Traveling Places: The Cultural Episteme of Places and Relations in the US
Nicole Schneider, M.A.
This project, based in American Studies, seeks to analyze the visual, historical and (de)colonial connections held in iconic places and intends to establish an interdisciplinary model for reading place as a social imaginary construct. Examining specific places and their visual or fictional representations, I propose to uncover the widely unseen and unacknowledged relations encompassed in place. Its practice theoretical and dialogical approach attends to the questions what certain places do, how they shape practices, opportunities, relations, and social lives, and how they are shaped and negotiated by these connections, interactions, and enunciations.
In considering these articulations of and practices in place, I intend to theorize the cultural episteme of place and relation in terms of what I tentatively call ‘traveling places.’ These simultaneously address places we travel to, ideas and images of places we have, and the wider dialogical and political frameworks these places hold. They are inseparably connected to depictions, images, and imaginaries and obtain their cultural and historical significance through fictional or idealized narrations, iconic allusions, and commercialized arrangements operating in and around place. The experience of a place and the lives lived within its boundaries are not only determined by its geographic, ecological, and economic configurations, but also its spatiotemporal cultural representations and practices.
The project uses an antiracist and decolonial lens to consider questions of inequality and differential allocation of sovereignty and precarity, as they are played out in these traveling places. It intends to discern how Western thought systems affect practicing and practiced places over time and seeks to appraise the ways in which practices and representations of a place function to unsettle, deconstruct, and change a place’s epistemic makeup, rendering progressive senses of place central to different modes of being in the world.
The ‘traveling places’ discussed symbolize and embody the unconscious, systemic, and dialogical social practices which exist therein in various ways. As a correlation between a place and its cultural imaginary, the traveling place is an unstable formation revealing its position in colonial and national history, equal justice projects, as well as hierarchies of power.