The West Hesseltine steamed out of New York harbor in the summer of 1923, bound for West Africa. On board was a young poet, Langston Hughes. As the freighter passed Sandy Hook, a long spit of land stretching into the mouth of the bay, Hughes dragged a crate of his books out on deck. There he stood, in the faintness of dusk, staring down at their bindings. Into the water they went. Reflecting on the impulse to sink his literary cargo in The Big Sea (1940), his first autobiography, Hughes explains that, in slipping off the continent’s edge, he felt himself come unmoored from a lifetime timeline of disappointments:

Hughes’s inventory of his library doubles as an itinerary of the places where it was packed and unpacked. His memories are organized as a list of toponyms: Cleveland to Toluca, Toluca to Columbia, Columbia to Harlem. One can sense, in this sequence of placenames, a cartographic effect: a manifesting image, like those in a classic adventure film, where a protagonist’s travels are animated as a line, extending point-by-point across a map. As a quasi-cartographic figure, Hughes’s library trunk indexes the locales he traversed in the formative years of his life, making a long scalene triangle: from “Cleveland’s vast Negro quarter” (30) down south to Toluca, in the “highest inhabitable valley in Mexico” (42), and back to the island of Manhattan, where he left Columbia’s factory-like dormitories for a room of his own in Harlem. The books he collected along the way, as he reiterates throughout The Big Sea, “happened to him,” and so had the places with which they were associated. Aboard the ship he responds with an unmaking of that map, uprooting of his tortuous route through memory. The momentousness of moving “Beyond Sandy Hook,” as the first chapter of his memoir is called, is underscored by the cathartic act of heaving away this metaphorical atlas, which had weighed down his heart like “a million bricks” (98). This shipboard scene is portentous enough to make for a pivot point in the structure of Hughes’s autobiography; the event both opens and closes the book’s first section, which narrates the first twenty years of his life. The ship’s deck emerges as a waystation where Hughes exchanges a geography of accident for a chart of his own making. The departing vessel is a logistical switching point, both in the narrative structure of the text and in the transit of his life. Sinking his paper cargo sends the sadness of his past into a state of oceanic flux.

A similar urge to remap is demonstrated by a more traditionally cartographic object from Hughes’s archive, made some four decades after his embarking for Africa. In the final years of his life, he would again combine geographic presentation with an unmaking of printed material (Figure I.1). In this case, Hughes tore out the innards of his Hammond’s Handy Atlas of the World (circa 1938) and used a red pencil to plot his life’s journeys across its inside covers. By removing the block of pages from the atlas, he renders its cover a contradictory surface, ripped yet contiguous. On the pastedowns of the atlas, he draws a red-pencil network to exhibit decades of travel, a lifetime of journeying discernible at a glance. The effect is reminiscent of the quotation from The Big Sea cited above, and yet provides a useful contrast. While the imaginary line drawn between the habitations of his childhood is figurative and illusive, the red pencil is illustrative and editorial. In the word-drawn map, Hughes reprises so many sites of his embittered adolescence; in the second, the adjacent covers narrate his migrancies with a retrospective finality. Each one functions as a cartographic summary, shorthand for the halting transit and messy feelings of life. And each is inspired by marine transport in its attempt to represent multiple locations simultaneously. Each is part of Hughes’s abiding experiment with the reconceptualizing of geographic space, as he produces a record of spatial simultaneity that is, paradoxically, “preserved and summarized as a temporal sequence.”Footnote ²

Figure I.1

Langston Hughes’s world journeys.

Figure I.1 Long description

The map highlights geopolitical boundaries with regions labelled Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, French West Africa, and Indochina. The Arctic Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, and Pacific Ocean, along with numerous islands and archipelagos, are marked. The map includes both latitude and longitude markers on the borders. Capitals are denoted with symbols. At the bottom center of the map is a legend that displays the scale used. The map highlights a route starting from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, leading to the Pacific Ocean, the United States, and New York. After New York, it splits into four routes, leading to Europe, the Mediterranean sea, Africa, and South America.

Courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Hughes’s employment of narrative as map and map as narrative concisely illustrates a central-most preoccupation of this book, which aims to examine the shifting relations of cartographic authority, literary genre, and media technologies in the first half of the twentieth century. To pursue this objective is to intervene in vastly changed and still changing accounts of how, and where, modern literature happened. As Vera Kutzinski has pointed out, Hughes is a figure who inhabited “intellectual way stations or crossroads” on the “fringes of modernism as we know it in the English-speaking world, geographically, linguistically and aesthetically.” Spurred by a “feeling of being in perpetual exile,” his migrations, both real and imagined, saw him take up “residence in multiple linguistic and cultural homes,” from Lawrence, Kansas to Havana, Cuba, from decommissioned freight ships to high-society luncheons.Footnote ³ At the same time, his drawing of maps, both real and figurative, is part of a broader transformation in the relationship of modern literature and cartography as such. Houston Baker has commented that literary modernism stems from a historical situation where the location of “anyone and anything” could “no longer be charted on old maps of ‘civilization.’”Footnote ⁴ In The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that the artistic avant-gardes of the early twentieth century moved from representing objects in space to reconceptualizing the experience of space itself. Modern artists negotiated their perceptions of social space in terms of fragmentation and wholeness, the near and the far, tensions of simultaneity and sequence. Their practice was shaped, says Lefebvre, amid a historical situation in which “all reference points were evaporating,” in which the violence of imperial competition was rampantly remaking the world map.Footnote ⁵

As literary artists of the industrial era remade conceptions of space, they responded to a political context in which geographic knowledge was becoming undeniably ephemeral. As Baker notes, the location of anyone and anything on the modern map was provisional, contestable, prone to change. Between Hughes’s first African journey and his remaking of his handy atlas, political geographies shifted like so much sand turned by surf. The Ottoman Empire, once vast, disappeared. The nations of Iraq and Turkey replaced it, bordering the modern kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Japanese Empire extended itself into the mainland of Asia and across the island chains of Northern Oceania. The British Empire contracted, leaving Canada, Australia, and South Africa as newly established nations. Contested protectorates changed hands, as new political outlines insinuated themselves into an international mosaic. Imperial warfare and territorial consolidation made cartography into a Sisyphean venture, erasing and redrawing boundaries as they flitted onto and off the map.

