Sumários
The idea of "America"
30 Janeiro 2019, 08:00 • Margarida Vale de Gato
Reading: Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “America,” from Keywords for American CulturalStudies. Class discussion focused on this essay, on the history of the word “America” and the ways it is applied as the name of a continent, a hemisphere, a country, and a set of political and cultural associations with the United States. The shifting meanings of the word emphasize the ambiguity of American identity. Building on an argument Gruesz makes, I ask students to identify whatever comes to mind when they hear the word“America”—results are an interesting combination of political, artistic, musical, economic, and military relationships that reflect the United States’ place in the world.
Imagining the Border
28 Janeiro 2019, 08:00 • Margarida Vale de Gato
We viewed several demographic, indigenous, and speculative maps of the current and historical territory known now as the United States. The map of indigenous northAmerica, which allows users to search a present-day address to see its location in pre-conquest indigenous land; maps of a “greater” and “lesser” United States that might have resulted from different histories of 19th-century expansion; and maps showing the distribution of racial populations in major US cities. We discussed the ways that “cultural geography” differs from conventional mapping, and how it compels us to consider how space is made and imagined through relationships of power that change over time.