Countermapping Ulysses

Abstract

This essay introduces to modernist literary studies the concept of “countermapping,” which originated in sociology in the mid-1990s and describes marginal communities’ appropriations of state maps and mapping technologies for use against dominant power structures. Although the first few generations of scholarship on James Joyce’s work emphasized its cartographic detail and accuracy, more recent studies of Ulysses, in particular, have understood it as both theorizing and practicing alternative forms of cartography. The essay collates and builds on several recognized forms of Joycean countermapping before drawing attention to two underexplored forms that scholars in Irish studies and modernist studies might take up in the future: nongeographical “betweens” as theorized by Rinaldo Walcott, Tiffany Lethabo King, and other figures in exilic Black thought; and literary maps that project multiple, often discordant temporalities onto an ostensibly single spatial representation.