THURSDAY 2 MAY 2024
Location: In person event, Montpelier Room, 6th Floor, Madison Building, Library of Congress. Lectures will be available virtually via Library of Congress registration. (Arranged in conjunction with the Philip Lee Phillips Society, Library of Congress).
Lecture 1, 3:00-4:00 pm
Title: Extractive Place Naming Practices in Early Modern North America
Speaker: Lauren Beck, Canada Research Chair in Intercultural Encounter; Professor of Visual and Material Culture Studies, Mount Allison University, Canada
Summary: Extractive place naming practices come in several forms in early modern North America. The first reflects European attempts to obtain Indigenous toponymy, whether for cultural caché, wayfinding, or for understanding where the resources they described might be found. Yet, language barriers prevented people such as Columbus and Cartier from extracting place names, which gave rise to misnaming. A second extractive naming practice awarded names relating to resources linked to locales where those resources had been confirmed to exist. This naming practice for describing what sort of resources one would encounter in a place was deployed differently by both Indigenous and European peoples. A third practice, which Europeans did not embrace, involved place stories that forewarned how one could move through, interact with, and care for the resources of a landscape. This lecture will examine these forms of extractive naming practices using exploration narratives and associated cartography from the 16th-18th centuries alongside Indigenous historical sources.
Bio: Lauren Beck (Mount Allison University, Canada) is professor of Visual and Material Culture Studies and the Canada Research Chair in Intercultural Encounter. She researches early modern visual culture of the Atlantic world and has published several monographs, including Canada’s Place Names and How to Change Them (2022), Illustrating el Cid, 1498-Today (2019), and Transforming the Enemy in Spanish Culture (2013), as well as edited collections, among them Firsting in the Early Modern Transatlantic World (2019) and Visualizing the Text: From Manuscript Culture to Caricature (2017). She is the series editor of the 6-volume Cultural History of Exploration (2024) and has previously held editorial positions at Terrae Incognitae, and has guest edited journal issues, including The Social Lives of Maps (Material Culture Review, vols. 92-95, 2023).
To register for in person or virtual attendance at the Library of Congress events, please use this link to register:
Following the Library of Congress events, the Washington Map Society has arranged for an informal dinner at the nearby Hunan Dynasty Restaurant (215 Pennsylvania Ave., SE), starting at 6:30 pm. The cost will be $40.00 cash (including tax and tip). We need to provide the restaurant with a reasonably accurate count one week in advance. Please use the following link to make a reservation by April 24: https://washmapsociety.org/event-5663230/Registration