Spatial Fictions: Imagining (Trans)national Space in the Southern and Western Peripheries of the Nineteenth Century United States

The nineteenth century emerges as a pivotal period in the spatial formation of the United States; it is an era marked by expansionism and the consolidation of the nation. Up until today, many historical writings relate the nineteenth century to spatial concepts such as the Frontier and the Errand into the Wilderness—the settlement of the territory of the United States on an East-West trajectory

Narrating the Isthmus: Mobilities and Archipelagic Memory in Texts about the Panama Canal

The essay uses an archipelagic lens to explore narratives of mobility and relationality surrounding the Panama Canal Zone. In the early twenieth century, the various projects of creating an interoceanic route culminated in the territorializing project of the Panama Canal that was organized around the colonization of land and ocean spaces and tied to the imperial expansion to the Caribbean and the Pacific, making the isthmus a crucial link in the imperial archipelago. After briefly discussing Willis J. Abbot’s popular history of the canal, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose (1913), the essay explores two texts by Black writers that question dominant representations of the canal and of the migrant Caribbean workers who built it: Eric Walrond’s collection of stories, Tropic Death (1926), and the bilingual prose–poetry history of Black West Indians in Panama, An Old Woman Remembers (1995), by Carlos E. Russell. I argue that these texts practice “archipelagic memory” by evoking an archive of submerged historical experiences that relates the Canal Zone to other spaces, and by making visible spectral presences and the sediments of imperial history submerged in the waters of the canal

Spatial Fictions: Imagining (Trans)national Space in the Southern and Western Peripheries of the Nineteenth Century United States

The nineteenth century emerges as a pivotal period in the spatial formation of the United States; it is an era marked by expansionism and the consolidation of the nation. Up until today, many historical writings relate the nineteenth century to spatial concepts such as the Frontier and the Errand into the Wilderness—the settlement of the territory of the United States on an East-West trajectory

Mexican Travelers and the "Texas Question," 1821-1836

The essay analyzes selected works of Mexican travel writing from 1821 to 1836 and their discussion of the so-called “Texas Question”—the growing Anglo Americanization of the region that would lead to its separation from Mexico in 1836. More than any other textual genre of the nineteenth century, travel accounts were not only thematically concerned with, but also actively participated in practices of national self-formation via (post)colonial discourses and territorial expansion. Even though the “Texas Question” was widely debated among the Mexican elite during the 1820s and early ‘30s, only few members of these groups actually traveled to the region or wrote about it in the context of other journey accounts. Two small and distinct groups of Mexican travel texts from the period address the issue: intellectuals’ travelogues about the United States discussing Texas in the context of U.S. territorial expansion, on the one hand, and journey accounts by military officers and scientists who inspected Texas on behalf of the Mexican government, on the other. After a brief overview of the situation of Texas during the 1820s and early ‘30s, the article provides a comparative reading of the major Mexican travelogues of Texas with regard to how they treat the "Texas Question.

Periphere Räume in der Amerikanistik

This volume addresses the notion of the periphery as a concept in cultural studies and the discursive and narrative dimensions of peripheral spaces. Peripheral spaces are defined as those spaces that are controlled and directed only to a limited extent from the center

Spatial Fictions: Imagining (Trans)national Space in the Southern and Western Peripheries of the Nineteenth Century United States

The nineteenth century emerges as a pivotal period in the spatial formation of the United States; it is an era marked by expansionism and the consolidation of the nation. Up until today, many historical writings relate the nineteenth century to spatial concepts such as the Frontier and the Errand into the Wilderness—the settlement of the territory of the United States on an East-West trajectory