MAHSHID MAYAR is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of British and American Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. She is co-editor, with Marion Schulte, of the essay collection Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations across Disciplines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), and is currently working on Erasure: Poetics, Politics, Performance, a book project that interrogates the politics and poetics of silence and silencing in contemporary US poetry.
Mayar’s research and teaching interests include historical childhood studies, 19th-century cultural history of the US, new empire studies, 21st-century protest poetry and political literature, the history of race and racialization, and critical game studies. In her first book, Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), Mayar deploys archival evidence to develop an understanding of turn-of-the-century American children as ambivalent cartographers. By focusing on the way children consumed, engaged with, and adapted the maps and mapping practices of the American Empire, Citizens and Rulers of the World endeavors to show how imperial pedagogy and cartography, once in children’s hands, became both a personal and a political site.
M. BUNA: Socializing turn-of-the-century American children into the ways of the empire relied on employing “home geography” as a pedagogical tool to underline the comfort and “civilization” of familiar spaces, as opposed to colonized or racialized ones. In Citizens and Rulers of the World, you contend that, far from being mere performers of adults’ scripts, “turn-of-the-century American children […] consumed geographic knowledge and produced spatial narratives and cognitive maps of their own.” What were the marks of the cartography they envisioned in response to inherited maps drawn by the imperial pedagogy of the colonizing machine?
https://rulmovie.tumblr.com/post/689562475905138688/%E5%AE%8C%E6%95%B4%E7%89%88%E9%9B%B7%E7%A5%9E4%E7%88%B1%E4%B8%8E%E9%9B%B7%E9%9C%86hd-%E9%AB%98%E6%B8%85%E7%B7%9A%E4%B8%8A%E7%9C%8B
https://open.firstory.me/user/cl5hzd1w101ta01tm1ce8hyzi
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/malashintia77/n-a-1303876
https://lu.ma/3n1vzdka
https://techplanet.today/post/4-2022-hd-2
https://wakelet.com/wake/THOn1RaFBw4nrfu9W7GNC
https://peatix.com/event/3300761/view?k=1274dc07d0b55c26f5c881b0510d589671cf184c
https://ecs.instructure.com/eportfolios/3413/Home/4_2022HD__TWHK
https://www.deafhoosiers.com/profile/malashintia77/profile
https://lu.ma/m7dy4vm2
https://open.firstory.me/user/cl5i19qm901wa01s015er0p0b
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/melaninarsB/n-a-1303910
https://techplanet.today/post/2022-1080p-hd-quality-3
https://wakelet.com/wake/qajMkKa-K_xVA6OYd4uFL
https://peatix.com/event/3300802/view?k=7c0d758dc3bdfd6c882d3349b3274b545fc4c7f8
https://ecs.instructure.com/eportfolios/3414/Home/__Minions_The_Rise_of_Gru__2022
https://www.pueblozoo.org/profile-1/minions2fullversiontw/profile
https://www.deafhoosiers.com/profile/melaninarsha/profile
https://www.managingmatters.com/profile/minions2chinesetaipei/profile
https://www.happyvalleybeer.com/profile/minionsfulltwonlinehd/profile
Domestic playthings included dissected or “puzzle” maps that were more than mere educational toys provided by adults trying to administer children’s playtime. Writing that “dissected maps are both the ideological offspring and the material agents of colonial violence,” you bring up what you call reinscriptive cartography. How can this be a useful concept when trying to understand children’s pastimes in hindsight?
Dissected maps — that is, maps mounted on cardboard or wood and then cut into smaller pieces that children were to put back together — are a generative example of the ways imperial pedagogy (and the violence it promoted under the cover of such seemingly benign notions as “home geography”) found its place outside formal education, in children’s lives outside the classroom. I view these maps as “the ideological offspring and the material agents of colonial violence,” mainly because their very act of production — i.e., dissection of a larger cartographic whole into smaller units with a handsaw or scissors — most tangibly replicated the reckless violence inherent in the colonial practices of drawing up borders that resulted in displacement of peoples, cutting off their ties of kinship, and in genocide.
