ABSTRACT
What politics can emerge when we imagine global space not as a pre-given set of territorial lines, but to be constantly created in the threads-being-woven of human passages and relations? This question is at the heart of my final chapter, “Unravelling the Nation State: Openwork Lives in Migrant Graphic Narratives.” This not a thought experiment, as migrant paths are already re-defining and traversing the spaces so carefully territorialized by post-war diplomats and so diligently measured by their cartographers. Working with migrant graphic narratives, I seek to turn this forcefully repressed reality into a seeding round for a different conception of citizenship, re-inscribing change and movement into the core of human life. Understanding space not as defined by endpoints and borders, but as a shifting ground of passages and transformative nodal relays, I articulate a notion of nomadic rootedness. The textures of braiding and open lacework in graphic narratives by Marjane Satrapi, Shaun Tan, or Hamid Sulaiman are both literal and figurative; yet all their aesthetic languages activate existent, lived spaces, energizing realities that are at best casually ignored and at worst violently repressed. Instead of resulting from the violence of the trenches, they generate political space as a participatory process. Whereas bird’s eye cartographies operate on normative codes of ethnic exclusivity, economic profitability or military strategy, which are hidden beneath the apparent clarity of the borderline, woven maps dismantle such codes.
