who’s representing who? What is a community anyway? What is a black community? What is a Latino community? I have trouble with thinking of all these things as monolithic fixed categories.’ Bhabha, The Location of Culture (n 37) 4.

  44. Rosello and Wolfe, ‘Introduction’ (n 22) 3; Huggan, ‘Decolonizing the Map’ (n 39) 24.

  45. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/4543/installation_images/37868. Accessed 08 February 2021.

  46. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (n 37) 5.

  47. Renée Green, cited in ibid.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Ibid.

  51. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (Albert Hofstadter tr, Harper Perennial 2001) 152.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Ibid. 150–151.

  54. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (n 37) 1.

  55. Ibid. 6.

  56. Ibid. 7.

  57. Bhabha, ‘The Third Space’ (n 26) 211.

  58. Rosello and Wolfe, ‘Introduction’ (n 22) 11.

  59. Bhabha’s theory generates another fundamental problem. While approximating the ‘theory of culture’ to the ‘theory of language’, he does not perceive culture as that which fashions the individual, as Heidegger argues regarding language (Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought [n 51] 144), but describes cultural hybridity as an ambiguous process of identification through otherness. See Bhabha, ‘The Third Space’ (n 26) 210–211. As distinct from spatial objects whose identities are wholly dependent on differential apparatuses, however, cultural differences do not (only) emerge from the process of identification, but from the plurality of historical experiences. The Assamese, Mizo, or African communities did not develop their unique manner of being in the world in opposition to other communities. The binary oppositions of black/white, self/other, identity/difference arise from the futile (but perhaps unavoidable) attempt to juxtapose different cultures. Even though cultural differences do not represent racial or ethnic essences, they are also not the product of signifying practices and processes of identification and othering as Sartre and others maintain. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti‐Semite and Jew (George J Becker tr, Schocken Books 1995) 49.

  60. Lal Dingluaia, ‘Maps, Mission, Memory and Mizo Identity’ (2018) 35(4) Transformation 240.

  61. Ibid. 241.

  62. Ibid. 242.

  63. Ibid.

  64. Ibid.

  65. Homi Bhabha, cited in Rosello and Wolfe, ‘Introduction’ (n 22) 11.

  66. Dingluaia, ‘Maps, Mission, Memory and Mizo Identity’ (n 60) 245.

  67. Homi Bhabha cited in Rosello and Wolfe, ‘Introduction’ (n 22).

  68. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press 1993).

  69. Ibid. 99.

  70. Dingluaia, ‘Maps, Mission, Memory and Mizo Identity’ (n 60) 241.

  71. Ibid.

  72. Thlana Bazik, ‘Rih Dil Titi’. https://bazikart.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/rih-dil-titi.pdf. Accessed 09 February 2021.

  73. Ibid.

  74. The name of a mythical personage who lives at the junction of the roads leading to Mitthi-khua.

  75. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (n 51) 152.

  76. Bazik, ‘Rih Dil Titi’ (n 72); emphasis added.

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    Achia Anzi

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Anzi, A. The ambivalence of borders: Map art through the lens of North-East Indian artists. Jindal Global Law Review 12, 117–137 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41020-021-00142-9

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