We can never know for sure whether children recorded their day-to-day encounters with, and speculations about, the idea of home and the geopolitical realities of the American Empire exclusively at the invitation of adults, or as an attempt to take part in the exciting “publics of childhood” that the juvenile periodicals had given shape to over the course of the 19th century. But either way, it is critical to study these records to find out how empires (what I characterize as “multigenerational power constellations”) survived by making accessible pedagogical scripts that children of the white and wealthy could learn from and appropriate as times changed. More crucially, they are critical to study because it is often through them that historians find early drafts of dissent toward colonial violence (even if playfully executed), and of deviation from binary thinking about colonialism (even if marked as “child-like” misreading). Last but not least, the study of childhood as a highly politicized yet pre-political category of dependence in the 19th century opens doors to more fruitful engagements with the ways childhood as an allegedly innocent, ambivalent project of growing up corroborated, was shaped by, and gave shape to the empire as an inescapably violent, racialized project.
https://issuu.com/zakariyekuno
http://www.shadowville.com/board/general-discussions/childrens-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with-mahshid-mayar#p537158
https://dailybusinesspost.com/childrens-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with-mahshid/
https://webhitlist.com/forum/topics/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with
http://beterhbo.ning.com/profiles/blogs/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with
https://mcspartners.ning.com/photo/albums/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with
http://allabouturanch.com/forum/topics/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with
https://caribbeanfever.com/photo/albums/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with
http://playit4ward-sanantonio.ning.com/photo/albums/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with
https://www.onfeetnation.com/profiles/blogs/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with
https://wadeszig.vip/childrens-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with-mahshid/
https://articleroom.xyz/childrens-maps-of-the-american-empire/
https://writeonwall.com/childrens-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with-mahshid-mayar/
https://party.biz/blogs/107197/151201/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with-mah
https://trendingnews.cookpad-blog.jp/articles/734045
http://ptits.net/boards/t/87044/childrens-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with-mahshid-mayar.aspx
Sánchez-Eppler does something particularly generative for childhood studies: before delving into her study of Sunday school moral tracts for white, Christian American children, she likens the expansion of US economic and cultural empire to raising children as future citizens, soldiers, and servants (not the other way round). I find this generative because, instead of sanctioning views that question childhood’s political involvement in the world of geopolitics, “Raising Empires like Children” centers the study of US Empire on childhood as an inherently political project. She convincingly argues that empires learn from and owe to childhood in their attempts at survival and growth over generations. This is where the common 19th-century views of nation as domestic space (nursery, household, family) and empire as the nation’s territorial and ideological outgrowth enter the discussion.
Children’s Maps of the American Empire: A Conversation with Mahshid Mayar
Mayar’s research and teaching interests include historical childhood studies, 19th-century cultural history of the US, new empire studies, 21st-century protest poetry and political literature, the history of race and racialization, and critical game studies. In her first book, Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), Mayar deploys archival evidence to develop an understanding of turn-of-the-century American children as ambivalent cartographers. By focusing on the way children consumed, engaged with, and adapted the maps and mapping practices of the American Empire, Citizens and Rulers of the World endeavors to show how imperial pedagogy and cartography, once in children’s hands, became both a personal and a political site.
M. BUNA: Socializing turn-of-the-century American children into the ways of the empire relied on employing “home geography” as a pedagogical tool to underline the comfort and “civilization” of familiar spaces, as opposed to colonized or racialized ones. In Citizens and Rulers of the World, you contend that, far from being mere performers of adults’ scripts, “turn-of-the-century American children […] consumed geographic knowledge and produced spatial narratives and cognitive maps of their own.” What were the marks of the cartography they envisioned in response to inherited maps drawn by the imperial pedagogy of the colonizing machine?
