The Interview
Hook
Priya Malhotra makes maps that refuse to stay still. As a writer, theorist, and artist- cartographer, she’s spent the last decade exploring how language can rewrite geography—specifically, how the stories we tell about where we’re from reshape where we can go. We sat down with her to discuss the intersection of memory, place-making, and the politics of naming in her latest project, “Unmapped Interiors.”
Q&A
You use the phrase “feminist cartography” frequently. What does that mean to you?
For me, it’s about refusing the authority of official maps. Traditional cartography has always been an instrument of power—who decides what gets named, what gets borders, what gets erased? Feminist cartography asks: whose knowledge about place matters? It means centering the stories of people whose geographies have been marked as minor or irrelevant—immigrant routes, women’s labor movements, displaced communities. It’s saying: your place-making counts.
In your work, memory seems as important as physical geography. How do you map something that’s internal?
Language is my compass. Memory isn’t a fixed location; it’s a living archive that gets rewritten each time we speak it. By playing with syntax, etymology, untranslatable words, I’m literally drawing maps through the act of writing. A phrase in Urdu that has no English equivalent becomes a borderline on the page. A sentence that refuses standard grammar becomes unmappable terrain. This is how we make interior geographies visible.
You’ve written about the politics of naming—particularly how immigrant communities “rename” places. Can you give an example?
Absolutely. My grandmother called the city where she resettled “that place”—never by its official name. She had renamed it through memory, through what she missed, through the foods she grew there and the relationships she built. That renaming was an act of refusal and reclamation. She wasn’t accepting the city as given; she was making it hers linguistically. I think all displaced people do this, though it’s rarely honored as intellectual work. Feminist practice means documenting these counter-maps.
What’s the relationship between your work as a writer and as a visual artist?
They’re the same project, honestly. I think of text as a visual medium—the shape of a sentence on a page, the white space, the broken lines. When I make visual maps, I’m embedding language into topography. There’s no separation. Both are ways of asking: how does it feel to occupy contradictory spaces? How do we live in places that don’t quite claim us, while we claim them fiercely?
Who do you hope reads or experiences your work?
Anyone who’s ever felt linguistically homeless. Anyone who knows a place by a name that no one else uses. Anyone who’s had to invent themselves geographically. And also: scholars, activists, and institutions who need reminding that knowledge production happens outside official archives—it happens at kitchen tables, in diaspora, in the spaces between languages.
Bio
Dr. Priya Malhotra is a writer, visual artist, and theorist based in Toronto and Lahore. Her work has appeared in Meridian, Asymptote, and Women & Performance, and her artist’s book series “Unmapped Interiors” won the 2024 Feminist Archive Prize. She teaches courses on diaspora poetics, critical cartography, and decolonial aesthetics at three universities simultaneously (a fact she finds deeply funny).
