The book’s introduction outlines its ambition to read literature as a variety of cartography, and presents a technical vocabulary for grasping literature’s role in the changing geo-epistemology of the twentieth century. It begins by exploring Langston Hughes’s creation of literary maps, and introduces the concept of "counter-mapping," a practice of producing knowledge that challenges official geographies. It then sets out to reexamine modernism’s connection to technology by arguing that the spatial ramifications of media and transit technologies imbued early twentieth-century writing with a unique geotechnical aesthetic. Drawing from postcolonial theory, the book aims to map this geotechnical aesthetic across a range of authors from across the dominion of the United States.

The coda to the book reads the contemporary author Craig Santos Perez to reflect on the violence of US territory making and the role of literary language in reorganizing its effects. I provide a close reading of Perez’s from unincorporated territory and its orientation toward the modernism of Claude McKay. By reworking McKay, Perez makes a contribution to cartographic literature that helps to see the US map as a dialectical image, provisional and contingent as opposed to authoritative and final.

The Introduction establishes the key theoretical approaches underpinning the book. C. S. Peirce’s taxonomy for signs as index, icon, or symbol offers a useful framework which I use as a helpful way to distinguish between different functions of Shakespearean photographs, and resist in arguing that all photographs operate across Peirce’s categories. The book’s reliance on Walter Benjamin’s work is also explained, particularly as it relates to the concept of ‘aura’, which I suggest has been used problematically in performance studies. The Introduction also explains my choice of case studies, and outlines the major scholars whose work the present book builds on, most notably the late Barbara Hodgdon.