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Thoughts on Geographic Imaginaries  
for the 21st Century 

Diana Sorensen

My thoughts are informed by my five years as Dean for Arts and Humanities at Harvard University, where I 
have been able to observe the intellectual configurations that have emerged and taken shape in response 

to the ways in which the world is being reimagined and represented in the first decade of this century. By trac-
ing how the categories of space, materiality and movement are being thought about, I want to understand the 
institutional and intellectual transformations that are taking place in the humanities and the interpretive social 
sciences.  One of my goals is to reduce the distance that tends to separate the institutional, administrative world 
from the strictly intellectual one, and to further their coexistence under the larger academic umbrella which 
shelters both. 

The present time’s geographic imaginaries are taking on different shapes, both large and small. The conceptual 
models we employ to map our global topographies expand, contract, and are organized along shifting, often 
incommensurate, logics. As Deleuze  and Guattari observed, we are “at the crossroads of all kinds of formations,”2  
in which the ordering patterns produce shifting, fractal terrains. The paradigm of studying specific regional 
areas established during the Cold War no longer provides the central organizational structure that reflects 
our institutional cultural mappings, which can be, in Saskia Sassen’s words, “contradictory spaces.” A crisis of 
understanding has resulted from the inability of old categories of space to account for our diverse cartographies, 
as if our geographies had become jumbled up.

In literary and cultural studies, the world is mapped along differing principles of organization: a very capacious 
World Literature initiative is becoming the prominent paradigm in a number of Comparative Literature 
departments (including Harvard’s); it goes hand in hand with the rising interest in translation studies and 
bilingual studies. This kind of model has produced significant tensions around the role of vernacular languages, 
the potentially flattening gaze of translation, and the totalizing force of Anglo-Globalism.

Other—quite different—ways of thinking about contemporary space tend to privilege regional cominglings 
that may be expansive or contractive in their gravitational force. There are initiatives to further areas of study 
such as Mediterranean Studies and the Global South—itself seen more as a condition than a place, and, in several 
ways, an heir to the now outmoded “Third World” as a designation for non-hegemonic areas. Orientations 
such as “Global South” are parceling up the larger field of Postcolonial Studies, representing a reordering of 
the geographic in order to focus on the parts of the world marked by the highest degree of political, social and 
economic upheaval. In a different alignment of forces, North and South are brought together in the Hemispheric 
Studies of the Americas, which is modifying the configuration of some History and Literature departments. 
The globe is reshaped in yet other regimes of representation in Transatlantic Studies, whose gravitational pull 
is West–East, and which are thriving in departments of History, History of Science, English, Comparative 
Literature, and in Spanish or Lusophone Studies, often ruled by the logic of colonial affiliations. A case in point 
is Hispanic Transatlantic Studies, generously supported by the Spanish government as it seeks to renew old ties 
severed by independence movements in the nineteenth century, and by the shift of power alignments that took 
place in the twentieth century.   



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Forces of contraction are also at work. Regional studies such as Catalan, Galician, Czech, Mapuche–Huilliche 
or Aymara studies are taking root across the academic landscape. This is not new in itself, but it is significant as 
a response to the perceived risk of overgeneralization, homogenization, and the flattening of specificities. The 
power of local languages is emphasized in these groupings, and they are seen as the backbone of the scholar’s 
understanding of the cultural world in question. The nation–state is eschewed in favor of the region, the city, 
or the village—reminding us, with K. Anthony Appiah, that “humans live best on a smaller scale.” In a loosely 
connected way, I’ve been struck by the rising interest among young linguists in dying languages, which implies 
studying groups of five or six speakers and their disappearing cultural universe in remote, tightly circumscribed 
areas.  

What is local and vernacular is in constant transformation as our epistemologies respond to the unstable 
territorial politics of our time. Borders are confounded by diasporic peoples who actually inhabit or make 
present their vernacular cultures in the midst of a foreign state, so that, for example, within California we may 
have parts of Mexico or India. Migration is transforming the relationships between the state and its citizens in 
sending as well as in receiving countries. The modern relationship between the state and its citizens was based 
upon the assumption that state, territory and population would coincide: as rights are extended to nationals 
abroad, citizenship ceases to be divorced from territory. Cultural flows in these contexts are both homogenizing 
and heterogenizing: some groups may share in a global culture regardless of where they might be; they may be 
alienated from their own hinterlands, or else they may choose to turn back to what may have once been seen 
as residual, very local cultures which deliberately separate themselves from global culture. As Homi Bhabha has 
pointed out, we need to turn to paradox in order to name the ever rearticulating formulations of our geographic 
imaginaries: we have coined such oxymoronic phrases as global village, globloc, vernacular cosmopolitanisms, or 
transcultural localisms. 

