Literature, Geography, and the Spaces of Interdisciplinarity

Some years ago, while we were driving to the Grand Canyon, my husband flipped on the car radio. Out of it came not the usual bluster of pop-rock and car-lot commercials, but a dulcet voice speaking a language neither of us understood or, for a moment, recognized. It was Diné, of course, more widely known as Navajo. Deep in the heart of the United States of America, we had crossed the border into another nation altogether: simultaneously inside, and outside, the map of “America.”

The American map, which lies so apparently flat and solid, is in fact yeasty with such heterogeneous spaces. This may seem counterintuitive: US Americans grow up thinking of “America” as an iconic shape with clear boundaries separating home from abroad, and indeed, my trusty national map stops crisply at those boundaries, pushing even our fellow Americas, Mexico and Canada, off the edges of the known world. According to this map, America expanded to its present shape like water poured onto a table, spreading smoothly outward, flooding all in its path until, suddenly, for reasons left unsaid, it simply stopped—as if geography were blind to history. But this cannot be true: at its onset, modern geography was defined by virtue of historical processes. In the words of Alexander von Humboldt, both landforms and languages could be understood only as a function of their development through time: “Their form is their history” (1.72). In Humboldt’s vision of the Cosmos, human history itself was no less than geo-graphy, earth-writing, landforms and languages interacting in a reciprocal and unfolding dynamic with no traces of a beginning and no end in sight. This profound insight could have been the foundation of something new, a deeply interdisciplinary fusion of language, literature, culture, and society with the earth and earth processes: literature and science and history as geography, born in one gesture.

Could have been, but was not. The watchword for the nineteenth century was disciplinary specialization, not fusion, and the possibilities opened by Humboldt’s vision fragmented and intensified into separate academic fields, disciplinary islands each pursuing its own set of problems. The gaps this fragmentation creates are today being addressed by a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, the most far-reaching of which point us toward the very conditions that produced such an archipelago of knowledges, and also toward the currents and cross-currents that move across and connect the separate institutional islands, undermining some, upbuilding others, creating new causeways and linkages. As the whole movement toward disciplinary knowledge began with the episteme that rendered spatial form as a product of temporal development, perhaps the most foundational new linkage of all is that explored in these three books: the reciprocal, dialogical interactions of languages, histories, cultures, and the earth.

This recent spatial turn began in the 1980s in the work of such postmodern geographers as Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Edward Soja, who in 1989 challenged the prevailing “space-blinkered historicism” by asserting “the interpretive significance of space,” and announced the arrival of “a new animating polemic on the theoretical and political agenda, one which rings with significantly different ways of seeing time and space together, the interplay of history and geography, the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ dimensions of being in the world freed from the imposition of inherent categorical privilege” (11). This approach to space as an active construction rather than a passive backdrop foregrounds America as a remarkably spatial problem. As Miles Orvell and Jeffrey L. Meikle declare, American culture becomes “the history of place-making and of the instantiation of meaning in the structures, boundaries, and configurations of space,” and particular American places leap to new life as historical palimpsests, material records of institutional dynamics and ideological conflicts. America itself as a “place”—that is...