Mahshid Mayar
Growing Up In A Smaller World: United States in the 1890s (Working Title)
Around and after the turn of the twentieth century, distance - the gap between two points in space or time - is pronounced dead.
It is believed that the world is getting smaller, time and space have lost their distancing effects, and as human culture has taken an
unprecedented direction towards proximity and entropy, it is influenced by unprecedented changes. In denial of long past roots,
"death/annihilation of distance," questions of proximity, accessibility and instantaneity have occupied much space in conceptual takes on
globalism and globalization studies.
My project, however, seeks to trace back the footprints of time/space compression within a globalizing locale in the past: 1890s'
United States. Through Foucauldian discourse analysis of a select number of juvenile periodicals published during the period and under
the light of Foucauldian governmentality theory, I focus on American adults' efforts during the 1890s to define - and redefine - their new
globalizing identity, and to deal with the dynamics of living in a simultaneously expanding and contracting world.
The juvenile periodicals studied - Harper's Young People, the Youths' Companion, and Saint Nicholas - had (upper) middle-class juvenile
audience and enjoyed highest circulation numbers among all juvenile periodicals published in the era. Taking the tumultuous 1890s historical
context into account, my project focuses on how American adult writers of these juvenile periodicals perceived of their pulsating distance with
the outer world and hoped - and helped - their audience to draw and re-draw a map of the world based on their national, imperial and global priorities
at a time when the isolationist path of the nation had reached a road sign which read "the world."
