Framing Space: A Popular Geopolitics of American Manifest Destiny in Outer Space

Abstract

This paper examines how ‘ways of seeing’ landscape, as practised within the little-known American astronomical art community, can be used to examine the popular geopolitical scripting of an American manifest destiny in outer space. A significant body of work in critical geopolitics has sought to recognise the way in which culturally manifest representations of space and place, together with embedded visual practices, can reproduce and elucidate the construction of geographical imaginations. Despite this, cultural representations of outer space have frequently been overlooked in readings of American popular, geopolitical discourse and associated geographical understandings. As a response to this lacuna, this paper interrogates how visual motifs of an American manifest destiny, developed in nineteenth-century American romanticism, have been mobilised through American astronomical art to explain and popularise conceptions of outer space that invite American human space exploration. By way of conclusion, the paper stresses how the inscription of outer space under the rubric of an American manifest destiny continues to frame the way in which the American space programme, and by extension American geopolitical and geographical imaginations, can be understood today.