critical regionalism 

Research Project by
Deniz Bozkurt

My (ongoing) dissertation project Spatial Fictions in Antebellum American Writings about the Southern Peripheries of the United States focuses on spatial imaginations regarding the Southern peripheries of the US in the nineteen-century fictional and non-fictional literature. Laden with controversies such as discussions on slavery and abolition, territorial expansion and annexation, sectionalism, secessionism and unionism, industrialization and agricultural reforms, the literature on the nineteenth-century South a wide range of diverse spatial projections than the canonical spatial metanarratives, which evolve around concepts like Manifest Destiny, Errand into the Wilderness, and the Frontier, offer. While these metanarratives often contradicted the lived-realities of the region, the South was located in “the national imagery” that they constructed as the peripheral “internal other” to the US.

The main objective of this dissertation is, thus, to create a more heterogeneous and complex representation of spatial imagination regarding the American South in an era where the nation consolidation was accompanied and complicated by geographical expansion. Concentrating on the narratives about important events and debates of the era for the South like filibustering expeditions to Cuba and Nicaragua, and Southern independence and slavery, the first discursive complex of this projects aims at exploring geographical imaginations that envision the South as the center of a Southern empire that extends beyond the presumed borders of the South and reaches as far as Brazil. In the second part, texts by African-American and abolitionist authors who established invisible networks in space and time that spread from the Southern US to as far as Africa through shared experiences and expectations in their works will be read to draw an alternative landscape of spatial imaginations that is distinct from the texts that will be explored in the first discursive complex.

​Research Project by
​Dr. Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez

This (ongoing) project, Spatial Fictions: (Re)Imaginations of Nationality in the Southern and Western Peripheries of 19th Century America, is part of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199 Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition. It examines the imagination of space in nineteenth-century American cultural and literary discourses. Canonized patterns of spatialization in American national history are linked to central spatial concepts such as the frontier and the “errand into the wilderness” (i.e. the settlement and civilization of the American continent on an east-west geographical axis). However, the geographical imagination in the period from the American Revolution to the Civil War was much more diverse. The consolidation and expansion of the nation during the nineteenth century were accompanied by different and conflicting imaginations of spatial formats that often contradicted the official rhetoric of “Manifest Destiny”. Particularly in the yet unstable and mobile southern and western peripheries of the nation, the ideology of  Manifest Destiny collided with the topographical, social, economic, and cultural realities of the border zones, producing alternative “spatial fictions” that often pointed to commercial, political, or other entanglements with regions beyond the nation’s boundaries.

The project comprises two dissertation projects (see project description by Steffen Wöll and Deniz Bozkurt) as well as a unit on the spatial construction of Florida in the early 19th century. This part explores Florida as a space that in the period between its successive acquisition from Spain and its permanent settlement by Americans generated widely varying spatial narratives. The divergent representations that the peninsula experienced in travel narratives, novels, captivity tales, and historical writings by American writers reveal how it became a foil of projection for quite different agendas. The geographical imagination of their authors about Florida reveals that as a spatial nexus of the domestic and the foreign, situated between the U.S. and the Caribbean, the peninsula played a crucial role in the debates about nationhood, expansionism, and slavery, and in the conflict between centrifugal and centripetal forces, i.e. those forces endorsing the consolidation of the nation v. those arguing for further expansion.

Dissertation Project by
Steffen A. Wöll

My (ongoing) dissertation project on "Globe, Region, and Periphery: The Spatialization of the American West in Antebellum US Literature" examines spatial imaginations of the Western American peripheries and their representation in US literature during the nineteenth century, comprising both fictional and non-fictional literary accounts of the Western peripheries, including travel narratives, diaries, exploration reports, as well as (pseudo-)scientific geographical and anthropological texts. Taking into consideration both populist and elitist views, female and male perspectives, racialist and philanthropist ideologies, I put focus on the intertextual dynamics that result in the discursive construction, affirmation, contestation, deconstruction, hierarchization, as well as synthetic and antithetic negotiations of imagined and actual spatial formats and orders. Without ignoring the Turnerian and New Western History’s approaches to the American West and concepts like frontier and borderlands, my intention is nevertheless to take a step back. This seems necessarily especially in the light of current, often highly politicized discourses that view the West as yet another stage on which to transplant personal expectations and enact political agendas, resulting in presentism and ahistorical epistemic conceptualizations.