Description
In 1849 and 1851, Irishman William Kelly (1791-1855) traveled to the American West. He published his experiences in the widely-read memoir An Excursion to California (1851), which was published in two volumes. Kelly’s little-studied narrative is remarkable not just because of the way it reveals a tension between capitalism and the environment that continues to be relevant today, but because it seems to anticipate contemporary conceptualizations and even deterritorializations of California.Using Gayatri Spivak’s notion of “spectralization,” I argue that Kelly’s writing can be read as an early example of a text that turns a region into a disembodied imaginary; an abstracted construct rather than an actual, physical place. Specifically, I will show that his writing reveals a tension between ecology and economy that has only intensified since the 1850s, and that the initial move towards abstraction continues to have social and political implications for present-day California. Indeed, because global structures of power (what Manuel Castells calls “functional flows”) and actual, lived reality have become separated, regional or local problems have tended to become obscured by a more powerful, transnationally constructed Californian imaginary.
Kelly’s text, then, is more than a tourist account of “an excursion to California”: it is a document that shows the lasting influence of transnational writing on the construction of a region.
| Period | 11 Jan 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Cultural Representations of the Region in Transnational Contexts, c. 1840-1940 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Nijmegen, NetherlandsShow on map |