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Events
Mar. 1 | 2012 Franklin Prize
Nominations for 2012 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for the best-published book in American Studies due
Mar. 1 | 2012 Romero Prize
Nominations for 2012 Lora Romero Publication Prize for the best-published first book in American Studies due
Mar. 1 | Community Partnership Grants
Applications for the 2012 Community Partnership Grants Program to assist American Studies collaborative, interdisciplinary community projects due
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
By University | By Year
Koelle, Alexandra. "Rights of Way: Race, Place, and Nation in the Northern Rockies," History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, June 2010. Advisor: Donna Haraway
This study follows well-known and forgotten transportation corridors to trace relations between people and places in the formation of a distinct region within the United States, one commonly regarded as remote from the coastal locations of hegemonic state power. I focus on the linear spaces of roads and trails - zones of passage across the landscape rather than places of dwelling - because they cut through and across naturalized maps, thus bringing attention to the constructed and relational qualities of regional enclosures and boundaries.
I examine contemporary re-enactments of Lewis and Clark’s journey, commemorations of the Nez Perce flight across the Bitterroot Mountains, and a current highway widening project that prioritizes safe crossings for wildlife on the Flathead Reservation. I follow the routes of nineteenth-century African-American and Chinese travelers to call attention to the ways in which popular memory often functions to normalize the demographic and political dominance of Euro-Americans.
Three meanings of the term “right-of-way” serve as tropes and guides. Rights-of-way are transportation corridors, public zones of travel and transit that I argue are central to how regions define themselves and create categories of belonging and exclusion. “Right-of-way” also connotes legal relationships between persons traveling along routes. I expand on this concept by looking at who has control over roadways, who decides to build them or block them, and most of all, what kinds of political structures and agendas allow some people passage and residency while denying the same to others. Lastly, “right-of-way” phonetically plays on “rites,” i.e. collective performances that take place along routes, and that define how spaces are being claimed in the present through practices of remembering or commemorating certain elements of the past.
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