Robert Gunn
University of Texas at El Paso
Robert L. Gunn, panelist, is Associate Professor of English, and affiliated faculty of the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies, at the University of Texas, El Paso. His research centers on North American literatures and culture prior to 1900, and focus primarily on the shifting western geographies of American empire in the nineteenth century. His book, Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands, was published by NYU Press in 2015 as part of the series “America and the Long 19th Century,” and is the winner of the 2016 Early American Literature First Book Prize.
Given its importance to cultural and literary history, the term “frontier” has nevertheless remained ambiguous. Patricia Nelson Limerick defines it as a “place undergoing conquest,” for instance, while Donald Worster... [ view full abstract ]
Given its importance to cultural and literary history, the term “frontier” has nevertheless remained ambiguous. Patricia Nelson Limerick defines it as a “place undergoing conquest,” for instance, while Donald Worster has argued that it is a “place where there is not enough rain to grow eastern crops.” While these definitions are different, they share the idea of the frontier as space or “place.” This panel proposes to use the occasion of the C19 conference’s setting in the frontier “place” of New Mexico to offer its own definition of this ambiguous term that thinks beyond the spatial imaginary, and thinks instead about the frontier as a “climate” of contested temporality. Building on the temporal turn in nineteenth-century studies, this definition of the frontier discovers the ways that encounters on the frontier occurred not simply at a particular time, but also through time. Drawing on a range of narratives—expedition notebooks, travelogues, journals, and novels—across a host of borderlands—New Mexico, the Rocky Mountains, New Spain, and even the South Seas—this panel reveals how contact narratives helped index the competing notions of temporality inflecting particular frontier moments even as they played a vital role in telling and re-telling the story of conquest in the nineteenth century. In this sense, our panel focuses not simply on representations of time in narratives that recount the encounters of the frontier, but also attends to the representations in time of narratives that negotiate encounters on the frontier. Our panel thus engages in close reading in order to unpack the way narratives bowed and flexed to accommodate both normative time measured in minutes, hours, and days, and different understandings of chronology—geologic timespans, indigenous temporal organizations, or meteorological events—that writers encountered in the climate of the frontier. This panel thus seeks to recuperate the term frontier in order to ask new questions about the aesthetic and political stakes of our own reading formations in the wake of historicism, symptomatic and surface reading, and the new formalism, with a particular emphasis on the how we read in a climate of unsettled temporality.
Robert Gunn explores the relationship of timekeeping to place-making in two widely-read U.S. expeditionary narratives about New Mexico, William Emory’s 1846 Notes on a Military Reconnaissance, and J. W. Abert’s An 1845 Reconnaissance of Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. Focusing on the the tables of astronomical observations, time, and temperature, and calculations of latitude and longitude, Gunn considers how that data corresponds to local New Mexican and indigenous temporalities and forms of spatial understanding. The production of geodetic data was both time-and-place intensive (calculations must be made in the field with rigorous consistency) but also highly attenuated (the cartographic use of this data required the labor of mathematicians at the Naval Observatory in Washington). By revealing how these center/periphery dynamics bear on the episodic temporality of these two narratives, he argues that the local practices of timekeeping shaped competing claims of sovereignty during this period of political and military upheaval.
