Every map is a decision.
A choice of what appears — and what is erased.
This chapter traces the contours of disappearance: voices, places, and stories that have been deleted from archives, displaced from official narratives.
At its centre is not what is remembered, but what remains unseen —
what is meant to be absent, yet continues to resonate.
Amid the endless noise of the information age, there are spaces of silence — a topography of what has been suppressed.
This chapter maps absences: places, voices, and stories erased from official narratives.
Cartographies of the Forgotten is a poetic act of resistance against the violence of the archive — against the illusion of complete memory.
It opens space for a knowledge that remains fragmentary: fleeting, fractured, defiant.
These absences are no accident.
They are politically produced blank zones in the collective memory — acts of erasure.
Lines of power trace what is
silenced: Indigenous voices,
environmental catastrophes, colonial
violence. Forgetting here is not a
failure — it is a strategy.
Epistemic Gaps: A History of Disappearance
Forgetting is not a mere oversight — it is part of power structures.
Michel Foucault describes the archive as an invisible framework that determines what can be said, remembered, and acknowledged.¹
Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, with its fragmented panels, reminds us how fragile memory is — always in flux and threatened by fading.²
Yet within these cartographies of the forgotten lies resistance.
Where memory breaks off, spaces emerge for new connections, alternative narratives, and the echoes of those who refuse silence.
Memory is never neutral. As Elena Esposito shows, it is a social process — a struggle for visibility and meaning.³
And erasure, argues Achille
Mbembe, is no void but a strategy: a
deliberate passage into “non-being.”⁴
Footnotes:
1. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), esp. chap. 3.
2. Aby Warburg, The Mnemosyne Atlas, ed. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000).
3. Elena Esposito, Social Forgetting: A Sociology of Memory, trans. Richard R. Barron (London: Routledge, 2022).
4. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics,
trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2019), esp. chap. 1.
