This project is part of my efforts to document my doctoral research on cartomancy. Cartomancy is the practice of using cards– any kind, including Tarot or a standard deck you would use to play poker–to divine the future. This method of fortune telling has been practiced around the globe for centuries, and in the United States since the country’s beginning.
My dissertation, “Stacking the Deck: Fortune-Telling Cards and American Identity in the Long Nineteenth Century” asks how cartomancy played a role in the culture of the United States from the Colonial era to around 1914. I examine the visual and material culture of this practice and examine specialized card decks, as well as paintings, prints, photographs and other media that depict cartomancy, and publications that taught consumers how to read the cards themselves.
The goal of my work is to question how the materials of fortune telling are entangled in creating a national identity as well as systems of empire. Why was exoticized knowledge of the future so popular as a form of entertainment in the long nineteenth century? How did objects and texts create the stereotype of the fortune teller as a gendered, racialized figure? In asking these questions, I hope to work through these complicated histories and unstack the deck.
The Cambridge English Dictionary.