The Indigenous Erotics of Riding Barebac

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Volume 53, Number 1, Spring 2018 2

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Western American 5
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Literature 7
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A Journal of Literary, Cultural, and Place Studies
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2 Western Literature Association
3 Executive Council
4 Co-Presidents Co-Vice Presidents Co-Presidents Elect
5 Michael K. Johnson Kerry Fine SueEllen Campbell
6 University of Maine, Arizona State University Colorado State University
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8 and Rebecca Lush Alex Hunt
Emily Lutenski California State West Texas A&M
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St. Louis University University, San Marcos University
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11 Treasurer Co-Past-Presidents Executive Secretary
Nancy Cook Florence Amamoto Nicolas S. Witschi
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University of Montana Gustavus Adolphus College Western Michigan
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Amy Hamilton, Northern Michigan University
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Brady Harrison, University of Montana
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Lisa Tatonetti, Kansas State University
21 Amanda Zink, Idaho State University
22 Rachel Bolten, graduate student, Stanford University
23 2019
24 Matt Burkhart, Case Western Reserve University
25 William V. Lombardi, Feather River College
26 Maria O’Connell, Wayland Baptist University
27 Ashley Reis, SUNY Potsdam
28 Jessica Lopez, graduate student, Michigan State University
29 2020
30 Jennifer Dawes, Henderson State University
31 Jenny Kerber, Wilfrid Laurier University
Kyoko Matsunaga, Kobe City University of Foreign Studies
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Joshua Smith, Biola University
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Patrons
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Nancy S. Cook, David H. Fenimore, Hisayuki Hikage,
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Michael Kowalewski, Gerald I. Locklin, Susan Naramore Maher,
36 Allen K. Mears, Laurie Ricou, Tim Steckline
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Sponsors
38 Jeffrey Chisum, David Cremean, J. Gerard Dollar,
39 Brady Harrison, Joni Iglinski, Maria O’Connell, Sharon A. Reynolds,
40 Stefano Rosso, Robert Thacker, George E. Wolf
Western American Literature Editorial Officers 1
Editor 2
Tom Lynch 3
Editorial Board 4
José Aranda, Rice University 5
Neil Campbell, University of Derby, UK 6
Nancy Cook, University of Montana 7
Krista Comer, Rice University
8
Charles Crow, Bowling Green State University
Cheryll Glotfelty, University of Nevada, Reno 9
Victoria Lamont, University of Waterloo, Canada 10
David Rio, University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Spain 11
Susan Shillinglaw, San José State University 12
Sara Spurgeon, Texas Tech University 13
Janis Stout, Texas A&M University
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Lisa Tatonetti, Kansas State University
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Steve Tatum, University of Utah
Nicolas S. Witschi, Western Michigan University 16
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Book Review Editor
George Wolf
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Editorial Fellow
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Christian Rush
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Graduate Editorial Assistants 22
Kristi Carter
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Dan Clausen
Maureen Daniels 24
Lydia Presley 25
Emily Rau 26
Keene Short 27
Cory Willard 28
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Contents 1
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xi Introduction: Pasts, Presents, Futures 5
Krista Comer and Susan Bernardin 6
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Genealogies 9
1 The Indigenous Erotics of Riding Bareback, or, the West 10
Has Always Been Queer 11
Lisa Tatonetti 12
11 Toward a Feminist Turn 13
Krista Comer 14
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21 Anthropocene Frontiers: The Place of Environment in 16
Western Studies 17
Sylvan Goldberg 18
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31 Unhomely Wests: Meditations in Critical Archaeology 20
Stephen Tatum 21
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Keywords 23
45 “Land” 24
Cheryll Glotfelty 25
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49 “Mexican” 27
José F. Aranda Jr. 28
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53 “Pedagogy”
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Randi Lynn Tanglen
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59 “Postwestern” 32
Susan Kollin 33
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63 “Queer” 35
Ryan Wander 36
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1 69 “Regionality”
2 Neil Campbell
3 75 “Settler”
4 Alex Trimble Young
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6 81 “Sovereignty”
7 Kirby Lynn Brown
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9 91 “Visuality”
10 Audrey Goodman
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12 Methodologies
13 97 Lines of Sight in the Western
14 Joanna Hearne
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16 113 Outbreak from the Vaudeville Archive
17 Christine Bold, with Monique Mojica,
18 Gloria Miguel, Muriel Miguel
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20 Book Reviews
21 127 Daniel Robert King, Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution:
22 Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author
23 Herb Thompson
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25 129 Jennifer Sinor, Letters Like the Day: On Reading
26 Georgia O’Keeffe
27 Luke Morgan
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29 130 Pete Fromm, The Names of the Stars: A Life in the Wilds
30 O. Alan Weltzien
31 132 Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart’s Starling
32 Nathaniel Otjen
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34 134 Jennifer Sinor, Ordinary Trauma: A Memoir
35 Gaynell Gavin
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136 Melvin R. Adams, Atomic Geography: A Personal History of 1
the Hanford Reservation 2
Max Frazier 3
137 Michael P. Branch, Rants from the Hill: On Packrats, Bobcats, 4
Wildfires, Curmudgeons, a Drunken Mary Kay Lady, and Other 5
Encounters with the Wild in the High Desert 6
Jeremy Elliott 7
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139 Brit Bennett, The Mothers 9
Kalenda Eaton 10
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142 Awards 12
143 WLA Conference Information 13
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145 Submissions 15
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1
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Introduction 3
4
Pasts, Presents, Futures
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6
Susan Bernardin and Krista Comer 7
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9
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Placing Ourselves 11
The Western Literature Association’s fiftieth anniversary 12
conference in 2015 marked an opportunity to think about, through, 13
and across the field of western American studies. While a milestone 14
conference inevitably recognizes foundational moments in our 15
field’s formation, it also calls us to engage with current concerns 16
and imagine forward. Hosted by co-presidents David Fenimore 17
and Susan Bernardin at Harrah’s, the quintessentially Reno 18
casino hotel, participants gathered at what Will Lombardi dubbed 19
“WestEdge”—a place that resists easy placement. Reno is many 20
Wests, after all, alternately defined by juxtapositions, edges, and 21
movements. Reno’s urban river edges aging casinos and borders 22
states and bioregions; the city has served as a through line for 23
histories of multiethnic labor and for movements of emigrant 24
trails and railroad lines, pasts and “futures” of booms and busts. 25
Musician and comics artist Arigon Starr (Kickapoo and Muscogee) 26
and Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe gave performances in Sammy’s 27
Showroom, built by Bill Harrah for famed African American singer 28
Sammy Davis Jr. within the confines of regional and national 29
white supremacy. The central presence of Indigenous arts and 30
scholarship at this conference underscored that everywhere our 31
conference meets is Indian Country, in this case Washoe and 32
Paiute homelands. Writer and musician Willy Vlautin’s keynote 33
appearance made visible and audible the gritty understories of 34
edgy urban Wests. Posthumous recognition of foundational Basque 35
American writer and journalist Robert Laxalt recognized Basque 36
histories of immigration and home-building in the intermountain 37
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1 West, yet another understory in popular lexicons of the American
2 West. Several panels organized by José Aranda featured Latino/
3 Chicano Wests, including one in collaboration with the Latino
4 Research Center (Emma Sepulveda Pulvirenti, director) honoring
5 the first anthology of Latino writers in Nevada. The many ways
6 we could locate this conference’s presence in Reno speak to the
7 definitional complexity of western American literary and cultural
8 studies, past, present, and future. How do our various locations
9 inform the critical lens and languages we use? The histories and
10 inheritances we draw from? The conversations we might have, or be
11 unable to have, across our differences?
12 To foreground these questions about the tenses and tensions of
13 the field, its many-stranded pasts and future possibilities, the con-
14 ference featured three linked plenaries—Genealogies, Keywords,
15 Methodologies—that are the focus of this special issue. At their
16 core, these sessions were driven by the five staples of journalistic in-
17 quiry with an added sixth “w”: who, what, when, where, why, West.
18 Perennial questions related to the “us,” the “we” of the Western Lit-
19 erature Association, seemed especially present at the Reno confer-
20 ence, as did the question of where we are when we talk about “the
21 West.” We conceive our “field” here as the intersecting and at times
22 incommensurate bodies of knowledge that express the organiza-
23 tion’s critical enterprise and institutional purposes. If a commemo-
24 rative or anniversary issue might be expected to strike a celebratory
25 tone or consolidate critical trends, and celebration is warranted to
26 be sure, what the fiftieth annual conference suggested additionally
27 was the benefits of openness to lines of thought and to critical his-
28 tories that disrupt whatever “our” common sense might be.
29
30 Western Killjoys
31 To recognize the exclusions, omissions, and erasures in any proj-
32 ect defined as western American studies is to risk invoking the
33 figure of the “killjoy.” In her influential essay, “Feminist Killjoys
34 (And Other Willful Subjects),” Sara Ahmed names the problem of
35 being seen as the problem when calling out systems of oppression,
36 including misogyny and sexism. She writes, “feminists are read as
37 being unhappy, such that situations of conflict, violence, and power
38 are read as about the unhappiness of feminists, rather than being
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40 xii Western American Literature vol. 53, no. 1 spring 2018
what feminists are unhappy about” (67). In the context of western 1
American studies, what happens when dissent, interruption, or 2
intervention are perceived, subconsciously or not, as complaint? 3
Rephrasing Ahmed, what is needed for the western killjoy toolkit? 4
How do we engage in core questions of the field while also work- 5
ing toward transforming it? How might western American studies 6
refuse to function as a field of containment, one that incorporates 7
rather than reckons with minoritized histories and viewpoints? Af- 8
ter all, the additive approach of multicultural models of inclusion 9
ultimately privileges particular perspectives, timelines, and tra- 10
jectories as normative. So how do we meaningfully facilitate con- 11
versation across and among what are often separate or parallel but 12
not intersecting knowledge projects: western American studies; 13
feminist studies; Indigenous studies; environmental studies; latinx 14
and borderlands studies? Aspirationally, how might methodolo- 15
gies drawn from such fields as Indigenous studies or queer studies 16
fundamentally reframe western American studies? What, in other 17
words, will be the future of our future archive, when we look toward 18
the centennial conference of 2065? 19
For us as editors, the process of gathering revised versions of 20
many of the plenary offerings as well as new work by a range of 21
scholars in western American studies has depended crucially on 22
attention to matters of relationality, of collaboration, and of ac- 23
countability to the facts and implications of life and work in settler 24
societies. “We are all caught up in one another,” Scott Morgensen 25
teaches, and the spaces between us, to use Morgensen’s phrase, of- 26
fer chances for learning, political understanding, and alliance (1). It 27
allows insight as well into limits, fault lines, fraught spaces where 28
we cannot listen to one another very well. These spaces establish 29
what as editors we came to call “the mess we work with”—the con- 30
tests over place, over the language(s) we use to speak of place, over 31
resources and meanings. In our editorial efforts we have chosen not 32
to smooth out unevenness. Instead, we have encouraged pressure 33
points and provocations, not with the aim to readily resolve them 34
but rather to establish relations, even when uneasy, and to invite 35
ongoing conversation. Simply put, we have wanted to step into 36
spaces of fracture and conflict and to do our work there. As scholars 37
working in western American studies through the lenses of Indige- 38
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Introduction xiii 40
1 nous studies (Bernardin) and feminist studies (Comer), we both see
2 the productivity of conversations across difference—to “sit with”
3 differences while seeking shared ground. Given the hospitality for
4 which the WLA is famous and the relatively intimate scale of our
5 community, we reached aspirationally toward building closer rela-
6 tionships and forming new critical kinships. Critical relationality of
7 this kind is fragile, vulnerable, subject to every bad wind. Recogniz-
8 ing its tender and tentative status in order to shelter and treasure
9 relations we now have is, in spite of the odds against alliances, part
10 of our work.
11
12 Contributions: Genealogies, Keywords, Methodologies
13 At Reno’s Genealogies plenary, speakers Lisa Tatonetti, Krista
14 Comer, and William Handley chose lineages, trajectories, and
15 legacies that must engage US West scholars. Stephen Tatum
16 served as plenary chair. Although the term “Genealogies” invokes
17 Foucault’s tactical history-doing and the nonlinearity of knowledge
18 and power processes, it also aims to make visible intergenerational
19 continuities. Acts of retrospective recovery and prospective
20 imagination, the lesser recognized histories and knowledges
21 spotlighted in the plenary, demand what else is hidden from view,
22 absent from the record.
23 In “The Indigenous Erotics of Riding Bareback, or, the West
24 Has Always Been Queer,” Lisa Tatonetti unsettles origin stories
25 that underpin heteronormative settler genealogies of the West.
26 A queer West killjoy, Tatonetti delineates the long continuity of
27 queer Indigeneities that have been unmarked in western American
28 studies, helping us to “better see the West that has always been.”
29 Krista Comer urges US Western studies “Toward a Feminist
30 Turn.” Noting the importance of women scholars and scholarship
31 about women and gender to the fields constituting and traversing
32 Western studies, she asks why, then, feminist thought as feminist
33 thought is so absent both in recent scholarship and in the annual
34 Western Literature Association conference program?
35 William Handley’s talk, “Environmentalist Genealogies,”
36 while not offered here, feeds into Sylvan Goldberg’s contribution,
37 “Anthropocene Frontiers: The Place of Environment in Western
38 Studies.” With the term “geologic” West, Goldberg argues for a
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40 xiv Western American Literature vol. 53, no. 1 spring 2018
genealogical break with pastoral, agricultural, arid, domestic, and 1
wilderness Wests. He puts the problems of scale and risk associated 2
with theorizing the Anthropocene at the center of western 3
American critical attention. Stephen Tatum, in “Unhomely Wests, 4
Meditations in Critical Archaeology,” offers a series of philosophical 5
reflections on the problems of homelessness and dispossession at 6
this moment in history. Tatum cuts a large swath across populations 7
and literatures, grappling with aesthetics, poetics, affect, political 8
economy, and power. 9
The design of the Keywords plenary was conversational and 10
collaborative, provisional and provocative. Participants identified 11
a keyword of their own choosing, departing from a term, subfield 12
heading, or other organizing or theoretical interest. They prepared 13
short conceptual pieces, reflecting on how their keywords high- 14
lighted crucial shifts, interventions, lenses, or approaches to our 15
field. Ultimately, a broader range of perspectives than were orig- 16
inally featured in the conference session appear here and include 17
these: Land, Mexican, Pedagogy, Postwestern, Queer, Regionality, 18
Settler, Sovereignty, and Visuality. Sequenced alphabetically, these 19
nine keywords invite readers to note dissonances and affinities. 20
Definitions, but hardly definitive of the full range and reach of the 21
field, they compel us to take the measure of what is missing and 22
contingent. Simply put, there is a great deal that is important to 23
the field that is not here. At the same time, the juxtapositions of 24
critical approach and theoretical orientation in play here stress the 25
rich dynamisms of the field. Taken together, Keywords alternately 26
remind, affirm, and query what has and should matter in our re- 27
spective world(s). 28
In “Postwestern,” Susan Kollin cautions that “important 29
instances of scholarly research and creative interventions predate 30
and achieve many of the same goals [that] go by other names than 31
‘postwestern.’” Yet “postwestern” functions as a useful analytic 32
of local– global relationality, one epitomized by transnational 33
movements of the cinematic Western. “Regionality,” argues Neil 34
Campbell, involves the process of opening the local or bounded 35
regional West to the world, a frictional and productive agitation. 36
Regionality works against a fixed sense of region as known and flat, 37
gathering “people, places, and things” into affective assemblages 38
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Introduction xv 40
1 that move. With “Visuality,” Audrey Goodman places ways of seeing
2 and of imagining sight at the center of understandings of power
3 and place. She shows how critiques of visual authority and social
4 organization “along many spatial and temporal scales” reframe
5 histories of western American knowledge production. “Pedagogy,”
6 Randi Tanglen’s submission, delineates how the institutional
7 history and mission of the Western Literature Association
8 dovetails in important ways with the guiding philosophies of
9 critical pedagogies. Tanglen forwards pedagogy as a way to advance
10 the intersections of social justice, the West, and the aims of
11 education. The keyword “Queer,” by Ryan Wander, invites critics to
12 embrace the still untapped promise of queer theory for thinking
13 otherwise in western American studies and against the grain of
14 broad heteronormative social organization. “Queer” suggests less
15 a politics of identity, he notes, than a politics of difference and
16 relationality.
17 Postwestern and critical regionalism studies, as well as the crit-
18 ical and creative interventions of “those who do not conform to
19 the norms of the settler state,” poise scholars, in Alex Young’s es-
20 timation, to engage with settler colonial studies and “the transna-
21 tional study of empire more broadly.” “Settler,” a descriptor for the
22 normalized, ongoing violence of colonization in the United States,
23 Canada, and other settler nations, serves as a sharp edge to meth-
24 odologies that do not address the contemporaneity of this vio-
25 lence. With “Land,” foundational ecocritic Cheryll Glotfelty makes
26 the case for the Western Literature Association to embrace more
27 fully the bioregional as an activist ethos and guiding framework,
28 drawing from thinkers such as Aldo Leopold. In yet another reg-
29 ister, Kirby Brown demonstrates the complexity of “Sovereignty”
30 for Indigenous scholars and allies and its impetus “for a variety of
31 political, intellectual, and methodological projects.” By embedding
32 his discussion of sovereignty within a relational web of intellectual
33 kinship, Brown honors diverse genealogies of thought while center-
34 ing “questions of nationhood, citizenships, and belonging.” Finally,
35 in choosing “Mexican” as keyword over the more common signifier
36 “Borderlands” in western American studies, José Aranda spotlights
37 its complexity as a term that invokes statelessness at the same time
38 it serves as “underestimated index for comprehending Spanish /
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40 xvi Western American Literature vol. 53, no. 1 spring 2018
Mexican / Anglo settler colonialisms in pre-and post-1836 Amer- 1
ica.” The sustained, slippery meanings of “Mexican” across “iden- 2
tities, ideologies, territorial holdings, and politics” make it all the 3
more urgent to mark them, especially in this precarious and urgent 4
political, national, and cultural moment. 5
In their invocation of engaged, transformative thinking, 6
both past and future, Keywords advance methodologies suited 7
to the task. The final session of interlinked plenaries at Reno— 8
Methodologies— marked a major methodological moment for 9
the field. In their recuperation of earthworks knowledges, Le- 10
Anne Howe and Chad Allen modeled the making of Indigenous 11
research methodologies. While their work could not be included 12
here, their memorable performance at Reno offered a powerful 13
rejoinder to conventions of academic presentations and scholar- 14
ship. Through acts of collaborative, embodied research that include 15
walking among, listening to, and witnessing earthworks at differ- 16
ent times of day and seasons, Howe and Allen work to reactivate 17
Indigenous memories and knowledges of and from these places. 18
Their efforts to resituate these sites within Indigenous rather than 19
settler terms emphasize the transformative potential of decolonial 20
methodologies. 21
In this issue, ally scholar Joanna Hearne resituates the 22
dominant “lines of sight” produced by cinematic Westerns. Through 23
the decolonial lens provided by her work here and elsewhere, we 24
can never see Westerns in the same way. Moreover, in the hands 25
of Indigenous filmmakers, Westerns— “the very generic form 26
intended to represent their demise”—instead incubate Indigenous 27
knowledge and continuance. In a similar turn to popular culture, 28
Christine Bold works to facilitate the archival recovery of 29
intergenerational Indigenous vaudeville performance. Bold not only 30
asks how scholars might recover the ephemerality of performance, 31
she stages the complexity of doing so as a settler scholar working 32
within the structural limitations of print. Like Howe and Allen, 33
Bold highlights her work as relational, ongoing, and collaborative. 34
Most notably, as a settler scholar, Bold embeds the tricky task of 35
“building relations of research” with Indigenous theater artists 36
Monique Mojica, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel as she and they 37
uncover their family’s history in vaudeville. 38
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Introduction xvii 40
1 Pedagogies for the Future
2 Contributors to this anniversary issue communicate a number of
3 questions and directions to pursue as we move through the next
4 half century. First, the Western Literature Association continues to
5 be a social space to negotiate fields, an incubation space for ideas
6 and experimentation. What is the relation of the WLA as an orga-
7 nization, however, to the fields that cross it? Might the WLA more
8 explicitly act upon the field’s legacy of critical pedagogy that Randi
9 Tanglen raises for our consideration? What would an explicit ethos
10 of accountability or responsibility look like?
11 Taking our cues from the contributors, and putting our own
12 commitments on the table, we imagine a field that prioritizes is-
13 sues of allyship, critical relationality, and more robust engagements
14 of scholars with communities and publics. Embracing the role of
15 public intellectualism will be key to a process of new learning, lis-
16 tening, and teaching. As an organization, it behooves us to tele-
17 graph clearly what we stand for. What would a reimagined mission
18 statement for the WLA announce as our values? Here are some
19 thoughts, hardly a complete list, but a beginning. A renovated mis-
20 sion statement might recognize Indigenous homelands and terri-
21 tories, commit our scholarship to ending the masculinist violence
22 so synonymous with western American legacies, insist we work in
23 languages beyond English, and practice a more fierce environmen-
24 talism. It might ask us how much we are willing to give, and give up,
25 for the project of critical relationality.
26 Susan Bernardin is Director of the School of Language, Culture, and Society at
27 Oregon State University. She served as co-president of the WLA in 2015 with David
28 Fenimore and together they organized that year’s conference in Reno. She guest
29 edited a special issue of Western American Literature, “Indigenous Wests: Literary
30 and Visual Aesthetics” in 2014 and is editor of the Routledge Companion to Gender
and the American West (2019).
31
32 Krista Comer is a professor of English at Rice University and affiliated with the
33 Rice Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her books include
34 Landscapes of the New West, Surfer Girls in the New World Order, and the 2013
35 spring/summer issue of Western American Literature, devoted to works of younger
scholars. She has been writing essays lately out of a new project, “Feminist States
36
of Critical Regionalism,” as well as directing The Institute for Women Surfers, a
37
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40 xviii Western American Literature vol. 53, no. 1 spring 2018
public humanities project in grassroots political education. In 2003 she served as
1
president of the Western Literature Association.
2
3
Works Cited
4
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke UP, 2017.
5
Morgensen, Scott. Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous
Decolonization. U of Minnesota P, 2011. 6
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genealogies 1
2
The Indigenous Erotics of Riding 3
4
Bareback, or, the West Has Always 5
Been Queer 6
7
Lisa Tatonetti 8
9
10
11
12
As we ponder, on this fiftieth anniversary of the Western 13
Literature Association, the subject of genealogies, “the queer West,” 14
at least for any Foucauldians in the room, would seem a likely topic. 15
For, as Foucault famously posited, queerness has always been with 16
us. Like kudzu or, in the case of my backyard, trumpet vine, queer 17
discourses proliferate wildly in the very act of their suppression. 18
Thus, I approach my essay with the assumption that the queer 19
West, though frequently posited as a relatively new subject of 20
inquiry, arises from a long history in Western American studies. 21
As I researched this essay, I came to decide that I was right. And I 22
was wrong. 23
In terms of that wrongness, we can’t get around the fact that in 24
reviewing the many years of Western American Literature that had 25
been published at the time of the 2015 anniversary conference of 26
the Western Literature Association, we find the journal forwards a 27
kind of queer invisibility: while the first issue of the WAL appeared 28
in spring 1966, there had not yet been a published essay with the 29
terms “lesbian” or “gay” in the title, and only one 2015 piece had 30
included the word “queer”—Lee Bebout’s “The First Last Genera- 31
tion: Queer Temporality, Heteropatriarchy, and Cultural Reproduc- 32
tion in Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero.” Thus, while the 33
recent years have included references to homosociality and trans- 34
gressive gender representations, like Katie O. Arosteguy’s work on 35
white masculinity in “’It Was All a Hard, Fast Ride that Ended in the 36
Mud,’” we find significantly few analyses that reference homoerotic 37
bonding between people or queer approaches to western studies. 38
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40
1 (I’m delighted to note that between the time of the fiftieth an-
2 niversary conference and the publication of this commemorative
3 issue, a special issue devoted to Queer Wests was published by the
4 journal in summer 2016, which includes articles on Bret Harte,
5 Frank Norris, Helena María Viramontes, and The Laramie Project.
6 This addition to the publication’s history is an important marker;
7 yet even with the addition of these four essays, queer readings and
8 approaches have not necessarily proliferated like the previously
9 mentioned trumpet vines in a genealogical review of our journal
10 and association.) Based on this observation, we can perhaps see
11 why the ideological concept of “the queer West” might still be pos-
12 ited as a “new” subject of inquiry. We are, one might think, trem-
13 bling together at the very start of something queer, or, as I prefer to
14 think of it, about to plunge bareback into the erotic abyss.