The different movements of expansion and contraction operate with logics of their own, so that the overall 
effect is similar to the movement of tectonic plates. While this is known to be characteristic of the era of 
globalization, there may be several interlocking and even contradictory logics at work in these liminal moments, 
made all the more unstable by the current global financial crisis. I plan to chart the often contradictory and 
even agonistic constellations of discourses and institutional practices which have been addressing the expansion 
and contraction of our geographic imaginaries. In these potentially paradoxical configurations, I would claim 
that rather than the oft-cited process of deterritorialization  what we are witnessing is intense territorialization 
(hyperterritorialization), obtaining in spatial figurations and models which are often incommensurate.

The divergent processes I have sketched unify or fragment the object of study and its explanatory force. It 
would be interesting to trace the logics of understanding produced by some of the current geographic models, 
studying the kinds of knowledge they are likely to enable. For example, Transatlantic Studies are predicated on 
the logic of the colonial and its effects —whether English or Spanish, North or South. Their maritime inflection 
privileges crossings and exchanges, movement and distances to be traversed, multi-local networks and migration.  
Their vast geopolitical reach embraces imperial histories, the slave trade, scientific and biomedical exchanges, 
biogeography and cultural geography, all in multiple directions of movement in space and historical periodicity. 
We read about the Red Atlantic of revolutions, the Black Atlantic of the slave trade, the Green Atlantic of Irish 
migrants; Cis-Atlantic and Circum-Atlantic studies are introduced into the broader Transatlantic realm; we see 
efforts to reinterpret empires like the Portuguese one according to the extent to which the Atlantic might or 
might not do justice to its holdings beyond Africa and Brazil. In a different, North-South axis, Hemispheric 
Studies take stock of indigenous commonalities and differences, cross-border exchanges, and the comparative 
structures that united and separated the Americas with the arrival of the Europeans. The “Hemispheric Turn” 
in American Studies might be a step towards furthering Inter-American relations, and so far it has operated by 
tackling such projects as comparing different appropriations of European culture, or by tracing the presence of 
Spanish-speaking groups in the nineteenth century along borders that separate the US and Mexico today. The 
Hemispheric turn is receptive to notions of creolization and mestizaje, which is especially productive in the study 



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of the heteroglossic Caribbean. In Hemispheric Studies, considerable tensions exist around the direction of 
the gaze in a historically fraught North-South relationship. The power alignment it favors is in a relationship of 
potential rivalry with Transatlantic Studies, where Spain is given greater salience than the U.S.  

The oscillation between expansion and contraction that I have been discussing is subject to varying senses 
of distance and movement as constitutive of cultural production and understanding. The awareness of distance 
presents the need for cultural and linguistic specificity: what is understood as being far is different --linguistically 
and culturally. Whether it is China as understood in the West, or the Andean nations in Latin America, we 
oscillate between distant readings, as in Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees,3 and the close reading paradigm in 
which difference and specificity are the guiding principles. In its fullest expression, the focus on difference can 
provide specificity and contextual richness; it can also produce a certain exhaustion of difference whereby, as Arif 
Dirlik has pointed out, our recognition of previously ignored aspects of cultural difference, while countervailing 
the pitfalls of essentialization, may have the undesirable effect of producing a conglomeration of differences 
which resist naming and the postulation of collective identity. In Arif Dirlik’s terms, “The dispersal of culture 
into many localized encounters renders it elusive both as a phenomenon and as a principle of mapping and 
historical explanation.”4 Even when the transnational impulse is arrested, and one nation is studied as a discreet 
unit, the spatial logic of explanation and the function assigned to distance will produce different accounts of 
the object of study—that is to say, different geographic imaginaries. To help flesh out these concepts, a couple 
of illustrations may be helpful.  One is offered by Arif Dirlik in a study of Chinese culture that rethinks the 
intersection between space and historical explanation.  For Dirlik, distance is not so much a measure between 
two or more bounded cultural worlds, but a “potentiality, a space of indeterminacy inherent to all processes of 
mediation, and therefore inherent to the social process per se.” When distance is brought into play, new ways of 
conceiving social and cultural space follow. In the Chinese example, it would call into question the traditional 
account of the formation of Chinese civilization as radiating from a Han monarchic center towards peripheries 
in which “barbarism” ruled under the aegis of fifty-six recognized ethnic nationalities. Dirlik sees in the current 
condition of migration and displacement (“living in a state of flux”) an opportunity for relinquishing static, 
traditional notions of cultural formation, replacing them with paradigms that stress motion and process, distance 
and mobility over “stable containers.” (14) Such alternative spatialities would instantiate a more productive 
understanding of the role of boundaries in the formation of Chinese culture, which would cease to be unified, 
and become, instead, the product of “multiple contact zones of a people in constant motion.”  In this reversal, 
the Chinese would be global in reach “because they have been formed from the outside… The inside and the 
outside become inextricably entangled in one another...” (11) What I find interesting is the emplacement of 
explanation and its bearing on the geographic imaginary it produces: what emanates from a centrally located 
origin (the Han) is refigured and radically transformed in its explanatory logic when the border becomes the 
intellectual perch, the place from which the scholar looks.  

