Our panel will address the groundwork of American culture in some of its most literal and simultaneously paradoxical manifestations, exploring the reciprocities, asymmetries, slippages, and outright conflicts between literary and cartographic representations of place, space, landscape, region, and territory in the changing United States and beyond.

Potential areas of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Reading maps through literature, and vice versa

• Contested cartographies, stolen ground: Conflicting visions of Native American territory and identity since the 18th century

• Historicizing literary cartography

• The place of literary reworkings of landscape in problematics of race, gender, class, region, and religion

• Blue states, gray states: Charting the USA/CSA divide, 1861-1865

• Red states, blue states: The role of region in U.S. political writing and culture

• Intertextuality in/between literary maps, official maps, and cartographic discourses in literature

• Local/regional/national boundaries and boundary disputes in maps and literature

• Literary legacies of the Jeffersonian grid

• The laws and literature of the free-state/slave-state crisis of the 1850s

• Mapmaking, narrative, and the (neo)imperialist enterprise

• Environmental crisis and the technologies of representation

• Maps, literature, and the formation of trans/ postnational imaginaries

For more information on the conference, see the ASA Web site at the web address provided below.