15 Yet, here is where I circle back to my initial conjecture. Though
16 I may have been wrong to assume that scholarly considerations of
17 the queer West have an extensive history in western American lit-
18 erary studies, I was right, too. Because to posit the queer West as a
19 new topic of inquiry exemplifies what some term “Columbusing”—
20 the habit white folks have of employing rhetorics of origin in prac-
21 tices of (dis)possession. By contrast, as many WLA members well
22 know, the ideological and geopolitical genealogies of the West were,
23 without question, always already queer. In fact, queer Indigeneity,
24 rather than white masculinity, monogamous heterocouplehood,
25 and/or the heteropatriarchal nation-state, has long grounded pub-
26 lic and intimate relations on Turtle Island.
27 A vibrant conversation about queer images, texts, and peoples
28 in Native American and Aboriginal contexts has been ongoing since
29 time immemorial in the land on which we currently meet. To name
30 just a few instances, consider the pictographs of multiply gendered
31 kachina figures holding both bow and corn in the Petroglyph Na-
32 tional Monument on the outskirts of Albuquerque; Diné origin
33 stories; the 1919 accounts of Osh-Tisch, a Crow boté and warrior;
34 or the stories of Lozen, a renowned Apache warrior woman, who
35 is just one of many women to hold such a position. Histories of
36 gender fluidity and stories by and about what we might today de-
37 fine as queer Native people have existed in North America since the
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40 2 Western American Literature vol. 53, no. 1 spring 2018
first folks to live here emerged from the land, fell from the skies, or 1
migrated here as the glaciers crept forward. Any claim for a queer 2
West therefore rests on this important fact: the existence of queer 3
practices and identities in spaces now called “the West” is ancient; 4
to consider a genealogy of the queer West, one must therefore chart 5
the survivance of Indigenous peoples and traditions from their self- 6
described origin points to the present day. Given the brief nature of 7
our plenary remarks, I choose here only one possible tendril among 8
the many riotous vines that construct these genealogical relation- 9
ships in an attempt not to “discover” something new but to allow us 10
to better see the West that has always been. 11
The example I offer arises from my current work on iterations 12
of female masculinity and affect in Indigenous contexts. This book 13
project—tentatively titled Indigenous Knowledges Written by the 14
Body: Female, Two-Spirit, and Trans Masculinities—explicitly at- 15
tempts to circumvent static iterations of Indigenous masculinities 16
and the white masculinities constructed upon them, two represen- 17
tations of masculinity that, together, have been jutting pillars of 18
western studies. By contrast, the affective, transformative power of 19
female masculinity holds the trace of Two-Spirit histories, of gender 20
traditions extant before and beyond the halls of academe. Here, I 21
stake a claim for Indigeneity as the point of departure in any read- 22
ing of gender and sexuality, rather than as the afterthought it so of- 23
ten represents in additive models of the multicultural West. These 24
interlocking claims about masculinity, embodiment, and Two-Spirit 25
traces show that recovering a genealogy of the queer West through 26
the study of female and noncisgendered masculinities makes legi- 27
ble the affective, relational ties between present-day western litera- 28
tures and ongoing traditions of gender variance. 29
Depictions of warrior women in texts from the late nineteenth 30
century to the turn of the twenty-first century cross both genres 31
and tribal nations—from Indigenous histories to anthropological 32
accounts, from short fiction to the novel, from sentimental romance 33
to high fantasy. Collectively, these images demonstrate that the 34
female masculinities of Native warrior women operate affectively, 35
centering kinship narratives that rely on an embodied, affiliative 36
archive of familial and tribal responsibility. Thus, genealogies of the 37
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Lisa Tatonetti 3 40
1 queer West are intimately embedded in narratives of relationality.
2 To demonstrate this fact, I touch here first on two historical and
3 then two literary examples in which the figures of warrior women
4 index kinship.
5 Northern Cheyenne warrior Buffalo Calf Trail Woman
6 (identified, too, as Buffalo Calf Robe Woman and Buffalo Calf Road
7 Woman) fought in Montana Territory during the June 17, 1876
8 Battle of the Rosebud (also called the Battle of Rosebud Creek) as
9 well as participating in the June 1876 Battle of the Greasy Grass
10 (termed by non- Natives as the Battle of the Little Bighorn).
11 Northern Cheyenne tribal historians explain that in the Battle of
12 the Rosebud, Buffalo Calf Trail Woman saved her brother, Chief
13 Comes in Sight, through an act of heroism. Moreover, Buffalo Calf
14 Trail Woman subsequently turned the tide of the entire battle by
15 rallying Cheyenne and Lakota forces and thereby enabling them
16 to defeat General George Crook. In honor of her bravery on the
17 battlefield, the Cheyenne call that conflict the “Fight Where the
18 Girl Saved Her Brother.” According to Helena’s Independent Record,
19 in 2005, when the Cheyenne ended a hundred-year vow of silence
20 about the Battle of the Greasy Grass, tribal historians shared
21 further stories of Buffalo Calf Trail Woman’s bravery and credited
22 her with striking the blow that knocked George Armstrong Custer
23 from his horse (Kidston).
24 Hunkpapa Lakota warrior Tashenamani, or Moving Robe, like-
25 wise fought in the Battle of the Greasy Grass. The accounts of
26 Tashenamani (identified, as well, as She Walks With Her Shawl and
27 Mary Crawler) note that she continued to fight after the death of
28 her brother in order to avenge him. Talking to celebrated Dakota
29 doctor and author Charles Eastman in 1905, the Hunkpapa Lakota
30 warrior Rain in the Face1 recounts his memory of Tashenamani’s
31 participation in the Battle of the Greasy Grass:
32
33 All of us who were mounted and ready immediately started down
34 the stream toward the ford. There were Ogallalas, Minneconjous,
35 Cheyennes, and some Unkpapas, and those around me seemed
36 to be nearly all very young men.
37 “Behold, there is among us a young woman!” I shouted. “Let
38
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no young man hide behind her garment!” I knew that would 1
make those young men brave. 2
The woman was Tashenamani, or Moving Robe, whose broth- 3
er had just been killed in the fight with Three Stars. Holding her 4
brother’s war staff over her head, and leaning forward upon her 5
charger, she looked as pretty as a bird. Always when there is a 6
woman in the charge, it causes the warriors to vie with one an- 7
other in displaying their valor . . . (qtd. in Eastman 511) 8
9
Rain in the Face’s recollection situates the presence of women 10
warriors at such battles as somewhat, but by no means entirely, 11
uncommon. His final statement—“Always when there is a woman 12
in the charge”— suggests that such events occur frequently 13
enough to create a recognizable pattern of behavior. Furthermore, 14
this depiction foregrounds the interactive, affective nature of 15
gender performances. In his analysis of female masculinity in 16
Caribbean contexts, Ronald Cummings points to the way “gender 17
performances, productions and meanings are embedded in the 18
realm of the social. [Such r]ecognition serves to frame masculinity 19
in terms of a series of iterations: recurring performances, images, 20
perceptions and discourses . . . [These discourses] serve to make 21
female masculinities [legible] as social and discursive sites of 22
relation” (130–31). Analyzing this process of social legibility 23
therefore allows us to recognize how, according to Rain in the Face, 24
Tashenamani’s physical presence alters the psychology of battle. 25
Importantly, Rain in the Face explicitly contends that expressions 26
of Indigenous masculinities shift because of the relational impact, 27
or what I term the affective force, women warriors have on 28
their male-identified counterparts. The overt way these bodily 29
encounters transform performances of masculinities highlights 30
their malleable, contextual, and shifting nature, reminding us that 31
masculinities are not only multiple but also mobile, able to move 32
between and among bodies. 33
Correspondingly, these women warriors suggest that a geneal- 34
ogy of the queer West includes masculinities that function as both 35
a form of deeply embodied knowledge and an assumed and con- 36
sciously employed gender identity rooted in Two-Spirit histories. 37
Notably, though, rather than being perceived as anomalous, as is 38
39
Lisa Tatonetti 5 40
1 the case with women such as the Greek warrior Atalanta, whose
2 singular history of abandonment, triumph, and eventual transfor-
3 mation was marked as an alterity in Greek art and story, the female
4 masculinity of the Indigenous warriors in each of these histories is
5 culturally sanctioned and incorporated within a web of familial and
6 bodily relationship.
7 Not all representations of warrior woman, however, offer this
8 sense of women’s bodies and masculinities as queerly generative.
9 For example, Muscogee Creek author S. Alice Callahan’s 1891
10 Wynema: A Child of the Forest—which is both the first published
11 novel by a Native American woman as well as the first Indigenous-
12 authored fictional text to present images of Plains women in
13 battle—does not ring with quite the same level of transformative
14 possibility as do the accounts of Buffalo Calf Trail Woman and
15 Tashenamani. Callahan depicts an event in which a group of forty
16 Lakota women, many with children in arms, undertake a sixteen-
17 mile trek to join their husbands on what will become ground zero of
18 the Wounded Knee Massacre. In Callahan’s rewriting of Wounded
19 Knee, women’s presence on the battlefield contributes directly to
20 the Lakota loss. Her entirely inaccurate description of the massacre
21 overtly contradicts not only the events of December 29, 1890, but
22 also all extant historical narratives about women warriors. In many
23 ways, Wynema represents a refusal of the sorts of relational ties
24 found in tribal histories such as those of the Northern Cheyenne.
25 In those historical records, Indigenous women who enter
26 into battle are marked as exceptional in courage as well as in the
27 strategies and execution of combat. Additionally, as we’ve seen with
28 Buffalo Calf Trail Woman and Tashenamani, kinship narratives
29 are situated as central to women’s entrances into battle, whether
30 those ties are through connections to brothers, husbands, and/
31 or tribal nations. Moreover, while women’s presence in hand-to-
32 hand combat was by no means ubiquitous, their participation,
33 especially in the context of the Lakota to whom Callahan refers,
34 makes cultural sense. Noted Standing Rock anthropologist Beatrice
35 Medicine explains that “whether Plains Indian women participated
36 in military activity directly or supported it in an indirect way, it
37 is clear that they saw their own well-being and that of their kin
38
39
and community in terms of a social system [that] revolves around 1
warfare” (“Warrior Women” 275). Thus, the interactions of Lakota 2
warrior women would serve to support rather than undermine this 3
system and would operate, as well, within the extant genealogical 4
assemblages that map national alliances and familial attachments 5
within a Plains cosmology. In many cases, these maps of belonging 6
brought Plains women to the battlefield. Once there, as Rain in 7
the Face notes, their bodies held an excess of affective possibilities 8
that queer the battlefield, our understandings of masculine gender 9
performances, and the West, in remarkably productive ways. 10
A Native-authored literary representation of a woman warrior 11
that more closely resembles the historical narratives about such 12
figures comes from the pen of famed Yankton Sioux author Zitkala- 13
Ša. In her short story “A Warrior’s Daughter,” which originally 14
appeared in a 1902 issue of Everybody’s Magazine, Zitkala-Ša shows 15
that in Dakota contexts, the bravery, courage, and daring inherent 16
in a warrior masculinity can run from father to daughter. Thus, 17
Tusee, the eponymous “warrior’s daughter,” is the embodiment 18
of every aspect of her paternal heritage—she rides, strategizes, 19
performs acts of daring, and ultimately succeeds where her suitor 20
fails in making war on Dakota enemies. By the end of the piece, 21
in stark contrast to Callahan’s doomed and ineffectual Lakota 22
women, Zitkala-Ša’s protagonist embodies a productive, protective, 23
and affective form of female masculinity that hinges on familial 24
relationship and tribal responsibility. 25
Tusee’s bravery and success explicitly reflect her inheritance 26
from her father and her embodiment of the key virtues of warrior 27
masculinity. Armed with a knife and a burning need to prevail over 28
her enemy, she stalks toward the enemy’s victory dance “with a 29
panther’s tread” (146). Her actions here and throughout the scene 30
are infused with courage and boldness as she singlehandedly plans 31
and executes a rescue after her lover is captured while trying to gain 32
the warrior status that will enable him to wed her.2 As a warrior 33
woman, Tusee therefore completes specific actions that her people 34
perceive to be characteristics of masculine gender performances. 35
Medicine argues, “the warrior role for women was institutionalized 36
in Plains Indian communities, and . . . it was one of several cul- 37
38
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Lisa Tatonetti 7 40
1 turally accepted positions which accorded women power and pres-
2 tige in areas typically identified as ‘masculine’” (“Warrior Women”
3 268). Speaking of early Plains practices of masculinity, Marian W.
4 Smith maintains that “war honors” among Plains peoples include
5 “fearlessness, the power to overcome an antagonist or show supe-
6 riority to him, and the ability to carry out successful war projects.
7 All of these were connected with the warrior’s relationship [to] the
8 supernatural” (429). Tusee manifests each of these facets of an In-
9 digenous warrior identity. Moreover, the fulfillment of her prayer
10 that she be granted her “warrior-father’s heart, strong to slay a foe
11 and mighty to save a friend,” aligns her with the spiritual properties
12 of warrior masculinities (Zitkala-Ša 146). These spiritual responsi-
13 bilities, which are all-too-often elided in dominant representations
14 of such identities, index the larger intersectional relationships be-
15 tween a warrior, her nation, and her people.
16 In Zitkala-Ša’s 1902 short story, then, we find a female warrior
17 who embodies every aspect of idealized masculine prowess. Tusee
18 becomes the most successful and properly masculine of all the
19 young warriors in the text by moving fluidly through a range of
20 gender roles—she takes on the guise of a bent old woman to elude
21 attention, a desirable and forward young maiden to draw her
22 foe from the safety of his friends, and a physically strong young
23 warrior when she hoists her lover on her shoulders and strides off
24 with her prize at the conclusion of the story. Tusee passes through
25 all of these locations and transforms depending on the needs and
26 subsequent affective responses that coalesce at each point of bodily
27 contact along the way. The dynamic movement through such points
28 of embodied exchange, rather than any final, immobile destination
29 or definition, characterizes the somatic potential and active nature
30 of a female-bodied masculinity.
31 In the end, the very fluidity of Buffalo Calf Trail Woman’s,
32 Tashenamani’s, and Zitkala- Ša’s Wests demonstrates how
33 Indigeneity might be read as the genealogical foundation for queer
34 western studies. These layered gender performances show us how
35 queer the West really is by radically expanding the representations
36 of warrior masculinities that, for so long, were the foil against
37 which an idealized white western masculinity was constructed. As
38
39
well as working to destabilize settler understandings of masculine 1
performance, female and noncisgender masculinities present an 2
expanded sense of the generative possibilities of folks who today 3
might be seen as queering the boundaries and expectations of 4
gender performances and sexualities in both hegemonic and 5
Indigenous contexts. Considering the Indigenous erotics of 6
riding bareback then, on the occasion of the Western Literary 7
Association’s fiftieth anniversary, reveals not only that the West 8
has always been queer but also that queerness as a longstanding 9
component of Western studies stems from deep and abiding roots 10
and long-standing Indigenous intellectual traditions. 11
12
Lisa Tatonetti is a professor of English at Kansas State University, where she
13
studies, teaches, and publishes on queer Indigenous literatures. She is coeditor of
14
Sovereign Erotics and author of The Queerness of Native American Literature. Her
current book project considers female, Two-Spirit, and trans masculinities in 15
Indigenous literatures. 16
17
Notes 18
1. Hyphens from original text omitted for current usage. Eastman, for exam- 19
ple, writes of “Rain-In-The-Face.” 20
2. Such images of female strength are analogous to Zitkala-Ša’s beliefs about 21
her own identity, as well. In her analysis of Zitkala-Ša’s letters to her then fiancée, 22
Carlos Montezuma, missives that would have been written at the same time as
23
“The Warrior’s Daughter,” Ruth Spack highlights that Zitkala-Ša “declares her in-
dependence repeatedly” (181).
24
25
Works Cited
26
27
Arosteguy, Katie O. “’It Was All a Hard, Fast Ride that Ended in the Mud’: Decon-
structing the Myth of the Cowboy in Annie Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming 28
Stories.” Western American Literature, vol. 45, no. 2, 2010, pp. 116–36. 29
Bebout, Lee. “The First Last Generation: Queer Temporality, Heteropatriarchy, 30
and Cultural Reproduction in Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero.” 31
Western American Literature, vol. 49, no. 4, 2015, pp. 351–74. 32
Cummings, Ronald. “Jamaican Female Masculinities: Nanny of the Maroons and
33
the Genealogy of the Man-Royal.” Journal of West Indian Literature, 21, nos.
1–2, 2012, pp. 129–54.
34
Eastman, Charles Alexander. “Rain-in-the-Face: The Story of a Sioux Warrior.” The 35
Outlook, 27 Oct. 1906, pp. 507–12. 36
Kidston, Martin J. “Northern Cheyenne Break Vow of Silence.” Inde- 37
pendent Record, 27 June 2005, http://helenair.com/news/state-and 38
39
Lisa Tatonetti 9 40
1 -regional/northern-cheyenne-break-vow-of-silence/article_fcf44c96
2 -cfb6–56f4–9c57–062e944350ce.html. Accessed 4 Dec. 2017.
3 Medicine, Beatrice. “’Warrior Women’—Sex Role Alternatives for Plains Indian
Women.” The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women, edited by Patricia
4
Albers and Beatrice Medicine, UP of America, 1983, pp. 267–80.
5 Queer Wests, special issue of Western American Literature, edited by Geoffrey
6 Bateman, vol. 51, no. 2, 2016.
7 Spack, Ruth. “Dis/engagement: Zitkala-Ša’s Letters to Carlos Montezuma, 1901–
8 1902.” MELUS, vol. 26, no. 1, 2001, pp. 173–204.
9 Zitkala-Ša. “A Warrior’s Daughter.” In American Indian Stories, 1921. U of Nebraska
10 P, 1985, pp. 137–53.
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1
2
Toward a Feminist Turn 3
4
5
Krista Comer
6
7
8
9
With minor editing for publication, I have let this piece stand largely as it was 10
delivered in 2015. It seemed fitting, however, to amend a postscript. There I 11
reflect on what I learned from the reception of this talk and others like it that
12
I gave shortly afterward. The intervening presidential election of 2016, and
the new worldwide feminist resistance set in motion by it, offer one answer 13
to a central question posed here: What will it take to bring feminism out of 14
the shadows? The need for less “stuck” and predictable conversations about 15
feminism is a priority. The times call out to all feminist killjoys! —K.C. 16
17
The charge of this genealogical plenary is an “anniversary 18
charge,” to take the long view and ask ourselves: What critical 19
works and theoretical approaches have been important to the field 20
of western American literary and culture study, what is important 21
currently, and what could or should we do in the future? Those 22
questions ask us to think about but also beyond the Western Liter- 23
ature Association as an organizational and intellectual enterprise. 24
My own interests are in feminist thought, and I make several 25
claims. One is that it would benefit scholarship in US West studies 26
to put feminism on the agenda not only of this fiftieth anniversary 27
conference but especially of the future agenda of western studies. 28
Feminist thought as feminist thought is not much on the table these 29
days, and this is not a western studies phenomenon exclusively 30
(American studies, for all its innovations, shares similar limits). 31
Feminism’s embattlement no doubt is a sign of the postfeminist 32
times in which we live and the chilling effect of postfeminism on 33
political climates, including in universities. Doing feminist work, 34
making the case for it, has gotten harder. Embattlement also owes 35
to the complexities of feminist theory itself and its own genealog- 36
ical quandaries and theoretical paradoxes. For example, is working 37
38
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40
1 on “women” as opposed to “gender” theoretically naïve? That is a
2 question, one we don’t take up in western literary studies much
3 since “women” is usually taken for granted. I too invest in “women”
4 as an ongoing profound social and ontological category, but, in con-
5 texts of feminist studies, one must make a case. As postfeminism
6 lives into what looks like a third decade, many feminists ask anew
7 in what relation we situate our work, or ourselves, to feminist stud-
8 ies as a field, or to explicitly feminist epistemologies? If we work on
9 women, do we do so as feminists or as scholars of feminist studies
10 as a discipline, or as critical race feminists, Indigenous feminists,
11 material feminists, and what differences, in which contexts, do
12 such distinctions make? What about feminist thought in relation to
13 queer and/or transtheory, to studies in gender, or to masculinity?
14 Obviously in fifty years Americanist literary scholarship has
15 seen a lot of critical turns, and scholarship on the West tracks in
16 relation to them. Most of us will know recent major turns—toward
17 “theory” and poetics, and an expansion of materials considered le-
18 gitimate evidence, including popular culture and literature, diaries,
19 visual culture; toward race and gender as analytics; toward the so-
20 ciality of space; toward the transnational / hemispheric / critical
21 regional; and recently, the turn toward comparative settler Wests,
22 trans-Indigeneity and an ethics of refusal, and queer dwellings and
23 rurality. Feminist work on the West has been entangled in all of
24 them, as have “they” been entangled in and often brought about
25 by the innovations of feminisms, including especially the work of
26 women of color feminism and, in a related but distinct category, the
27 work of Indigenous women and Indigenous feminism.
28 I want to gesture to the arc of that work and urge an invigora-
29 tion of explicitly feminist thinking, even a feminist turn. The rea-
30 sons to do this seem obvious. A “feminist turn” would transform
31 studies of the West by moving in feminist directions the fields in
32 which West study is embedded and embattled: Indigenous studies,
33 settler theory, border theory, transnational and critical global stud-
34 ies, cultural geography and space/place studies. These fields have
35 feminists in them, and yet as fields they don’t articulate themselves
36 through feminist studies. It would also transform feminism itself
37 by explicating what vision of knowledge or social justice it offers in
38
39
2015. A turn of this kind would deploy feminism as an opportunity 1
for more engaged, public, methodological, and intellectual practices 2
and would expose as weak the idea that feminism is a special inter- 3
est project, a narrow identity concern. As long as feminism is made 4
partial in this way, speaking for only this or that, another presumed 5
center persists and operates as the real topic, the larger or more 6
pressing “we.” A feminist turn would also retrospectively inform 7
how we think about founding moments and field imaginaries of the 8
organization when it began in 1965. 9
Consulting institutional memory as well as scholarly archives, 10
the early years are narrated around female leaders in the 11
organization: Mary Washington, Bernice Slote, and Helen Stauffer. 12
All were WLA presidents between 1975– 80, Slote’s papers are 13
housed at the University of Nebraska; she wrote about Willa Cather. 14
She wrote poetry. I could not find much about Mary Washington, 15
but Helen Stauffer will be remembered as a Mari Sandoz scholar 16
and a mentor. Like Slote, Stauffer was interested in women writers 17
who took up issues of violence, sexuality, and gender in relation 18
to aesthetics. Lawrence Lee, also a president, published Women, 19
Women Writers, and the West, a book of collected essays in 1979. I 20
remember finding that book as a graduate student in the mid-1990s 21
and writing Larry Lee, who responded kindly about helping along 22
my work. Ann Ronald, the Edward Abbey scholar, environment 23
scholar, and among our strongest leaders, was WLA president 24
in 1984. Ronald has been a feminist friend to many, including 25
me. Activities of mentoring, and scholarship on women writers, 26
constitute feminist legacies. 27
Feminism as an explicit critical approach arrived with Annette 28
Kolodny and Melody Graulich—both then at the University of 29
New Hampshire. Kolodny’s work brought force and depth, with 30
Lay of the Land (1975) and The Land Before Her (1984), as well as 31
with her classic statement “Dancing through the Minefield” 32
(1980). Kolodny’s monographs cleared the table with a kind of 33
one-two punch of, first, a field-transforming critique of the “land 34
as woman” metaphor and, next, a remapping of the earlier period 35
through texts by settler women. Kolodny posed metaquestions 36
about the complex powers for storytelling of female fantasy 37
38
39
Krista Comer 13 40
1 and desire alongside crucial questions about how to theorize
2 across race/Indigeneity when archival sourcing and scholars’
3 skills did not match. Kolodny’s theoretical work in “Dancing”
4 was equally important: there she laid out the ongoing concerns
5 of feminist scholarship: the interface of theory and practice, the
6 risk and rewards of diverse methodologies, the game-changing
7 claim that all knowledges are situated. From emphases on sexual
8 stereotyping and “image critique,” feminism moves rapidly to the
9 insight, as Kolodny writes, that “literature [is] a social institution;
10 embedded not only within its own literary traditions, but also
11 within the particular physical and mental artifacts of the society
12 from which it comes” (4). “Everything has been thrown into
13 question,” Kolodny tells us, “Our established canons, our aesthetic
14 criteria, our interpretative strategies, our reading habits, and
15 most of all, ourselves as critics and as teachers” (2).
