European Journal of American Culture - Volume 39, Issue 1, 2020

The beginning of Space Age coincided with the global spread of a subterranean, post-apocalyptic imagination of the bunker. The coexistence of faith in technological progress and fear of a nuclear-caused self-annihilation created a tension between a claustrophilic and a claustrophobic relation to space that deeply shaped American spatial imagination. As I argue in this article, this spatial tension can be profitably illustrated by focusing on the cartographic imagination of science fiction produced in America between the 1950s and the 1980s. Drawing on David Seed and Fredric Jameson among others and focusing on both exemplary novels and films, this article shows to what extent Cold War American science fiction not only translates territorial anxieties into alternative universes or versions of the future, but spatially stages its inner conflict, the tension between a claustrophobic distress on the one hand and an unfulfilled claustrophilia on the other.

Cartography was a model for Dennis Oppenheim’s territorial conception of sculpture and the road map was a site on which he sought to expand sculpture’s boundaries. This article focuses on five works conceived in the late 1960s in which Oppenheim built upon the proprietary claim to space implicit in cartography. Whether plotted on a map or constructed alongside the highway, Oppenheim viewed these sculptures as instruments of spatial orientation and territorial possession, as well as mechanisms to reroute the infrastructures and informational networks of everyday life. In Oppenheim’s sculpture, the liberatory aesthetics of minimalism’s phenomenology is marked with a territorial violence that plays out in cartographic and real space. He sought a way to force the body to register within abstract systems and, in turn, to imprint those abstract systems on the body. The road map was both a model and a site for this exchange.

In 1968, photographer Laura Gilpin published The Enduring Navaho, which intentionally juxtaposes colonialist cartography with an immersive understanding of landscape. This article situates Gilpin’s project within the broader historical trajectory of traditional Navajo spatial imaginaries, including the work of contemporary Navajo artist Will Wilson. Euramerican settler-colonist maps of the Navajo Nation at mid-century were tools for Native displacement, revealing the transnational dilemma of the Navajo people. Their twentieth-century history was one of continual negotiation; on a pragmatic level, it often entailed the cultivation and education of Euramerican allies such as Gilpin. For her, landscape photography offered an alternative indexical authority to colonial maps, and thus had the potential to redefine Navajo space in the Euramerican imagination – in terms that were closely aligned with Navajo ideology. Without escaping the contradictions inherent in her postcolonial situation, Gilpin sought a political space for Navajo epistemology, and thus for Navajo sovereignty.

This article examines the work of a diverse group of photographers who in the late 1960s and 1970s employed mapping techniques and devices as a means of artistic creation. Products of photography’s unprecedented growth, photographers John Pfahl, Michael Bishop, Kenneth Josephson and the participants of the Rephotographic Survey Project employed cartographic and topographic strategies as part of their exploration of the history of their medium and the American West. These artist-photographers, moreover, responded to the nineteenth-century surveys of the West as well as its relation to other, better-known contemporary movements like ‘New Topographics’. In all, this article provides the first exploration of this distinctive group of American photographers which may be collectively termed: ‘new cartographics’.

This article examines the ways Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams (1994) (re)maps two key locations in the American West. The text centres on Yosemite National Park and the Nevada Test Site, locations emblematic of histories of colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and the military in the United States. Considering how Solnit constructs a counter-map of these places, this article argues that by tracing ‘lines of convergence’ on a landscape deemed empty by the dominant culture, Solnit both documents and is part of resistance to power structures upheld by traditional cartography. Using an ecofeminist framework based on drawing connections in the face of the dominant culture’s emphasis on fragmentation and separation, I discuss how Solnit exposes the silence and violence of the map. I then consider the ways she constructs a ‘testimonial network’ that counters both. Finally, I suggest that Solnit’s textual counter-map prompts us to re-read the traditional map on connective, ecofeminist terms.

Review of: Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First-Century America, Inderpal Grewal (2017)

Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 322 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-82236-898-4, h/bk, $104.95, p/bk, $27.95

Review of: Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Joanne Barker (ed.) (2017)

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 260 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-82236-365-1, h/bk, £79.00, p/bk, £30.99

Review of: The Quiet Contemporary American Novel, Rachel Sykes (2018)

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 226 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-52610-887-6, h/bk, £80

Review of: European Perspectives on John Updike, Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton (eds) (2018)

Rochester, NY, and Woodbridge: Camden House, 220 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-57113-972-6, h/bk, $78.58