Hughes’s cartographic interventions emerge against this historical backdrop where the relationship between territory and sovereignty was becoming increasingly conditional, prone to violent contestation and sudden change. On one hand, the fundamental and self-assigned task of cartography, in the century’s opening decades, was to create “an objective, comprehensive, and politically neutral record of the world.”Footnote ⁶ Mapping was a practice shaped, according to the historian William Rankin, by “the ideal of authoritative representation,” an ideal that supposed tight correspondence between making territory legible and taking control of it. And yet this was an era of pointed cartographic upheaval, in which political base maps needed constant updating or total remaking. The post-Versailles world map revealed the “objective” records of state cartographers to be contested fabrications, with polities divided and parceled in closed-door negotiations, issuing a deep disappointment to the advocates of decolonization.Footnote ⁷ Even as nation-states took shape as the “fundamental building blocks of global geography,” they revealed themselves to be a species of metageography: “constructed, contingent, and often imposed.”Footnote ⁸ Even so, no matter how tumultuous and arbitrary this historical process was, cartography’s ideal of authoritative representation served to bolster an abiding nation-state ideal. It allowed for a hardening of international borders, which have, excepting the dissolution of the USSR, changed less dramatically in the seventy years after World War II than in the seventy years preceding it. Ironically enough, such a hardening of national maps has accompanied a change in the expectations of map users, or rather a transformation in cartography’s symbolic authority. By the close of the twentieth century, maps proliferated not so much as unwavering emblems of state authority but as fluid vectors of geographical data, ceaselessly updated by software engineers and geo-tagging consumers.

This book supposes that historical transformations in cartography directly informed the way that literary authors conceived of and reproduced geographic knowledge in literary form. It likewise suggests that changes in literary form helped, in their own way, to loosen up the colonialist equivalence of political authority and geographic representation. To establish this case, I follow Hsuan Hsu in charting the different attitudes that writers assume “toward dominated space, ranging from passive description to imaginative transformation.” The cartographic flux of the early twentieth century stirred up a contentiousness in and between literary authors as they reacted to transforming logics of territorial representation. Some sought to challenge national authority; others to chart out a “panoply of changing and contested spaces.”Footnote ⁹ As political territories became evermore contradictory, contingent, and imposed, twentieth-century authors employed a variety of written genres in the construction of what I characterize as literary counter-maps. In the chapters that follow, I am continuously drawn to these uneven and unfinished attempts at signifying what Lefebvre refers to as a “differential space,” a space that accommodates difference and yet eschews the geopolitical fragmentation of the official, jigsaw map. I describe how authors from across US dominion tinkered with a variety of literary genres to make them run contrary to territorial nationalism and, by contrast, assert divergent aspirations toward another kind of spatial design. These alternative geographies, issued from current and former US territories, sought to break open official representations and, in their interstices, articulate a new feeling for political space. In the making of counter-maps, official methods of claiming and dominating territory were tested, contested, and, in the end, collectively revised.

This signal term, “counter-mapping,” moves across a variety of scholarly fields. The Oxford Dictionary of Human Geography defines counter-mapping as the “production of maps by a community that seeks to challenge the maps produced and used by a state, administrative body, or commercial company.” The term was first employed in scholarship by Nancy Lee Peluso while working alongside the Dayak community to challenge forestry maps of Kalimantan, Indonesia, and so it is sometimes used synonymously with “Indigenous mapping.” Over the last decade, Native American studies has produced a rich conceptualization of Indigenous counter-cartographies, articulated by scholars such as Lisa Brooks, Shari Huhndorf, and Mishuana Goeman. In a cautionary tale, Joe Bryan and Denis Wood have exposed the way militaries and corporations enlist Indigenous participants in the construction of reconnaissance maps, often in ways that subvert Native interests. In another permutation of counter-mapping, Elizabeth DeLoughrey has brought together Oceanian and Afro-Caribbean understandings of oceanic travel to theorize the relations between literary writing and island geographies. Still another and related locus for counter-mapping is in the work of the Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter, whose idea of the “counter-concept” influences the cultural geographies of Katherine McKittrick. In her book. Demonic Grounds (2006), McKittrick demonstrates how the enclosures of slave ship and plantation issued “an oppositional geography,” or patterns of spatial knowledge “that work alongside and across traditional geographies.”Footnote ¹⁰

These sources of the counter-map are crucial to my account of modern literature and its cartographic imagination, not least because they deviate from and reroute European cartographies of discovery and conquest. The assumptions embedded in centuries-old maps of conquest persisted through the cartographic transformations of the twentieth century and continue to influence contemporary geopolitics. As Nicolás Wey Gómez asserts in his study of latitude, climate and Columbus’s voyages, today’s commonplace distinction between the “developed” nations of the global north and the “developing” nations of the south derives from an ancient Greek understanding of geography as the “quest to apprehend the nature of all things placed.” After discovering that Europe was a northern neighbor to an “immensely rich and populous world to the south,” not an uninhabitable “torrid zone” that medieval scholars had presumed lay south, Columbus and his “ideological heirs would insist on construing tropical peoples as Europe’s moral periphery.”Footnote ¹¹ The east-to-west orientation of United States’s own mythic history tracks stubbornly along this Columbian, moral latitude. The southern border of the continental United States functions as a fantasy-mirror of cultural perceptions, a latitude of ideology “wedded to nineteenth-century notions of time as linear and progressive, and to geographical space as a metaphor for the inexorable movement of history.”Footnote ¹² In its lasting commitment to manifest destiny, the map of the United States succumbs to what psychoanalysts call a “negative hallucination,” a refusal to display the extension of its territories from the Arctic Circle to the sub-equatorial Pacific. Nursery rhymes convey a simplified geographic fantasy to the school children of the republic, who learn to sing that their nation spans from “sea to shining sea” and to recite that Columbus sailed the “ocean blue” in 1492 – only to mistakenly name the people he encountered “Indians.”

