Mapping Decolonial Futures: Imagining Islands Beyond the Colonial Gaze

Abstract

Maps and mapping practices aid in understanding spatial phenomena and shape our conceptualization and representation of place. Historically, maps have long served colonial projects of conquest, exerting power over territories, resource extraction, and violence all while privileging the world vision of a few colonial powers. These power dynamics remain embedded in the ways we often visualize and represent place through mapping today. Despite the prevalence of colonial ways of mapping, a range of initiatives have sought to counter colonial cartographic traditions. But how can these diverse initiatives help inform a decolonial approach and framework? And what is the potential of the map to be used as a generative tool to subvert colonial ways of understanding place, to construct and imagine alternative futures? Following Jacques Derrida’s thinking that “there is no world only islands” (Pugh and Chandler, 2021, p. 136) we center islands as a geographical entity crucial in the colonial quest which at the same time has been historically and presently misrepresented. Through thinking with and learning from island ontologies, we aim to conceptualize and illustrate how mapping islands marks coloniality as well as how we could subvert colonial cartographic traditions. In putting decolonial theory in conversation with the mapping of islands, we articulate a praxis of subversion, relationality, and plurality to contest colonial projects, and construct decolonial futures. These points will be illustrated with examples from art exhibitions and maps.