Crossing Borders: Mapping, Necropolitics, and Border Thinking in Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Map of Salt and Stars

Mapping spaces across times, Syrian American author Zeyn Joukhadar’s novel meditates self-reflexively on storytelling and its participation in acts of mapping, reimagining maps to break up boundaries. Thus, this article analyzes the novel in terms of Walter Mignolo’s ‘border thinking’. However, The Map of Salt and Stars contrasts enthusiastic appraisals of borders and border crossings with the reality of the border and forced mobility, necessitating an analysis aware of the necropolitics of the border (Mbembe 2019; de León 2015). On the level of form, Joukhadar’s novel resists borders by connecting frame and embedded narrative as well as by fusing narrative genres, among them the travel narrative (Ben Driss 2021b) and the Bildungsroman . Tracing how Joukhadar’s novel resists necropolitics, the article closes by discussing the suitability of a Western-marketed Anglophone novel to capture refugee lives.