But those that sing “America the Beautiful” are little less mistaken. The United States does not begin and end at the edges of two seas but maintains dozens of what Brian Russell Roberts calls “noncanonical” maritime borders. Its territorial seas adjoin those of Tonga, New Zealand, Japan, and Russia. This geopolitical reality does little to trouble the “continental nationalism” entrenched by classroom maps.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, the United States’s control of the Panama Canal from 1903 to 1999 – as well as its administration of an “insular state” encompassing Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico – extended Columbus’s famous “mistake.” He and his followers imagined Asia and the Americas as conjoined in a malleable, imperial fantasy structure called Las Indias. After a war with Spain in 1898, territories shaped by that fantasy became included in “The Greater United States of America.”Footnote ¹⁴ By situating literature amid such a mercurial field of geopolitics, this book seeks to pursue a deimperializing view of present and former US territories.Footnote ¹⁵ It makes a distinctive contribution to the study of what Ricardo Padrón, in his scholarship on sixteenth-century Spanish imperium, calls “cartographic literature.” The category includes “written texts deeply invested in the configuration of space,” and Padrón names “travel narrative and official historiography” among its genres (12). My account seeks to complement this category by adding analyses of autobiography, loco-descriptive poetry, maritime fiction, folk anthology, and ethnographic romance. Over the course of five chapters, I explain how authors retooled these genres to grapple with the material infrastructures of American dominion. In short, this is a study of the cartographic literature of US empire.

My approach builds upon scholarly interventions that have established connections between modes of literary production and institutions of map-making, the achievements of individual cartographers, and the protocols of geography as an academic discipline.Footnote ¹⁶ What is unique about this book is the emphasis it places on the technological infrastructure that surrounded and pervaded literary conceptualizations of space in the twentieth century. By focusing on the way cartographic literature reconciled itself with new media and modes of transit, I treat literary form as a kind of map, mediated by its industrial environs. My aim is to establish modern writers as counter-cartographers who were diversely affected by a historical proliferation of transport and communication technologies – machines such airplanes, automobiles, cameras, record players, and film projectors – all of which subjected space and time to strange variations previously inaccessible to human experience and aesthetic presentation. This broadened view of media infrastructure follows David Trotter’s example in construing the machinery of transit and shipping as no less communicative than telephones, radios, or written texts.Footnote ¹⁷ Speaking geographically, the opening of a new roadway allows one part of a country to communicate with another one, an old semantic link between transportation and communication still audible in the everyday cognate “commuter.” I will expound on this infrastructural experience of space, or “geotechnical aesthetic” as I call it, in the next section of this introduction. Doing so enables me to set the methodological stakes of my approach, its commitment to engaging with literary formalism and political history at once. In setting this methodological compass, I will eventually return to Hughes on the deck of the West Hesseltine. His autobiography offers an object lesson in how attending to matters of infrastructure can work to deimperialize cartographic knowledge, maps of the USA included.

Geotechnical Aesthetics

By intertwining themes of technology and territory, my literary-critical approach draws from two distinct scholarly traditions, media ecology and postcolonial theory, each of which inspires and guides my understanding of cartographic literature. Any study of technology and aesthetics must locate itself in a vast and branching intellectual genealogy. My own thinking in this space is informed by Frankfurt School theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Susan Buck-Morss, a lineage of Canadian media studies scholars, from Harold Innis to Jody Berland, as well as foundational historians of technology, such as Lewis Mumford. This stream of media studies carries me directly toward the topic of cartographic literature, not least because of its abiding investment in the spatiality of media. Innis’s classic lectures on empire and communications, for instance, stressed the dynamism of a particular medium as it balanced a bias toward space and a bias toward time. Fragile yet easy to store, Egyptian papyrus evinced a time-bias, concentrating a monopoly of knowledge within a class of clerical scribes, whilst cuneiform tablets, more durable and transportable, evidenced the Phoenician space-bias, distributing knowledge across a seafaring, mercantile society.Footnote ¹⁸ Jody Berland has extended Innis’s theory of communications into an investigation of the cultural technologies of empire, alloying media ecology with theorists of the spatial turn, such as Lefebvre, and postcolonial theorists, such as Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said. This unique confluence inspires her insight into the cartographic flux of the last century, that maps celebrate a “love of surfaces” as well as “the inspiration of movement in which surfaces morph and disappear.”Footnote ¹⁹

To conjure such a movement in the map of the United States, my approach draws on the works of Said, Spivak, and Édouard Glissant, as well as on an engagement with Native American Studies, carrying these commitments along a more recent “archipelagic turn” in American Studies. Decolonizing methods forwarded by Black and Indigenous thinkers have been vital to this emergent framework, which establishes that the “insular” territories of the United States, such as Guam and Puerto Rico, have been eclipsed by the nation’s continental bias. What Paul Giles calls the “archipelagic accretion” of American Studies has been shaped by a compaction of concepts from Oceanian and Caribbean worldviews. The Micronesian navigational principle of “the moving island,” Kamau Brathwaite’s theory of “tidalectics,” Glissant’s “poetics of Relation,” Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s “repeating islands,” Wynter’s idea of the “counterconcept” – all have been mobilized to upset the hierarchical divisions of land and sea, continent and archipelago, state and territory that define the nation’s geo-epistemology.Footnote ²⁰ In the latter half of this book especially I investigate how these insular regions shaped the cartographic imagination of modern American literature. Here the Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez guides my navigations of the “terripelagic relations” of US imperium. Equally important to such a deimperializing map of the United States is the work of Filipino scholar Allan Punzalan Isaac. His American Tropics (2006) investigated the legal and cultural language that tethered island “appurtenances” to the national polity, whilst likewise expelling them and their inhabitants into a shadowy realm of colonial ambiguity.Footnote ²¹

My goal in this introductory section, though, is to articulate a conceptual language that cinches the concerns of media ecology closer to those of postcolonial theory in general, and archipelagic American Studies in particular. To accomplish this, I want to effect two things. First, I want to introduce a lexicon that allows my reader to grasp the impact that new media technologies had on the spatial sensibilities of early twentieth-century authors. After that, I will establish the spatial scope of my study – its map, if you will. It seems important to pursue these goals in tandem because they jointly support the synoptic claim of this book: that the technologies which dominated space in the early twentieth century, once impressed into the minds of literary writers, became intellectual instruments for re-conceiving that space, and for interrogating the map’s ideal of representational authority. To frame this argument, we need a theoretical structure where issues of technology and territory intersect.