In fact, the border is not only the focus of current Border Studies; it is also the nodal point which represents 
the convergence of geography and mobility. It is emblematic of new identity formations, and, at the same time, 
of the current politics of national security, surveillance and containment. The border is not exclusively situated 
in the national periphery: boundaries are dispersed in cosmopolitan cities, marking exchanges of technology, 
objects and persons. Their plurality contains the dilemma of contemporary citizenship and belonging. The 
subject position that stems from the boundary is the immigrant, who tends to represent the reality of internal 
exclusion.  

Shifting from the center to the border produces an alternative geographic epistemology; so does an 
explanatory logic displaced from a territorial center to the sea. Consider the role of the “heartland” in an agrarian 
American tradition invented in the nineteenth century, when the notion of Manifest Destiny evoked a drive 
west and the move of the European settlers towards the interior, with its rolling, grain-producing plains and its 
imposing mountains. There is an emerging countervailing model which does not emanate from the heartland: 
it displaces its stable centrality and opts, instead, for maritime studies as fluid spaces of movement and multiple 



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engagements that eschew closure and operate with different causal systems. As Gary Okhiro explains it, “The 
sea, before Europeans, had no exclusionary laws, fences, or border patrols or imaginary cartographic lines, but 
rather ‘points of entry that were constantly negotiated and even contested. The sea was open to anyone who 
could navigate a way through.” Within the fluid parameters of the maritime imaginary we would have to make 
distinctions between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the North and the South. If the border or contact zone—be it 
China or the US-Mexico border—de-essentializes the logic of explanation by taking stock of transborder forces 
and assailing notions of cultural homogeneity, the fluid notion of the seas eschews confinement and tracks 
multiple directions of contacts and crossings. My point is that there are important distinctions emanating from 
each epistemological location—whether it settles on the sea or the interior, the North or the South, the East or 
the West, the center or the border. 

Different explanations stem from the geographic imaginaries produced in the very locational impulse, in 
the direction of the gaze. In the contemporary intellectual scene there are multiple and shifting geographic 
logics at work; the institutional mappings they are producing override national borders and replace them with 
potentially contradictory, frequently interstitial, always dynamic configurations. There is no outside to the global 
system, but it can be mapped from different locations, and it is being drawn and redrawn in structures of various 
kinds both within the academy and in the geopolitical order.5 It is no longer enough to echo Marx’s Communist 
Manifesto and quote the deterritorializing effects of capitalism, as has been done since postmodern theory re-
read this passage. As I observed above, whether global or local, our intellectual projects are hyperterritorial in a 
manner that shapes our understandings of history and culture, and that are in constant transformation.

Connected with the shifting regional, global, interstitial and liminal mappings, there is great interest now 
in theorizing materiality in literature, history, anthropology, and art-history departments. Thingness appears in a 
variety of contexts, as if anchoring so much geopolitical fluidity and counterbalancing the digital world. Objects 
in fiction, in anthropology, or in the visual arts might help make contact with the real, seeming to provide 
compensatory materiality in the face of discourse and the digital world. They are studied in their ability to 
organize our relationships with matter, desire, and the phenomenal world. Things occupy space; they inscribe 
memory as well as temporality: as Heidegger notes, “the question ‘What is a thing?’ includes in itself the question: 
‘What is Zeitraum (time-span)?’, the puzzling unity of space and time within which, as it seems, the basic character 
of things, to be only this one, is determined.”6 And, indeed, Heidegger insists on the determinative power of 
quality, extension, relation, place and time in our study of the thing.