16 Melody Graulich’s theoretical interests emphasized issues
17 of authorship and literary publics. A Mary Austin authority who
18 recovered Cactus Thorn, and the editor for many years of Western
19 American Literature, Graulich published extensively in feminist
20 journals and in edited books about women’s literature and gender
21 and race issues as they inform history, readership, and visual
22 culture. It was Graulich’s work about Wallace Stegner’s legacy that
23 I first read as a graduate student, and it was her I went to visit in
24 New Hampshire from nearby Providence, Rhode Island, searching
25 for and finding feminist friendship about being from the West.
26 In the same early 1980s to early 1990s period, feminist histo-
27 rians, too, were occupied with histories unknown and unreflected
28 in field paradigms. But historians had a larger critical mass in uni-
29 versities than did critics, and they immersed their work directly
30 in questions of race and of histories of conquest—texts with clear
31 if loose western geographies like This Bridge Called My Back (1981)
32 found discussion in western history more than in literary study
33 (Moraga and Anzaldúa). Judging from how many historians linked
34 their work to prominent contemporary civil rights and Indigenous
35 writers, literature (though rarely criticism) seemed to set a new
36 standard in the present for how feminist historians might conceive
37 the past. If feminist literary critics pondered the viability of a “fe-
38
39
male aesthetic,” women’s “counter-traditions,” and “resisting read- 1
erships,” historians worked toward a cross racial “Women’s West” 2
(Armitage and Jameson), a West of networks and cross border kin 3
circuits (Deustch), a queered cultural space and homosocial every- 4
day world (S. Johnson). New Western feminist historians centered 5
the importance of Chicana, Asian American, and Indigenous wom- 6
en’s presence to theories of conquest and race formation and white 7
womanhood (Ruiz and DuBois; Pascoe; Jacobs). 8
Significantly, decolonial thought in this period erupts explicitly 9
from Indigenous feminists (Trask; Smith; Mihesuah), and Chicana 10
feminists (Perez; Sandoval), though little makes its way into the 11
confluence of feminist critical geographies that mark a pivot point 12
toward studies of the twentieth century and contemporary cultural 13
scenes. The civil rights critical race paradigm holds sway. Still, this 14
confluence allows for new feminist work in US West literature 15
and culture (Comer, “Landscapes”; Georgi- Findlay; Norwood 16
and Monk), film (Tompkins), border geographies (Brady), critical 17
Pacific study (Lowe), and critical theory (Campbell). Masculinity 18
becomes a serious topic (Mitchell; M. Johnson), as does 19
heteronormativity (Handley). Just as quickly, though, questions 20
of national and transnational crossings, as well as of globalization 21
and its remapping of world politics, suddenly alter how regions 22
function relative to nations. Feminist perspectives find themselves 23
again in the margins (Soto). Steve Tatum’s work on postregions, 24
taking off in part from Spivak and theorizing the vulnerability of 25
subaltern women’s labor—grapples with the change. And it’s this 26
critical regional shuffling of the world order, and with it the 2007 27
UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, that brings 28
questions of sovereignty so prominently to the political fore. No 29
longer feeders of or peripheries to national financial metropoles, 30
regions under globalization band together into economic and 31
political blocs, like NAFTA, CAFTA, and the EEC. This changed 32
situation governs cultural and social life in the present and is a 33
major context out of which recent theoretical keywords of the field 34
have been produced: “critical regionalism,” “postwestern,” and, 35
judging from its currency, “sovereignty.” What relation do any of 36
these new emergent analytics have to feminist thought? 37
38
39
Krista Comer 15 40
1 Let me hold off on answering that question a moment to ap-
2 preciate what we have on hand here at this conference. There is no
3 absence of “women writers” broadly conceived, and certainly many
4 approaches to women’s cultural production, including gender/sex-
5 uality and notably, for this conference, Indigenous approaches, in-
6 cluding LeAnne Howe’s Tribalography. We have scholars like Jane
7 Hafen, Susan Bernardin, Lisa Tatonetti, Joanna Hearne, and more
8 recently Kirby Brown and, of course, Chad Allen to thank for this.
9 And it is a huge accomplishment, fifty years in the making, to cen-
10 ter Indigeneity at this conference.
11 As a kind of self- checking exercise, I went through the
12 conference program with a yellow highlighter. There is a clear
13 presence of individual papers and whole panels organized around
14 gender, women, sexuality, masculinity, intergenerationality, and
15 what we might broadly term “intersectionality” (class, race, gender-
16 entwined analyses). But there is also a near-total absence of the
17 term “feminism” or explicit conversations in panel and paper titles
18 with the larger theoretical apparatus of feminist studies, critical
19 race feminisms, intersectional feminisms, or Indigenous feminism.
20 I have noted this absence at the WLA over the last few years, noted
21 it in titles and in paper content and to some degree in my own
22 work. Clearly a feminist impulse is in my mind, it’s likely in others’
23 minds, and at times it is made explicit: for instance, in president-
24 elect Linda Karrell’s call for feminist and queer studies approaches
25 for WLA Bozeman 2016. Clearly it’s prominent either now or in the
26 past, for works of many scholars here, including Judy Nolte Temple,
27 Audrey Goodman, Susan Kollin, Victoria Lamont, Christine Bold,
28 Cathryn Halverson, Kayann Short, Priscilla Ybarra, and Randi
29 Tanglen. Advanced graduate students and recent PhDs seem
30 committed to and well trained in feminist directions too: including
31 Paul Wickelson, Will Lombardi, Brittany Henry, Lorena Guthereau,
32 Elena Valdez, Julie Williams, Scott Pett, and Elisa Bordin at the
33 University of Verona, as well as Merche Albert from the University
34 of Basque Country, who traveled last year to the United States to
35 spend five months studying with me, specifically about feminism.
36 And yet we are not regularly bringing attention to and prioritizing
37 or practicing citation of our feminist genealogies.
38
39
What would it take to bring feminism out of the shadows? 1
One: The effort needed is collective and cannot be the province 2
of a single scholar or single period or field. So, how to set in motion 3
this sea change? Two: How shall we distinguish work on women 4
from work within feminist studies, including work with texts by 5
women of color as distinct from working from critical race feminist 6
approaches? Three: How can practices and epistemologies of 7
engagement (praxis) so central to the founding of feminist thought 8
serve as innovations that create productive methodological 9
openings and highlight “West” as the contested space it is? Four: 10
How can an archive of materials that knows something about and 11
explicitly cares about women’s lives and feminist questions figure 12
as evidence (as it does not now) for the claims made through the 13
conceptual keywords of our field? My own work of recent years 14
responds to that question (“Thinking Otherwise”; “Place and 15
Worlding”). Five: How can those who wish to do so engage the 16
limits of certain fields, for instance the field of transnational studies 17
in American studies, by taking seriously the feminist concerns 18
of postcolonial, Native, and critical race and Latin Americanist 19
scholars? Finally: What can we contribute to theorizations of place, 20
critical regionalism, and sovereignty? This critical site with such 21
important material effects and anchor points remains a key area, 22
since scholarship in general undertheorizes place, if it is theorized 23
at all, or sees “place” as naïve, “local,” “parochial.” Between material 24
feminism, Indigenous theories of place, critical race postpositivism, 25
and newer work in feminist/queer dwelling, there is a lot to work 26
with in order to move in directions of decolonial Wests. 27
28
Postscript. Looking back, I did not anticipate the stir this piece 29
would generate, the whispered hallway conversations after the fact 30
in which people took me aside, anxiously, to express like-minded 31
but secret and seemingly illicit solidarities. This tone carried on 32
after WLA in other talks and other Q and A’s. Clearly it was femi- 33
nism, the “f” word, setting people off—its instant associations with 34
white Eurofeminisms or with feminism as a form of settler white- 35
ness, even when those feminisms were not ascendant in the gene- 36
alogies that had just been addressed. Certainly, the anxiety about 37
38
39
Krista Comer 17 40
1 white feminisms is not new; it matters, and white feminisms have
2 much to answer for. At the same time, a predictability or reactive
3 discursive dominant about the compromises of feminism has come
4 often to preclude more considered thinking, and that reactiveness
5 is a problem.
6 Back to the question: What would it take to bring feminism out
7 of the shadows? The crisis of the 2016 election, and the feminist
8 mobilization and worldwide Women’s Marches of 2017, offer ongo-
9 ing answers. A certain malaise and fatigue—generated by twenty
10 years of battling postracial and postfeminist neoliberal orders—has
11 been interrupted. Amid these changed circumstances, where will
12 critics and engaged scholars stand in relation to producing knowl-
13 edge? Critical disinterest is not neutral or benign since it lends it-
14 self to larger postfeminist silences and misinformation. Torpedoing
15 feminism as always white is not by definition antiracist or progres-
16 sive. It may be “just” antifeminist; and it also may be an erasure of
17 women of color feminisms.
18 The scale of mobilization witnessed in the Women’s Marches
19 is hardly spontaneous. Some of its histories are visible in this
20 essay. As genealogies go, this piece has limits—if one wants a
21 critical history of the field in its engagement with women writers,
22 Victoria Lamont’s stellar synthetic article “Big Books Wanted” is
23 a go-to reference. It’s generally compatible with this one, even as
24 I have tried here for something else: for challenging the absence
25 of feminist analytic frames and asking how we unframe what
26 we have and, in that process, shift the field and the spaces called
27 “West.” When feminism is continually criticized and reconstituted
28 as “white feminism,” what Other feminisms are sacrificed? Can
29 we stop dooming feminism, expecting perfection not expected of
30 other major complicated liberation projects, to see what is on offer
31 instead?
32
Krista Comer is a professor of English at Rice University and is affiliated with
33
the Rice Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her books in-
34 clude Landscapes of the New West, Surfer Girls in the New World Order, and the 2013
35 spring/summer issue of Western American Literature, devoted to works of younger
36 scholars. She has published many essays and lately has been writing out of a new
37 project, “Feminist States of Critical Regionalism,” as well as directing The Institute
38 for Women Surfers, a public humanities project in grassroots political education.
39
Works Cited 1
Armitage, Susan, and Elizabeth Jameson. Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Cul- 2
ture in the Women’s West. Oklahoma UP, 1997. 3
Brady, Mary Pat. Extinct Lands Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the 4
Urgency of Space. Duke UP, 2002. 5
Campbell, Neil. The Cultures of the American New West. Routledge, 2000.
6
Comer, Krista. Landscapes of the New West: Gender & Geography in Contemporary
Women’s Writing. U of North Carolina P, 1999.
7
—. “Place and Worlding: Feminist States of Critical Regionalism.” Transconti- 8
nental Reflections on the American West: Words, Images, Sounds beyond Borders, 9
edited by Ángel Chaparro Sainz and Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo, Portal Edi- 10
tions SL, 2015, pp. 153–71. 11
—. “Surfeminism, Critical Regionalism, Public Scholarship.” The Critical
12
Surf Studies Reader, edited by Dexter Zavzala Hough-Snee and Alex Eastman.
Duke UP, 2017, pp. 235–62.
13
—. Surfer Girls in the New World Order. Duke UP, 2010. 14
—. “Thinking Otherwise across Global Wests: Issues of Mobility and Fem- 15
inist Critical Regionalism.” Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Human- 16
ities, vol. 10, 2016, pp. 1–18. http://arcade.stanford.edu/occasion/thinking 17
-otherwise-across-global-wests-issues-mobility-and-feminist-critical 18
-regionalism.
19
Deustch, Sarah. No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic
Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940. Oxford UP, 1987. 20
Georgi-Findlay, Brigette. The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and 21
the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion. Arizona UP 1996. 22
Graulich, Melody. “O Beautiful for Spacious Guys: On the Legitimate Inclination 23
of the Sexes.” Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American 24
Literature, edited by David Mogen, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant. Texas A&M
25
Press, 1989, pp. 186–201.
Handley, William. Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West.
26
Cambridge UP, 2002. 27
Jacobs, Margaret D. Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879– 28
1934. U of Nebraska P, 1999. 29
Johnson, Michael K. Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Litera- 30
ture. U of Oklahoma P, 2002.
31
Johnson, Susan Lee. “’A Memory Sweet to Soldiers’: The Significance of Gender in
the History of the American West.” Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 4,
32
Nov. 1993, pp. 465–518. 33
Kolodny, Annette. “Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the 34
Theory, Practice and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism.” Feminist Stud- 35
ies, vol. 6, no. 1, spring 1980, pp. 1–25. 36
—. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 37
1630–1860. U of North Carolina P, 1984.
38
39
Krista Comer 19 40
1 —. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor As Experience and History in American Life
2 and Letters. U of North Carolina P, 1975.
3 Lamont, Victoria. “Big Books Wanted.” Legacy, vol. 21, no. 2, 2014, pp. 311–26.
Lee, L. L., and Merrill Lewis, editors. Women, Women Writers, and the West.
4
Whitston Publishing, 1979.
5 Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts. Duke UP, 1996.
6 Mihesuah, Devon. Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment,
7 Activism. U of Nebraska P, 2003.
8 Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. U of Chicago P,
9 1996.
10 Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color. State U of New York P, 1981.
11
Norwood, Vera, and Janice Monk, editors. The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern
12 Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art. Yale UP 1987.
13 Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the
14 American West, 1874–1939. Oxford UP, 1993.
15 Perez, Emma. Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Indiana UP,
16 1999.
Ruiz, Vicki, and Ellen DuBois. Unequal Sisters: An Inclusive Reader in U.S. Women’s
17
History. Routledge, 1990.
18 Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. U of Minnesota P, 2000.
19 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples.
20 Zed Books, 1999.
21 Soto, Sandra. “Where in the Transnational World are U.S. Women of Color?”
22 Women’s Studies for the Future, edited by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and
Agatha Beins, Rutgers UP, 2005, pp. 111–24.
23
Tatum, Stephen. “Spectrality and the Postregional Interface.” In Postwestern Cul-
24 tures: Literature, Theory, Space, edited by Susan Kollin, U of Nebraska P, 2007,
25 pp. 3–29.
26 Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. Oxford UP, 1992.
27 Trask, Haunani-Kay. From a Native Daughter, Colonialism and Sovereignty in
28 Hawaii. U of Hawaii P, 1993.
29
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1
2
Anthropocene Frontiers 3
4
The Place of Environment in Western Studies
5
6
Sylvan Goldberg 7
8
9
10
To think of the West as “geological”—rather than, say, as pas- 11
toral, agricultural, arid, domestic, or wilderness—is to challenge 12
without erasing the environmental frames that have dominated 13
western American studies. Recently the Anthropocene has brought 14
just such a geologic imagination into the humanities. For western 15
studies this prompts a return to the nineteenth century, in which 16
the US West became synonymous with what Clarence King, lead- 17
er of the Fortieth Parallel Survey, called its “impressive geological 18
drama” (4). For King and his contemporaries—Timothy O’Sullivan, 19
Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Church—the imposing western land- 20
scapes affirmed a school of geology called catastrophism, so named 21
for the rapid and violent rate of change through which it envisioned 22
alterations to the earth’s surface occurring. The geologic imagina- 23
tion of the Anthropocene retains this catastrophic sensibility, but 24
sublime awe has given way to the anxieties of climate change. The 25
western environment is especially prone to this increasing precarity, 26
dependent as it has been—and continues to be—upon a complex 27
infrastructure to maintain its livability: railroad construction, irri- 28
gation, wildfire management. Every summer, it seems, more of the 29
West burns, its rivers and groundwater run lower, and temperatures 30
rise to such extremes that the heat map has needed new colors. 31
In western studies, it might be tempting to call this moment 32
a frontier, poised between civilization and what can be salvaged 33
of it. The American West and its erstwhile frontier mentality is 34
central to the history that has stranded us here: rich in petro 35
and other resources, the West—in both its cultural and material 36
manifestations—helped to fuel the use-it-up-and-move-along 37
38
39
40
1 attitude that continues to drive our reliance on fossil fuels,
2 extending the “western frontier” to spaces like Alaska and the
3 Arctic. As scholars have by now long shown, the concept of the
4 frontier offered a monologic account of US national progress—
5 white, settler, masculine, agricultural—insufficient to represent its
6 diverse cultures. In smoothing over a story of resource exploitation
7 and colonial violence with a tale of national progress, the frontier
8 narrative silenced communities with other stories to tell. Recently,
9 these voices have grown louder, even as the universal collectivity
10 invoked in Anthropocene critique has grown beyond the confines
11 of the nation; as Dipesh Chakrabarty insists, the human acts now
12 at the level of the species. And yet, while there may be value in
13 such a concept of a species-based collectivity, in order for it to be
14 of use, as Stacy Alaimo has argued recently, it cannot efface its
15 localized manifestations, expressed through the categories of social
16 difference that have helped to unmask the workings of power in a
17 diversity of cultures.1
18 This construction maps onto the human what western studies
19 has recently claimed about place: that the forms of contemporary
20 society that scale up our frames of analysis amplify, rather than
21 diminish, our commitment to understanding the local—or what
22 William Lombardi has called the “postlocal”—as embedded with-
23 in these larger formulations. Critical regionalism, the postwestern,
24 and the postregional each provide frameworks to understand the
25 interlocking scales of place that unsettle the Western environment.
26 And as in Stephen Tatum’s postregionalist account of the “cease-
27 less haunting of the present by the contagious residue of a violent
28 past,” these scalar concerns are temporal as well as spatial (17). The
29 Anthropocene expands these frames, invoking a geologic West that
30 moves backward through the nineteenth century into deep time,
31 even as it anticipates a catastrophic future in which human per-
32 sistence appears precarious.
33 “Scale” and “precarity”: these two terms are central to the envi-
34 ronment of the US West and its representations in western stud-
35 ies. In the Anthropocene it is precisely the conjunction of these two
36 terms that marks a break with the genealogies we’ve inherited, as
37 the vast spatial and temporal scales of climate change put both the
38
39
human and nonhuman at increasing risk. This is appropriate for 1
the geologic West, for geology is a story not of continuity but of 2
rupture, of gaps in the record that open up space for speculation. 3
And while this account of the Western environment retains its own 4
gaps, Susan Kollin has recently offered up exemplary surveys of 5
similar ground, complementing the stories told here and helping to 6
reveal those that remain to be told.2 7
For Henry Nash Smith, writing a decade before the founding 8
of the Western Literature Association, the American West that 9
appears throughout Virgin Land (1950) was a region under threat 10
less in material than in cultural terms. A conceptual rather than 11
a geographical marker, Smith’s West meant “the vacant continent 12
beyond the frontier” (4), emptied of Indigenous communities and a 13
vibrant nonhuman nature and thus available as a utopic “Garden of 14
the World” for US settlers (12). Sacrificing regional specificity in fa- 15
vor of an advancing frontier, Smith’s myth and symbol school thus 16
had little to do with the material realities of the American West or 17
its natural world. The rising political prominence of the environ- 18
mental movement in the 1960s and ’70s made such an idealist ac- 19
count of environment less tenable. Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and 20
the American Mind (1967) and Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land 21
(1975) marked a turn: still primarily invested in elucidating cultural 22
constructions of environment but with a clear interest in the way 23
those ideas had found expression in the world beyond the text. En- 24
vironmental history in particular, a field with close ties to the emer- 25
gent New Western History, began in the 1970s and ’80s to advance 26
a more specific Western environment outside of the frontier and 27
wilderness frameworks: arid, as Donald Worster argued; subject, 28
prior to white settlement, to Indigenous land-use patterns far more 29
sustainable than those of its colonizers, as Richard White showed; 30
the site of an extractive conquest, in Patricia Limerick’s opus; and, 31
as William Cronon would famously argue, much closer to home 32
than concepts like “wilderness” implied.3 33
In literary studies, where western scholars were similarly fo- 34
cused on deconstructing the mythic West spawned by Smith and 35
others, the turn to the West’s environment occurred later. Cheryll 36
Glotfelty’s revival of the term “ecocriticism” at the 1989 meeting 37
38
39
Sylvan Goldberg 23 40
1 of the WLA, and the founding of the Association for the Study of
2 Literature and Environment in 1992, helped to spur this shift, but
3 it did so, in part, by widening the geographic frame of ecocriticism
4 beyond the context of the US West, engendering a move away from
5 western studies. Glotfelty’s claim that ecocriticism had “one foot
6 in literature and the other on land” aligned the field with a more
7 material account of nature, and a slow ratcheting up of this interest
8 has led to a proliferation of recent work more interested in ontol-
9 ogy than epistemology—a shift that can seem at times to speak at
10 cross purposes with western studies’ postwestern paradigm (xix).
11 Informed by both scientific and speculative realisms, these new
12 materialisms have explored the agency of the nonhuman world in
13 diverse ways. But this work has thus far made only minor inroads
14 into western studies, which can bring a healthy skepticism to new
15 materialism’s arms race toward a more accurate realism and a more
16 authentic nature—claims that raise red flags in a field long atten-
17 tive to the seductive appeal and ideological violence of such terms.
18 Still, the US West offers an important region for new materialism’s
19 interest in nonhuman agency because attempts to define the west-
20 ern environment in material terms have often exposed an intransi-
21 gent nonhuman world appealing precisely for its resistances to hu-
22 man hubris and its evocation of human precarity: aridity, and water
23 rights in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix; fault lines in California
24 and the Pacific Northwest; bioregional boundaries that confound
25 political ones.
26 These nonhuman checks on human conquest of the environ-
27 ment indicate a still underdeveloped topic in literary studies: as
28 New Western and environmental historians have by now long
29 shown, the frontier narrative often effaced the environmental
30 harm resulting from the exploitation and management of natural
31 resources central to the idealized West (gold and silver; oil; timber)
32 and whose material limits have shaped cultural and political strug-
33 gles over conservation, preservation, and, more recently, climate
34 change. Thus, western scholars are well positioned to tell this story,
35 and indeed, when such a resource imagination has appeared in lit-
36 erary studies it has, unsurprisingly, been largely in work by scholars
37 of the American West: Susan Kollin’s Nature’s State (2001); Nico-
38
39
las Witschi’s Traces of Gold (2002); Janet Floyd’s Claims and Specu- 1
lations (2012); Stephanie LeMenager’s Living Oil (2013). A number 2
of what can be called natural resource novels pull both ecocritical 3
and broader American literary attention westward: the mining nov- 4
els of Mary Hallock Foote; Mary Austin’s The Ford (1917) and Up- 5
ton Sinclair’s Oil! (1927); John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing (1960); 6
Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1971); Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit 7
(1990). As Kyle Powys Whyte reminds us, the history of US settler 8
colonialism—overlapping with that of the US West—is also a story 9
of resource extraction: “U.S. settlers had diverse motivations, such 10
as fur trading, gold mining, farming, and establishing settlements 11
beyond the so-called frontier” (160). 12
Whyte’s concern over colonial exploitation points to another 13
critique of the new materialisms emerging out of Indigenous 14
studies, a field often allied with western studies. A number 15
of scholars— Zoe Todd, Vanessa Watts, Kim TallBear, Juanita 16
Sundberg, Kyle Bladow—have begun to castigate the “ontological 17
turn” for its failure to cite Indigenous thinkers, whose ideas it often 18
reproduces. The persistence of such Indigenous environmental 19
knowledge renders new materialism’s insights a belated 20
rearticulation of knowledge that has existed elsewhere for far 21
longer than its current academic vogue. Such critiques thus make 22
clear that the erasure of Indigenous communities remains an 23
ongoing legacy of the settler colonial West, an erasure in which 24
scholarly work can at times participate. Nowhere in recent times 25
has this legacy been laid bare more explicitly than in the 2016 26
protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock 27
Sioux Reservation. The protests’ claims to Indigenous sovereignty 28
and environmental justice exposed some of the ways precarity 29
falls most heavily upon minoritized populations. The movement’s 30
widespread popularity also generated a number of concerns over 31
neocolonialism, as messages spread through social media platforms 32
detailed the disrespect with which some white protestors were 33
treating the camp and its Indigenous community. These posts 34
prompted a number of questions about collectivity, appropriation, 35
and voice that the Anthropocene has put under increasing pressure. 36
The scaling up of the human to the level of the species by scholars 37
38
39
1 purporting to speak for this reimagined Anthropocene collectivity
2 has generated new universalisms that risk effacing important
3 categories of difference.
4 Indigenous voices are one counterweight to such hegemonic for-
5 mulations, and other transnational, global, and altermodern tex-
6 tual traditions have much to say about competing visions of the
7 “Western” environment—often from positions where that region
8 isn’t west of anything. Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán’s The Lati-
9 no Nineteenth Century (2016) helps turn our attention toward one
10 possible set of voices heard less frequently. The essays collected
11 there are valuable in no small part because they help to show the
12 ways identity categories such as “Latino,” or “Indigenous,” often
13 positioned as one collective voice speaking back to a white Euro-
14 American culture, fail to cohere as singular worldviews. In arguing
15 that institutional forces can often lead to a conflation of identity
16 categories, epistemologies, and modes of inhabitation better held
17 apart, José Aranda, in his contribution to that collection, empha-
18 sizes something often taken for granted within an unmarked but
19 implicitly Anglo-American environmental archive. After all, Edward
20 Abbey’s militant environmentalism hardly looks like Al Gore’s far
21 quieter climate change activism, even when both deploy the genre
22 of the memoir to advance their environmental agendas. Where
23 does an attempt to articulate an African American environmental
24 West through works such as Percival Everett’s Watershed (1996) and
25 Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) break down—and where
26 does it hold together? These voices continue to need amplification
27 in accounts of the Western environment as we navigate the scalar
28 tensions of the Anthropocene.