Recent works by Lisa Gitelman, David Trotter, and N. Katherine Hayles have pointed to salutatory ways in which literary scholars can impact contemporary debates about media, technology, and politics, especially in ways that complicate the digital exceptionalism of the twenty-first century.Footnote ²² To contribute to this relevant confluence of literary and media histories, I want to elucidate a concept that is central to my account of cartographic literature, that of a “geotechnical aesthetic,” a term I use to designate a historically conditioned, infrastructural experience of space. The phrase builds on the historiographic language developed by Lewis Mumford in Civilization and Technics (1934), a now classic account of Europe’s conceptualization of “the machine.” Mumford makes a habit of adding odd prefixes to the word “technics” to delineate phases in the inexorable march of the machine’s progress. He uses “neotechnic” to name his own moment of late industrialism, marked by the arrival of electricity, aviation, cinema, phonography, the personal camera, plastics, anesthetics, antibacterial agents, and so on. He speculates that some future historian will need to reconceive of the neotechnic era as a “mesotechnic” phase, a blip between the industrial revolution and a future society, in which, Mumford hopes, technology will be adapted to the social and biological needs of all humans, rather than designed to benefit the few that invent, invest in, and legislate it.Footnote ²³ Rather than take the bait of teleology, I opt for “geotechnic,” a term that eschews his progressive model of history, and instead emphasizes the spatial ramifications of machines. Crucially, this term helps to see the planet as an agent of communication, a living technic that inspired literary counter-mapping at a moment of colonial upheaval.

If Mumford defined technics in terms of human agency, people’s adaptation and augmentation of their natural environment, the “geo” prefix, which refers to “planet,” “world,” or “earth,” situates the act and responsibility of communication elsewhere. The word “geography,” derived from Latin for “world-writing,” shares its “-graphy” suffix with a class of representational media that emerged in the epoch of industrialization: photography (light-writing), phonography (sound-writing), and cinematography (motion-writing). David Trotter notes how technologies that “attract the -graphy suffix” are often storage devices “which allow for re-presentation,” setting them apart from connective media, such as telephones or televisions, which connect people and places simultaneously.Footnote ²⁴ Trotter’s useful because not absolute distinction between connective and representational media is relevant to the sense of geotechnics I am articulating here. Though connective media possess a bias toward simultaneity, and while representational media divide the time and place of recording from that of playback, both varieties of media work to re-arrange geospatial perceptions and newly attune geospatial feelings. Both classes contribute to a shift in what William Rankin calls “geo-epistemology,” because they afford a situation in which something that is known to exist in one place might suddenly and somewhat surprisingly be found to exist somewhere else.

But what if, like Mumford, we stress the changing prefixes of these writing technologies rather than the enduring “-graphy” suffix. By referring to “geotechnical media,” I want to emphasize the profound and irreducibly geographical status of supposedly representational media. These are forms of writing, I want to suggest, wherein the planet, not a person, is attributable as author. Light, motion, sound, water; these forces, channeled by the implements of what Mumford calls the neotechnic, become self-sufficient and graphic means of communication. Rather than represent the world, the camera, gramophone, and cinema projector allow for the materiality of the planet to disclose itself to and through the machine. Medium and author are conflated amid an automated, mechanical process. As Kaja Silverman argues in her history of photography, cameras are means by which the planet speaks to humans. The ancient technic of the camera obscura, from which photographic reproduction derives, does not represent the light of the world; it is the light of the world. In this view, the camera produces not reproductions of reality but rather a “summons to relationality.”Footnote ²⁵ There is a growing tendency to brush media history against the grain by accepting the nonhuman as communicative. John Durham Peters thinks of clouds and atmosphere as a form of elemental media, and Melody Jue conceives of ocean depths as a mediating milieu of physical and conceptual estrangements.Footnote ²⁶ Such innovative works take the intellectual project of media ecology into a commodious niche. Building on their insights, my sense of geotechnical media outlines an aesthetically revolutionary moment in the history of the machine, the arrival of technics by which elements of the planet, rather than human beings, do the writing. Via geotechnical media, the earth becomes its own ambassador, alloying human communication with a restive otherness.

The term “geotechnical aesthetics” describes the mediation of historical space by a strange new nature, arising from technics of communication, transportation, and recording. Cinema, radio, photography: these media of the last machine age thoroughly altered human perception. Their effects were epistemological – impacting what people know about geography, and aesthetic – impacting how they perceive and feel space. As geotechnics attuned new spatial feelings, a dawning awareness of this altered geo-epistemology emerges in the cartographic literature of modernity, as the fresh effects of geotechnical media loosened the assumption that cartography authoritatively placed and fixed things. For Walter Benjamin, to step into a cinema is simultaneously to be enclosed by the prison-world of industrialism and to see it blown apart. On the screen, things formerly felt to be remote become suddenly proximate. According to Benjamin, it is another nature that speaks through the camera.Footnote ²⁷ The same can be said of what Trotter taxonomizes as representational media. Light through a camera’s aperture or sound waves on a microphone diaphragm are stored indefinitely. As copies, they abound in other places. With the press of a button or drop of a needle, one earthly locale transposes itself on another. Recording technologies, as geotechnics, encode and recombine spatial information. Any given location is a composite or palimpsest of locations, grafting the site of recording to that of playback. By effecting this spatial flux, representational media such as photographs and phonographs lend themselves, as intellectual resources, to the working out of oppositional cartographies, to the conception of literary counter-maps. The arrival of the “geo” as an agent of graphism undermines the authority of objects such as Hughes’s handy atlas. Mediations of spatial experience – or, if you will, geotechnical aesthetics – spell trouble for geography’s “discursive attachment to stasis.”Footnote ²⁸

We can describe geotechnical aesthetics another way. By newly animating space and its representations, modern technologies of communication and representation accelerate a longstanding effect of narrative, that of psychic transport.Footnote ²⁹ Geotechnical media renewed the ancient role of storytelling as a form of spatial prosthesis, allowing an ever-changing audience an intimacy with places and things they otherwise could never experience directly. Under the geotechnic regime, art’s old relationship with imaginative transport only intensifies, as spatial rearrangements become more persistent, more pronounced, less predictable. In a rare comment on cinema, the philosopher Martin Heidegger expressed his wonder that films present “the most distant cities of the most ancient cultures as if they stood at this very moment amidst today’s street traffic.”Footnote ³⁰ The juxtaposition of ancient cities and automotive congestion evokes the uncanny turns of the geotechnic. Objects once preserved by dust or isolated by distance are now a multidirectional mass of commotion, an imminent collision. The far-to-near dynamic spurred by geotechnical media might equally recall the way Walter Benjamin described the “aura” of the artwork as withered by the onset of its reproducibility. Benjamin defined the aura in terms of spatial dialectic: the “unique apparition of a distance, no matter how near it may be.”Footnote ³¹ Cinema-going expressed a need to puncture an “apparition of a distance,” to get closer “spatially.” This desire – aimed at liquidating the distancing effect of the aura – was, for him, nothing less than revolutionary. In his foundational study of media aesthetics, he compares the painter, who produced for elite and select audiences, to the filmmaker, who produced for the masses. The painter, like a sorcerer, might heal a body by laying their hands on it. Theirs was an occult knowledge tuned to the surfaces of reality. The filmmaker, by contrast, was more like a surgeon, cutting into the reality and separating it from itself. Importantly, the geotechnical image is always more than what its creator intends it to be. In photographic reproduction, something other speaks to the mass audience: the future, nestled in the arms of the past, rises, ready to impress itself on the present. Benjamin called this temporal otherness “the dialectical image.”

