Millionth Map, a novel, and, The magic of arrival: the affective powers of maps, pageants and sashes

Sinclair, Fiona (2025) Millionth Map, a novel, and, The magic of arrival: the affective powers of maps, pageants and sashes. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

PDF Restricted to Repository staff only until 30 April 2028. Request a copy

Abstract

The purpose of the thesis is to ask why we feel different when we pull a sash over our head, when we take our place in (or even just watch) a pageant? It considers why one pastel-coloured shape on a map has an emotional pull which forces us to touch it as if it were a talisman? The thesis uses Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion as a lens to examine these objects, as well as her work on orientation in Queer Phenomenology. The “magic of arrival” in the title of this thesis is a quotation from this work. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is another key reference.

The thesis sets out that the activities of mapping and participating in a pageant can be understood as affective, producing the specific sense of belonging. The thesis includes a close reading of Virginia Woolf’s village pageant in Between the Acts. A further chapter focuses on how taking the sash from the context of a suffragette march and hanging it around the neck of a beauty queen changes the way we perceive it and asks whether it is in fact serving the same purpose. The piece concludes that maps, pageants and sashes create affect not because they tell the “truth” but because we believe them to.

The creative work Millionth Map is a historical novel, although not all of it is excerpted in this thesis. The central character is a British child transported to the USA and who enters the Miss America pageant to feel a sense of belonging to a nation, even though this creates divisions between her and her family. The novel has three narrative strands, the first set in the suffragette community in London in 1909 and the second is that of a cartographer working in 1930s Dalmatia on the International Map of the World (IMW), the Millionth Map which gives the novel its title. The third narrative is set in American beauty pageant from 1949-50.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	11 May 2026 13:36
Last Modified:	11 May 2026 13:36
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/102943
DOI:

Actions (login required)

View Item