“War and murderous politics,” Susan Sontag reminds us, are found on the same map as safety and privilege (102-103) it goes without saying that the trauma of war always spills over onto the domestic map.

Kirby refers to as “a relationship of mutuality with its objects” (65), complementing what is called “rampant plurality” in the novel ( Kartography 322), even in the often violent environment of Karachi indeed, violence and / or traumatic experience sometimes function as the catalyst which accelerates change and cements relationships, binding people in ways we could not have imagined – to threaten identity is simultaneously to affirm it (Laclau 27).

Rather than mapping to define the outsider, Kartography ultimately seems to argue for what Kathleen M. Such historical excess takes on geographical form in the novel (see Doreen Massey 145), and the image of mapping in 1980s Karachi becomes highly political in the aftermath of Partition and the civil war, and while maps transform as much as they record, Shamsie’s mapping strategy in particular “refused distinctions between space and story, place and past” (J. Kartography is a novel about membership, about who belongs where and with whom, about loyalties, about relational cause and effect (see Catherine Belsey xii), including the ongoing, intergenerational consequences of Partition and the 1971 war, all within a period wherein firsthand accounts are still easily available: “Too much history,” Nietzsche warned, can prove to be “the gravedigger of the present, since we are the outcome of earlier generations, we are also the outcome of their aberrations, passions and errors, and indeed of their crimes it is not possible wholly to free oneself from this chain” (76 see also Jeffrey K. 3 In an interview with Cara Cilano, Kamila Shamsie remarks on the particularly skewed nature of histo (.)ġKarachi is a city overflowing with history – quite literally overflowing, as contemporary Karachi exists in a space / time compression of cataclysmic events, among them Partition in 1947 and the civil war in 1971, which have profound, lingering effects on both the collective and individual levels the new maps that resulted are not simple representations on paper, as people and their stories are part and parcel of this space / time compression 1.2 Katja Sarkowsky, discussing Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, expands the notion o (.).Kirby reminds us that the notion of “time-space compression” comes from David Harvey’s (.)

Bloody British History by Clare Dixon