Oft cited as it is, Benjamin’s discussion of the copy’s nearness and the aura’s distance remains potent. Not only does his thinking underline how media enact what the geographer David Harvey calls “time-space compression,” a collapse of the near and far, it also indicates how technologies of representation are inserted into the corpus of reality and merge with organs of human perception.Footnote ³² On this point, Benjamin’s confidant and patron, Theodor Adorno, wrote in his Aesthetic Theory: “artistic modernism draws its power from the fact that the most advanced procedures of material production and organization … radiate out into areas far removed from them, deep into the zones of subjective experience.”Footnote ³³ Think of the consequences for an author’s subjective experience. Media are not just what one sees; they intermingle themselves with how one sees. Cinema radiates from within. Geotechnical media attune spatial feelings that are subjectively felt and disclosed only through equally estranging subjective impressions. Indeed, the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan points out that machines fundamentally affect how people feel space. The motor car, for instance, “opens up a world of speed, air, and movement” that for millennia had been best figured by the hunt for animals.Footnote ³⁴ Geotechnics both condition experience and emerge as an exhilarating effect of it, a spatial sensibility expressed in literary form – a radically other spatial feeling that collapses the strange and the familiar, the natural and unnatural, the far and the near.

Infrastructure and Errantry

Following this elaboration of geotechnical aesthetics, I want to return to Hughes’s autobiography to elaborate its status as a counter-map, and its enmeshment with geotechnics. This will require attention the specificity of his narrative, details that will urge me to enlist media ecology into a postcolonial method for reading cartographic literature. Hughes was no stranger to the struggle over social space, nor to the infrastructural arrangements of US power. In the months before setting to sea, he worked a medley of jobs, finding what limited work he could in the face of “the American color line” and its “inconvenient prejudices” (197). Most would-be employers greeted him incredulously: “‘But I didn’t ask for a colored boy’” (86). In his penultimate job before journeying to Africa, he ran deliveries for an upscale florist, driving extravagant bouquets that cost more than his monthly rent out to the exclusive enclaves of the New York metropolitan area: “Marion Davies on a yacht, the Roosevelts at Oyster Bay” (88). He did not much like the job, despite the occasional thrill of spotting a celebrity over a butler’s shoulder, so he looked elsewhere. After scouring “want ads, employment offices, the Y, the railroad stations, the big hotels, the shoe shine stands,” he finally spent his days haunting the shipping offices and dockyards of lower Manhattan (89). At last, he caught a break: a job as a mess boy on a ship. Only it was going nowhere. The winter of 1922 was spent aboard a “rusty tub” anchored up the Hudson River at Jones Point, with eighty or more equally unseaworthy boats that had been built on government contracts during World War I.

Hughes is comprehensive in detailing the logistical space created by his stewardship of this dead flotilla: “To reach us from Jones Point, you came out in a rowboat, boarded the first ship in the fleet, at the head of a long line of boats anchored in the river, then walked the whole length of the entire fleet, sometimes across planks connecting boats with no sign of railing or rope, and finally you reached our mother ship at the far end” (91). This sentence is more than just a description of precarious infrastructure; it is a navigational aid, written in the second person, as if conveying directions to be followed by a phantom visitor or imaginary delivery person. To be sure, Hughes, in his previous job, would have been on the receiving end of many such instructions. These two jobs thus position themselves at opposing ends of New York’s social infrastructure. In the first, he hurried through the churning machinery of the city’s transit system, barraged by orders and directions. In the next, his position is exactly reversed, made stationary. He cooks and reads and writes amid the hissing radiators of a weary ship, frozen in a bend of the river. He gives directions to an errant visitor who will reach him only figuratively, through the architecture of an autobiography he would write eighteen years later.

It is against this relatively localized backdrop of littoral New York that we can review Hughes’s more general project of charting his life’s migrations by attacking the physicality of written texts. We might pause to reconsider, in light of the immediate context related above, how his efforts to create counter-maps involved defiantly biblioclastic gestures: the sunken library, the gutted atlas. Each was informed by his transit of a maritime environment, which afforded him a subtle but important grammatical shift, the move from receiver to giver of navigational directions. Hughes’s literary cartographies prove deeply invested in presenting geographic space according to the relational perspectives of ship and shore. In The Big Sea, as the light of New York City recedes behind Sandy Hook, his books seem to him suddenly like dead weight. The departing freighter breaks his ties to the escapist habits of his childhood. The literary medium that once offered metaphorical transport now obstructs the real thing, an insight that comes from the ship’s power to spin the land around and sight it otherwise. Once a-sea, books emerge as figurative anchors that risk curtailing oceanic movement. In the case of the atlas, torn apart in the 1960s, the production of Hughes’s life-map compels violence again to be directed at the medium of the book, but now the hand and the pencil replace the ship and the ocean as the agents of transformation. As he recreates his nautical course across the Atlantic, he transfers the propulsive energies of the boat into a line of inscription transiting the page. This retroactively casts ocean-going as an alternative system of writing. Transit and gesture are posited as counter-veiling systems of cartographic representation, implicitly suggesting that that which is printed and engraved in books might be, and can be, rethought. While national maps assert themselves as political facts, soliciting the acceptance of a populace en mass, one’s lived experiences of space cannot be contained by their codes of representation.

