Counter-mapping Modernism: Literature, Oil, and the Cartographic Imagination

Talk with Aaron Nyerges (University of Sydney).

Aaron Nyerges’ recent book American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2025) is a new reading of American modernism that examines the cartographic literature of the United States and places it in context of the state's overseas expansion. Dr Nyerges stretches the map of US literature across an imperial archipelago of territories and outlines a method of comparative reading that brings canonical American authors into dialogue with under-represented writers from across the contested dominions of US empire. He argues that literary artists from across US dominion responded to space-dominating technologies of empire and retooled them to imagine counter-cartographies, designs that challenged the official geographies of the United States.

This talk explores the cartographic imagination of modernist literature as it relates to the territorial expansions of the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. We begin with Langston Hughes’s construction and destruction of cartographic material, his tearing apart of his world atlas, and his vision of a nation made errant by oceanic flux. From there we will assemble – and collaboratively analyse – a group of poems that make visible the divergent investments modernists made in the production of “counter-maps,” forms of geographic knowledge that challenge the maps made by governments and corporations. 

In particular, we will attend to the oil maps deposited in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, by which he critiques the resource expropriation of former Ottoman territories by Anglo-American cartels. At that very locus, the Iraqi modernist poet Nazik al-Malā’ikah envisions a different kind of energy poetics, where the dividing line between oil’s extractive and consumptive spheres is decidedly smudged. Her mapping of an abysmal geography provides anti-colonial counterpoint to the expanding highway infrastructure of the United States, as well as the thermodynamic aesthetics that exhilarate the lyrics of Pound and William Carlos Williams.

If you are interested in joining, please contact Dr. Martyn Bone (organizer, chair of the EH research group) for access to a PDF file that Aaron has put together relating to the talk. The event will start at 3.15pm due to the academic quarter.

Bio

Aaron Nyerges is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney. His book, American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.