Reading L'Enfant's Stars: An Antifederalist Critique of Washington D.C.

• Main Author: Passino, Sarah McAuley
• Other Authors: Dana Nelson
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: VANDERBILT 2006
• Subjects: English
• Online Access: http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-05262006-093521/

In 1790, a year after the Constitution of the United States was ratified, Congress passed an act to establish a federal city: Washington D.C. The principal actors in the early designs of the capital, George Washington and Pierre Charles LEnfant, understood the dialectic between the physical space and its inhabitants within a larger political framework and sought to use this aesthetic project of urban design to reinforce the political narrative of the federalists. But read through Ed Whites theoretical paradigm of the early American federalist synthesizers, and the subsequent trans-temporal re-inscription of this federalist synthesis by what he terms the megasynthesizers, Washington D.C. becomes not the putative coalescence of the ideology of the federalists, but rather an imperialist attempt to materially and physically silence the traces of competing and contestatory voices of the early nation. Further, borrowing Ed Whites conception of an antifederalist critique, George Washington and LEnfants plans to construct a physical iteration of a unified and imposing empire are seen to contain the seeds of its own subversion: LEnfants carrefoursthe star-shaped intersections of the federal citytransform from a top-down orchestration of human interaction to an emancipatory space that may be reclaimed as pedagogical tools for rediscovering a pre-national memory of a space that insists on heterogeneity, multiplicity, and contestation as democratic requirements. Only by recovering these silenced conflicts and spaces will we be able to resume a democratic dialogue and seek out the frontiers in our cities as sites for civic participation.