Maps and Mapping Dislocation: The Art of Contemporary Middle Eastern Women Émigré Artists

Abstract

Cartography has long served as a medium of territorial assertion, exemplified in the Middle East by the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, which carved out national borders with little regard for geography or population. Contemporary Middle Eastern émigré women artists rejected the scientific detachment and quest for precision and objectivity that have defined cartography since the early Renaissance and Enlightenment. They challenged mapping practices to confront the layered legacies of exile, migration, and spatial control, subverting cartographic forms to critique geopolitical boundaries, gendered spaces, and historical erasures. They transformed cartographic language to articulate personal and collective displacement, reimagining it as a visual language of resistance and repositioning the map as a site of feminist exilic practice.Mona Hatoum, Ariane Littman, Yto Barrada, and Diana Al-Hadid deconstruct, distort, and abstract maps, embedding migration histories within them through material and performative interventions, echoing J. B. Harley’s critique of cartographic neutrality and Gannit Ankori’s theory of Dis-Orientalism. In the works of Susan Hefuna, Jananne Al-Ani, and Elham Rokni, geographic scale is manipulated to map history, memory, and absence, drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of Postmemory and Tim Cole’s analysis of Microgeographies. A constellation of artists, including Shirin Neshat, Lalla Essaydi, Nava Levine-Coren, and Anisa Ashkar channeled Virginia Woolf’s advocacy for A Room of One’s Own and Hélène Cixous’s Écriture féminine to map their gendered spaces and assert agency through the act of writing.Across these practices, the artists stripped maps of their scientific pretense, presenting instead counter-maps shaped by the lived experience of displacement. This dissertation proposes an interdisciplinary framework for reading contemporary Middle Eastern art through the interwoven lenses of migration, gender, and trauma. It positions exilic map art as a feminist and postcolonial medium of resistance and self-definition.