29 Recent work on race and environment in the West has
30 highlighted not just other bodies of environmental knowledge but
31 other ways of experiencing the US West’s environment. Scholars
32 such as Sarah D. Wald, in The Nature of California (2016), and Priscilla
33 Ybarra, in Writing the Goodlife (2016), have discussed agricultural
34 labor as a form of environmental encounter in ways quite distinct
35 from Smith’s pastoral Garden of the World or the machine-in-
36 the-garden trope of a novel like Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901).
37 Indeed, a rich tradition of land-based labor literature in the West
38
39
extends through and beyond agriculture—from John Steinbeck’s 1
In Dubious Battle (1936) to the poet David Mason’s verse-novel 2
Ludlow (2007) about the 1914 massacre of Colorado miners—but 3
has played only a minor part in western environmental scholarship. 4
Both Wald and Ybarra invoke environmental justice criticism, 5
which has helped to push our environmental attention away from 6
pristine sights and toward toxic landscapes (Leslie Marmon Silko’s 7
Ceremony [1977] and Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge [1991] are 8
two notable examples) and urban and transnational spaces (for 9
example, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange [1997]). 10
In making claims that reveal the links between racially based 11
violence and harmful environmental practices, environmental 12
justice criticism extends a political vision rooted in the claims of 13
ecofeminism, which explores similar concerns in relation to gender. 14
The US West, with the hypermasculine protagonists of its pop 15
cultural form and its feminized landscape so evident in the title of 16
Virgin Land, has been central to ecofeminism: Kolodny’s The Lay of 17
the Land; Starhawk’s California-based spiritual environmentalism; 18
and more recently, Krista Comer’s study of the “related locals”— 19
nodes within a global network of local cultures— of women’s 20
surfing culture. Ecofeminism has largely shed an earlier reputation 21
for essentializing both women and nature and has done so in 22
part through an increasing turn toward queer ecologies, engaging 23
a broader set of questions about the relations between gender, 24
sexuality, and the nonhuman. Such work has only begun to 25
enter western American studies and has brought with it a richer 26
vocabulary for understanding not just the gendering of the 27
environment but, drawing on affect theory, the feelings generated 28
by our attachments to place and to nature in the many forms and 29
spaces it takes in the US West. 30
There is no shortage of bad feelings evoked by the precarious 31
environmental futures of the Anthropocene, as the planet bar- 32
rels into a sixth mass-extinction event that may spell the end of 33
humankind. Imagining a future without humanity may feel like a 34
daunting—if not downright depressing—task for the environmen- 35
tal humanities, but a cluster of climate fiction (cli-fi) novels have 36
begun to appear that imagine how that future might appear oth- 37
38
39
1 erwise. From the massively depopulated Colorado of Peter Heller’s
2 The Dog Stars (2012) to the sand-entombed California of Claire Vaye
3 Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus (2016), cli-fi insists that in the drought-
4 susceptible, wildfire-ravaged, and lower-population-density spaces
5 of the American West, this future may arrive sooner than in other
6 regions of the nation.
7 The asymmetries and asynchronies of this post- postwest—
8 altermodernities, queer temporalities, and other archives— can
9 alter not simply the content of our environmental knowledge
10 but the forms (literary, temporal, material) in which the western
11 environment continues to be redefined in the Anthropocene.
12 With its interest in earth systems and the local weather effects
13 of global climate change, the Anthropocene offers up a material
14 environmental account of postwestern theory’s rich terrain—a
15 geologic West in which the environmental humanities’ material
16 turn and western studies’ cultural projects operate in tandem.
17 When Clarence King wrote of such a geologic West nearly a century
18 and a half ago, he found in deep time a salve to the destruction
19 that man’s exploitation of the western environment had left on the
20 earth’s surface: despite the “old, rude scars of mining” he saw in
21 the Sierra Nevada, King insisted that “time, with friendly rain, and
22 wind and flood, slowly, surely, levels all” (292). Deep time, not to
23 mention the weather, seems far less consolatory now than it did
24 for King. But if King’s optimism seems ill-suited to the challenges
25 of the Anthropocene, his reminder that the western environment
26 has its own intentions exceeding those of the humans with whom
27 it coexists is a lesson worth retelling.
28
Sylvan Goldberg is an assistant professor in the English department at Colorado
29
College, where he teaches classes on American literature and the environmental
30 humanities. He has essays in The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner
31 and New International Voices in Ecocriticism.
32
33 Notes
34 1. See Alaimo’s Exposed and Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four
35 Theses.”
36 2. See Kollin’s “Environments in Western American Literature” and “The Amer-
37 ican West and the Literature of Environmental Consciousness.”
38
39
3. See Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American 1
West; White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island Coun- 2
ty, Washington; Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest; and Cronon, “The Trouble with 3
Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.”
4
5
Works Cited 6
Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. U 7
of Minnesota P, 2016.
8
Aranda, José. “When Archives Collide: Recovering Modernity in Early Mexican
American Literature.” The Latino Nineteenth Century, edited by Rodrigo Lazo 9
and Jesse Alemán, New York UP, 2016, pp. 146–67. 10
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 11
35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197–222. JSTOR, doi:10.1086/596640. 12
Comer, Krista. Surfer Girls in the New World Order. Duke UP, 2010. 13
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong
14
Nature.” Environmental History, vol. 1, no. 1, 1996, pp. 7–28. http://www.jstor
.org/stable/3985059.
15
Glotfelty, Cheryll. “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Cri- 16
sis.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll 17
Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. xv–xxxvii. 18
King, Clarence. Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada. Sampson Low, Mar- 19
ston, Low, & Searle, 1872. HathiTrust, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp
20
.33433081782637.
Kollin, Susan. “The American West and the Literature of Environmental Con-
21
sciousness.” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American West, 22
edited by Steven Frye, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 69–72. 23
—. “Environments in Western American Literature.” Oxford Re- 24
search Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford UP, 2016. doi:10.1093/ 25
acrefore/9780190201098.013.206. 26
Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the Ameri-
27
can West. Norton, 1987.
Lombardi, William. “Global Subcultural Bohemianism: The Prospect of Postlocal 28
Ecocriticsm in Tim Winton’s Breath.” New International Voices in Ecocriticism, 29
edited by Serpil Opperman, Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 41–54. 30
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. 1950. 31
Harvard UP, 1978. 32
Tatum, Stephen. “Spectrality and the Postregional Interface.” Postwestern Cul-
33
tures: Literature, Theory, Space, edited by Susan Kollin, U of Nebraska P, 2007,
pp. 3–29. 34
White, Richard. Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island 35
County, Washington. U of Washington P, 1980. 36
37
38
39
1 Whyte, Kyle Powys. “The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice, and
2 U.S. Colonialism.” Red Ink: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature,
3 Arts, & Humanities, vol. 19, no. 1, 2017, pp. 154–69. SSRN, https://ssrn.com
/abstract=2925513.
4
Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American
5 West. Pantheon, 1985.
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
1
2
Unhomely Wests: 3
4
Meditations in Critical Archaeology
5
6
Stephen Tatum 7
8
9
10
The alphabetical order erases everything, banishes every origin. . . . At 11
certain moments the alphabet calls you to order (to disorder) and says: 12
Cut! Resume the story in another way. . . . 13
—Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, 148 14
15
16
Notes 17
(1) Cf. Donna Haraway: “Home: Women-headed households, serial monogamy, 18
flight of men, old women alone, technology of domestic work, paid homework, 19
reemergence of home sweat shops, home-based businesses and telecommuting, 20
electronic cottage, urban homelessness, migration, module architecture, reinforced 21
(simulated) nuclear family, intense domestic violence” (“A Cyborg Manifesto” 170).
22
(2) Besides the texts cited in these meditations, I am thinking here of prose 23
works by Cormac McCarthy, Julie Otsuka, Willy Vlautin, Claire Vaye Watkins, 24
and Sandra Cisneros. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem represents
25
a crucial forerunner to this archive of contemporary homeless literature. The
writings of Meridel Le Seuer, Nelson Algren, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, 26
and Carlos Bulosan also represent important literary precursors treating the 27
intersecting themes of homeless vagabondage, labor history, class conflict, and 28
racial discrimination. 29
30
H ome/less 31
“Voy a ser uno de los ‘homeless,’” thinks Guatemalan refugee Antonio 32
Bernal as he is evicted from his Los Angeles apartment at the outset 33
of Héctor Tobar’s novel The Tattooed Soldier (1998). Since he cannot 34
discover a Spanish equivalent to capture “the shame and sooty des- 35
peration of his condition,” this “compound, borrowed word would 36
have to do: ‘home-less’” (5). Signifying polluted matter produced 37
38
39
40
1 by the incomplete combustion of coal, soot characterizes his abjec-
2 tion. In contrast to the jaguar tattoo marking the forearm of the
3 soldier who killed his family, soot also connotes camouflage, thus
4 underscoring a leitmotif in contemporary US West homeless liter-
5 ature: that of its invisibility or illegibility. Because he carries “the
6 unbearable burden” of feeling responsible for the 1985 murders of
7 his wife and son by a Guatemalan army death squad, and as exem-
8 plified when he gazes at reflecting surfaces and doesn’t recognize
9 himself, Antonio’s cognitive dissonance erases the border between
10 his domestic home and the lifeworld of a globalizing world system,
11 between private and public spheres, and between his past and pres-
12 ent hemispheric traumas.
13 The discourse of homelessness in the early 1980s describes “the
14 new homeless” to underline the differences in age, race, gender, and
15 ethnicity between this emergent population and the mostly white
16 male homeless population spatially segregated into urban Skid Row
17 areas during the years of the Great Depression and World War II
18 (Depastino 226–27). Throughout Tobar’s novel “home-less” con-
19 notes poverty and unemployment. It also designates a status (of
20 disaffiliation from kin, family, and citizenship); an existential con-
21 dition (“desperation”); and an affective mode of being (“shame”).
22 Both Antonio’s political exile and suddenly homeless state also ex-
23 pose a world that “has less to do with forcible eviction and more to
24 do with the uncanny literary and social effects of enforced social
25 accommodation, or historical migrations and cultural relocations”
26 (Bhabha 141; also see Goodman). In its dialectical interplay with
27 “home” and homesteading, (1) “homelessness” as theme or trope
28 both relays an existential homelessness and indexes the uneven
29 economic development, territorial divisions of labor, and deraci-
30 nation attendant upon gender, racial, and class inequalities in the
31 postregional, global US West. (2)
32
33 Note
34 (3) On the conflation of garbage with the “hidden and cheap labor” of wasted hu-
35 mans, see Yamashita, Tropic of Orange: “Then came the kids selling Kleenex and
36 Chiclets, / the women pressing rubber soles into tennis shoes, / the men welding
37 fenders to station wagons and all the people who do the work of machines: human
38 washing machines, / human vacuums, / human garbage disposals” (200). For a
39
nuanced discussion of literary representations of desert “waste” in relation to the 1
emerging post–World War II global marketplace and militarization of the border, 2
see John Beck, Dirty Wars. 3
4
O bjects 5
“The shape of the contemporary city,” claims Sze Tsung Leong, “is 6
no longer cohered by physical, visible characteristics, such as form, 7
iconography, or density, but arrived at by default, as the residue of 8
ulterior motives,” chief among which is control (767). “Control space” 9
constitutes a cartography of information grounded by technologies 10
of surveillance: smart cards, radio frequency identity chips (RFID), 11
demographic profiling and data mining, security apparatuses. 12
Control spaces also produce interstitial “residual spaces,” 13
obsolescent spaces of abandonment and ruin within and around 14
which the debris of consumer capitalism accumulates. Analogous 15
to what Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has called “junkspace,” 16
the object world of residual spaces relays the dominant ideology’s 17
valuation of instantaneity and of disposability (Harvey, Condition 18
286). Such values in the realm of commodity production lead to a 19
monumental waste problem; such waste testifies to the transit and 20
transience both of social relations and our affective attachments 21
to commodities. (3) Contemporary literary representations of 22
the material and human rubbish devolving from control spaces 23
functions much like Barthes’s photographic “punctum,” exposing a 24
glimpse of a capitalist social totality founded on exclusion and the 25
ephemeral (MacCannell, “Democracy’s Turn” 288–89). 26
Consider this assemblage in Luis Alberto Urrea’s 27
autoethnographical account of life and death in the Tijuana landfill, 28
By the Lake of Sleeping Children: ketchup bottles, Keds, and Kotex; 29
wooden crosses, plastic flowers, cribs and coffins, cardboard boxes 30
and toys; tractor tires used as temporary outhouses. All remnants 31
of a trash mountain sealing the landfill’s narrow canyon, creating 32
an artificial lake covering a makeshift children’s cemetery built 33
on a hillside. In a grotesque antipastoral vision ironizing the 34
resurrection of the dead and sacramental communion, Urrea 35
describes how “the children themselves were rising, expanding into 36
the water, and the gulls were eating them” under “a perfect blue 37
38
39
Stephen Tatum 33 40
1 southern California sky,” the same sky that shrouds garbage dumps
2 in such hemispheric places as Mexico City, Mexicali, Matamoras,
3 and Juarez; El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. “Jump in—you
4 own it: it’s Lake Nafta” (45–46).
5 Through his soundscape of repetitions, serial grammar, and
6 Baroque imagery Urrea lends this residual sacred/profane space a
7 “haptic visuality”: things emerge in their material thingness amid
8 the stench of shit and the miasma of mud. But as the final italicized
9 sentence above suggests, this material assemblage exists not only
10 on the level of the exemplary. It also exists on the level of the explan-
11 atory, as its disparate contents emerge as “auratic objects” commu-
12 nicating the truth of a reified social world (Marks 22, 140). Hence
13 the phantasmagoria inflecting Urrea’s object world: as the corpses
14 rise, wooden crosses topple, tractor tires march, and seagulls feast,
15 the unresolved historical traumas and the contradictions of capi-
16 talism experienced by abject populations uncannily hove into view.
17
18 Notes
19 (4) In our NAFTA “era of global capital flows in which a ‘borderless’ world enables
20 transnational capitalism and neoliberal definitions of freedom,” the critical task,
21 Krista Comer argues, becomes that of distinguishing critical regionalist modalities
22 of mobility from “the spatial behaviors of finance capital as well as the legacies of
23 settler spatial spreadings” (“Thinking Otherwise” 8).
24 (5) This anonymous woman’s vagabondage also indexes the gendering of labor in
25 the global economy. For an overview, see Saskia Sassen’s chapters, “Toward a Fem-
inist Analytics of the Global Economy” and “Notes on the Incorporation of Third
26
World Women into Wage Labor through Immigration and Offshore Production” in
27 her Globalization and Its Discontents.
28
29 M obility, lack of
30
Labeled drifters, bums, hoboes, vagrants, and tramps, the discourse
31
on and the constitution of homelessness during Frederick Jackson
32
Turner’s era responded to social, economic, and political anxieties
33
about immigration and urbanization, where fears regarding the
34
homeless city focused on the potential for violent revolution. Un-
35
like their tramp and hobo predecessors, the so-called new homeless
36
of the 1980s most affected by late capital’s new round of deindus-
37
trialization and technological innovation were the peripheral low-
38
39
wage temporary employees and the chronically unemployed—a 1
demographic dominated more by women (including women of 2
color) and ethnic minority male populations. While cultural dis- 3
course reproduces the symbols, icons, and rhetoric associated with 4
Depression-era documentary realism, literary discourse under the 5
sign of neoliberal globalization entwines the themes and imagery 6
of circulation and flows (of people, images, commodities, and cap- 7
ital) with focused attention on immobility: homeless protagonists’ 8
repetitious vagabondages to nowhere, their circular departures and 9
returns marked by “continuous sliding between states of terror, 10
amusement, and sheer banality” (Vidler 186). (4) 11
Consider Charles Bowden’s Dreamland (2010), when it describes 12
an unnamed older woman, representative of Ciudad Juárez’s work- 13
ing poor and homeless, walking toward a cardboard shack contain- 14
ing a wooden table made from a nearby maquiladora warehouse’s 15
discarded pallets (16). The lengthy single sentence narrating her 16
pedestrian transit periodically stalls out, interrupted by Bowden’s 17
repetitious phrasing and appositional elaborations of her spatial 18
and temporal journey. All the agglutinative details heap together 19
and thicken Bowden’s language, creating an overall rhetoric of ex- 20
haustion that draws us down into the everyday world’s obdurate 21
materiality—the toilet paper, tortillas, diapers, and milk in the 22
plastic sack she carries. Underscoring the banality and tedium of 23
existence, the passage’s rhetoric concentrates the visible as well as 24
invisible predations of a globalizing world system on one of the un- 25
homely walking dead doomed to be local. Bowden’s recoding of ev- 26
eryday mobility as a camouflaged immobility deploys the specificity 27
of strategic locales (a cardboard shack with wooden table adjacent 28
to the truck loading docks of a maquiladora warehouse) as a grat- 29
ing friction contending against the celebratory fictions promoted 30
by neoliberalism’s defenders. (5) 31
32
Note 33
(6) Cf. “Necropolitics,” Achille Mbembe’s description of regimes exercising their 34
sovereignty both through disciplinary technologies and the demarcation of zones 35
where death constitutes the dominant logic. Thus, the spaces of the disposable— 36
the refugee; the exile; the homeless—become targeted to produce terror and fatali- 37
ties, not the reproduction of life. 38
39
Stephen Tatum 35 40
1 E xposure
2 Ermila: “Who was it that told her everything went up into thin air
3 but never quite disappeared? Something always remained behind,
4 like the photographs of her parents, like the formidable mass of oil
5 on the asphalt where the van had once been parked” (Viramontes
6 295). Antonio: “He was squatting to look under the dresser when he
7 saw the bodies, three corpses lined up on a cement floor. Scattered
8 all over the green linoleum, everywhere, were pictures of corpses.
9 A morgue had fallen from the album and spilled around his feet”
10 (Tobar 180).
11 Drawn from novels deploying homelessness as theme, trope, and
12 image, these passages explore, through the medium of photogra-
13 phy, the disquieting, contradictory meanings of exposure. A photo-
14 chemical process preserving emanations of light from some “there”
15 and “then,” photographs literally present existence within a matrix
16 of temporal and spatial relationships binding together the quick
17 and the dead. However, the temporal and spatial distance between
18 the evidence of captured past light and the gaze in the present mo-
19 ment also underscores the inherent abyss between the “then” and
20 the “now,” reminding beholders of the world’s resistant opacity. An-
21 tonio’s gaze at the photographs secreted in a dresser drawer in the
22 tattooed soldier’s LA apartment dramatizes a catachrestic slippage
23 between regarding photography as a technological apparatus and
24 as a “medium” offering a communion with the dead (Santner 56). In
25 the Viramontes passage, photographic traces of parental abandon-
26 ment are coupled with asphalt and oil stain residue, metonyms for
27 the effects of freeway construction in the Los Angeles petroculture
28 that has transformed the domestic and familial home and neigh-
29 borhood into an unhomely and alien streetscape. In both passag-
30 es, it is as if these characters are themselves photographic plates,
31 their sensoria imprinted through exposure as a shock opening to
32 the spectral traces of historic violence and suffering associated with
33 the national and transnational dislocations of capitalist modernity
34 and postmodernity. (6)
35
36
37
38
39
Note 1
(7) As Mike Davis argues, “The Oz-like archipelago of Westside pleasure domes—a 2
continuum of tony malls, arts centers and gourmet strips—is reciprocally depen- 3
dent upon the social imprisonment of the third-world service proletariat who live in 4
increasingly repressive ghettos and barrios” (City 227). 5
6
L abor 7
E conomics 8
Initially intending to sleep in one of “the concrete hollows at the 9
center of the [freeway] interchange,” the newly homeless Antonio 10
Bernal instead discovers a homeless camp spread across “a flat, 11
empty space” at the top of a small hill rising over downtown 12
Los Angeles (Tobar 13). While looking for an open space to build 13
a shelter, he discovers “the geometry of a home that had been 14
demolished many years ago,” one of several residences comprising 15
“a forgotten neighborhood built with brick and cement” (15). In 16
succeeding days, he discovers both a broken cyclone fence with a 17
sign reading “Coming Soon: Crown Hill Hotel and Finance Park” and 18
an old couch positioned on an edge of this “lush knoll of wild plants 19
and grasses in the middle of the city,” so the homeless can enjoy a 20
panoramic view of the Financial District’s skyscrapers, City Hall, 21
and the Harbor Freeway, where car accidents periodically provide 22
spectacular entertainment (43). 23
Concrete shards of sidewalks and stairs, broken tiles from kitch- 24
en and bathroom walls: such rubble both encrypts an architecture 25
of abandonment engendered by historical development and testi- 26
fies to once-existing familial and social relations. The “lost commu- 27
nity” of the Gilded Era Crown Hill neighborhood emerged during 28
the so-called tramp crisis that began in the 1870s and continued 29
throughout the periodic economic recessions of the 1890s and into 30
the Great Depression. This crisis indexed “the larger struggle over 31
the destiny and meaning of the new industrial America” that cours- 32
es both throughout Frederick Jackson Turner’s historiography and 33
in then-contemporary anxieties about the threats to the family 34
home posed by the West’s population of seasonal homeless refu- 35
gees laboring on the “wageworker’s-frontier” (Depastino 4, 61). 36
37
38
39
Stephen Tatum 37 40
1 Concerns over poverty, threats to family life posed by economic
2 displacement, and changing patterns of labor and social relations
3 during economic regime change link the past and present moments
4 defining the archaeological palimpsest of Crown Hill. However, the
5 explosive growth of cities and of homeless populations beginning
6 with the Reagan–Bush years contrasts with the earlier moment
7 of industrial modernity. Spatialized in The Tattooed Soldier via the
8 juxtaposition of Crown Hill’s muddy plateau with the Financial
9 District’s gleaming skyscrapers, urbanization largely has been de-
10 coupled now from industrialization. And hemispheric economic
11 policies promoting agricultural “deregulation and depeasantiza-
12 tion” have accelerated the transnational exodus of surplus rural
13 labor to urban slums—“even as cities ceased to be job machines”
14 (Davis, Planet 9–10). The eventual bulldozing of the Crown Hill
15 homeless camp to construct a hotel and financial “park” exposes
16 how bank deregulation and multinational corporate purchasing of
17 undervalued property (where the working poor and homeless typi-
18 cally live) exacerbate (1) existing class and racial inequalities and (2)
19 the spatial tensions accruing from the struggle over public spaces
20 between those who prosper and those who suffer in the shift from
21 an industrial to an information and financial services economy
22 (Harvey, Urban 259, 272).
23 The so-called emergent “festival marketplace” urban architec-
24 ture of performing arts and athletic arenas, museum districts, and
25 mega–shopping malls spatialize time as a place of leisured con-
26 sumption, not labor. (7) Tobar depicts men lounging on an old
27 couch on the precipice of Crown Hill’s abandoned lots, watching for
28 the occasional car wreck on the nearby freeway interchange, their
29 pose compared to that of suburbanites entertaining guests in their
30 living rooms. Given the scene’s pastoral imagery and the mimicry
31 of suburban leisure entertainment, couch time exemplifies the “idyll
32 of the idle” informing everyday life “for the uprooted, the unem-
33 ployed, the lost and the existentially paralyzed” (Sobchack 167).
34 Couch time simultaneously dramatizes the pleasure of the home-
35 less at surveying the extension of a risk society’s contingent dan-
36 gers beyond their immediate territory—and the dark pain arising
37
38
39
from an inability to imagine being at home amid the accumulating 1
accidents of historical development. 2
3
Note 4
(8) The trope of cannibalism is anticipated in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), 5
where Marx and vampiric capitalism feature (see Book Two, “Reign of Fire-Eye 6
Macaw”). Relevant here is Dean MacCannell’s observation about capitalism’s 7
fascination with “producing capital gain through legalized murder, plunder, and/ 8
or inheritance, and compounding the gains by eating the dead” (Empty Meeting 9
Grounds 53).
