What is a nation?

Abstract

Reimagining the national map should also invite a reimagining of “nation” as a category. Maps do crucial work in stitching together the term's two overlapping meanings—nation as territorial state, and nation as group of people—and maps can, in turn, help to interrogate and reconstitute these meanings. In my commentary, I offer three ways that “nation” is at stake in Rossetto and Lo Presti's argument: (1) in distinguishing cartographies of diversity from cartographies of belonging; (2) in distinguishing a pluralism of bodies from a pluralism of perspectives; and (3) in the choice between renegotiating and abandoning the term itself.

Between hyperboles and litotes: The middle passage of everyday cartographic nationhood

“…However, the sense that we had in reading the commentaries was that the map problem was often addressed as a representational concern in which certain limits could not be overcome. In the representational thinking frame, Rankin (2022) claims to go beyond cartographies that display diversity (which are conservative in their own ways); Craib (2022) affirms that the national map reifies the nation by definition (even if it should be problematised as in the case of representing diasporic nations without contiguous spatialities); Boria (2022) suggests paying more attention to the freedom granted by pictorial maps in opposition to Euclidean maps but then raises the question: can any image be considered a map? In his view, the national map cannot be extended to infinity since it is something endowed with a certain coherence.…”

“…As Boria (2022) usefully notes, the nation has often been addressed as a ‘pre-packaged’ category, not as ‘a reality here and now’ (Craib, 2022), which, we agree, cannot be fully comprehended without referring to its geo-historical contexts (Carraro, 2022; Craib, 2022). Yet, it is also too vivid and elusive, idealised and practised (Duggan, 2022; Rankin, 2022), conventional and constantly rebooted to not receive further attention and ‘methodological eclecticism’ (Boria, 2022) instead of being so easily abandoned. Nation and nationalism studies (less represented in the commentaries we received) are helpful here since they have been contributing much semantic discussion in the last few years, which, for instance, led us to talk about nationhood as an experience of coexistence rather than nationalism as a category of belonging (as suggested by Craib, 2022).…”

“…Similarly, Duggan (2022) asks how far we should go in considering cartographic objecthood without losing the representational features that are proper to every map. In a certain way, the interrogation of cartographic limits is linked to the interrogation of national limits (Rankin, 2022). To what extent can we imagine a progressive nation, given the ingrained and ‘viscous’ (Carraro, 2022) conservative meanings inexorably linked to the nation itself?…”

“…Is the nation just a category? Rankin (2022) is right in noticing that 'the category of the Nation does not seem to be on the table'. In fact, we are sitting on a table where the excess of reasoning about the nation as a category has given us indigestion (e.g.…”

“…Second, we enthusiastically endorse ‘the weight of praxis’ evoked by Boria (2022) to build on the idea that the work of imagination, even with the aspiration of creating more progressive cartographies, should always be grounded in specific national contexts and seen in the related material fractures and power dynamics. Lastly, to foresee a reparative study of national cartographies (Carraro, 2022; Rankin, 2022), we propose embarking on a middle passage of cartographic theory (swaying between hyperboles and litotes), in which doubt and hope, critique and affirmation, colonial past and anti-racism, hyper- and hypo-knowledge of maps, and their community of imaginations find equal rights to be analysed.…”