Port to Port Sea Voyaging and the Logistics of Empire

The chapter shows how the onset of the First World war rerouted the material and human circuits that traversed the eastern Mediterranean. The outcome of this process, though not without its challenges, was the establishment of a British maritime logistical network that linked Alexandria and Salonica, numerous islands between them, and, briefly, the Gallipoli peninsula. The chapter documents the extent of the movements of soldiers, labourers, and refugees set in course by the war and its aftermath and the interactions between them. In addition, it shows how these sea voyages contributed to the establishment of the geographic imaginary of the Levant and how the disciplinary regimes governing the transport ship provided a point of contrast to the city that would be encountered on arrival.

The Look of Tijuana

This chapter uses photographs to analyze how ordinary people in San Diego visualized the neighboring city of Tijuana in relation to their own. In qualitative interviews, forty-five people sorted a set of photographs from the Tijuana–San Diego borderlands, evaluating them according to how much they thought the images resembled Tijuana and discussing which visual cues led to their conclusions. This process brought to the surface dimensions of a bordered geographic imaginary that reflected implicit, mundane forms of social knowledge that they may not have thought to articulate otherwise. Three overarching and interrelated themes arose inductively from the interviews: dirt, disorder, and economic deprivation. Each of these themes reinforces the border as a marker of inequality, either in terms of class distinction or as part of a neocolonial imaginary about a socially distant “Third World.”

Geography, History, Trope: Facts on the Ground

This chapter explores how Russia's capital functions in its geographic imaginary. Here, only the center promises to make sense of everyplace else. Even today, educated Russians outside the capitals echo the belief that provincials must look through the capitals' lens in order to perceive anything, including provintsiia itself, with real clarity. The capital, they affirm, serves as “mirror” for the entire nation, reflecting “the true face of society” and thereby linking provincials to “the Unity of history.” And only the capital can lay claim to representativeness: by “creating the appearance of unity,” the capital “takes upon itself the role of complete spokesman for all national and state interests and opinions.”

Conclusion: The Provinces in the Twentieth Century

This concluding chapter looks ahead at the trope's afterlives in the twentieth century, considering briefly how Silver Age and Soviet writers made use of the geographic imaginary that they inherited. In post-Soviet times, the provinces continue to accrue meanings both positive and negative. This is seen in books, films, and television series that veer back and forth between versions of the Silver Age myth (provintsiia as repository of purity and cultural authenticity) and much darker views that once again depict provintsiia as locus of degradation and moral decay. Finally, the chapter concludes by reflecting on the relationship between Russian provinciality and the problematic (Western) idea of “World Literature.” This in and of itself is a category from which Russian texts, no matter how “worldly” or how widely circulated, have been almost wholly excluded.

Daniel’s Imperial Survey

Chapter 2 contrasts Spenser’s affinity for the miniature with Samuel Daniel’s denigration of it. In his laureate poems, Daniel attempted to undermine the cheap county maps that provided an alternative geographic imaginary to James I’s royal unification of England with Scotland. To do so, he borrowed from the language of the survey, a privileged testing-ground for translating the national topography into a broadly comprehensible set of signifiers. Daniel’s chapbooks the Panegyrike Congratulatorie (1603) and the 1607 Funerall Poem both reject the egalitarian principles of practical surveying to instead map for James a magisterial imperial state. This interpretation offers a corrective to existing scholarship on the poet as a populist nationalist by arguing that his works articulated a deeply hierarchical view of the realm. I contrast Daniel’s geographical elitism with John Norden’s accessible pocket-sized guides and surveying manuals circulating in the commonwealth culture of the Inns of Court.

Spenser’s Miniature Map of Faerie

Chapter 1 reads Spenser’s 1590 Faerie Queene in light of the miniature cartographic aesthetic exemplified by William Bowes’s 1590 county playing cards. I show that in the poem, which earned Spenser a pension from Elizabeth I, Amoret’s cut-up body represents in microcosm the imperial dissection of England and Wales by Christopher Saxton’s 1579 royally-funded county atlas. The romance heroine’s small size and unadorned beauty, which closely parallel the raw aesthetic of cheap maps, reveal the miniature’s potential to resist monarchical illusions of grandeur. This aesthetic reappears in Spenser’s descriptions of the Thames in Prothalamion (1596), as well as of Irish rebels resisting English colonization in the 1596 Vewe of the Present State of Irelande. In both, Spenser’s engagement with the geographic imaginary of small-format cartography complicates scholarly assumptions about the poet’s nationalism.

Davenant’s Numerical Nationhood

Chapter 4 begins by placing Davenant’s first laureate chapbook Madagascar (1638) into conversation with the popular pocket atlases of the 1620s and 1630s to argue that the poet’s imagistic “Numbers” map links between geographical precision and societal betterment. As he argues in his Discourse on Gondibert (his Sidneian defense of poesy), Davenant believed that the numerical structure of poetry could speak to a broad public sphere defined by its constituents’ numeracy, at a time when numbers were emerging as a prime language for measuring the shifting British landscape. Davenant’s royalist carto-poiesis reemerges in his chart of London as the “Royall city” in King Charles his Augusta (1648) on the eve of the regicide. His work to remap monarchical prerogative onto the national topography constituted a deliberate challenge to the geographic imaginary of the small-format cartography which pervaded the popular culture of mid-seventeenth-century Britain.

‘One-Day-Wide’ Canada: History, Geography, and Aerial Views at Trans Canada Air Lines, 1945-1955

This article shows how Trans Canada Air Lines (now Air Canada) navigated celebrating Canada’s geography while eliminating it using modern communications technologies in its midcentury public-facing material. TCA worked explicitly with modern and high-modern discourse of “space” and “time,” manipulating the historical and geographic imaginary to position itself as a natural part of the Canadian envirotechnical landscape. In so doing, TCA also self-fashioned as the gatekeeper of geographic experiences in the form of aerial views. By embracing a new technological system—aviation—and a new type of environment—the geographic imaginary—this article pushes the boundaries of envirotech and argues that the Canadian tendency towards both geographic and technological nationalism is, at its center, an envirotechnical relationship.