10
11
S paces, sepulchral
12
In the contemporary homeless literature of the US West, the ar- 13
chitectural motif of the transit shed predominates, those structures 14
whose function is defined by the continuous flows of bodies, imag- 15
es, and commodities through its interstitial, residual spaces rather 16
than by storage within them: hotels, motels, and boarding houses; 17
bus and train stations; public parks. The transit shed motif exists, 18
as if in thrall to repetition compulsion, in dialectical relation with 19
another motif—one where episodic narratives of transit and tran- 20
sience come to ground in crypt-like spaces. Basements in abandoned 21
fortune cookie factories; in a university department of Anthropol- 22
ogy; in a biomaterials lab specializing in harvesting human organs 23
from the homeless. Graveyards and garbage dumps. Caves formed 24
by tunnels, sewer pipes, and the underpasses of viaducts and free- 25
ways. Regardless of their different prose contexts, such spaces of 26
representation are invariably sepulchral, typically housing traumat- 27
ic artifactual or forensic evidence whose excavation and exposure 28
function in the manner of the uncanny, as a haunting return in the 29
present of buried violent pasts. “Every building was a tomb,” John 30
Smith thinks as he gazes at the Seattle skyline, containing “the 31
bones of fallen workers” (Alexie 405). 32
Crime scenes in interior settings especially trouble the phenom- 33
enological integrity and security associated with the familial and 34
familiar home. In Alexie’s Indian Killer, the serial killer stabs one of 35
his victims and carries the body into an empty house, where he de- 36
posits it on the living room floor, then scalps the man and stuffs the 37
38
39
Stephen Tatum 39 40
1 bloody souvenir into his pocket. He then tears out the corpse’s still-
2 open eyes and swallows them, exchanging this theft of sight for
3 two white owl feathers he places on the dead white man’s mutilated
4 chest (54). Prior to this scene, Alexie describes the killer stalking his
5 victim on a Seattle urban trail created from an abandoned railway
6 corridor. The killer’s coiled, sudden state of alertness; his sudden,
7 apparitional appearance before his victim, his facial shape-shifting
8 that camouflages his exterior appearance (analogous to his later
9 singing an invisibility song)—these uncanny effects situate the en-
10 tire sequence from beginning to end as one framed by a paranoid,
11 morbid anxiety.
12 The killer’s repeated stabbings of the corpse in the house’s living
13 room symptomize this anxiety, for the now mutilated body “on the
14 exterior mirrors not the outward appearance of the subject but its
15 own, now transparent biological interior.” The most foundational
16 fantasmatic scene, Slavoj Žižek remarks, “is not that of a fascinat-
17 ing scene to be looked at, but the notion that ‘there is someone
18 out there looking at us’; it is not a dream, but the notion that ‘we
19 are the objects in someone else’s dream’” (202). It is not just that
20 we are potentially always exposed to the surveillance technologies
21 of power, as in the Foucauldian reading of the panopticon society.
22 Rather, at the heart of the unhomely experience is the anxiety aris-
23 ing “from the prospect of not being exposed to the Other’s gaze all
24 the time” (202–3).
25 As if displaying an urgent need for the fantasmatic Other’s gaze
26 to guarantee his being and his genealogy, the ghostly Indian kill-
27 er’s harvesting and cannibalistic ingesting of his white victim’s eyes
28 transforms his own body and being into a corporeal cryptography.
29 By preserving the physical metonym of the Other’s gaze in his in-
30 terior crypt, the killer’s shocking actions in this now unhomely do-
31 mestic setting not only challenges the predominant trope of the
32 homeless as the invisible already dead (29). Such actions appro-
33 priate and invert the settler-colonial culture myth of regeneration
34 through violence, in the process magically exposing in condensed
35 fashion an entire history of repressed, contagious colonial violence
36 since Columbus. (8)
37
38
39
Note 1
(9) “In tasteful lounge chairs a civilization intent on rationalization comes to an 2
end,” writes Siegfried Kracauer in his 1920s-era meditation on the hotel lobby. The 3
ubiquity of surveillance, of fortuitous and ephemeral chance encounters, and of the 4
overall atomization and anonymity of social relations define Kracauer’s metaphys- 5
ics of this particular transit shed’s contribution to the transcendental homelessness
6
at the core of urban industrial modernity (54).
7
8
S cales, trespassing of
9
Centered on the legal eviction of a hotel’s mostly elderly Filipino 10
and Chinese bachelors, the second chapter (“Where Will You Live 11
When You Get Old”) in the final novella of Karen Tei Yamashita’s 12
I Hotel (2010) argues—through the example of a frontier town’s 13
algorithmic expansion—that whatever “the city had to offer had 14
a home in the hotel.” (9) “Hotel life” signifies “the freedom of the 15
city, but such freedom for some has been for some reason suspect, 16
and there are always those who want to police freedom.” As was 17
the case with the wandering tramps and hoboes of Turner’s era, 18
the transience of hotel life makes its residents morally and socially 19
“suspect,” marking them as “the displaced people in the city’s plan 20
to impose a particular meaning of home and of nation” (588–90). 21
Though centered on a San Francisco architectural structure “with 22
its regional locus of migrants, their cultural practices, and local his- 23
tories,” the I Hotel nevertheless registers “a whole transnational, 24
global regionality . . . that builds outward and inward as we respond 25
to the diverse refrains of coloniality and capital, of migration and 26
violence, internment and Cuba, Black Power, and Asian American 27
cultures” (Campbell 187). Through such trespassing of geograph- 28
ical scales, Yamashita’s narrator—speaking as a collective “we”— 29
explores how a dominant group’s setting the limits of home and 30
nation produces an agitated, residual space from which to speak 31
both of and about “a system that served the few and propertied and 32
wealthy, a social system that had failed our immigrant parents and 33
grandparents, had denied their human rights because of their class 34
and color” (599). 35
Dramatizing an oppositional resistance to that tendency in 36
modern and postmodern urbanism to create tabulae rasae envi- 37
38
39
Stephen Tatum 41 40
1 ronments through urban renewal, I Hotel—like the other texts dis-
2 cussed in this homeless alphabet—forwards a leitmotif of burial
3 and return, of excavation and exposure, through its specific em-
4 placed archeological narrative projects and its architectural struc-
5 tures. In opposition to “public memory,” and even as “we tumble
6 into the gravesite left by its demolition,” through remembrance
7 there may be rebuilt “a great layered and labyrinthine, now imag-
8 ined international hotel of many rooms, the urban experiment of a
9 homeless community built to house the needs of temporary lives.
10 And for what? To resist death and dementia. To haunt a disappear-
11 ing landscape” (605, emphasis added). Both in its formal design and
12 its themes, the novel exemplifies place-making as “worlding,” what
13 Krista Comer conceives as a particularly feminist critical regionalist
14 “political and knowledge practice sensitive to issues of place across
15 spatial scales,” with an emphasis on “globalization from below”
16 (“Place” 154).
17 Yamashita’s vision of a resurrected architectural “urban experi-
18 ment of a homeless community” achieved by a countermemory ar-
19 chive additionally defines “worlding” as a utopian space—a future-
20 anterior work in progress. Like a revenant, this vision “haunts,” for
21 it offers an enduring lesson about the precarity of existence: no
22 one, no matter how well educated and behaved, is guaranteed shel-
23 ter and sovereign rights: at any moment, anyone can be cast out. As
24 we witness in the spatial archeology of landfills and the vagabond-
25 age of the displaced homeless, working poor or elderly, still anoth-
26 er enduring lesson emerges: how everyone “lives only their relation
27 to production and consumption, trading in their human relation-
28 ships for ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ tied less to
29 each other than to their overflowing shopping carts,” whose uncan-
30 ny Other materializes in the sight of spectral homeless figures who
31 push carts full of cast-off belongings (MacCannell, “Democracy’s
32 Turn” 294).
33 This vision reminds us that the struggle against the virulent leg-
34 acies of conquest continues well beyond so-called first contact or
35 the so-called end of the frontier. This vision echoes that belief that
36 through a re-envisioned critical regionalism that travels over and
37 under the national scale there exists the potential for new political
38
39
alliances—like those forged during the 1960s and 1970s on the var- 1
ious first-floor spaces of the I Hotel. As this archive of contempo- 2
rary representations of the homeless in US West literature attests, 3
this political ecology centers on naming individual and collective 4
trauma, on recovering the memory of sustained oppositional sub- 5
cultures, and on recovering the work of organic intellectuals (e.g., 6
Mayan prophetic texts; the Black Panthers’ manifestos). And as we 7
witness in I Hotel, this vision of what comes next sketches a resil- 8
ient positional identity politics, one where political solidarity with 9
others gets realized through various groups’ similar positionality in 10
the struggle for specific social and environmental justice demands 11
(see Van Houten). 12
13
Stephen Tatum is a professor of English and an affiliated faculty member of the 14
Environmental Humanities Graduate Program at the University of Utah. His co-
authored book (with Nathaniel Lewis) Morta Las Vegas: CSI and the Problem of the
15
West was published in fall 2017 by the University of Nebraska Press. 16
17
Works Cited 18
Alexie, Sherman. Indian Killer. Grove Press, 1996.
19
Beck, John, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Litera- 20
ture. U of Nebraska P, 2009. 21
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 2004. 22
Bowden, Charles. Dreamland. U of Texas P, 2010. 23
Campbell, Neil. Affective Critical Regionality. Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.
24
Comer, Krista. “Place and Worlding: Feminist States of Critical Regionalism.”
Transcontinental Reflections on the American West: Words, Images, Sounds
25
Beyond Borders, edited by Angel Chapparro Sainz and Amaia Ibarraran 26
Begalondo, Portal Editions, 2015, pp. 153–71. 27
—. “Thinking Otherwise Across Global Wests: Issues of Mobility and Femi- 28
nist Critical Regionalism.” Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, 29
vol. 10, 2018, pp. 1–18. 30
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz. Vintage, 1992.
31
—. Planet of Slums. Verso, 2006.
Depastino, Todd. Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. U 32
of Chicago P, 2003. 33
Didion, Joan. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. 34
Goodman, Audrey. Lost Homelands. U of Arizona P, 2010. 35
Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women. Routledge, 36
1991.
37
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Blackwell, 1990.
38
39
Stephen Tatum 43 40
1 —. The Urban Experience. Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.
2 Kracauer, Siegfried. “The Hotel Lobby.” Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultur-
3 al Theory, edited by Neil Leach, Routledge, 1997, pp. 53–59.
Leong, Sze Tsung. “Ulterior Spaces.” Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping,
4
edited by Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, and Sze Tsung
5 Leong, Taschen, 2001, pp. 764–95.
6 MacCannell, Dean. “Democracy’s Turn: On Homeless Noir.” Shades of Noir, edited
7 by Joan Copjec, Verso, 1993, pp. 279–97.
8 —. Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers. Routledge, 1992.
9 Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film. Duke UP, 2000.
10 Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11–40.
Santner, Eric L. On Creaturely Life. U of Chicago P, 2006.
11
Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and Its Discontents. The New Press, 1998.
12 Silko, Leslie. Almanac of the Dead. Simon and Schuster, 1991.
13 Sobchack, Vivian. “Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film
14 Noir.” Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, edited by Nick
15 Browne, U of California P, 1998, pp. 129–70.
16 Tobar, Héctor. The Tattooed Soldier. Picador, 1998.
Urrea, Luis Alberto. By the Lake of Sleeping Children. Anchor Books, 1996.
17
Van Houten, Christina. “bell hooks, Critical Regionalism, and the Politics of Eco-
18 logical Returns.” Politics and Culture, 9 Mar. 2014, https://politicsandculture
19 .org/2014/03/09/bell-hooks-critical-regionalism-and-the-politics-of
20 -ecological-returns-by-christina-van-houten. Accessed 9 Sept. 2017.
21 Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. MIT
22 Press, 1992.
Viramontes, Helena María. Their Dogs Came with Them. Atria Books, 2007.
23
Yamashita, Karen Tei. I Hotel. Coffee House Press, 2010.
24 —. Tropic of Orange. Coffee House Press, 1997.
25 Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. Routledge,
26 2001.
27
28
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keywords 1
2
“Land” 3
4
5
Cheryll Glotfelty
6
7
8
9
The keyword I would like to discuss is “land” because land is the 10
bedrock of culture. As we go forward into the future we ought to 11
keep in mind the fundamental reality that culture exists in a bio- 12
physical, ecological context, which we can call “land.” 13
There are many different definitions of land, each implying a 14
specific paradigm or worldview. Today I would like to invoke Aldo 15
Leopold’s view of land, which he offers in his book A Sand County 16
Almanac, published in 1949, before the Western Literature Associa- 17
tion even existed. By appealing to Leopold, I am obviously looking 18
backward in time, but I would contend that our culture—and the 19
WLA—have yet to make the paradigm shift implicit in his writing. 20
“Conservation is getting nowhere,” Leopold laments, “because it 21
is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land 22
because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see 23
land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with 24
love and respect” (xviii–xix; emphasis added). 25
Elsewhere Leopold argues that the image of “man the conquer- 26
or” must be replaced with that of “man the biotic citizen” and that 27
the image of “land the slave and servant” must yield to that of “land 28
the collective organism” (260–61). In the dominant paradigm, we 29
are separate from the land, and we live on it; in Leopold’s paradigm, 30
we are part of the land, and we live in it. 31
I would like us to think about what it means for us as readers, 32
writers, and critics to be a “biotic citizen” of the “land community,” 33
a member of the “collective organism.” Even though Leopold’s vi- 34
sion is very grounded, I find these concepts to be abstract and hard 35
to translate into literary critical practice. 36
For me, bioregionalism is a helpful approach for turning Leop- 37
old’s ecological precepts into practice. A key insight of bioregional- 38
39
40
1 ism is that our interactions with the land community always occur
2 in a particular place. The bioregional perspective, then, asks us to
3 reimagine place in ecological terms. For example, under the still-
4 dominant paradigm, Harrah’s Casino is located at 219 North Cen-
5 ter St., Reno, Nevada, USA. However, the bioregional address of
6 Harrah’s is in the Truckee Meadows, two hundred meters north of
7 the Truckee River, on the east side of the Sierra Nevada mountains
8 of the North American continent.
9
10 Let me propose three critical projects for western American literary
11 studies that we might pursue in the next fifty years by adopting
12 Leopold’s notion of land within a bioregional frame:
13
14 1. Remap western American literature. Organize an an-
15 thology or a study of western American literature by biore-
16 gion rather than by chronology, theme, or geopolitical region.
17 This project might entail doing some new naming or reacti-
18 vating of Indigenous place names.
19
2. Write species/habitat studies. We need many more
20
studies like Michael P. Cohen’s A Garden of Bristlecones: Tales
21
of Change in the Great Basin and Laurie Ricou’s Salal: Listening
22
for the Northwest Understory. These transdisciplinary studies
23
of particular places combine cultural studies, science, and en-
24
vironmental history to illuminate our relationship with an-
25
other member of the biotic community.
26
27 3. Make Critical Regionalism more ecologically en-
28 gaged. Critical Regionalism appears to be intellectually de-
29 tached from ecological perspectives and from transnational
30 environmental issues. I think it is time to make critical re-
31 gionalism become more eco-critical. Or, perhaps, taking a cue
32 from Alex Hunt’s conference paper, “Working Toward a Criti-
33 cal Bioregionalism,” to work toward a critical bioregionalism.
34
35
36
37
38
39
I’d like to leave you with two questions. The first is one I’ve already 1
asked: 2
3
What might it mean for our practice as readers, writers, and crit- 4
ics to be a “biotic citizen” of the “land community”? 5
6
And, second, what critical project might you add to the ones I’ve
7
mentioned?
8
9
Cheryll Glotfelty is a professor of literature and environment and chair of the 10
Arboretum Board at the University of Nevada, Reno. She coedited The Ecocriticism 11
Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology; The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecol-
12
ogy, and Place; and The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg,
and she edited Literary Nevada: Writings from the Silver State. 13
14
Works Cited 15
Hunt, Alex. “Working Toward a Critical Bioregionalism.” Fiftieth Annual Confer-
16
ence of the Western Literature Association, Visual Culture of the Urban West, 17
14–17 Oct. 2015, Harrah’s Hotel and Casino, Reno, Nevada. 18
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. 1949. Ballantine Books, 1966. 19
20
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29
30
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Cheryll Glotfelty 47 40
1
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3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
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13
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40
1
2
“Mexican” 3
4
5
José F. Aranda Jr.
6
7
8
9
Despite the ubiquity of the term “Mexican” in US West studies, 10
there has been very little critical pressure on it. Nor on “Mexican 11
American,” for that matter. Critics’ interests typically have leaned 12
more toward “borderlands.” Treating “Mexican” as a keyword thus 13
makes visible how the term has evolved in important tension with, 14
first, regional understandings (the Texas War of Independence 15
in 1836 remapped multiple borders) and, second, national under- 16
standings (the US–Mexican War in 1848 added massive territory). 17
It makes visible, moreover, that “Mexican” has been implicated 18
across major transformations of identities, ideologies, territorial 19
holdings, and politics. While the origins of the term belong to the 20
republic of Mexico, simultaneously, “Mexican” must be delinked 21
from exclusive ties to those national origins in order to recognize 22
its construction, and the reasons for that construction, in the Unit- 23
ed States. The murky terrain between “Mexican” and “Mexican- 24
American” notwithstanding, it is clear that the former is deployed 25
as a disqualifier for the latter, rendering the hyphenated term prac- 26
tically unsuitable to denote US citizenship.1 27
As a keyword, “Mexican” functions as an underestimated index 28
for comprehending competing Spanish / Mexican / Anglo settler 29
colonialisms in pre-and post-1836 North America. It is also one of 30
the more sly markers for race, racism, and white nation building. In 31
a place like Texas, for example, where Anglo-Texan nationalism is 32
typified by a monument like the Alamo, the circulation of the term 33
“Mexican” ironically holds down the ground for an Anglo settler co- 34
lonial identity that continues a coloniality of power into the pres- 35
ent. “Mexican” is co-opted, even when rhetorically absent—build a 36
wall on the border for “national security” purposes instead of de- 37
38
39
40
1 claring a desire to “keep Mexicans out”—so as to forward a particu-
2 lar ideological and racialized political class as the true inheritors of
3 the Texas state.2
4 By contrast, to those of Mexican origin in Texas and in the na-
5 tion, the keyword is ever present, overdetermining, in real and
6 symbolic ways. For some, it is worn phenotypically, on the body, in
7 hair, skin, eyes; for others it revolves around an accented English.
8 For many it is a crisis of identity, of belonging neither here (in the
9 United States) nor there (in Mexico). The keyword weaves itself
10 painfully into mixed-status families, the documented and the un-
11 documented. Can one ever be “Mexican” enough? Or is “Mexican”
12 a postcard from cousins in Mexico (as it was for Mitt Romney in
13 2012)? The social effects of this phenomenon are vulnerability, am-
14 bivalence, and alertness to potential attack. It can come anytime,
15 even to the powerful: think of the consternation US District Judge
16 Gonzalo Paul Curiel endured during the 2016 presidential campaign
17 for being an accomplished public figure of Mexican heritage.
18 Why is “Mexican” so malleable, prone to manipulation and dis-
19 tortion? Why is the keyword simultaneously such an inescapable
20 feature for Mexican Americans of social life in the United States?
21 The heart of the matter lies with the history of the Treaty of Gua-
22 dalupe Hidalgo on questions of citizenship.3 Mexican Americans
23 are not conventionally understood to be a stateless people. But in
24 the immediate aftermath of the US–Mexican War, the US Senate,
25 in treaty revisions, eliminated the provision that granted citizen-
26 ship after one year to those Mexicans who elected to remain in the
27 newly conquered territories of the United States. At the moment of
28 invention of the possible category of Mexican American, the Sen-
29 ate disallowed the category. Disregarding the agreements made by
30 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Senate instead wrestled pow-
31 er back to itself. Only Congress had the authority to render deci-
32 sions about how, when, and where people of Mexican descent could
33 claim citizenship. It is precisely in relation to embattled questions
34 of citizenship that the term “Mexican,” in US legal history, was ini-
35 tially constituted. By withholding a recognized status under US law,
36 “Mexican” could only articulate a status of statelessness.
37 Until the Civil Rights period, in practice, all people of Mexican
38
39
descent, even US-born, were thought of as “Mexicans.” Jim Crow 1
laws were erected to obstruct or completely prevent people of 2
Mexican descent from voting or performing other civic duties 3
such as being a member of a jury. At other times, de facto means 4
of power segregated social spaces: No dogs or Mexicans allowed. 5
Whether under a legal framework or de facto racial codes, the term 6
“Mexican” could be relied upon to nullify claims on citizenship, 7
or civil rights, or even more broadly, human rights. If “Mexican” 8
is a term of national belonging outside the borders of the United 9
States, within the borders of the United States the term has evolved 10
to signify statelessness and powerlessness. Despite and against the 11
tremendous demographic growth of people of Mexican descent 12
in the United States over the last hundred and fifty years, the 13
Senate’s original dismantling of a path toward citizenship created 14
a contradictory presence of millions of effectively stateless people 15
inside the United States. The inherent vulnerability of this stateless 16
community was on display when candidate Donald J. Trump would 17
argue for border security by characterizing Mexicans as murderers, 18
rapists, and drug pushers, seemingly unaware that such charges 19
characterized everyone of Mexican descent, including US-born or 20
naturalized Mexicans.4 21
In short, the Senate’s dismissal of citizenship for people of 22
Mexican descent created stateless arenas where the term “Mexican” 23
became a placeholder for noncitizen, not American. Thus, the 24
term “Mexican,” although conceived in an era of nineteenth- 25
century nation building, is not just a production of the republic 26
of Los Estados Unidos de Mexico but also of the United States of 27
America. Given the rise of modernity out of coloniality, the ongoing 28
manifestations of coloniality of power through nationalism and 29
the refiguring of national boundaries because of globalization in 30
general and NAFTA in particular, where the social construction of 31
“Mexican” begins and ends is a very good question. But clearly it is 32
not only south of the border. 33
Without a doubt, “Mexican” evidences a tension from its more 34
regional romances (old Californio missions, Mexican cuisine, nos- 35
talgia for “old Mexico”) to perceived threats to the nation (repre- 36
sented by Mexican bandidos, zoot suits, and narcos). “Mexican,” 37
38
39
José F. Aranda Jr. 51 40
1 like its cousin term the “West,” often slides from one register to
2 another. The slippage is especially evident at the level of culture,
3 where borders are even more ambiguous. So just as the “West” of-
4 ten stands in for the “nation,” so too does “Mexican” stand in for
5 the “nation,” albeit the one that exists across the tracks, on the east
6 side, or “el otro lado.” As Sergio Arau’s satirical 2004 film, A Day
7 Without a Mexican, made so clear, if all “Mexicans” were to disap-
8 pear suddenly from the United States, the depths of disruption to
9 the economy, to social and cultural life, and to symbolic structures
10 of being would be so stark that they, the “Mexicans,” would have to
11 be brought back from the void to shore up the quotidian meaning
12 of not only the US West but the nation as a whole. Since “Mexican”
13 is one of the most crucial signifiers of the United States as a nation-
14 state, Arau’s film demonstrates how there could never in fact be a
15 day without a “Mexican.” Yet, Arau’s satire works precisely because
16 the disappearance of Mexicans in the film actualized what is already
17 understood as the lived experience, the open secret, of stateless-
18 ness for millions.
19
José F. Aranda Jr. is an associate professor of Chicano/a and American literature
20
at Rice University, where he has a dual appointment in the departments of English
21 and Spanish & Portuguese and Latin American Studies. He is also a board member
22 of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project.
23
24 Notes
25 1. For more on Mexican American citizenship, see Marc Simon Rodriguez,
26 “More Than Whiteness: Comparative Perspectives on Mexican American
27 Citizenship from Law and History,” Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, vol. 18, 2015,
28 pp. 79–86.
29 2. For more, see David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas,
1836–1986, U of Texas P, 1997.
30
3. For more on the history of this treaty, see Richard Griswold del Castillo, The
31 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict, U of Oklahoma P, 1990.
32 4. See, for example, Katie Reilly, “Here Are All the Times Donald Trump Insult-
33 ed Mexico,” Time, 31 Aug. 2016, http://time.com/rr73972/donald-trump-mexico
34 -meeting-insult/.
