| Summary: | This dissertation examines a series of transformative geographic narratives in the first half of the nineteenth century. In this period, the area of what is now considered the territorial borders of the United States was in the process of extensive geopolitical, economic, and scalar negotiation, punctuated by border wars, the changing economic geographies of slavery and colonial enterprise, and the absorption of western spaces through the appropriation of Native American
land. However, this process of claiming, occupying, and demarcating what would become U.S. national space was by no means a uniform project and would rely on various political, representational, and rhetorical strategies employed by a variety of writers in order to achieve the narrative coherence often attributed to the development of the nation. Despite the presence of complicated and conflicting histories, the transformation of national space is made to appear homogeneous, indistinct,
and free from social hierarchies. While the hemispheric turn in literary studies has led early American literary geographers to examine the supranational material, ideological, and discursive relationships between America and the larger Atlantic world, this project focuses on the internal geographic transformations of the nineteenth century, arguing that texts by disenfranchised groups like African Americans and Native Americans challenged these forms of scalar reconfiguration through
print to form countergeographies of belonging and exchange, developing alternative socio-spatial formations beyond the paradigm of the nation state. Thus, this project examines countergeographical discourses to understand the role of uncounted, misrecognized, and displaced groups in resisting the scalar negotiations of empire.
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