As a counter-cartographer, Hughes became fixated on bibliographic jetsam. All the short stories based on his journey aboard the West Hesseltine feature discarded reading material. A scholastic textbook is thrown overboard in “Bodies in the Moonlight.” In the “The Young Glory of Him,” a jilted youngster, the daughter of missionaries, leaps suicidally overboard, but not before attacking her diary, leaving it “obliterated with heavy pen and ink lines.”Footnote ³⁵ As if in memoriam, the narrator dutifully slips her ruined journal over the deck-rail. A Conradian character in “Luani of the Jungles” writes poems only to rip them up, echoing Hughes’s autobiographical wish to travel “away from my books into life.”Footnote ³⁶ Clearly Hughes dwelt for some time on his lost treasury, bloated and distended, scattered on the waves. Perhaps that is because these books transcend the status of personal effects. Once they take their place within the technological infrastructure of lived space, they are awash with what Padrón calls, in another context, the anxieties of “paper empires.”Footnote ³⁷ The reason I dwell with some patience on Hughes’s damaged library is because it provides a figure for putting the geography of the United States into motion, a gesture that spins its terrain around and charts it otherwise. In this sense, his jettison of the books is a powerful instance of what Martinican literary theorist Édouard Glissant describes as “errant thought.” In writing of nomadism, errantry, and exile, Glissant argues that we should see departure from colonial and national identity neither as a “resolute act of rejection” nor as an “uncontrolled impulse of abandonment.”Footnote ³⁸ Errantry does not stem, he writes, from a frustration with the “supposedly deteriorated (deterritorialized) situation of origin” (18). Of course, it would be easy enough to read Hughes’s discarded things in terms of just such a frustration, a rejection or abandonment resulting from his tormenting, personal encounters with Jim Crow. However, by attending to the mutable perspectives afforded by the marine infrastructure he transited, it becomes possible to see the same event another way. Seeking a new relation to the machinery of modernity, Hughes’s nomadic stories tell not of a rejection, nor of a voyage of discovery, but of an uprooting and exile that can be “experienced as search for the Other” (18). They set out in search of a counter-map – a nomadic, not a national, cartography.

In his own Glissantian account of Hughes’s internationalism, Brent Hayes Edwards sees such detours as a “turning away” from the “obsession with roots and singular genealogy” that structure national identity. He points out that Glissant “tends to fall back on the nation-state and the national community as the final points of entanglement.”Footnote ³⁹ In Glissant’s own words, errant theory cuts against the “current of nationalist expansion” (14). It emerges amid the “destructuring of compact national entities” (18). To me, Hughes’s maps demonstrate that such an “arrant, passionate desire to go against a root” (15) can be aimed at linguistic representation, how the quest for a dialectical relation to the Other requires a retooling of printed or engraved media. He bends maritime logistics toward a destructuring of the atlas. His shipboard perspective allows him to see his rootedness to a national territory as relational, as something Other. Hughes’s transit on the West Hesseltine – a ship carrying Hollywood films and automotive parts – emerges as its own, alternative cartographic system. In pursuit of errantry, The Big Sea charts a wandering away from genres of discovery and conquest. It flees from what Glissant calls the imperial “mechanics of the voyage,” opening a different kind of archive from which to consider the process of dispossession initiated by Columbus and the conquerors who followed. From this more hopeful stance, we might see his books, finally, as they settle on the seabed, as opening a new chart, as exchanging the rootedness of national literature for what Glissant, citing the Barbadian poet Kamau Braithwaite, celebrates as “submarine roots: that is floating free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Toward a Dialectical Map

Langston Hughes was by no means alone in understanding the complex ways that cartography, technology, and literature became inter-folded in the twentieth century. As an experiment in errant thought, this book travels along an extended network of literary counter-maps, displaying the various motivations and strategies that authors followed in making them. Each chapter employs a relational style of reading, bringing together canonical US writers with authors from territories construed as “peripheral” to, or rather erased by, the prevailing continental nationalism of the United States. As a mode of literary criticism, this method poses several compelling advantages. First, it helps to estrange the canonical foundations of US literature and point to the provisional, capricious, and unrooted logics of territorially based inclusions. Secondly, the attention to former and foreclosed US territories signals a commitment to a decolonial literary history. Finally, and perhaps most crucially for my purposes, such an expanded geographical frame is essential for establishing the primary contention of this book: that mass media technologies became an imaginative infrastructure by which authors from disparate locations of US dominion sought to interrogate, reassert, resist, and, in the end, figuratively transform the state’s authoritative assumptions about the representability of political space. This book’s map, if you will, is drawn by reading contrapuntally between nation and territory. It seeks, in the end, to unmake the continental icon of US nationalism.

Chapter 1 takes Gertrude Stein’s visit to the recently incorporated “Indian Territory” of Oklahoma as an opportunity to reread her geographical histories of the United States from a point in Native space. Stein undertook a project of writing an ode to each US state during a speaking tour where she flew from state to state. She apostrophized them on airline stationary emblazoned with a US map as logo. I contrast Stein’s autobiographical appreciation for aviation and state lines with the cartographic consciousness of the Yankton Dakota writer Zitkála-Šá. Her autobiographical essays of the early twentieth century contain shadow maps of Očhéthi Šakówin, or The Great Sioux Nation. Emphasizing horizon lines, clouds, and shadows, the spatial forms of Zitkála-Šá’s writing outline and defend Sioux land claims in the face of their territorial occlusion. They complicate Stein’s excitement over how the airplane makes patchwork earth look like an official US map. In essence, Zitkála-Šá’s literary and political activism proffers an Indigenous counter-map, submitting it for consideration by federal officials and the reading public alike. At its core, this chapter considers autobiography as a contested genre of cartographic literature. I argue that the form was retooled by Stein and Zitkála-Šá in ways that make the overlap of US geography and Native space visible as a differential space.

Chapter 2 turns to loco-descriptive poetry, read in the context of an expanding highway infrastructure. Whereas the first chapter confronts the erasure of Indigenous nations from the centre of US political geography, this chapter critiques the conceptual gulf that makes domestic US car culture seem remote from the foreign lands sustaining it. It opens with a consideration of oil maps deposited in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, some of which critique the expropriation of former Ottoman territories by Anglo-American cartels. At that very locus, we find the Iraqi modernist Nazik al-Malā’ikah, whose lyrics of the 1940s envision a very different kind of energy poetics as that fantasized by Anglo-American modernists. Hers is a map where the dividing line between oil’s extractive and consumptive spheres is decidedly smudged. Her lyrics sound out an abysmal space of colonial violence that echoes with the potential for pan-Arab nationalism. Reading this spatial differential allows us to navigate a US canon of car poems anew. As such, the chapter closes with a close reading of automotive aesthetics in Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. The oily infrastructure of the US highway system provides them with a conflicted linguistic resource, distinguished by the expulsion of extractive violence from the exhilarations of their paratactic lyrical accelerations.