35
36
37
38
39
1
2
“Pedagogy” 3
4
5
Randi Lynn Tanglen
6
7
8
9
Paulo Freire’s seminal Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published 10
in 1968, just three years after the 1965 establishment of the 11
Western Literature Association. Although Freire’s work wasn’t 12
translated into English until the 1970s, the organization and the 13
field of critical pedagogy both originated when the academy itself 14
was changing in response to student activism in the women’s 15
rights movement, the civil rights movement, and the American 16
Indian movement. These movements’ intellectual aims were 17
similar to those of Freire’s critical pedagogy: to question systems 18
of domination in order to lead to greater critical consciousness and 19
social change. The field of critical pedagogy assumes that “men 20
and women are essentially unfree and inhabit a world rife with 21
contradictions and asymmetry of power and privilege” and that 22
the resulting inequalities are replicated in institutions of public 23
education and higher learning (McLaren 61). In fact, the Western 24
Literature Association was started in response to how knowledge 25
of the West was brokered, distorted, and manipulated by relations 26
of power, place, and privilege within the academy, particularly the 27
dominant northeastern literary and cultural establishment. 28
A critical pedagogy that emphasizes intersections of theory and 29
practice has been central to the research, teaching, and activism of 30
teachers of western literature as a community of critical educators. 31
While the production of knowledge in the academy and organiza- 32
tions such as the WLA is not free of biases and hierarchies that re- 33
sult in an asymmetry of power and privilege, the educational ex- 34
perience can promote student empowerment and transformation. 35
Western literature teachers join a long line of progressive educators 36
and social activists from the critical pedagogy movement, including 37
38
39
40
1 Freire, Ira Shor, Henry Giroux, and bell hooks, whose beliefs pro-
2 mote the possibility of education as an emancipatory enterprise.
3 As educators, members of the Western Literature Association in
4 the past and present aim to train students to be aware of the many
5 sides of social inequalities and to become social justice advocates.
6 The organization has emphasized critical pedagogy issues in rela-
7 tion to the West, particularly the historicity and construction of
8 knowledge of and about the West; literature and the environment;
9 race, ethnicity, and indigeneity; and feminist concerns about gen-
10 der, women, and sexuality.
11 In the classroom, western literature educators posit that ac-
12 ademic knowledge of and about the West was created in specific
13 historical moments and traditionally understood in the context of
14 the ideology of manifest destiny and the American Dream. To that
15 end, from its founding and into the present day, the field of west-
16 ern American literary and cultural studies has questioned the dom-
17 inant myth of the cultural, symbolic, and geographic meaning of
18 the West, both in the teaching and research produced by the field.
19 Early on, the journal Western American Literature published articles
20 such as “West as Myth: Status Report and Call for Action” (1966) by
21 Warren French, which, similar to Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land:
22 The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), advanced the study
23 of the West beyond the prevailing clichés and conventional under-
24 standings of the region. Annette Kolodny’s 1992 “Letting Go Our
25 Grand Obsessions: Toward a New Literary History of the United
26 States” took this earlier work even further by dismantling the tra-
27 ditional geographic and linguistic definition of frontier literature.
28 Theoretical developments in “critical regionalism” as applied to the
29 field have given scholars and teachers a method for investigating is-
30 sues of place, region, culture, and identity in western literary stud-
31 ies (Campbell 2008). Amy T. Hamilton and Tom J. Hillard’s volume
32 Before the West Was West: Critical Essays on Pre-1800 Literature of the
33 American Frontiers (2014) expands the time frame and content of
34 what is considered western American literature and thereby is in-
35 cluded in the syllabi of western studies classes in order to trans-
36 form students’ established understandings of the West and western
37 literature.
38
39
Western literary studies also examines how academia reproduc- 1
es the power relations of society, especially settler-colonialist dy- 2
namics that emerge out of the standard historicity of knowledge 3
about the West. Such understandings of the West have resulted in 4
the destruction of the natural environment and landscape of the 5
West, leading some scholar-teachers in the organization to focus 6
on issues of environmental concerns connected to the West and 7
its landscapes as represented in literature. The Association for the 8
Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) grew out of these 9
scholarly interests and social concerns of WLA members and con- 10
tinues to enact critical pedagogy’s investment in the intersections 11
of theory and activism. Western American Literature published some 12
of the first essays on literature and the environment, and Cheryll 13
Glotfelty and Harold Fromm’s The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in 14
Literary Ecology was published in 1996 as a resource for the field and 15
the classroom. Indicative of the creative and innovative teaching 16
in the field, environmental literature classes on the WLA’s online 17
syllabus exchange include a wide range of authors, texts, and ap- 18
proaches and often integrate the hands-on experiences of service 19
and place-based learning in order to link students’ lived experienc- 20
es to the production of knowledge about the field (Glotfelty and 21
Lavin). 22
Scholarship and teaching that critically disrupts the 23
authoritative settler-colonial narrative of the West and places 24
Indigenous worldviews in the curriculum has found its way 25
into the organization and its conference. Such an approach is 26
modeled by a 2008 conference teaching workshop with Susan 27
Bernardin and Chadwick Allen titled “Earthworks: Land, Bones, 28
and Native Literatures in the Classroom” and Chadwick Allen’s 29
essay “Serpentine Figures, Sinuous Relations: Thematic Geometry 30
in Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run” (2011), which received the 31
organization’s Don D. Walker prize for the best essay published 32
in the field. Susan Bernardin’s work on Native graphic novelists 33
and visual artists focuses on contemporary Native expression 34
and representation, as highlighted in the 2014 special issue of 35
Western American Literature on Indigenous Wests: Literary and 36
Visual Aesthetics. The field has started to engage the “many sides 37
38
39
Randi Lynn Tanglen 55 40
1 of problems when class, race, gender, and power intersect”
2 by exploring issues of western cultural hybridity and border
3 crossings, exemplified by Lisa Tatonetti’s cutting edge work on the
4 convergence of indigeneity and sexuality, The Queerness of Native
5 Literature (2014) (McLaren 62).
6 Feminist pedagogy aims to decenter canonical knowledge and
7 uncover gender, race, and class in shaping patriarchal power rela-
8 tions in the world and in the classroom. Feminist pedagogy also
9 privileges student- centered learning and emphasizes student
10 knowledge and experience as much as instructor erudition. Krista
11 Comer’s Surfer Girls in the New World Order (2010) provides a meth-
12 od and model of a feminist pedagogy that calls for an “intergen-
13 erational conversation” between second-and third-wave feminists
14 and greater support of young women and scholars in the field (17).
15 The aims of feminist pedagogy are also apparent in the field’s long-
16 established efforts in mentoring graduate students and early career
17 faculty and a 2013 special issue of Western American Literature on
18 Young Scholars. Feminist critical pedagogy questions the construc-
19 tion, forms, and locations of knowledge, and in the field of western
20 literary study this has included women’s personal narratives, dia-
21 ries, and biographies as relevant sources of knowledge of and about
22 the West. Examples include Judy Temple’s Baby Doe Tabor: The Mad-
23 woman in the Cabin (2009) and Christine Bold’s archival recovery of
24 the life and cultural production of Princess Chinquilla featured in
25 a 2016 WLA conference plenary session and her book The Frontier
26 Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880–1924 (2013).
27 The replication of hierarchy and inequality is a concern of teach-
28 ers of western literature, particularly in relation to the cultural
29 politics and culture wars around public education in the United
30 States (11). Consideration of the most practical aspects of ped-
31 agogy and teaching will become more important to the field and
32 the profession as a whole as the state of higher education in the
33 United States continues to follow the fate of K-12 education. Stan-
34 dards-and outcomes-based education reform in the United States
35 has started to infiltrate higher education through regional accred-
36 itation and pressure from an increasingly skeptical public. The or-
37 ganization sponsors an annual K-12 educator award to bring public
38
39
school teachers who develop creative approaches to teaching west- 1
ern literature to the annual conference to present their lesson plans 2
and teaching strategies. In 2016 WLA president Linda Karell invited 3
dozens of high school English teachers from the Yellowstone Writ- 4
ing Project to the organization’s conference in Big Sky, Montana, in 5
order to enhance WLA members’ understanding of issues in K-12 6
education and promote discussions of critical pedagogy. 7
Tenure, which once guaranteed the academic freedom to ask 8
hard questions for the intellectual and personal development of 9
students, is disappearing through the chronic and systematic de- 10
funding of higher education in the United States, thereby changing 11
teaching and classroom practices, especially those rooted in the as- 12
sumptions of critical pedagogy. As the structure of the professori- 13
ate changes, the organization may consider more opportunities for 14
members to substantively and transparently discuss their teaching 15
and pedagogy as a means to move the broader professional and cul- 16
tural conversation about teaching and student learning beyond out- 17
comes and assessment. The organization’s journal, Western Ameri- 18
can Literature, may offer opportunities to publish critical pedagogy 19
“praxis” essays that directly link paradigm-shifting research with an 20
eye toward student learning, course design, and classroom applica- 21
tions. Such an approach to publication will be a shift, as the larger 22
profession privileges the rigor of research and publication over is- 23
sues of teaching and the classroom as legitimate forms of knowl- 24
edge production. This means that the organization may have to 25
confront assumptions about the nature and construction of knowl- 26
edge, particularly as it relates to the binary of research and teach- 27
ing, as higher education faces a daunting and uncertain future. 28
29
Randi Lynn Tanglen is associate professor of English and director of the Robert
30
and Joyce Johnson Center for Faculty Development and Excellence in Teaching at
Austin College in Sherman, Texas. She is currently coediting a volume of essays on
31
teaching western American literature with Brady Harrison. 32
33
Works Cited 34
Allen, Chadwick. “Serpentine Figures, Sinuous Relations: Thematic Geometry in
35
Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run.” American Literature, vol. 82, no. 4, Dec. 2010, 36
pp. 807–34, doi:10.1215/00029831-2010-046. 37
38
39
Randi Lynn Tanglen 57 40
1 Bold, Christine. “Outside the Frontier Club.” The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns
2 and Cultural Power, 1880–1924. Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 207–32.
3 Campbell, Neil. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transna-
tional, Global, Media Age. U of Nebraska P, 2008.
4
Comer, Krista. Surfer Girls in the New World Order. U of North Carolina P, 2010.
5 Darder, Antonia, Marta P. Baltodano, and Rodolfo D. Torres, editors. “Critical
6 Pedagogy: An Introduction.” The Critical Pedagogy Reader, second ed., Rout-
7 ledge, 2009, pp. 1–21.
8 Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic, 1970.
9 French, Warren. “West as Myth: Status Report and a Call for Action.” Western
10 American Literature, vol. 1, no. 1, 1966, pp. 55–58.
Giroux, Henry. Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning.
11
Bergin & Garvey, 1988.
12 Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, editors. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks
13 in Literary Ecology. U of Georgia P, 1996.
14 Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Matt Lavin, editors. “Syllabus Exchange.” Western Liter-
15 ature Association, www.westernlit.org/syllabus-exchange/. Accessed 28 July
16 2017.
Hamilton, Amy T., and Tom J. Hillard. Before the West Was West: Critical Essays on
17
Pre-1800 Literature of the American Frontiers. U of Nebraska P, 2014.
18 hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge,
19 1994.
20 Indigenous Wests: Literary and Visual Aesthetics, special issue of Western American
21 Literature, edited by Susan Bernardin, vol. 49, no. 1, Spring 2014.
22 Kolodny, Annette. “Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions: Notes Toward a New Lit-
erary History of the American Frontiers.” American Literature, vol. 64, no. 3,
23
1992, pp. 1–18.
24 McLaren, Peter. “Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts.” The Critical
25 Pedagogy Reader, second ed., edited by Antonia Darder, Marta P. Baltodano,
26 and Rodolfo D. Torres, Routledge, 2009, pp. 61–83.
27 Shor, Ira. Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change. U of Chicago
28 P, 1992.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Harvard
29
UP, 1950.
30 Tatonetti, Lisa. The Queerness of Native Literature. U of Minnesota P, 2014.
31 Temple, Judy Nolte. Baby Doe Tabor: The Madwoman in the Cabin. U of Oklahoma
32 P, 2009.
33 Young Scholars, special issue of Western American Literature, edited by Krista Com-
34 er, vol. 48, nos. 1–2, Spring–Summer, 2013.
35
36
37
38
39
1
2
“Postwestern” 3
4
5
Susan Kollin
6
7
8
9
In addressing the keyword “postwestern,” I am first prompted to 10
attend to the power and ambiguity of the term “West” itself. Krista 11
Comer takes up this task, noting how the “West” operates as a fluid 12
concept, encompassing both a “geopolitical entity and physical to- 13
pography” that shifts meanings when placed in the context of that 14
larger entity, “Western civilization” (238). What does it mean to 15
call forth a “postwestern” critique when the term references both a 16
seemingly distinct locale and a geography that has held significance 17
for global populations, from the ancient Greeks and Romans who 18
saw it as the place of Elysium to the Europeans who set in motion 19
a five hundred–year colonial matrix of power (Mignolo xiii; Kollin, 20
“Environments” 2)? Rather than continually demarcate one West 21
from another, the keyword “postwestern” acknowledges how each 22
extends the other in a confirming and enabling relationship. In this 23
way, Neil Campbell notes how regionality always involves “relation- 24
ality” because it makes “encounters beyond itself”; regionality is 25
“impinged upon by otherness and outside forces” and “necessarily 26
transformed through its relations with its outsides” (141). 27
Relationality makes visible how the hemispheric division of the 28
planet, the global colonial matrix of power, and settler colonial his- 29
tories all underpin the dominant logic and founding myths of the 30
American West (Mignolo; Kollin, “Introduction”). These histories 31
are evident in the Western itself, that continually evolving genre so 32
closely aligned with the mythical Turnerian struggle between sav- 33
agery and civilization on an ever-shifting frontier. As I argue in Cap- 34
tivating Westerns: The Middle East in the American West, although the 35
Western is typically framed as a US genre, it was produced through 36
outside forces, having emerged from a larger tradition of European 37
adventure stories that were once named after the sites of their ex- 38
39
40
1 ploits, such as is seen in the African adventure tale or the “oriental”
2 narrative (36–38). While the Western is often understood as a US
3 and settler colonial genre, it has also traveled globally in places such
4 as the Middle East, where the United States exerts colonial rather
5 than settler colonial power and where it comes into contact with
6 other nations’ Westerns, such as the Italian spaghetti Western,
7 whose transnational popularity may be linked to its critiques of US
8 global power and its ability to address postcolonial predicaments
9 (188). “Postwestern” as a keyword may help us not only interro-
10 gate the exceptionalist frameworks that underwrite many of the
11 region’s narratives but also recognize larger transnational develop-
12 ments that have shaped those very narratives. In doing so, we may
13 develop new ways of knowing that enable a realignment of regional
14 scholarship with a greater set of political allies and objectives.
15 In this context the term “post” deserves some scrutiny. As Ann
16 Laura Stoler argues in the context of the postcolonial, no matter
17 how it is reworked or “how ‘post’ one’s stance might be,” scholars
18 might best regard the “post” with “skepticism,” recognizing the “ar-
19 tifice” in the “cut” (ix). Colonial “temporalities” are experienced in
20 complex ways, she argues, and colonial realities exist in both “tan-
21 gible and intangible forms” (ix). Stoler notes how “geopolitical and
22 spatial distribution of inequalities . . . are not simply mimetic ver-
23 sions of earlier imperial incarnations but refashioned and some-
24 times opaque . . . reworkings of them”: she goes on to argue that
25 colonial histories and “the affective charges they reactivate” are of-
26 ten so woven “through the fabric of contemporary life forms” that
27 “they seem indiscernible” (4–5). Shifting from colonial to settler co-
28 lonial realities in discussions of western American literature, Alex
29 Tremble Young and Lorenzo Veracini likewise note the complex
30 temporalities entailed in our critiques, particularly the difficulties
31 of ushering in the “post,” situated as we are in “the settler colonial
32 present” (18).
33 Because the colonial and the settler colonial are not past, their
34 logics linger in our ways of knowing. For Mignolo, then, it is use-
35 ful to examine the structures that have enabled “the conditions to
36 build and control a structure of knowledge” (xv). As he argues, en-
37 tities such as racism and patriarchy “made it possible to eliminate
38
39
or marginalize what did not fit into those principles that aspired to 1
build a totality in which everybody would be included” (xv). In his 2
critique of settler colonial forms, Veracini also calls for new “con- 3
ceptual frames” that are needed for imagining what might come 4
next (115). Work that fractures these old frameworks is being de- 5
veloped productively by critics such as Christine Bold, whose study 6
of Indigenous presence in Western film, for instance, considers 7
how we narrate “beginnings” and prompts us to examine how our 8
frames of study may unwittingly marginalize key texts and play- 9
ers that don’t fit into existing structures of knowledge. While some 10
influential scholars of cinematic Westerns treat the early period 11
as a “false start,” Bold calls for “reattaching the genre to its begin- 12
nings” where Indigenous presences make the form “mean different- 13
ly again,” such that it becomes “less about possessive investment, 14
binary opposition, or regeneration through violence . . . and more 15
about the perpetual entanglement with Indigeneity and the ways in 16
which, in hiding this history, westerns mask their modernity” (237). 17
While postwestern analyses offer strategies for reevaluating 18
dominant frameworks, these challenges have been underway for 19
some time in Indigenous studies, environmental humanities, queer 20
theory, feminism, borderlands criticism, transnational studies, set- 21
tler colonial theory, and postcolonial criticism. To place all of these 22
critical efforts under the rubric of the postwestern may risk re- 23
producing the dynamics of assimilation. Likewise, for Indigenous 24
studies and borderlands criticism, retaining the terms “western” or 25
“West” in a critical apparatus may present insurmountable prob- 26
lems by codifying or favoring a particular geopolitical imaginary 27
and historic mission. 28
In this way, it’s crucial to identify affiliations and acknowledge 29
interventions that seek similar goals or that go by other names. 30
Following Wai Chee Dimock’s caution against uncritically 31
adopting approaches that are “dictated by the obliterating myth of 32
‘newness,’” I would argue that the best work in postwestern studies 33
locates new allies and forms productive new allegiances while 34
avoiding the creation of theoretical American Adams or Eves whose 35
unmappings disavow prior histories (Dimock 32; Veracini 86, 90). 36
Thus, Chadwick Allen’s transnational study of global Indigenous 37
38
39
Susan Kollin 61 40
1 literary critique, José Aranda’s work in recovering US Hispanic
2 literary histories, Victoria Lamont’s study of Indigenous and
3 settler women’s contributions to the Western, and Lisa Tatonetti’s
4 queer genealogies of Native American literature—to name just a
5 few instances—highlight for me the importance of maintaining
6 a deep awareness of and indebtedness to what predates and
7 what continues to enable a politically vibrant and self-reflective
8 postwestern critique.
9
Susan Kollin is a professor of English and director of the Center for Western
10
Lands and Peoples at Montana State University. Her research areas include West-
11 erns in fiction and film, environmental humanities, and feminist theory.
12
13 Works Cited
14
Bold, Christine. “Early Cinematic Westerns.” A History of Western American Litera-
15 ture, edited by Susan Kollin, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 225–41.
16 Campbell, Neil. Affective Critical Regionality. Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.
17 Comer, Krista. “West.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, 1st ed., edited by
18 Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, New York UP, 2007, pp. 238–42.
19 Dimock, Wai Chi. “Hemisphere Islam: Continents and Centuries for American
Literature.” American Literary History, vol. 21, no. 1, 2009, pp. 28–52.
20
Kollin, Susan. Captivating Westerns: The Middle East in the American West. U of
21 Nebraska P, 2015.
22 —. “Environments in Western American Literature.” Oxford Research Encyclo-
23 pedia of Literature, edited by Paula Rabinowitz, Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 1–29.
24 —. “Introduction: Historicizing the American Literary West.” A History of
25 Western American Literature, edited by Susan Kollin, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp.
26 1–12.
Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial
27
Options. Duke UP, 2011.
28 Stoler, Ann Laura. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Time. Duke UP, 2016.
29 Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Palgrave Macmillan,
30 2010.
31 Young, Alex Trimble, and Lorenzo Veracini. “’If I am native to anything’: Settler
32 Colonial Studies and Western American Literature.” Western American Litera-
ture, vol. 52, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–23.
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
1
2
“Queer” 3
4
5
Ryan Wander
6
7
8
9
I propose that we understand “queer” as an analytic keyword 10
whose adjectival (as in queer theory), noun (as in persons who iden- 11
tify as queers), and verbal (as in to queer the West) forms are all in- 12
tegral to the past, present, and future of western American cultural 13
production and scholarship. I propose this understanding not in an 14
imperialistic or totalizing spirit but in the denaturalizing spirit— 15
the thinking otherwise approach—that informs the theoretical 16
and political promise of queer thought within and beyond western 17
American literary and cultural studies. This notion of “thinking 18
otherwise” has its roots in poststructuralist approaches to lan- 19
guage, history, and knowledge, such as Derridean deconstruction 20
and Foucauldian genealogy. To engage in queer thought is to ex- 21
amine, destabilize, and undo the (binary) categories through which 22
we experience and know our own and others’ sex, sexuality, and 23
gender. When queer studies scholars think otherwise, we engage in 24
projects that imagine new modes of identity and sociality, family 25
and futurity. What we imagine are new worlds. 26
The terms “queer” and “queer theory” are notoriously slippery, 27
and purposefully so. As poststructuralist formations, they are 28
not really terms within a politics of identity; rather, they partake 29
of a politics of difference and relationality, as queer theorist 30
Annamarie Jagose has demonstrated. Indeed, one of the defining 31
characteristics of the many diverse academic mobilizations of the 32
terms “queer” and “queer theory”—whether antisocial or utopian, 33
Foucauldian, Marxian, or psychoanalytic—has been a structuring 34
binary of queer versus normative. In place of falsely stable and 35
often exclusionary unities such as gay and straight people or gay 36
and straight culture, “queer” names those bodies and practices 37
38
39
40
1 that stand askew of what “normal” folks look like and do. Queer
2 theory and politics develop around sexuality and gender, but they
3 are concerned as well with all those aspects of individual and social
4 life on which gender and sexual norms exert an informing, often
5 coercive influence. Queer theorists Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth
6 Wilson recently have suggested that this emphasis on opposition
7 to the “normal” threatens to create (perhaps already has created)
8 a new and equally false unity out of the heterogeneity of “normal”
9 people and practices. Despite this emerging limit, the wide-
10 ranging critical and epistemological implications of queer theory’s
11 politics of difference and relationality allow us to (re)read western
12 American cultures and scholarship as particularly productive sites
13 of queerness.
14 To apprehend sufficiently the queerness of the North American
15 West, we need to begin with the Indigenous peoples and practices
16 rendered queer by their difference from Anglo-American social and
17 political norms. As queer Indigenous studies scholar Mark Rifkin
18 has argued, Indigenous kinship formations eccentric to Anglo-
19 American social and political forms provided a pretext for the
20 dispossession of native peoples, who were portrayed “as primitively
21 perverse, as needing to be trained in the ostensibly natural kinds of
22 privatized intimacy organizing bourgeois family life” (When 34). In
23 Rifkin’s hands, queer theory and the category of sexuality provide a
24 powerful major framework for a critique of US settler colonialism.
25 Moreover, as Lisa Tatonetti points to in her piece in this volume,
26 other forms of Indigenous queerness, such as the female warrior
27 masculinity of the Dakota woman Tusee in Zitkala-Ša’s short story
28 “A Warrior’s Daughter,” can be productive and protective for the
29 family and the tribe. This is not to say that a character like Tusee
30 or many of the Indigenous individuals and collectivities that Rifkin
31 treats in his study would have self-identified as queer. Rather, the
32 point of Rifkin’s approach to Indigenous kinship, and of Tatonetti’s
33 reading of Tusee, is to recognize the central and labile place of
34 queer sexualities and queer genders in the histories and cultures of
35 the North American West. It is to think relationally about the space
36 and the people who inhabit it. For the West is not intrinsically or
37 essentially queer, though it is home to many people, Indigenous
38
39
and non-Indigenous, who identify themselves as queer. Rather, 1
the West is queer in relation to the various and heterogeneous 2
normativities— the “normal” people and practices— that are 3
constituted and reproduced every day. 4
Anglo-American cultures of the North American West, notwith- 5
standing the many ways in which they exercise hegemony, also are 6
sites of queer peoples and practices. The immediate temptation here 7
is to point to urban spaces of white-dominated LGBTQ cultures and 8
activism that have been integral to the political and intellectual pos- 9
sibilities that queerness offers to us as subjects and scholars, such 10
as San Francisco’s Castro District. However, more dispersed sites of 11
LGBTQ cultures and activism in the West also require our serious 12
and devoted attention. Work in queer rural studies has served as 13
one way of addressing this need and attending to the intersection 14
of queerness with the urban and the rural. Judith Halberstam, for 15
example, engages in a critique of queer studies’ “metronormativi- 16
ty” by reading transgender white man Brandon Teena “as a figure 17
who represents both anachronism (an earlier model of gay identity 18
as gender inversion) and dislocatedness (a person who chooses the 19
rural over the urban as his theater for staging his gender)” (In 36, 20
16). But we also need to keep our eyes open to historical and con- 21
temporary forms of Anglo-American queerness that racist and het- 22
erosexist epistemologies have occluded. Chris Packard gestures to- 23
ward the paradoxical invisibility and centrality of Anglo-American 24
queerness in the West when he argues that “there is something ho- 25
moerotic about American national identity as it is conceived in the 26
literary West” (12). 27
WAL and western American literary and cultural studies have for 28
a long time been attuned to issues around gender and sexuality that 29
feature significantly in queer thought, such as homosociality and 30
gender transgression. Queer West historiographer Susan Johnson 31
has written about the many, often forgotten manifestations of 32
homosociality in the literature and culture of gold rush California, 33
including “the homosocial ties . . . and tensions” that Bret Harte 34
dramatized in his mining camp stories (Roaring 335). In my article 35
from the recent Queer Wests issue of WAL, I find in Harte’s 36
portrayals of these “ties” and “tensions” the materials of queer 37
38
39
Ryan Wander 65 40
1 regionalist chronotopes that (re)configure the West and the nation
2 in sexually and racially inclusive ways. Queer West historiographer
3 Nan Boyd’s history of gay and lesbian identity formation in San
4 Francisco calls to mind Judith Butler’s work on drag and gender
5 performativity in recounting the notoriety of the Dash, an early
6 twentieth-century Barbary Coast establishment where “degenerate
7 female impersonators” performed (Boyd 25).
