The Propositional Logic of Mapping Transnational American Studies—A Response to “‘Deep Maps’: A Brief for Digital Palimpsest Mapping Projects”

This response to Shelley Fisher Fishkin's “‘Deep Maps’: A Brief for Digital Palimpsest Mapping Projects” explicates the layers of complex interconnected practices that Fishkin’s paradigm of Deep Maps instates. Bishop notes that Fishkin’s trope of palimpsests “depends on a scholarly methodology that privileges the transnational as a structure, a means, and a dynamic site of excavation for intellectual inquiry” and “provides for new forms of collaborative writing and new reading practices” in which scholars, students, and even members of the general public can build geo-archives together. Fishkin’s Deep Maps project, Bishop concludes, foregrounds a construction of place in a “self-reflective placial exercise” that accepts “other national literatures and histories [with] . . . their own ways of understanding and engaging with the transnational.”