Since the 1980s the performance artist Ricardo Dominguez has been involved in collaborative art projects experimenting with political aesthetics. Critical Art Ensemble, formed in 1987, explored intersections between art, technology, political activism as well as critical theory. In the 1990s, the Zapatista uprising and its insurgent use of communication technology inspired Dominguez to rethink his notion of art and art's role in society. In 1997 Dominguez was co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater. About a decade later, in 2008, the group initiated the installation and performance piece Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT). The Electronic Disturbance Theater planned to distribute inexpensive mobile phones among individuals South of the US-Mexico border who planned to cross North. The group had developed a phone app that provided experimental poetry to unauthorized migrants while using GPS technology to lead them to water stations in the deserts of the borderlands. As an installation (water stations) and a performance (distribution, poetry, crossing of the border), the Transborder Immigrant Tool calls attention to the process of crossing the border and the dangers involved. After all, each year about 250 deaths of migrants are registered in the borderlands, most of them caused by dehydration. 1 TBT's art intervention confronts the public with the borderlands as a place of violence and death. At the same time, it reflects on art's potential of going beyond its own complicity in power structures. TBT also links art and politics to the technological and digitalized culture of surveillance. In 2010, the development of the project caused controversy as the project was funded by public money in California. Dominguez, who is professor in the visual arts department at UC San Diego, was accused of misusing public funds and of promoting illegal activities-the group of artists was seen as providing aid to undocumented border crossers. The artists of The Electronic Disturbance Theater were investigated by the FBI Office of Cybercrimes and UC San Diego. The pivotal questions raised in the investigation were: Can TBT be regarded as art? Is it an aesthetic way of dealing with social issues? And if it is considered to be art: To what extent is it legitimate for art to interfere in politics, social issues, and humanitarian action? Ultimately the University of California stated that TBT did not misuse research funds, but would not comment

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Travel reports have shaped the emergence of early U.S. culture and its “geographical imagination” (David Harvey). Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere examines the trans-national imagination in travel reports by American authors written between 1770 and 1830. Its range is from John and William Bartram’s pre-revolutionary travelogues and Jonathan Carver’s exploratory report on his journey in the Great Lakes region (1778), to Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative (1789), to early nineteenth-century reports, such as Anne Newport Royall’s Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the United States (1826) and William Duane’s A Visit to Colombia (1826). The chapters of the monograph concentrate on writing about journeys to the North American ‘interior‘, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. The primary sources were written between the beginning of the struggle against British rule, following the end of the French and Indian War, and the beginning of Andrew Jackson’s presidency. The decades between 1770 and 1830 were times of shifting colonial boundaries, nation-building, and emergent discourses of collective identification in North America. The study reads travel writing in the context of the identity-generating discourses of nation-building, imperialism, anti-colonialism, and cosmopolitanism. In contrast to scholarship that engages a notion of Americanness based primarily on ‘domestic’ outlooks and experiences such as westward expansion (the frontier), the study highlights the function of categories such as the outside world, neighboring nations, and colonial empires in the emergence of U.S. national literary imagination. How does a shift in focus from a discursive ‘domestication’ of North American space to an interest in the Othering of what lies beyond national borders affect the understanding of the emergent national self? These are the kind of questions that begin by seeing the transnational as a fundamental element of national emergence. The monograph ultimately works to demonstrate how travel writing – with very few exceptions – supports and affirms processes of nation-building. Thus, the national narrative evolves from representations of contact scenarios in North America, in the transatlantic world, and around the globe. Without ignoring the roles of national mythology, the analysis concentrates on the continual co-existence of fluid notions of both ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ in times of shifting geographical borders. From such a perspective, travel writing not only contributes to shaping the national imagination and its conceptions of superiority but is also complicit in territorial expansionism and its subjugation of conquered peoples and their respective cultural histories. The present study emphasizes the significance of accounts of non-voluntary movement that embrace captivity narratives, slave narratives, sailor narratives, and reports by individuals who had access to neither publishing nor public culture. Accounts by such authors have often been published posthumously, promoted by printers, professional authors, or scholars. The central focus of analysis, however, examines how American self-fashioning and self-positioning in the world appear in the travel writing of the period. The trans-national imagination engages in a symbolic construction both of the collective national ‘Self’ and of the outside world as the nation’s ‘Other.’ Travel writing functions as a tool in the nation-building process of the United States: a tool that reflects the mindset of the time, a tool that imagines a national community, and a tool that shapes the mindset of a people. The study maintains that travel writing, as a literary format, negotiates the triangular relationship between American post-revolutionary nation-building, continued European colonial expansion in the Americas, and the ongoing existence of indigenous nations. Underlying each of the readings is a common thesis that travel writing defines and negotiates borders, limits, and territorial expansion, and that it does so within the parameters of nation-building.

Peer Review PoliciesStockholm University Press ensures that all book publications are peer-reviewed. Each book proposal submitted to the Press will be sent to a dedicated Editorial Board of experts in the subject area. The full manuscript will be reviewed by chapter or as a whole by two external and independent experts.A full description of Stockholm University Press' peer-review policies can be found on the website: http://www.stockholm universitypress.se/site/peer-review-policies/.The Editorial Board for Stockholm English Studies applied a single-blind review process while assessing the manuscript: the author's name was revealed to the reviewers, while the reviewer names were disclosed to the author at the time of publishing the book, unless the reviewers had chosen to be thanked anonymously.

Peer Review PoliciesStockholm University Press ensures that all book publications are peer-reviewed. Each book proposal submitted to the Press will be sent to a dedicated Editorial Board of experts in the subject area. The full manuscript will be reviewed by chapter or as a whole by two external and independent experts.A full description of Stockholm University Press' peer-review policies can be found on the website: http://www.stockholm universitypress.se/site/peer-review-policies/.The Editorial Board for Stockholm English Studies applied a single-blind review process while assessing the manuscript: the author's name was revealed to the reviewers, while the reviewer names were disclosed to the author at the time of publishing the book, unless the reviewers had chosen to be thanked anonymously.