8 These historical and literary links between the West and queer-
9 ness connect West and world, past and present. In other words,
10 western American literary and cultural studies expand and cohere
11 by engaging queer studies issues and concerns. Susan Johnson con-
12 nected the “disrupted gender relations” of the historical West to the
13 critical aims of queer and postcolonial theory when she suggest-
14 ed that “studying gender in the West holds promise for the proj-
15 ect of denaturalizing gender and dislodging it from its comfortable
16 moorings in other relations of domination, from small-town racism to
17 worldwide imperialism” (“A Memory” 93, emphasis added). Over fif-
18 ty years ago Leslie Fiedler, whose concern with male identity for-
19 mation has been taken up in fresh ways by westernist scholars Lee
20 Mitchell and Michael Johnson, famously associated flight from
21 civilization and into the frontier with the (male) American writer’s
22 avoidance of “adult heterosexual love and his consequent obsession
23 with death, incest, and innocent homosexuality” (xi).
24 Yet queer approaches to the North American West,
25 which emphasize relationality and the denaturalization of
26 heteronormative categories and practices, nonetheless remain
27 relatively scant and are ripe for further development. The imperative
28 as we move forward into the next fifty years is to follow the spirit
29 of Susan Johnson’s words about studying gender in the West, in
30 which she implicitly charges us with the task of demonstrating the
31 value of queer theory for our field and the crucial value of the West
32 for the enterprise of queer thought.
33
Ryan Wander is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of
34
California, Davis, and is an exchange lecturer in American Studies at Johannes
35 Gutenberg University, Germany, for the 2017–18 academic year. His research
36 focuses on the relationship between time, region, and literary genre in late
37 nineteenth-and early twentieth-century literatures of the North American West.
38
39
His dissertation, tentatively titled “Queer Times Out West: Genres of the North 1
American West, 1868–1912,” examines this relationship by focusing on genres 2
whose beginnings are tied to the region: regional writing, dime novels, Westerns, 3
and literary naturalism.
4
5
Works Consulted 6
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006. 7
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed., Aunt Lute
8
Books, 2012.
Boyd, Nan Alamilla. Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. U 9
of California P, 2003. 10
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 11
1990. 12
Cohen, Cathy. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of 13
Queer Politics?” GLQ, vol. 3, no. 4, 1997, pp. 437–65.
14
Coviello, Peter. Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century
America. New York UP, 2013.
15
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004. 16
Eng, David. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intima- 17
cy. Duke UP, 2010. 18
Ferguson, Roderick. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. U of 19
Minnesota P, 2004.
20
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. Criterion, 1960.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by
21
Robert Hurley, Vintage, 1990. 22
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke UP, 23
2010. 24
Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural 25
Lives. New York UP, 2005. 26
—. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke UP, 2011.
27
Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York UP, 1996.
Johnson, Michael. Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature. 28
U of Oklahoma P, 2002. 29
Johnson, Susan Lee. “’A Memory Sweet to Soldiers’: The Significance of Gender in 30
the History of the ‘American West.’” Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 31
4, 1993, pp. 495–517. 32
—. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. Norton, 2000.
33
Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. U of Chicago P,
1996. 34
Morgensen, Scott Lauria. Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and 35
Indigenous Decolonization. U of Minnesota P, 2011. 36
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New 37
York UP, 2009. 38
39
Ryan Wander 67 40
1 —. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. U of
2 Minnesota P, 1999.
3 Packard, Chris. Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-
Century American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
4
Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke UP,
5 2007.
6 Rifkin, Mark. Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the
7 American Renaissance. U of Minnesota P, 2014.
8 —. When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and
9 Native Sovereignty. Oxford UP, 2011.
10 Rohy, Valerie. Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality. State U of
New York P, 2009.
11
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. U of California P, 1990.
12 Tatonetti, Lisa. The Queerness of Native American Literature. U of Minnesota P,
13 2014.
14 Wander, Ryan. “Heterochronic West: Temporal Multiplicity in Bret Harte’s Re-
15 gional Writing.” Western American Literature, vol. 51, no. 2, 2016, pp. 143–73.
16 Warner, Michael, editor. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. U
of Minnesota P, 1993.
17
—. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Harvard
18 UP, 1999.
19 Wiegman, Robin, and Elizabeth Wilson. “Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer
20 Conventions.” differences, vol. 26, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–25.
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1
2
“Regionality” 3
4
5
Neil Campbell
6
7
8
9
Regionalism often appears as a fixed and knowable set of beliefs 10
or a centered totality (Painter), an “ism” to put alongside all the 11
other “isms” we appear to know as finished acts or things complet- 12
ed; ways of seeing and being, thinking and operating that reassure 13
us and provide a clear horizon and a stable boundary within which 14
to function. In 1997 Lucy Lippard summarized this well: 15
16
Today the term regionalism . . . continues to be used pejorative-
17
ly, to mean corny backwater art flowing from tributaries that
18
might eventually reach the mainstream but is currently stagnat-
19
ing out there in the boondocks. (36)
20
With this in mind, Deleuze and Guattari might term “regionalism” 21
an “order-word” functioning to “mark stoppages or organized, strat- 22
ified compositions” while reassuringly reminding us that “There 23
are pass-words beneath order-words. Words that pass, words that 24
are components of passage” (Thousand 110). What I am arguing here 25
is that since Lippard’s comment of 1997 there has been a shift to- 26
ward what I have termed “expanded critical regionalism” defined by 27
“components of passage” that saw region as decidedly mobile and 28
diverse, rather than static and closed-in, and engaged with multiple 29
disciplines beyond architecture (Campbell, Rhizomatic). 30
Such reimagining began in 1980 with Anthony Alofsin’s early 31
move toward a definition of critical regionalism as “an architecture 32
that both follows local traditions and transforms them” (qtd. in 33
Canizaro 370). Later Kenneth Frampton developed Paul Ricoeur’s 34
idea stating that the central tension in critical regionalism was “how 35
to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, 36
dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization” (Framp- 37
ton 16). These simple-sounding but complex arguments formed the 38
39
40
1 dramatic elements through which regionalism might take on a new
2 and different complexion within western studies.
3 An expanded critical regionalism would, therefore, no longer be
4 associated with nostalgia or defined as simply “local” and, there-
5 fore, as a “place of lesser achievement and the source of backward-
6 ness, provincialism, and chauvinism” (Canizaro 12), as suggested by
7 Lippard above. Instead it would be about placing the “local quality
8 of life” at the forefront, “not in spite of global concerns and pos-
9 sibilities, but in order to better take advantage of them . . . [and]
10 to re-embed us in the reality and diversity of our local places—
11 critically and comfortably” (12).
12 More recently regionality has developed as a new “pass-word”
13 brim-full of “components of passage” insisting upon “becoming”
14 rather than fixity, moving, in every sense of that word, as it gathers
15 up senses of people, place, and things as a complex assemblage of
16 region (Campbell, Affective 15). Jane Bennett refers to “the quaran-
17 tines of matter and life” that, for me, suggests the closed weight
18 of regionalism needing to be challenged with what she calls tur-
19 bulent and “vital materiality” (vii). Such vitality and becoming is,
20 for example, expressed in Ellen Meloy’s struggle to articulate the
21 wonders of the western desert, where she senses no single stable
22 thing but rather the “uncountable thousands” of colors that make
23 up “some exquisite combination of Place” (15).
24 Regionality is, therefore, a form of “vital materiality” or “exquisite
25 combination” that moves still further beyond Canizaro’s position
26 above, placing the emphasis upon process and becoming rather
27 than established ground and invariance (or “re-embedding”)—so
28 that encircling unanimity is constantly and productively challenged
29 by multiple, critical processes, little refrains of difference, vital
30 local histories, and the interruptions of the “minor” (acting like
31 a foreign language within the dominant language, as Deleuze and
32 Guattari define it). Regionality is, therefore, less about “comfort”
33 and reassurance of a settled place in the world and more about an
34 active critical presence that turns the proximate and local outward
35 in dialogic relations with the world. In this process, regionality
36 unashamedly worlds.
37
38
39
Regionality, in Kathleen Stewart’s seminal essay of the same 1
name, comes alive through her swirling, descriptive passages, 2
forming and deforming what she calls “the tactile compositionality 3
of things” (277), tracked in voices, actions, places, memories, and 4
histories. Regionality is an “edgy composite” (281) of the materi- 5
al and immaterial, the human and nonhuman as an active and en- 6
ergetic presence: “it permeates the contours of the landscape, the 7
rocks the glaciers left, the climate, the layers of determination laid 8
down by histories, the leftovers of everything that has happened” 9
(278). But critically, Stewart’s poetic assemblage, her regionality-as- 10
compositionality, is necessarily riven with affect: “impassive corpore- 11
ality . . . redemption, a glacier of impatience . . . anxiety dissected by 12
fault lines of rage. It has drama, intensity, an energetics of tension 13
and release” (278). Composing and decomposing as it moves and 14
alters, her sense of region is troubling and yet nonetheless vibrant 15
and alive with such powerful “energetics.” Consequently, these are 16
never contained energies or affects that turn back on themselves to 17
sustain and reinforce the enframed totality of regionalism, for they, 18
recalling Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus, “pass from body 19
to body—human bodies, animal bodies, machine bodies, bodies of 20
thought, ecosystems, visceralities, and noumena spread out across 21
a vast atmospheric field” (278). 22
These passing forces form tactile compositions of regionality 23
that echo Jane Bennett’s “vital materiality,” refusing to remain con- 24
stant or fixed, for they are endlessly and extensively connecting, 25
affecting and being affected, “constituted in moves and encounters 26
that continually reset the self-world relationship” (Stewart 278). To 27
know the place you are in, its people, its attunements and atmo- 28
spheres, as Stewart shows throughout her work, is never defined as 29
a closed, single circle or vessel but much nearer to Rebecca Solnit’s 30
sense of place as “leaky containers” that “always refer beyond them- 31
selves . . . and can be imagined in different scales, from the drama 32
of a back alley to transcontinental geopolitical forces and global cli- 33
mate” (Solnit vii). In Stewart’s words regionality operates as “con- 34
centric rings stretching out from encounters, tastes, bodies, neigh- 35
borhoods, a valley, a state, a geographical region” (280. emphasis 36
37
38
39
Neil Campbell 71 40
1 added), each ring connecting beyond itself to the worlds it is a part
2 of and entangled with. As a result, there is a continual unfixing and
3 resetting of the self-world relationship.
4 In Adventures in Ideas, Alfred North Whitehead argues, “the focal
5 region cannot be separated from the external stream. . . . It is a state
6 of agitation” (Whitehead 157). Regionality for me is, therefore, such
7 an entangled process, a layered “interfusion,” an “agitation” and
8 so a frictional becoming with the world. In western studies, which
9 has for so long been attracted to the writings of place and region,
10 it is politically important that such turbulence and agitation be
11 cherished as a positive, questioning, and productive disturbance.
12 Disturbing the local ground, as all gardeners know, is not to lose
13 its potency or its value but rather a means to improve its quality
14 and vitality within the wider ecological system. Anna Tsing’s
15 recent notion of “collaborative survival” born out of appreciating
16 “entangled,” interdependent ways of life often emerging precisely
17 because of “precarity” and “disturbance” reinforces this process’s
18 relevance to Western Studies (Tsing 4). Following Tsing, one
19 must adopt alternative forms of critical regionality that exhort
20 “entangled ways of life,” “curiosity,” and “noticing” so that the
21 nuances, details, and surprises of the local become uppermost,
22 not to turn inward and close borders but rather to “enlarge what is
23 possible . . . [through] other kinds of stories” (Tsing 4, 6, 37, 156).
24 Indeed, in all forms of imaginative storytelling, whether in writing,
25 film, art, or other media, the West has to find ways to survive
26 collaboratively by embracing the entanglements of regionality as a
27 canvas of possibility opening itself to the world.
28 For as Jacques Rancière wrote, the artist’s job—in whatever
29 medium— is to “crack open the unity of the given and the
30 obviousness of the visible, in order to sketch a new topography of
31 the possible” (49). In this lies the vital work of writing regionality
32 in the American West, of creating a different topography of the
33 possible, or to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari again, to envisage
34 region as always “to come,” in a process of becoming, since, as
35 Donna Haraway has written conclusively, “The only way to find a
36 larger vision is to be somewhere in particular” (196).
37
38
39
Neil Campbell is an emeritus professor at the University of Derby, UK. His most 1
recent book is Affective Critical Regionality and he has an edited collection due in 2
2018, Under the Western Sky, on the music and fiction of Willy Vlautin. 3
4
Works Cited 5
Alofsin, Anthony. “Constructive Regionalism.” Architectural Regionalism: Collect- 6
ed Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition, edited by Vincent B. 7
Canizaro, Princeton Architectural Press, 2007, pp. 368–73.
8
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010.
Campbell, Neil. Affective Critical Regionality. Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. 9
—. The Rhizomatic West: The American West in a Global Media Age. U of 10
Nebraska P, 2008. 11
Canizaro, Vincent B., editor. Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, 12
Identity, Modernity and Tradition. Princeton Architectural Press. 2007. 13
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophre-
14
nia. 1987. Athlone, 1996.
Frampton, Kenneth. “Towards a Critical Regionalism.” Postmodern Culture, edited
15
by Hal Foster. 1983. Verso, 1990. 16
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Free 17
Association Press, 1991. 18
Lippard, Lucy R. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. The 19
New Press, 1997.
20
Meloy, Ellen. The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and
Sky. Vintage, 2002.
21
Painter, Joe. “Cartographic Anxiety and the Search for Regionality.” Environment 22
and Planning A, vol. 40, Feb. 2008, pp. 342–61. 23
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Verso, 2009. 24
Solnit, Rebecca. Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. U of California P, 2010. 25
Stewart, Kathleen. “Regionality.” The Geographical Review, vol. 103, no. 2, April 26
2013, pp. 275–84.
27
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility
of Living in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton UP, 2015. 28
Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. 1933. Free Press, 1967. 29
30
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32
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34
35
36
37
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Neil Campbell 73 40
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1
2
“Settler” 3
4
5
Alex Trimble Young
6
7
8
9
The word “settler” tends to carry with it connotations both bu- 10
colic and nostalgic. Even certain dictionary definitions are at pains 11
to remove it from the colonial circumstances in which it is most 12
often employed. The Oxford Living Dictionary offers a definition and 13
sample sentences that exemplify the willful act of erasure at the 14
heart of everyday understandings of the word: 15
16
A person who settles in an area, typically one with no or few pre- 17
vious inhabitants. 18
“the settlers had come to America to look for land” 19
20
“Jewish settlers” 21
22
The field of settler colonial studies has worked to undo the erasure
23
performed by this definition by theorizing settler colonialism as a
24
distinct structure of imperial domination defined by a genocidal
25
project aimed primarily at seizing Native territory rather than ex-
26
ploiting Native labor. Settler colonialism, in the United States and
27
other settler societies around the globe, is a structure that must be
28
dismantled in the present, rather than an event that can be con-
29
signed to the historical past (Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism” 388). For
30
settler colonial studies, “settler” names both the perpetrators and
31
the beneficiaries of this form of structural violence.
32
Since Indigenous studies scholars in North America began to
33
engage settler colonialism as a category in the 1990s, debates about
34
the utility of settler colonial studies as an analytic in the US context
35
have bumped up against a key question: who exactly is a settler,
36
and to what extent can settler as a category be understood as
37
coextensive with whiteness, heteropatriarchy, or other structures
38
39
40
1 of domination? Australian theorist Patrick Wolfe insisted that
2 settler colonialism is structured around a binary division between
3 non-native settlers and Indigenous peoples, a binary that operates
4 irrespective of the positionality of the non-native (“Recuperating
5 Binarism” 257). Various Indigenous and critical ethnic studies
6 scholars in the United States maintain similar positions and have
7 explored the circumstances in which people of color in settler
8 colonies have participated in and benefited from the violence of
9 settler colonialism, many taking up Haunani- Kay Trask’s term
10 “settlers of color” to describe this phenomenon (Trask 6).
11 Chicano/a studies scholars have undertaken an especially
12 robust exploration of this question in considering the complex
13 and overlapping forms of racialization and coloniality in the US–
14 Mexico borderlands. Various settler colonial studies scholars have
15 argued that the state-sanctioned embrace of mestizaje in Mexico
16 suggests that the settler colonial paradigm does not adequately
17 describe the mode of coloniality at work in Mexican contexts
18 (e.g., Veracini 30). Chicano/a studies scholars including B. V.
19 Olguin and Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez have argued, however, that
20 settler colonial dynamics developed in the near-stateless spaces of
21 Mexico’s northern frontier (and the subsequent borderlands that
22 emerged there). While eliminatory violence was often brought to
23 bear against Mexican subjects by Anglo settlers and the US state,
24 in certain circumstances Mexican and later Chicano/a settlers also
25 exerted a “hegemonic mestizaje” when they mobilized genocidal
26 violence, often in concert with Anglo settlers, against Indigenous
27 collectivities (Olguin 31, 45). Olguin and Guidotti-Hernandez argue
28 that the legacy of this anti-Indigenous violence should temper too-
29 easy identifications of twentieth-century articulations of Chicano/a
30 nationalism and claims to Indigeneity with decolonial resistance
31 (Guidotti-Hernandez 19).
32 Discussions regarding the biopolitical boundaries of the cate-
33 gory “settler” necessarily engage questions of gender and sexuality
34 as well as racialization. Grounded in an extensive body of Indige-
35 nous feminist scholarship on the centrality of heteropatriarchal vi-
36 olence to settler colonialism, queer and gender studies has worked
37 to track settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy as structures that
38
39
are coconstitutive but not coterminus. While settler colonial soci- 1
eties have attempted to coerce Indigenous peoples into conforming 2
to the norms of heteropatriarchal sexuality, they have also accom- 3
modated deracinated forms of feminism and queer sexuality within 4
the settler collective.1 5
Despite the fact that many scholars of settler colonialism argue 6
that “settler” is a category that does not always map neatly onto 7
dominant racial or sexual categories, most scholars have not fol- 8
lowed Wolfe in reading the term “settler” as one that should be ap- 9
plied to all non-Natives living on Indigenous land. In contrast to 10
Wolfe’s binary scheme, Lorenzo Veracini and Jodi Byrd have both 11
articulated triadic schemes to describe positionality in a settler so- 12
ciety. Veracini distinguishes between Indigenous peoples, settlers, 13
and “exogenous others” (18). Byrd draws a distinction between 14
settlers and “arrivants,” a neologism she borrows from Caribbean 15
poet Kamau Brathwaite (xix). For both Veracini and Byrd, this third 16
term articulates the position of racialized non-native bodies in set- 17
tler societies that neither carry the sovereign capacity of the settler 18
subject nor stand as the beneficiaries (or at least the primary bene- 19
ficiaries) of settler violence. 20
The analytic value of the category “settler” has also been rejected 21
altogether from some corners. Afro-pessimist theorist Jared Sexton 22
has argued that any categorization of the Black body as settler both 23
elides the history of Indigenous slaveholding in North America 24
and is necessarily circumscribed by the fundamental violence of 25
sovereignty, a violence that, in Sexton’s formulation, necessarily 26
reproduces anti-Blackness, even when sovereignty is enacted in the 27
alternative forms imagined by Indigenous nations.2 28
Sexton’s intervention, among others, has occasioned renewed 29
and heated debate in Indigenous, critical ethnic, and settler colo- 30
nial studies about the definition and applicability of settler as a cat- 31
egory of analysis, and the relationship between settler colonialism 32
and white supremacy. Significant rejoinders to the Afro-pessimist 33
position have emerged from both Indigenous and ethnic studies. J. 34
Kēhaulani Kauanui, writing for an American Quarterly roundtable 35
on Wolfe’s legacy, recently critiqued the Afro-pessimist insistence 36
on the Black body’s lack of agency as a position marked by a “stat- 37
38
39
Alex Trimble Young 77 40
1 ic [racial] ontology” that not only dehistoricizes the complexities
2 of racial and colonial violence but “destroys the possibility for co-
3 alitional politics” through “ontological absolutism” (Wolfe qtd. in
4 Kauanui 257; Kauanui 263). Iyko Day, in a recent Critical Ethnic Stud-
5 ies article, approaches the strident binarism of both Sexton and
6 Wolfe as axes that might be incorporated into broader intersection-
7 al analyses rather than as structural trump cards that diminishes
8 the significance of the violence of the other (103).
9 This ongoing conversation regarding the limits and possibilities
10 of “settler” as a category is one to which scholars of western
11 American literature are uniquely positioned to contribute. The work
12 of postwestern studies to transnationalize the practice of critical
13 regionalism, and to denaturalize the assumptions undergirding
14 the regionalist critique of frontier studies, has primed the field
15 for a more robust engagement with Indigenous and settler
16 colonial studies as well as the transnational study of empire more
17 broadly.3 Beyond the academy, authors writing in and about the
18 West—especially those who do not conform to the norms of the
19 settler state—have long been thinking, in narrative and poetic
20 terms, about how settler colonialism has shaped racial and sexual
21 identities. Whether in the allegory of Indigenous resurgence
22 presented in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes, the queer
23 frontiers of Jack Spicer’s Billy the Kid, or the brilliant reversal of
24 genre norms enacted in Indigenous Australian filmmaker Ivan
25 Sen’s 2016 Western Goldstone, the diverse archive of transnational
26 cultural production that both celebrates and critiques “westness”
27 engages with these issues in ways that can help us map the contours
28 of settler colonialism as a structure and envision the decolonial
29 modes of relation that could dismantle settler colonialism and its
30 coconstitutive structures of oppression.
31
Alex Trimble Young is an honors faculty fellow in Barrett, the Honors College at
32
Arizona State University. His articles can be found in journals including a/b: Auto/
33 Biography Studies, Social Text, and Western Historical Quarterly.
34
35 Notes
36
1. For an overview of the Indigenous feminist analysis of gendered violence in
37 the service of the logic of elimination, and certain forms of white feminism’s com-
38
39
plicity with that project, see Kimberley Robertson, “Rerighting Historical Record: 1
Violence Against Native Women and the South Dakota Coalition Against Domestic 2
Violence and Sexual Assault.” For an expansive analysis of the role of heteronor- 3
mative imperatives in structuring US Indian policy, see Mark Rifkin, When Did the
4
Indians Become Straight? For a consideration of how queer affect can be co-opted
into the service of the logic of elimination, see Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne’s analysis of
5
queerness and Indigeneity in “Animating the Indigenous, Colonial Affects, and 6
‘Going Native’ in Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles” (88–90). 7
2. Another notable example of a scholar who rejects “settler” as a category is 8
Australian Indigenous scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson, who focuses on critiqu- 9
ing whiteness in her analysis of global Indigenous struggles against empire, The 10
White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty.
11
3. For an overview of postwestern scholarship’s multifaceted critique, see Post-
western Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space, edited by Susan Kollin. For a more com- 12
plete account of Western regionalism’s engagement with settler colonial studies to 13
date, see Alex Trimble Young and Lorenzo Veracini, “If I am Native to Anything: 14
Settler Colonial Studies and Western American Literature.” 15
16
Works Cited 17
Byrd, Jodi. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. U of Minne- 18
sota P, 2011. 19
Day, Iyko. “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial
20
Critique.” Critical Ethnic Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, fall 2015, pp. 102–21.
Goldstone. Directed by Ivan Sen, Bunya Productions, Dark Matter, 2016.
