Utopian Cartography and Political Imagination

This article considers how political imagination shapes the articulation of multidirectional utopias and dystopias by Palestinian artists. The cartography of Palestine-Israel has been drawn by many hands: from the lines demarcated by British Mandate officials between 1918 and 1948 to the borders, crossings, and checkpoints constructed by the Israeli government since 1948. As an archive of geopolitical change, the maps provide a helpful representation of the land, and yet, they have another, less visible function as the place names, roads, and routes have counterpoints: missing towns, omitted place names, and roads that close for some, but not others. Just as territory is at the root of utopia, so too do counter-maps offer a foundation from which to re/negotiate what has been and what could be. As space is redefined in the maps by Mohamed Abusal and Bisan Abu-Eisheh, this article concludes that in the context of Palestinian counter-maps, utopia, and dystopia look in two directions, to the past and the future, providing an opportunity for multidirectional cartographical memory work.