Maps

MAHSHID MAYAR is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of British and American Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. She is co-editor, with Marion ...

In the essay “Raising Empires like Children: Race, Nation, and Religious Education” (from her 2005 book Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture), Karen Sánchez-Eppler draws on an analogy between domestic spaces and the nation in order to describe how the processes involved in the rearing of 19th-century American children were replicated in nation/empire formation. But either way, it is critical to study these records to find out how empires (what I characterize as “multigenerational power constellations”) survived by making accessible pedagogical scripts that children of the white and wealthy could learn from and appropriate as times changed. And this is best registered in the letters children wrote to Harper’s Young People and St. Nicholas, but also to other juvenile periodicals of the time (such as the long-lived Youth’s Companion). In these letters, we encounter American children writing about the towns and cities they come from and about their travels or studies abroad. Children designed puzzles that, as the title of the chapter where I discuss them suggests, looked for places as far apart from one another as Amoy and Zanesville. Given the frequency with which juvenile periodicals of the time printed child-made geographical puzzles, children’s involvement in composing scripts of empire confirms that what motivated them to design geographical puzzles involved more than mere showing off of the basics of geographic literacy. Dissected maps — that is, maps mounted on cardboard or wood and then cut into smaller pieces that children were to put back together — are a generative example of the ways imperial pedagogy (and the violence it promoted under the cover of such seemingly benign notions as “home geography”) found its place outside formal education, in children’s lives outside the classroom. Therefore, the drafts of “home geography” that I study in my book scripted far messier lessons in world geography as they recorded far more aggressive views of “home” in terms of what/where/whom it included and what/where/whom it excluded, both within and beyond the immediate borders of the United States. Thanks to “home geography” as an imperial pedagogic tool, white, well-to-do, literate American children not only lived in the safety of homes (housing their immediate families, but also, symbolically, the nation), but many of them also learned how to identify and imagine “homes” on the map of the world. In return, playing with dissected maps was designed to keep children both silent and informed about the world the United States was keen on entering and colonizing; it invited children to assume a unique, complex role. M. BUNA: Socializing turn-of-the-century American children into the ways of the empire relied on employing “home geography” as a pedagogical tool to underline the comfort and “civilization” of familiar spaces, as opposed to colonized or racialized ones. As I propose, this double scripting was characterized by an abundance of curiosity, misreading, and misrepresentation (including misspelling place names or misplacing them on the map of the world). On the one hand, as “home” became ever more closely associated with whiteness, literacy, hygiene, heteronormativity, and Christian values, the resident children of such “ideal” homes would look for spaces, both inside and outside the United States, that they could immediately, or after brief consideration, identify as comparable to the model. By focusing on the way children consumed, engaged with, and adapted the maps and mapping practices of the American Empire, Citizens and Rulers of the World endeavors to show how imperial pedagogy and cartography, once in children’s hands, became both a personal and a political site. In her first book, Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), Mayar deploys archival evidence to develop an understanding of turn-of-the-century American children as ambivalent cartographers.