Introduction – Geographies of Promise and Betrayal: Land and Place in US Studies

Abstract

In various ways, the essays published in this special issue of the Canadian Review of American Studies testify to the perils, potentials, and necessities of “aestheticizing” the rapidly shifting social topographies of the United States. The concentration of immigrant and rural populations in cities during the latter half of the nineteenth century, for example, demanded the development of new practices and perceptions of affect and place, new somatic vernaculars and discursive phenomenologies, new styles and habituations that might accommodate the shocks of the new within the hoarier mythological narratives of frontier republicanism and American exceptionalism. In a more palpably destructive, perhaps, but no less dynamic fashion, the post-industrial dismantling of the securities of “place” compels scholars, artists, activists, cultural labourers of all stripes to question anew the unstable domains and terrains of American identity, questions we posed when deliberating our themes for the 2012 Canadian Association of American Studies conference on place and space in American Studies: What makes a house a home? What makes a home a good investment? What makes a real estate “bubble” burst? Who “owns” the streets? The water? The land? What makes this land your land, my land, or our land, from California to the New York Island, or beyond? How do you “occupy” Wall Street? How can you “walk for the cure”? How is land/earth/terrain understood and used? What are the distinct debates, discourses, and spatial practices that have defined American culture and society in the past, and how might they be changing today?