This project combines contributions and interviews that reimagine mapping, space, power, and coloniality across Africa and the diaspora. The project collectively wonders; What is the use of a map for an African body? How can we map against our own epistemic displacements while most of the maps we know are devices of that displacement? When can this practice of mapping be of ceremonial use? The project has recognized the map in its complicity in the colonization of our land and bodies. It is especially complicit in the division of this world into countries, regions, cities, towns, and streets, in orienting us in particular ways towards space. It became the documentation and the realization of what Frantz Fanon describes as a “world divided into compartments” in The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

Menna Agha is an architect, researcher, and assistant professor of design and spatial justice at Carleton University. Agha was a 2019–20 Spatial Justice fellow, a visiting associate professor at the University of Oregon, and the 2021 spatial justice agenda coordinator at the Flanders Architecture Institute. Agha is a third-generation displaced Fadicha Nubian, which ushers her research interests in race, gender, space, and territory. Among her published works are “Nubia Still Exists: The Utility of the Nostalgic Space,” “The Non-work of the Unimportant: The Shadow Economy of Nubian Women in Displacement Villages,” and “Liminal Publics, Marginal Resistance.”

Sara Salem is an assistant professor in sociology at the London School of Economics. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, Marxist theory, and global histories of anticolonialism, and her work focuses on the context of Egypt during the period of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century. Her recently published book with Cambridge University Press is entitled Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony (2020). A selection of published journal articles include: on Angela Davis in Egypt in the journal Signs; on Frantz Fanon and Egypt’s postcolonial state in Interventions: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies; on Gramsci and anticolonialism in the postcolony in Theory, Culture and Society; and on Nasserism in Egypt through the lens of haunting in Middle East Critique.