“The Big Open”? Heterotopias and Colonial Expansion in North America

Abstract

Modernity is characterised by a substantial transformation of space. The closed medieval space defined by a hierarchy of fixed places gives way to the open and infinite space of modern science and imagination. According to Michel Foucault, modern space “is presented to us in the form of relations of emplacement.” In contrast to fixed places, most emplacements are mobile and functional, yet not all of them are determined by their specific functions. For instance, “heterotopias” undermine the functional status of other emplacements. Moreover, heterotopias engender “heterochronias”, which attract attention to discontinuities of space and conventional time. As heterotopias, modern ruins unsettle the discourses of redemption and progress, and testify to the failures of economic or technological power. This is especially true about the “ghost towns” emerging during the colonisation of the American West as one of its major symbols articulating the space of the “Big Open”: the West as both an “exceptional” and a “national” region, historical as well as mythical experience. As discursive and material objects, ghost towns oscillate between the function of historical monuments of the Gold Rush, prosperous industrialisation or local settlement, and the squalor and obscurity of trash, which, however, can be fetishised or even monumentalised. From its outset, the colonisation of North America has been represented and justified by means of religious, as well as secular, apocalyptic narratives constructing the continent as a space of revelations (of the future destiny of nations or the end of history). As “spectres” (Jacques Derrida), ghost towns reveal an important feature of North American colonial expansion – the imaginary, illusory, but also real nature of the Frontier. Moreover, they may turn our attention to the functioning of modern borders, especially migration flows and social divisions.