We need to think about the intersection between mobility and materiality in the geographic context described 
above. My claim is that the deeper the anchor materiality seems to provide, the denser are the pathways of 
movement and transmission it inscribes. Take Timothy Brook’s latest book, the charming Vermeer’s Hat. The 
Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World,7 in which the hat in question inscribes the history of its 
manufacture, and it traces a series of routes which take us to Champlain’s adventures in North America and the 
search for beaver pelts. From there we move to cultural and economic history, as Brook narrates the effect on 
fashion and status of the arrival of pelts from Canada into European markets in the late sixteenth century. His 
narrative logic derives from the conjuring of distance, mobility and materiality to suggest a new understanding of 
the invisible ties that link places as distant as Delft and what would later become Canada. Brooks draws on the 
discourse of globalization to show what others before him had anticipated: that globalization has always already 
been with us, but that it now provides a structure of understanding and a kind of interpretive teleology which 
thrives on movement across vast spaces, following things and their transformations (say from beaver pelt to hat 
to the suitor in Vermeer’s painting). The hat as thing condenses disparate orders of knowledge: the history of 
early North American settlers, the qualities of beaver pelts and the effects of glue on the mental health of hat 
makers, the travel narratives of Marco Polo and the search for China in the early explorations of America, the 
development of the arquebus, the inventory of Vermeer’s possessions drawn up by his bankrupt wife after his 
death. As Heidegger explained it, “the determinations name the respects in which things exhibit themselves 
to us in the assertion and talk about them, the perspectives from which we view things, in which they show 



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themselves.”8  

In the study of things we deploy multiple regimes of signification, endowing materiality with the power to 
contain the same epistemological diversity I discussed above in relation to geographic imaginaries.  In art history, 
the study of objects is standard practice, but inserting a consideration of their mobility within a geographic 
context implies a significant departure from the autonomy and anchored materiality of the object at rest.  Motion 
and distance are constitutive: they intervene proleptically in the production of a work of art, whose materiality 
can be partly determined by the anticipation of movement and transportation.

 I think we should be exploring how interpretation is transformed by the geographic imaginary in which 
it is located.  How would insertion into a Transatlantic corpus transform our understanding of a given author 
or group of works?  What interpretive insights would be derived from such a conceptual model, and how 
would they be transformed by a Hemispheric one, or a World-literary one?  What questions of translatability 
(broadly construed) would have to be considered? Would such critical geographies allow for interdisciplinary 
transformations that transcended our conventional departmental arrangements?  What would be the intellectual 
and institutional effects of grouping together areas of study along new geographic principles of organization?  
For example, gathering the study of the ancient world around the Mediterranean would lead to assembling the 
Classics, Egyptology, and the Middle (or Near) East, and this would have profound effects in terms of cultural 
affiliations and understanding, on notions of influence and origin.  Some institutions are considering grouping 
German and Slavic: is that more productive than a possible French-Slavic alignment?  What relationships of 
belonging and family resemblances are presupposed and generated by each assemblage?   Has the time come 
to rearrange the area studies paradigm inherited from the Cold War era?  Could we turn to material objects 
to ground our spatial displacements, while, at the same time, allowing for the tracing of their pathways and 
the avatars of their historical transmission?  Colonial art, for example, needs to be understood in the light of 
distant destinations anticipated in the very crafting of an object: a gift for Philip II of Spain would bear the 
traces of its future transit even before it was sent across the Atlantic to Spain.  Such traces would include size 
and scale, and the tensions inherent in the question of cultural translatability from Precolumbian to colonial 
frames of understanding.  Such studies would encapsulate the role played by geography, distance, materiality and 
mutability in cultural construction and reception.  In dialogue with new models for thinking about time, we may 
be ushering in profound and productive transformations in the ways in which we imagine time and space in this 
liminal moment which we inhabit.

Endnotes
1. This Lecture was presented at the first Latin American and Latino Studies Teaching Workshop held at  

Viterbo University, La Crosse, Wisconsin, on April 26 – 27, 2010.
2. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, On the Line, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
3. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees.  Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005).
4. Arif Derlik, “Timespace, Social Space, and the Question of Chinese Culture.”  Boundary2 35:1 (2008), 5
5. An interesting geopolitical illustration would be the different configurations of Groups which gather to discuss the 

world financial crisis that began in 2008.  Aside from the Group of 8, we have a new Group of 20 which reflects 
divergent notions of emerging power, as well as an array of local trade organizations such as Asean and Mercosur.  A 
revealing new group of very recent formation is BRIC, constituted by Brazil, Russia, India and China.  Its agenda 
included an attempt to go beyond the dollar as the international currency. 

6. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co, 1967), 17.
7. Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat. The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (New York, Berlin, London: 

Bloomsbury Press, 2008).
8. Heidegger, 63.

Address Correspondences to: 
Diana Sorensen
Harvard University
e-mail: Sorensen@fas.harvard.edu


