Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the It is old news, in the shadow of the millennium, that we inhabit a posthistorical era. Over the last two decades, a constellation of texts and scholars drawing on cultural theory, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy has not only declared that history as god-term is dead, but that temporality as the organizing form of experience has been superseded by spatiality, the affective and social experience of space. Preeminent Marxist intellectuals concede that it is now space rather than time that hides consequences from us, raising the omni-present danger that our mental maps no longer match current realities (Harvey, Condition 306; see also Soja, Postmodern Geographies 1; Berger 40); anthropologists and feminist theorists remind us that theory travels, knowledges are situated, subjects localized, communities and public spheres diasporic and globalized. In the face of the insistent effects, material and hyperreal, of postindustrial economies and global cities (Sassen), cultural theorists exhort their readers [t]o recognise space, to recognise what 'takes place' there and what it is used for (Lefebvre, Survival 17). To paraphrase a well-known spaceman, American pop icon James Tiberius Kirk, space is indeed the final frontier. Edward Soja, Saskia Sassen, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre: the thinkers I cite, along with others more and less familiar to readers in American studies, have been instrumental in inaugurating a field-or rather, a shared rubric and set of concernsoften called the new cultural geography. Revisiting problems in traditional geography (roughly, the study of the distribution of the physical, biological, and cultural aspects of the earth's surface), the new geography is rooted in Marxist cultural critique, French structuralism, and English political economy; its analytic tools are being adapted from sociology, urban studies, and cultural studies.' Unifying its diverse expressions is a shared project: the articulation of space as a social product, one that masks the conditions of its own formation. Its practitioners aim not only to unmask these contradictions but also to elaborate space in the abstract, as well as specific places, as sites where individuals