The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (review)

Part of the achievement of Martin Brückner's book is its success in bringing the field of geography to bear on early American literary and cultural studies, opening up original and exciting territory, as it were, for scholarly and pedagogic exploration. Another of its achievements is its integration of a fascinating and diverse archive of material artifacts (not just paintings and book illustrations but embroidery samplers, porcelain pitchers, and map puzzles) and textual documents (not just novels and travel writing but surveying manuals, geography textbooks, and schoolroom spellers) into its study of the late colonial and early national periods. Brückner's use of the visual and textual archive is impressive, informed, and stimulating. The book's 56 visual images are compellingly read and deftly woven into his analysis. And his attention to the geographic content and context of a number of unexpected literary and cultural texts—such as William Byrd's Journey to the Land of Eden, George Washington's school papers, and Charles Brockden Brown's Jane Talbot—repeatedly offer startling insights that begin the important work of rescuing these texts for a richer and more textured American literary and cultural history.

But perhaps this book's most compelling achievement is its theorization of what Brückner calls "geographical literacy"—not just the ability to read maps and employ geographic terms, but the complex and fascinating cross-articulation of geometrics and alphabetics in the schoolrooms, parlors, and identities of landed and literate settler Americans in the long eighteenth century, when "lessons in geographic modes of reading and writing intersected with the more familiar practices that we commonly associate with literary competence, from the first ciphering of the alphabet to performing speeches to writing narrative compositions" (4). The Geographic Revolution in Early America argues that the "literary construction of the modern American subject" was profoundly shaped by the "internalization of geography as a kind of language" (12). In learning and practicing such geographical literacy, common readers inaugurated and animated the nation, and they did so "by poring over geographic texts that produced and reproduced their cultural commodity as a geographic reality, as a recognizable American sign" (141). Brückner thinks anew about selfhood and nationhood and their relationship to each other, and does so in part by engaging with the wonderfully specialized models and vocabulary of surveying and mapmaking, such as the common plat, the cadastral survey, and the cartouche.

The book's first chapter outlines the effect of the land survey on colonial writing practices. As a form of record that combined a map and a text, the property-claiming model of the "colonial plat" offered pre-Revolutionary Anglo-American landowners a visual and textual apparatus for imagining themselves in relation to the colony and the empire. Brückner carefully and brilliantly analyzes the cross-articulation of alphabetic with geographic literacy in the formation of the late colonial subject, who was thus positioned simultaneously as author, surveyor, and landowner. Even if the subjects in question here are implicitly white, male, and propertied, Brückner's fascinating analysis of this "structural and conceptual overlay of alphabet, survey, and human form" (34) positions American subject-formation within the intertwined technologies of land and print management. The subsequent chapter turns from the survey to the continental map as a figure used by colonial rhetoricians simultaneously to represent the incipient coherence of the nation and to obscure the continent's indigenous inhabitants. These maps repeatedly positioned in their cartouches (the decorative insignia in a map's corner that contains its title and key) a Native American caught in a moment of "oral containment" (63), thus replacing an oral with a print conception of the continent and symbolically silencing any competing claims to the territory. Over the course of this chapter the Native Americans, settler colonists as Americans, and the American continent each become at various points identified with each other...