While the first two chapters highlight the interplay between technologies of transport and literary configurations of space, the next three revolve around geotechnical modes of recording. This is a chain of island counter-maps, each focusing on a single representational media technology – camera, phonograph, and film projector – as it informs the cartographic imagining of the nation’s “insular” empire. As I itemize the technical functions of recording – the camera’s capture of light, the record’s storage of sound, the cinema’s phantasmagorial projection – I draw the discourse of media ecology into conversation with the emergent framework of archipelagic American Studies. While several contributors to the archipelagic turn in American Studies have emphasized the status of the United States as an oceanic nation, attending to issues of maritime law and Economic Exclusion Zones, my emphasis remains on techno-mediating infrastructures. My reading of these multimedia maps seeks to dislodge the continental United States from its representational centrality. Methods of recording and mechanical reproduction, I maintain, were essential to the federal government’s management of its “insular” possessions, a fantasy composite that stitched together Caribbean, Pacific, and Philippine waters. As they inform modern literature’s cartographic imagination, geotechnical media elucidate a zone of contest and negotiation, where authors pursue the divergent aims of mapping another America entirely.

Chapter 3 reads two maritime fictions against the cartographic and photographic records of US War Department’s Bureau of Insular Affairs. I argue that the unpredictability over the camera’s mode of photochemical exposure heightened colonial anxieties regarding the assimilation of the Philippines into the body politic and national culture of the United States. To showcase a literary counterpoint to the Bureau’s colonizing project, I read back and forth between the island-hopping narratives of Ernest Hemingway and Ramon Muzones, addressing the fluid visual field of their contrasting counter-maps. Muzones is a Hiligaynon language novelist from the Visayas who idolized Hemingway and whose career parallels his in that both writers worked for US military intelligence agencies during World War II. Their shipboard fiction sets adrift the repressive and racializing logics of US military technics. But the novelists move in different directions. Disillusioned, the late Hemingway gets lost at sea, uninterested in a return to national homeland. Muzones, by contrast, complies a pre-Hispanic nautical map, asserting a regional Visayan space that subtends the national geography of a newly independent Philippine republic.

Chapter 4 parallels the formalism of the literary anthology with technologies of audio recording, arguing that methods of storing and recombining audio artifacts impress themselves on the editorial organization Zora Neale Hurston’s literary anthropologies. I begin by presenting folklore collections as a species of sonic cartography. Drawing from Hurston’s fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti, I argue that she hears national boundaries in stereo image, where the political borders between the US and Caribbean islands are both offset and overlapped. Hurston’s notion of a national sonic boundary is distinct from that heard by Jean Toomer, for whom folksong is a spiritual rejoinder to the oppressive violence of agricultural labor. Toomer’s famous swansong to Georgia’s small-town sugarcane harvest is echoed and distorted by Cuban soundscapes. Poems of cañaveral, or cane harvest, by Agustin Acosta and Nicolás Guillén provide a contrapuntal documentation of Cuba’s rather different agricultural identity and pose toward US imperium. While presenting the literary collection as a genre of cartographic literature, I suggest that the line demarcating continental nation from island colony was not just aquatic, but was also sonic: heard in stereo, and often out of phase.

Chapter 5 introduces a final genre of cartographic literature in its dialectic with the technics of US territory-making. Here I focus on the ethnographic romance, in novel and film, highlighting the written word’s response to the phantasmagorical effects of cinematic projection. I begin with an extended reading of Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, which redramatizes the cowboy myth of Mesa Verde’s “discovery.” An anti-Hollywood novel that emulates Hollywood’s cinematic shimmer, the novel sites Mesa Verde as sacred island, reefed by the kitsch “civilization” of the United States. I compare Cather’s ethnological romance to that of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s contemporaneous film Moana of the South Seas. The first film to be called “documentary,” it romanticizes the isolation of Sāmoa as magical lotus-land set outside “civilization.” Both the Flahertys and Cather mark out national space against the anachronism of a remote island. Spinning this view around, I close the book with the story of a young woman, Fialelei, who served as producer and translator for the Flahertys in Sāmoa. Fialelei accompanied the Flahertys to the United States after shooting the film, and Fialelei’s malaga [voyage] to the United States visualizes its urban geography according to the Samoan spatial principle of the Vā, which means, in Sāmoan, both “division” and the “space-between.” This Oceanian counterpoint provides a new position from which to view not just the film Fialelei stewarded, but for interrogating the role of cinematic fantasy in isolating the “primitive” from “civilized,” and projecting the former onto the “insular.”

This is a compilation of maps that cumulatively trace out an errant cartography, a dialectical relation between nation and its Other. Crucially, this is a Glissantian “Other,” which does not mean a foreign person or an alien land, exactly, but comes closer to signifying a state of mental estrangement, a reappropriation of the Freudian unconscious, a territory of thought that figures the limit of what is mappable. This self-estranging encounter with an internal Other turns any reader of literary history into “a disconcerted actor in the poetics of relation.”Footnote ⁴¹ As Joshua Bennett puts it, such a “relation is exemplified not by the lifelong bond or the unbreakable phalanx but by strangers screaming in disparate tongues across the void.”Footnote ⁴² Such placement in the abyss and such incomprehensible exchange makes relation into a fragile and fraught communicative practice, where speakers collide in various combinations and refuse completion in any form of racial or national cohesion. In the context of errantry, the Other refers to a geographical knowledge that is yet-to-be, political potential that is blocked by the contraposed identarian terms of colonizer and colonized, by the conceit that a nation is racinated through figures of blood and soil. In the spirit of Glissant’s errantry, this book’s archiving of literary maps refuses to set its foundation in diametrically opposed figures of modern and traditional, developed and undeveloped, domestic and foreign, colonizer and colonized. A decolonial relation will be achieved, says Glissant, when these oppositional terms no longer hold water.