https://rulmovie.tumblr.com/post/689562475905138688/%E5%AE%8C%E6%95%B4%E7%89%88%E9%9B%B7%E7%A5%9E4%E7%88%B1%E4%B8%8E%E9%9B%B7%E9%9C%86hd-%E9%AB%98%E6%B8%85%E7%B7%9A%E4%B8%8A%E7%9C%8B
https://open.firstory.me/user/cl5hzd1w101ta01tm1ce8hyzi
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/malashintia77/n-a-1303876
https://lu.ma/3n1vzdka
https://techplanet.today/post/4-2022-hd-2
https://wakelet.com/wake/THOn1RaFBw4nrfu9W7GNC
https://peatix.com/event/3300761/view?k=1274dc07d0b55c26f5c881b0510d589671cf184c
https://ecs.instructure.com/eportfolios/3413/Home/4_2022HD__TWHK
https://www.deafhoosiers.com/profile/malashintia77/profile
https://lu.ma/m7dy4vm2
https://open.firstory.me/user/cl5i19qm901wa01s015er0p0b
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/melaninarsB/n-a-1303910
https://techplanet.today/post/2022-1080p-hd-quality-3
https://wakelet.com/wake/qajMkKa-K_xVA6OYd4uFL
https://peatix.com/event/3300802/view?k=7c0d758dc3bdfd6c882d3349b3274b545fc4c7f8
https://ecs.instructure.com/eportfolios/3414/Home/__Minions_The_Rise_of_Gru__2022
https://www.pueblozoo.org/profile-1/minions2fullversiontw/profile
https://www.deafhoosiers.com/profile/melaninarsha/profile
https://www.managingmatters.com/profile/minions2chinesetaipei/profile
https://www.happyvalleybeer.com/profile/minionsfulltwonlinehd/profile
Domestic playthings included dissected or “puzzle” maps that were more than mere educational toys provided by adults trying to administer children’s playtime. Writing that “dissected maps are both the ideological offspring and the material agents of colonial violence,” you bring up what you call reinscriptive cartography. How can this be a useful concept when trying to understand children’s pastimes in hindsight?
Dissected maps — that is, maps mounted on cardboard or wood and then cut into smaller pieces that children were to put back together — are a generative example of the ways imperial pedagogy (and the violence it promoted under the cover of such seemingly benign notions as “home geography”) found its place outside formal education, in children’s lives outside the classroom. I view these maps as “the ideological offspring and the material agents of colonial violence,” mainly because their very act of production — i.e., dissection of a larger cartographic whole into smaller units with a handsaw or scissors — most tangibly replicated the reckless violence inherent in the colonial practices of drawing up borders that resulted in displacement of peoples, cutting off their ties of kinship, and in genocide.
We can never know for sure whether children recorded their day-to-day encounters with, and speculations about, the idea of home and the geopolitical realities of the American Empire exclusively at the invitation of adults, or as an attempt to take part in the exciting “publics of childhood” that the juvenile periodicals had given shape to over the course of the 19th century. But either way, it is critical to study these records to find out how empires (what I characterize as “multigenerational power constellations”) survived by making accessible pedagogical scripts that children of the white and wealthy could learn from and appropriate as times changed. More crucially, they are critical to study because it is often through them that historians find early drafts of dissent toward colonial violence (even if playfully executed), and of deviation from binary thinking about colonialism (even if marked as “child-like” misreading). Last but not least, the study of childhood as a highly politicized yet pre-political category of dependence in the 19th century opens doors to more fruitful engagements with the ways childhood as an allegedly innocent, ambivalent project of growing up corroborated, was shaped by, and gave shape to the empire as an inescapably violent, racialized project.
https://issuu.com/zakariyekuno
http://www.shadowville.com/board/general-discussions/childrens-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with-mahshid-mayar#p537158
https://dailybusinesspost.com/childrens-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with-mahshid/
https://webhitlist.com/forum/topics/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with
http://beterhbo.ning.com/profiles/blogs/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with
https://mcspartners.ning.com/photo/albums/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with
http://allabouturanch.com/forum/topics/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with
https://caribbeanfever.com/photo/albums/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with
http://playit4ward-sanantonio.ning.com/photo/albums/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with
https://www.onfeetnation.com/profiles/blogs/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with
https://wadeszig.vip/childrens-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with-mahshid/
https://articleroom.xyz/childrens-maps-of-the-american-empire/
https://writeonwall.com/childrens-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with-mahshid-mayar/
https://party.biz/blogs/107197/151201/children-s-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with-mah
https://trendingnews.cookpad-blog.jp/articles/734045
http://ptits.net/boards/t/87044/childrens-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with-mahshid-mayar.aspx
Sánchez-Eppler does something particularly generative for childhood studies: before delving into her study of Sunday school moral tracts for white, Christian American children, she likens the expansion of US economic and cultural empire to raising children as future citizens, soldiers, and servants (not the other way round). I find this generative because, instead of sanctioning views that question childhood’s political involvement in the world of geopolitics, “Raising Empires like Children” centers the study of US Empire on childhood as an inherently political project. She convincingly argues that empires learn from and owe to childhood in their attempts at survival and growth over generations. This is where the common 19th-century views of nation as domestic space (nursery, household, family) and empire as the nation’s territorial and ideological outgrowth enter the discussion.