Disrupting the Cartographic View from Nowhere: “Hating Empire Properly” in Layla Curtis’s Cartographic Collage The Thames

This article gives a close reading of a contemporary artwork, The Thames by Layla Curtis (2013), as an opportunity to think through how it disrupts the “cartographic view from nowhere.” This characteristic viewpoint of cartography is understood as a form of cartographic abstraction, the material mode of thought and experience that can be produced through cartographic ways of depicting the world. The Thames uses collage to bring together disparate cartographic images and place names, creating an altered and disrupted image of the River Thames at London, UK. In reading the artwork, I aim to acknowledge authorial positionality (within the “imperial centre,” in this case London) in order to show that The Thames both uses and disrupts the cartographic view from nowhere, showing it to be conceptually “collaged.” This disruption can usefully be read in a postcolonial context as a “productive fiction,” showing the co-constitution and “mutual imbrica- tion” of “centre” and “periphery.”