Speaker bio
Markus Heide\, PhD\, is Associate Professor of American Li terary and Cultural Studies at the University of Hildesheim (Germany) and a n affiliated researcher at the Swedish Institute for North American Studies (SINAS) at Uppsala University. He published articles and monographs on U.S.\, Canadian\, and Mexican literature\, film\, and cultur al history. His recent research has been in comparative border studies. In 2018 he was a research fellow at the Center< span class="s3"> for Iberian and Latin American Studies (CILAS) at UC San D iego\, doing research and fieldwork for his project on The US-Mexico Borderlands as Contested Space: F ilm\, Art\, and Popular Culture. As part of this project\, he recently published the article "Populism and the Politics of the Media Spectacle in the US: The Imagery of the US-M exico Border" in Populism\, Democracy\, and the Hum anities: Interdisciplinary Explorations and Critical Inquiries (Eds. Iulian Cananau and Peder Thalén. Lanham: Rowman &Littlefield\, 2022). In 2022 his monog raph Framing the Nation\, Claiming the Hemisphere: Transnational Imagination in Early American Travel Writing (1770-1830) was published by Stockholm University Press. He coordinated and contributed to several international research projects.
Based on the work of scholars including Richard Slotkin (1973)\, Benedict Anderson (1983)\, Amy Kaplan (1993\, 2005)\, a nd Walter Mignolo (2000\, 2 005)\, I understand the American national imaginati on as a dynamic negotiation of boundaries both real and imagined. Such boundaries can be based on regional\, religious\, racia l\, linguistic\, or anticolonial considerations. These boundaries are contr oversial sites that ultimately bear on what distinguishes the nation from i ts outside. How are the national ‘Self’ and its ‘Others’ represented and im agined in travel writing of the early national era? How do the nation’s constantly morphing geographic al borders and its rapidly transforming union of republican states affect e arly American conceptions of self and international mobility?
I will discuss < span class="s3">the function of categories such as the outside world\, neighbo ring nations\, and < span class="s4">colonial empires in the emergence o f a U.S. national imagination. How does a shift in focus from a discursive ‘domestication’ of North American space (the Fronti er myth) to an interest in the Othering of what lies beyond national borders u ltimately affect the understanding of the emergent national self? These are the kind of questions that begin by seeing the tra nsnational as a fundamental element of national emergence. I will show how tra vel writing of the period s upports and affirms the discursive processes of nation-building. From such a perspective\, travel writing not only contributes to shaping the national imagination and its conceptions of superiority but is also complicit in te rritorial expansionism and its subjugation of conquered peoples and their r espective cultural histories.
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