Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious (original) (raw)

Surveys, Illustrations and Paintings: Framing Manifest Destiny in the Early American Republic

Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center, 2012

World-systems analysis in recent years has focused on the relationship between a historical system based on capitalist accumulation and the materiality of the world in which it moves through and transforms. But how does the production of visual images relate to both processes, especially through the production of distinct spaces and landscapes? This article looks at the relationship between the representation of abstract space through geometric visual methods and the material environments being represented. Taking the early American Republic as the object of study, this article examines such linkages, especially through the initial Northwest Territory survey, as well as in contemporary landscape paintings. Lastly, this article emphasizes that these visual and material processes did not go uncontested, but instead were part of a larger struggle to displace previous of not only seeing, but organizing the North American periphery within the larger world-economy.

Frontier Myth and American Popular Culture

Two key concepts from SF are central to what is being attempted herein: a) the process of ‘creating and recreating worlds’, and b) ‘social and cultural systems within imagined spaces’. These concepts are sought to be accommodated within two phenomena that have immense cultural signification in the American mind – the American Frontier and the Star Trek science fiction TV series of the 1960s.

A Contested West: New Readings of Place in Western American Literature

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2014

The traditional field of the Old West never seemed to attract much attention in Spanish academia. Luckily, the rise of the paradigm of the New West has altered that anomaly so that, nowadays, a solid body of research on the subject is being carried out in several universities all over Spain. The leading exponent of this new scenario is David Río, who teaches U.S. Literature at the University of the Basque Country, and is one of the three editors of A Contested West. After exp loring for years the intricacies of the South, over the last decade he has shifted his attention to the West, putting together conferences and publications, as well as a major research project. He is also behind an unusual project in Spanish academic circles: creat ing a book series, 'American Literary West', with an editorial board formed by names as distinguished in the field as Fran k Bergon, Neil Campbell, Richard W. Etulain, Maria Herrera-Sobek, or Peter Hulme. Three essay collections on the multip le identities of West have been published in only three years: Beyond the Myth. New Perspectives on Western Texts (2011), The Neglected West. Contemporary Approaches to Western American Literature (2012), and now, A Contested West. New Readings of Place in Western American Literature (2013). Like its predecessors, the third volume offers challenging and insightful views on the West. Even the cover departs from the traditional iconograply, since it is a colorful reproduction of a poster depicting a Chicana field wo rker. Author Rick Bass pens a brief but densely lyrical introduction on the ineffable essence of the territory, noting that "there is something about the West which, though it might thus far elude precise capture, nonetheless exists, thrums, is redolent with the abilit y, it seems, to both generate and receive deep emotion" (iv), words which bring to mind The Great Gatsby. He also adds the suggestive notion that, most likely, the art and the literature of a space as vast as the West are characterized by "a greater imaginativeness, [.. .] greater loneliness, greater joys, greater volatilit ies of weather and the seasons" (vi). Many of the essays in the collection do move in this direction,

Liminal Life: The Biopolitics of Manifest Destiny

In this paper, I explore how Manifest Destiny functions as a biopolitical ideology through two works by nineteenth century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt. The work presented here represents the critical center point to my forthcoming master's thesis. Presented at the New Terrains: The Landscape Reviewed Conference, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, March 13, 2015

Placing the Frontier in Early American Literature

Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, reveals that there seems to be an obsession with civilizing the wild, firmly placing America as the space which immediately follows the frontier. That space is fundamentally different from the spaces of Europe, which had conquered the wilderness long ago. America's position is thus within such a liminal space, between the established and the undiscovered. It is one which highlights the dichotomy between civilization and nature in spite of, or maybe due to, their close proximity. Crucially, this space is by definition unstable, necessitating a continual drive to advance or perish, correlating with the historical realities of westward expansion. This relentless need for progress, combined with a finite world, ultimately begets the final question: what happens when the frontier is lost? This anxiety is fully articulated in Frederick Jackson Turner's HOU 2

What Lies Beyond – The Frontier and the Creation of the Monstrous

What Lies Beyond-The Frontier and the Creation of the Monstrous Space represents a crucial component in the process of analyzing and understanding literature and the various cultural implications that literature is more often than not exposed to. This is particularly true when the subject of the analysis is American literature whose origins, and its later development through the years, represent a constant interchanging and merging of numerous cultural and social values. The spatial aspect and its influence on American literary production constantly develops, much like the country and its literary focus, adapting to the ever-changing world. Therefore the aim of this analysis cannot be an attempt to provide an overview of the numerous instances of interaction that have taken and still are taking place between literature, or its authors, and the various notions and ideas of space as defined by disciplines such as human geography. Instead, what this particular analysis can do is to provide insight into a type of "space" both extremely specific to the American experience and in many ways a constant presence within numerous American creative processes. It is the concept of the "Frontier" that positions itself as a key notion that defines many aspects of both the American imaginary and the real, and which as the analysis will show, is not limited to a defined historical or cultural context, but instead functions as a continuous source of inspiration and national/personal introspection. When discussing the actual Frontier, and the later development of the concept, it is necessary to view its historical purpose and function, and the actual geographic value that the Frontier once held. The early settlers observed it as a clearly defining and dividing line between the tamed nature and "civilized" surroundings of their settlements, and the vast wilderness which uncontrollably extended encircling the Puritan's "city on the hill". This actual physical encirclement indicated not only a space that could be mapped and defined, but combined