To prepare for such a journey into errantry, I would like for my readers to imagine that they hold in their hand a sheaf of maps that make translucent the operations of colonial map-making as such, exposing them as contingent, imposed, and arbitrary. The literary maps in this book are all palimpsests, at variance with themselves, open to being read in several ways at once. They produce representations that challenge the very codes by which representations function. The prospect of deimperializing conventional maps might compel readers onward, despite what Brent Edwards, apropos of Black internationalism, calls the “unavoidable misapprehensions and misreadings” that come with reaching beyond the national archive.Footnote ⁴³ For this reason, my collection of counter-maps is defined by a failure to cohere. It invites a disjunctive style of organization and analysis. The archiving together of multiple literary forms and traditions should not be read, for instance, as an attempt to include Cuban or Dakota authors within the confines of a US literary canon, nor within a stable definition of “American Modernism.” Rather my method of pairing a canonical author with an outlying one exemplifies what Said called “contrapuntal” reading, a “different kind of reading and interpretation,” simultaneously aware of the dominant discourse of literary historiography and the “other histories against which” it acts. This book’s organization of authors seeks to reinterpret modern literature by acknowledging how literary conceptualizations of space are “fractured geographically by the activated imperial divide.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Considering the continental and oceanic expansion of the United States, literary and cultural archives are deeply divided by the legal ambiguities of territory, which absorb Indigenous nations as “domestic dependents” and enable the shunting of “insular” territories from the nation’s cartographic logo. Indeed, the US map is a perplexing icon, a “useful illusion” in the way all maps are illusory and pragmatic.Footnote ⁴⁵ Calling attention to the vagaries of territorial thinking, Daniel Immerwahr has interrogated the nation’s “logo map,” borrowing the term from Benedict Anderson, who describes the imperial production of maps as an “infinitely reproducible series, transferred to posters, official seals, letterheads, magazines, textbook covers, table cloths and hotel walls.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The issue with the US logo map, as Immerwahr points out, is not that it proliferates a mass-producible image of US colonialism, but that it does the opposite, erasing its archipelagic empire entirely. The sheer edges of the forty-eight states reinforce the fiction of a “politically uniform space,” while the United States might better be represented as a “partitioned country,” divided between two sections – states and territories – where different laws apply.Footnote ⁴⁷ Even as the colonial production of the logo map asserts a territorial coherence, it does so by way of illusory mystifications. The epistemic violence of US territorialism hides behind the alibi of the “the insular.”

The issue is well illustrated by this map of the United States and its Territories and Insular Possessions, created by the Department of Interior in 1923 (Figure I.2). It follows a trend among US cartographers by crowding the space with toponyms,Footnote ⁴⁸ which appear most abundantly east of the Mississippi, in the “Territory of the Original Thirteen States.” The outline of that colonial vestige discloses the engraving’s purpose: a map to tell the story of the nation’s mapping. The entire continental span from Ohio to the Pacific is overlain with a rectilinear grid, reflecting the surveying system established by Northwest Ordinance of 1787. No such gridlines apply to territories never meant to become states, however, as the country’s “Insular Possessions” are grouped in a horizontal row of insets along the bottom margin. The organization draws them implicitly into relation with Mexico and Cuba, jurisdictions subject to US military intervention at the time. The light blue hatching around the coastlines and islands creates a weightless, aquatic foreground, above which a boldly bordered and varicolored nation dominates. It would take a keen eye to catch the faint watermarks narrating the creation of insular territories: the US Virgin Islands (“Acquired from Denmark in 1917”) or the Canal Zone (“Ceded by Panama in 1904”). Felt even more faintly are the map’s kaleidoscopic effects, its mingling of international water borders. The inset groups together Alaska, the Philippines, Virgin Islands, and Canal Zone, a bizarre confluence of Russian, Indonesian, British, and Sāmoan territorial waters with those of the United States.

Figure I.2

Department of Interior Map of the United States including territories and insular possessions (1923).

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

The Philippine historian Vincente Rafael remarks that colonial cartographies are marked by hallucinatory projections, asserting a uniform image that belies their heterogeneity and incompletion. The logo map of the Philippines alone – represented here as single US possession – was instigated by colonialist delusion, by the “contingencies of voyage and conquest.”Footnote ⁴⁹ For Michelle Ann Stephens and Brian Russell Roberts, the editors of Archipelagic American Studies, the United States has a “relation to the archipelagic Americas that might be described as a collective negative hallucination.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Critiques of US empire often defer to the Freudian language of disavowal and repression, a lexicon that connects Amy Kaplan and Donald Peases’s post-national American Studies to Allan Punzalan Isaac’s history of the “American Tropics.” Anti-colonial counter-maps also employ psychoanalytic motifs, dream images. Édouard Glissant, for example, describes the Caribbean as an unconscious, and calls Martinique “an anti-space.” To map it with words is to “expose the landscape to those various kinds of madness” manifested by the violence of slavery and colonization.Footnote ⁵¹ The subsequent chapters of this book show how geotechnical aesthetics, which bristle with so many techno-mediated spatial feelings, propelled writers from across US dominion to replace the delusions of state cartographies with fantasies of their own. By forging these counter-maps, authors in dramatically different contexts transacted on their divergent desires for errant maps, for lived alternatives to territorial rootedness. In the process they estranged the genres of cartographic literature, making them windows into the unconscious of empire.

Collectively, such imaginings work to reconfigure the ubiquitous national logo-map, pointing to the possibility that the icon of the continental United States might be reshaped into what Walter Benjamin would call a “dialectical image.” The dialectical image is a figure of dynamite-like surprise that explodes the dreamlife of the unconscious and releases its radical potential. As Benjamin’s unsurpassed interpreter Susan Buck-Morss explains, the dialectical image is a densely layered concept lying at the center of his Freudian-Marxist system. A primary element that concerns us here is what she describes as its axis between sleeping and waking, the way in which the novelty and flash of the past can radically awaken us to something in the present.Footnote ⁵² There is just such a dormant power in the cartographic literature of the Greater United States, something Other, waiting to be retrieved from the shadowed repository of its conflicting and compacting spatial desires. The map of the United States can gather its dialectical charge by being subjected to the imaginations of “multiple beholders,” who – by testifying to the gap between their spatial experience and the map’s visual codes – enable its logo-like appeal to “escape control and take on generative power.”Footnote ⁵³ In reading this book, scholars and students of modern literature might continue to ask, how can a logo-map be redrawn as a dialectical image? How can more and more of us awaken to the political violence that the map both admits and conceals? Perhaps we could start by seeing the maps of nation-states not as orthodox and unswerving but as provisional and negotiable. The spatial convolutions of the literary imagination can help to realize that even the most supposedly static political units of representation are hallucinated and yet radically potent objects. This is an insight that cartographic literature, in its engagement with geotechnical aesthetics, persists in sparking. It calls us to see the map anew.