The spatial imagination, critics have long contended, is fundamental to literary practice and readerly experience. This topic has been invigorated by the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, propelled in part by the climate emergency, the dazzling explosion of ecocritical approaches, and the development of technologies such as GIS. These two books demonstrate the fruitfulness of the spatial turn for US literary studies.
Soto would have much to say about the census’s prominence in contemporary political discourse, given the Trump administration’s efforts to place a citizenship question on the census as evident strategy of racial disenfranchisement. Soto’s book examines the historical power of census data to put African Americans on the map, literally and culturally. In skillfully crafted chapters, he argues that “African American identity as we today understand it solidified” a century ago in response to the US census, which enabled the “conceptual linkage of abstract geopolitical...
