Stargazing like a State: Blackness, Astronomy, and Government Printing in the Early Republic

• In Event: Technologies of State Power, Technologies of Dissent

Abstract

On April 15, 1791, celebrants gathered at a place called Jones’s Point, on the banks of the Potomac River in the District of Columbia. They were there to establish the new capital city’s precise longitude—its exact position in astronomical and geographic space. According to a newspaper account of the event, the master of ceremonies declared that the celebrants were laying the cornerstone of “a superstructure” that would “invite even the Savage of the Wilderness to take shelter under its roof.” This was no mere rhetorical flourish. The Jones’s Point marker was instrumental to the production of government almanacs and maps. In short, the astronomical project enabled a settler-colonial one. And yet, in many ways, these intersecting projects remained incomplete. By 1809, a Congressional study of maps and almanacs in the United States found that they seldom agreed on the location of US borders, cities, or waterways. Moreover, the most widely reprinted almanac of 1794 was not the official, state almanac produced by geographer general Andrew Ellicott, but was instead a version composed by an African American assistant to the capital survey expedition, Benjamin Banneker.

Building upon the scholarship of Martha Schoolman, Jared Hickman, Hsuan L. Hsu, James C. Scott, and others, this paper will consider how agents of the US state attempted to deploy printed almanacs as a means of locating the capital city in geopolitical and astronomical space—and how they failed. Recent turns in American literary and cultural studies have called upon scholars to consider the cultural problems produced by a geographically mutable, expansionist United States. By tracing the distribution of the Banneker and Ellicott publications, this paper will articulate the radical limits of attempts by agents of the state to shape how readers understood the nation’s changing spatial dimensions. In short, this project considers how alternative configurations of space—geographic, astronomical, and even racial—circulated in print. Schoolman has suggested that nineteenth-century geography functioned as an “idiom of political critique.” I would add that, for many, it held out the unfulfilled promise of totalizing, political domination. This paper will suggest that the deep origins of US efforts to master geopolitical space can be found in the state’s earliest attempts to survey land and to print the workaday publications of empire. And this project suggests, finally, that understanding such origins will enable us to articulate the limits of state power and to reclaim space and place as idioms of critique.

Author

• Gordon D Fraser, North Dakota State University