21
Guidotti-Hernandez, Nicole M. Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican 22
National Imaginaries. Duke UP, 2011. 23
Kahuanui, J. Kēhualani. “Tracing Historical Specificity: Race and the Colonial Pol- 24
itics of (In)Capacity.” American Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 2, 2017, pp. 257–65. 25
Kollin, Susan, editor. Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space. U of Nebraska 26
P, 2007.
27
Mo’e’hahne, Ho’esta. “Animating the Indigenous, Colonial Affects, and ‘Going
Native’ in the City: Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles.” Western American Literature, 28
vol. 52, no. 1, 2017, pp. 75–94. 29
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous 30
Sovereignty. U of Minnesota P, 2015. 31
Olguin, B. V. “Caballeros and Indians: Mexican American Whiteness, Hegemonic 32
Mestizaje, and Ambivalent Indigeneity in Proto Chicana/o Autobiographical
33
Discourse, 1858–2008.” MELUS, vol. 38, no. 1, 2013, pp. 30–49.
Rifkin, Mark. When Did the Indians Become Straight? Oxford UP, 2010. 34
Robertson, Kimberly. “Rerighting Historical Record: Violence Against Native 35
Women and the South Dakota Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexu- 36
al Assault.” Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 27, no. 2, 2012, pp. 21–47. 37
38
39
Alex Trimble Young 79 40
1 “Settler.” Oxford Living Dictionary. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/set-
2 tler. Accessed 17 Aug. 2017.
3 Sexton, Jared. “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign.” Criti-
cal Sociology, vol. 42, nos. 4–5, Dec. 2014, pp. 583–97.
4
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Gardens in the Dunes. Simon and Schuster, 1999.
5 Spicer, Jack. Billy the Kid. Enkidu Surrogate, 1959.
6 Trask, Haunani-Kay. “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony: ‘Locals’ in
7 Hawaii.” Amerasia Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, 2000, pp. 1–24.
8 Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Palgrave Macmillan,
9 2010.
10 Wolfe, Patrick. “Recuperating Binarism: A Heretical Introduction.” Settler Colonial
Studies, vol. 3, nos. 3–4, 2013, pp. 257–79. doi:10.1080/2201473X.2013.830587.
11
—. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Geno-
12 cide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006, pp. 387–409.
13 Young, Alex Trimble, and Lorenzo Veracini. “If I am Native to Anything: Settler
14 Colonial Studies and Western American Literature.” Western American Litera-
15 ture, vol. 52, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–23.
16
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36
37
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39
1
2
“Sovereignty” 3
4
5
Kirby Lynn Brown
6
7
8
9
In social science, political theory, and philosophy, “sovereignty” 10
is variously understood as a power inherent and exclusive to 11
states; as a theory of internal political authority and external 12
independence; and as a more general discourse of claims states 13
make about themselves and their relations to other states (Brierly; 14
Hinsley). It has its origins in late medieval conflicts between church 15
and secular governments, in Renaissance and Enlightenment 16
debates between the divine rights of kings and natural law, and in 17
conflicts between emergent European states competing over lands 18
and resources possessed by peoples they’d never heard of, couldn’t 19
account for, and didn’t understand (Williams, American; Deloria and 20
DeMaille; Deloria and Wilkins). Along with papal bulls and doctrines 21
of discovery and conquest, sovereignty is a foundational principle 22
of international law and forms the basis for understandings of 23
land-as-
political-
territory and of what constitutes legitimate 24
actors within that system (Brierly; Anghie; Leeds; Jackson). Not 25
surprisingly, sovereignty has been used to rationalize everything 26
from popular revolution and fascist repression to religious conflict 27
and secular revolt and from imperial conquest and decolonial 28
resistance to political isolationism and expansionist intervention 29
(Hannum; Krasner). In this framing, sovereignty is an origin story 30
not unlike the horrific narrative of witchery, fear, paranoia, death, 31
and destruction released into the world in Laguna novelist, poet, 32
and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. The multiply occupied 33
and colonized Indigenous homelands we now know as the settler 34
states of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand/ 35
Aotearoa bear the historical traces and contemporary consequences 36
of these histories. 37
The “survivance” of tribal nations—that is, their active, five 38
39
40
1 hundred-year-old struggles for survival, continuance, resistance,
2 and resurgence—also points to what White Earth Anishinaabe
3 writer and theorist Gerald Vizenor might term a “postindian”
4 “trickster hermeneutic” at work in the ways in which sovereignty
5 has been taken up in Indian Country and within Native Studies
6 in service of Indigenous peoples’ original and inherent rights
7 to self-determination (Vizenor, Manifest and Fugitive; Wilkins
8 and Stark). Though falling away somewhat in the onslaught of
9 allotment and termination from the late- nineteenth through
10 mid-twentieth centuries, Indigenous sovereignty reemerged as
11 a response to termination policies of the 1950s and ’60s and as a
12 strategy to demand fishing and treaty rights, urban Indian access
13 to services, demands for BIA reform, and a return to treaty/trust
14 relationships with the federal government (Deloria, Custer; Porter;
15 Barker; A. Cobb). This activism, taking place at both intensely local
16 and expansively national levels, led directly to a shift in federal
17 policy toward self-determination and a series of legislative actions
18 from the 1970s into the 2010s to protect American Indian treaty
19 and civil rights, religious freedoms, economic development, child
20 welfare, artistic production, and prosecutorial authority to name
21 but a few (Deloria, Behind; Smith and Warrior; Cobb and Fowler;
22 D. Cobb; Shreve). Such acts include the Indian Civil Rights Act
23 (1968), Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act
24 (1975), American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978), Indian
25 Child Welfare Act (1978), Native American Graves Protection and
26 Repatriation Act (1990), Indian Arts and Crafts Act (1990), and
27 the Violence Against Women Act (2013). Sovereignty also provided
28 the legal and discursive basis for tribal governments to grow and
29 strengthen their political autonomy, mobilize resources for cultural
30 revitalization and resource management projects, (re)gain federal
31 recognition, and contest the actions of an increasingly hostile
32 Supreme Court (Wilkins; Wilkins and Lomawaima; Williams,
33 Like). While such efforts don’t reflect “traditional” forms of Native
34 governance, and while tribal sovereignty itself is a hotly contested
35 topic in federal courts and across Indian Country alike, they
36 nevertheless constitute what Anishinaabe scholar Scott Richard
37 Lyons has called “x-marks,” qualified assents to modernity under
38
39
conditions not of one’s own making but in the hope that something 1
good, innovative, and productive might come of them (X-Marks). 2
Drawing upon these legal and political contexts, Native and 3
allied scholars over the past two decades have put sovereignty to 4
work for a variety of political, intellectual, and methodological 5
projects. Indigenous literary and cultural studies scholars 6
redirected critical attention from questions of identity and 7
authenticity toward more pressing issues of self-governance, legal 8
and political jurisdiction, and questions of nationhood, citizenship, 9
and belonging (Cook-Lynn, Why and Anti-Indian; Weaver, Womack, 10
and Warrior). While this body of work largely privileges a wide 11
array of Native intellectual and cultural contexts, rhetorical modes, 12
representational strategies, and expressive forms, it has done so 13
across tribally specific (Womack; Justice; Nelson), comparative 14
(Weaver, That the People; C. Allen, Blood; Brooks; Cox; Piatote; 15
Goeman), and broadly transnational frameworks (Huhndorf, 16
Mapping; Bauerkemper and Stark; C. Allen, TransIndigenous; 17
Bauerkemper). We now speak of intellectual sovereignty (Warrior), 18
representational sovereignty (Weaver), visual sovereignty (Raheja), 19
cultural sovereignty (Singer), rhetorical sovereignty (Lyons 20
“Rhetorical”), sitcom sovereignty (Tahmahkera), sovereign selves 21
(Carlson), sovereign erotics (Driskill et al.; Rifkin Erotics), sovereign 22
bodies (L. Simpson), temporal sovereignty (Rifkin, Beyond), and 23
a host of other conceptual framings. Additionally, sovereignty 24
has also served as a theoretical site from which to critique settler 25
colonial power and the practices through which it legitimizes 26
authority by domesticating Indigenous lands, nations, and 27
bodies (Bruyneel; Rifkin, Manifesting; Byrd; Piatote); subsuming 28
Indigenous political identities as racial/ethnic minorities (Barker, 29
Wilkins, and Stark); criminalizing Indigenous political resistance 30
(A. Simpson); or advancing rhetorics of reconciliation and healing 31
absent meaningful structural, political, and economic reforms 32
(Million; Coulthard). 33
Though at its best this large body of work maintains a healthy 34
suspicion of nationalist discourse, interventions by scholars 35
working in Indigenous feminist (P. Allen; Maracle; Huhndorf 36
Mapping; Suzack and Huhndorf.; Deer; L. Simpson), queer and two 37
38
39
Kirby Lynn Brown 83 40
1 spirit (Rifkin, Justice, and Schneider; Driskill et al.; Rifkin, Settler;
2 Tatonetti), and critical transnational studies have levied important
3 critiques at the limits of strictly nationalist, separatist, or overly
4 zealous sovereignty frameworks. Similarly, those engaged in tribal
5 resurgence and decolonization theories have questioned whether
6 and to what degree a concept anchored to coercive authority and
7 tied to empire, colonialism, extractive capitalism, and modes of
8 state recognition can support decolonization efforts (Alfred, Wasáse
9 and Peace; Corntassel and Witmer; Coulthard; Nelson; Rifkin,
10 “Making”; Sharma). Still others worry that sovereignty has become
11 so ubiquitous, so detached from its political and legal contexts, that
12 it risks losing all practical, real-world utility (Deloria, “Intellectual”;
13 Forbes; A. Cobb). If, on the one hand, we can view controversies
14 over disenrollment and expulsion, gender discrimination, racial
15 disenfranchisement, and capitalist exploitation as examples of
16 how tribal sovereignty can work internally against decolonization
17 interests, the persistence of backroom exchanges of tribal lands,
18 ongoing disruptions of Indian families, refusals to meaningfully
19 consult tribal nations in public policy, and the arbitrary exercise of
20 plenary power, and state-sanctioned violence over Native lives and
21 lands suggest the ongoing and acute necessity of tribal sovereignty
22 as a defense of the legal and political boundaries Indigenous
23 communities, peoples, and nations depend upon for their survival.
24 Responsibly navigating these tensions and the relations they
25 produce (or foreclose) is one of the central challenges facing con-
26 temporary Native studies scholarship. It is also central to how we
27 understand and conceptualize American, western American, and
28 American hemispheric/regional studies as fundamentally contested
29 spaces and perhaps recover older, innovative visions of shared, plu-
30 ral sovereignties in what Michi Saagigg Nishnaabeg writer, scholar,
31 and theorist Leanne Simpson terms “this place where we all live
32 and work together” (19). In this sense, tribal sovereignty in its more
33 capacious understandings constitutes what Choctaw writer and
34 theorist LeAnne Howe terms a tribalography, a “sacred third act . . .
35 for bringing things together, for making consensus, and for sym-
36 biotically connecting one thing to another” (46). To borrow from
37 Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday, tribal sovereignty might also be
38
39
seen as the most recent expression of the radical choice to conceive 1
a good idea of ourselves (4), to dare to imagine and determine over 2
and over again who and what we are and everything we might be as 3
Indigenous peoples, settlers, immigrants, arrivants, and relatives 4
responsible and accountable to all our relations. 5
6
Kirby Lynn Brown is an assistant professor of Native American literatures in the
7
department of English at the University of Oregon and an enrolled citizen of the
Cherokee Nation. He has published essays in contemporary Indigenous critical
8
theory, constitutional criticism in Native literatures, and Native interventions in 9
the Western and in modernist studies. His current book project, Stoking the Fire: 10
Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1907–1970 examines how four Cherokee writers 11
variously remembered, imagined, and enacted Cherokee nationhood in the period 12
between Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and tribal reorganization in the early 1970s. 13
14
Works Cited 15
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1993.
17
—. Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways to Action and Freedom. Broadview, 2005.
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Literary and Activist Texts. Duke UP, 2002. 19
—. Transindigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. U of 20
Minnesota P, 2012. 21
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian 22
Traditions. Beacon, 1986. 23
Anghie, Antony. Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law.
24
Cambridge UP, 2005.
Barker, Joanne. Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in 25
Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination. U of Nebraska P, 2005. 26
Bauerkemper, Joseph. “Indigenous Trans/Nationalism and the Ethics of Theory 27
in Native Literary Studies.” Oxford Handbook of Indigenous Literature, edited by 28
James H. Cox and Daniel Heath Justice. Oxford UP, 2014. pp. 395–408. 29
Bauerkemper, Joseph, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark. “The Trans/National
30
Terrain of Anishinaabe Law and Diplomacy.” Journal of Transnational
American Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2012, pp. 395–408. 31
Brierly, James. Law of Nations. 7th ed., Oxford UP, 2012. 32
Brooks, Lisa. The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. U of 33
Bruyneel, Kevin. The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.- 35
Indigenous Relations. U of Minnesota P, 2007.
36
Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. U of
Minnesota P, 2011.
37
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1 Carlson, David J. Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law. U of
2 Illinois P, 2005.
3 Cobb, Amanda J. “Understanding Tribal Sovereignty: Definitions, Conceptualiza-
tions, and Interpretations.” Joint issue of American Studies, vol. 46, nos. 3–4,
4
Fall–Winter 2004, and Indigenous Studies Today, vol. 1, Fall 2005–Spring 2006,
5 pp. 115–32.
6 Cobb, Daniel. Native Activism and Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty. U
7 of Kansas P, 2008.
8 Cobb, Daniel, and Loretta Fowler. Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics and
9 Activism Since 1900. School of Advanced Research, 2007.
10 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya’s
Earth. U of Illinois P, 2007.
11
—. Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice. U of
12 Wisconsin P, 1996.
13 Corntassel, Jeff, and Richard C. Witmer II. Forced Federalism: Contemporary Chal-
14 lenges to Indigenous Nationhood. U of Oklahoma P, 2011.
15 Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Rec-
16 ognition. U of Minnesota P, 2014.
Cox, James H. The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous
17
Mexico. U of Minnesota P, 2012.
18 Deer, Sarah. The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native
19 America. U of Minnesota P, 2015.
20 Deloria, Vine Jr. Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Inde-
21 pendence. 1974. U of Texas P, 1985.
22 —. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. 1969. U of Oklahoma P,
1988.
23
—. “Intellectual Self-Determination and Sovereignty: Looking at the
24 Windmills in Our Minds.” Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 13, no. 1, Spring 1998, pp.
25 25–31.
26 Deloria, Vine Jr., and Raymond J. DeMallie, editors. Documents of American Indian
27 Diplomacy: Treaties, Agreements, and Conventions, 1775–1979. Legal History of
28 North American Series. U of Oklahoma P, 1999.
Deloria, Vine Jr., and David E. Wilkins. Tribes, Treaties and Constitutional Tribula-
29
tions. U of Texas P, 1999.
30 Driskill, Qwo-Li, et al. Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory,
31 Politics, and Literature. U of Arizona P, 2011.
32 Forbes, Jack D. “Intellectual Self-Determination and Sovereignty: Implications for
33 Native Studies and for Native Intellectuals.” Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 13, no. 1,
34 Spring 1998, pp. 11–23.
35 Goeman, Mishuana. Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. U of
Minnesota P, 2013.
36
Hannum, Hurst. Autonomy, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination: The Accommoda-
37 tion of Conflicting Rights. U of Pennsylvania P, 1990.
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Hinsley, F. H. Sovereignty. 2nd ed., Cambridge UP, 1986. 1
Howe, Leanne. “The Story of America: A Tribalography.” Clearing a Path: Theoriz- 2
ing the Past in Native American Studies, edited by Nancy Shoemaker, Rout- 3
ledge, 2002, pp. 29–50.
4
Huhndorf, Shari. “Literature and the Politics of Native American Studies.” PMLA,
vol. 120, no. 5, 2005, pp. 1618–27.
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—. Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Indigenous Culture. 6
Cornell UP, 2009. 7
Jackson, Robert. Sovereignty: Evolution of an Idea. Polity, 2007. 8
Justice, Daniel Heath. Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History. U 9
of Minnesota P, 2006. 10
Krasner, Stephen D. Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton UP, 1999.
11
Leeds, Stacy L. “By Eminent Domain or Some Other Name: A Tribal Perspective
on Taking Land.” Tulsa Law Review, vol. 41, no. 1, 2005, pp. 51–78. 12
Lyons, Scott Richard. “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want 13
from Writing?” College Composition and Communication, vol. 51, no. 3, 2000, 14
pp. 447–68. 15
—. X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent. U of Minnesota P, 2010. 16
Maracle, Lee A. I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism. 1988.
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2nd ed., Pressgang Publishers, 2002.
Million, Diane. Therapeutic Nations: Healing in the Age of Human Rights. U of 18
Arizona P, 2014. 19
Momaday, N. Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain. U of New Mexico P, 2002. 20
Nelson, Joshua D. Progressive Traditions: Identity in Cherokee Literature and Cul- 21
ture. U of Oklahoma P, 2014. 22
Piatote, Beth H. Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American
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Literature. Yale UP, 2013.
Porter, Robert Odawi, editor. Sovereignty, Colonialism, and the Future of the
24
Indigenous Nations: A Reader. Carolina Academic P, 2004. 25
Raheja, Michelle H. Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Repre- 26
sentations of Native Americans in Film. U of Nebraska P, 2013. 27
Rifkin, Mark. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self- 28
Determination. Duke UP, 2017.
29
—. The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-
Determination. U of Minnesota P, 2012.
30
—. “Making Peoples into Populations: The Racial Limits of Tribal Sovereign- 31
ty,” Theorizing Native Studies, edited by Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith. 32
Duke UP, 2014, pp. 149–87. 33
—. Manifesting America: the Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space. 34
Oxford UP, 2009. 35
—. Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American
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Renaissance. U of Minnesota P, 2014.
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2 Nationality, and Indigeneity.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol.
3 16, nos. 1–2, 2010.
Sharma, Nandita. “Postcolonial Sovereignty.” Native Studies Keywords, edited by
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Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja. U of Arizona
5 P, 2015.
6 Shreve, Bradley G. Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the
7 Origins of Native Activism. U of Oklahoma P, 2012.
8 Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. Penguin, 1977.
9 Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler
10 States. Duke UP, 2014.
Simpson, Leanne. “The Place Where We All Live and Work Together: A Gendered
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Analysis of Sovereignty.” Native Studies Keywords, edited by Stephanie
12 Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja. U of Arizona P, 2015,
13 pp. 18–24.
14 Singer, Beverly R. Wiping the War Paint Off the Lens: Native American Film and Vid-
15 eo. U of Minnesota P, 2001.
16 Smith, Paul Chaat, and Robert Allen Warrior. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Move-
ment from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. The New Press, 1997.
17
Suzack, Cheryl, and Shari Huhndorf. Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics,
18 Activism, Culture. U of British Columbia P, 2010.
19 Tahmahkera, Dustin. Tribal Television: Viewing Native People in Sitcoms. U of North
20 Carolina P, 2014.
21 Tatonetti, Lisa. The Queerness of Native American Literature. U of Minnesota P,
22 2014.
Vizenor, Gerald. Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence. U
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of Nebraska P, 1998.
24 —. Manifest Manners: Postindian Narratives of Survivance. U of Nebraska P,
25 1999.
26 Warrior, Robert. Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions.
27 U of Minnesota P, 1994.
28 Weaver, Jace. That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native
American Community. Oxford UP, 1997.
29
Weaver, Jace, Craig S. Womack, and Robert Warrior. American Indian Literary
30 Nationalism. U of New Mexico P, 2006.
31 Wilkins, David E. American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The
32 Masking of Justice. U of Texas P, 1997.
33 Wilkins, David E., and K. Tsianina Lomawaima. Uneven Ground: American Indian
34 Sovereignty and Federal Law. U of Oklahoma P, 2002.
35 Wilkins, David E., and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark. American Indian Politics and
the American Political System. 3rd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2011.
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Williams, Robert A. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought. Oxford UP, 1
1992. 2
—. Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal 3
History of Racism in America. U of Minnesota P, 2005.
4
Womack, Craig. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. U of Oklahoma
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1
2
“Visuality” 3
4
5
Audrey Goodman
6
7
8
9
“Visuality” is “an old term for an old project,” Nicholas Mizroeff 10
claims (Right to Look 2). Originating in the discourse of military 11
theorists in the eighteenth century who needed to imagine mastery 12
of a complex battlefield, the term was coined by historian Thomas 13
Carlyle in 1840 to describe a great man as one who “could visualize 14
history as it happened” and maintain his authority through imagi- 15
native rather than material means (Mizroeff, Visual Culture Reader 16
xxx). More recently, visuality studies has moved toward more ex- 17
plicit interrogation of “that which authority wishes to conceal” and 18
the pursuit of activism at local and global levels (xxx). Mizroeff’s 19
identification of three major “complexes of visuality”—the plan- 20
tation complex, the imperial complex, and the military–industrial 21
complex—along with the diverse examples of global visuality stud- 22
ies in the third edition of The Visual Culture Reader (2013) further 23
mark the distance between “critical visuality studies” and the study 24
of art history.1 25
Located at the intersection of the “old project” of exposing colo- 26
niality and ongoing decolonial projects that approach images and 27
visual media as rich archival material for shaping new western fu- 28
tures, “visuality” has become a keyword in Western American lit- 29
erary studies because it specifies a flexible and interdisciplinary 30
method for exploring the geopolitical, social, cultural, and aesthet- 31
ic dimensions of vision. Visuality operates as an interface between 32
theoretical and political concepts of place and the many visual cul- 33
tural practices that have shaped these concepts; as it provides a 34
critical means of linking aesthetic and ethical concerns, it raises a 35
series of questions vital to our field: Can attention to the politics of 36
vision and spatial representation accomplish “a shift in the geo-and 37
body-politics of knowledge” (Mignolo 92)? How could we (re)locate 38
39
40
1 practices of seeing in place and in the body and thus “insist on the
2 embodied nature of all vision” (Haraway 356)? How do visual forms
3 of expression wield affective power?
4 Engaging visuality as a critical practice in western American
5 literary studies means, first, contending with colonial ways of
6 seeing time and space. Our collective work has investigated
7 histories of image production, circulation, and reception in relation
8 to the spatial imaginaries of settler colonialism, paying close
9 attention to the gaps, distortions, and discontinuities between
10 image and reality, “timeless” claims and historical contingencies.
11 If imagining any place requires integrating “information, images,
12 and ideas,” as Mizroeff describes the process of visualization
13 (Right to Look 2), critical interventions into regional imaginaries
14 require disaggregating those elements. Amy T. Hamilton and
15 Tom Hilliard’s Before the West Was West, for example, investigates
16 the deep cartographic and conceptual roots of the West prior to
17 the nineteenth century, the time when the “American West” took
18 shape; this important collection of essays reveals how the West “is
19 a triangulation of a place of earth, a moment in time, and an act of
20 visualization” (11).
21 Scholars in our field continue to recalibrate the concept of vi-
22 suality along many spatial and temporal scales, exploring how it
23 works in between and in conjunction with local and global net-
24 works. Many recent studies expose and interrogate imperial and
25 colonial practices of mapping at macro and micro levels: along vast
26 stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border (Irwin; Cox); beyond the con-
27 fines of the grid system (Campbell, “Critical Regionalism”); across
28 and beneath the Great Plains (Maher); within the network of ace-
29 quias in northern New Mexico (deBuys; Lynch); throughout the
30 tribal lands seized and renamed by white settlers (Goeman). Such
31 located scholarship puts practices of visualizing the US West in re-
32 lation and in motion, unsettling their origins and revealing social
33 and environmental crises otherwise overlooked.2
34 “Pop culture immediately raises questions of mobility and
35 assumptions about mobility” Krista Comer has argued, and recent
36 critical work in television and film studies asks which visual Wests
37 circulate and how widely. Morta Las Vegas by Nathaniel Lewis
38
39
and Stephen Tatum spins a single episode of CSI into a series of 1
questions about the nature of western identity and postregional 2
space, working at the interface between screen and city. Joanna 3
Hearne’s Native Recognition shows how Native directors, actors, 4
and writers have worked to reclaim the power of visual media and 5
redefine popular images of Native families. After viewers follow the 6
global travels of the spaghetti Western (Kollin); recognize women’s 7
centrality to the genre (Lamont); discover black Western race films 8
(Johnson); encounter the ghosts of history in post–World War II 9
cinema (Campbell, Post-Westerns); and recognize the television 10
drama Deadwood as a mother lode of profane language, haunting 11
images, and compelling stories (Graulich and Witschi), the West 12
as visualized through even the most familiar “Westerns” looks 13
profoundly different. 14
Visuality in western American literary studies also means 15
engaging with an astonishing range of forms: pictographs and 16
pictographic calendars, petroglyphs, maps, geological surveys, 17
grand landscape paintings, portrait paintings, photographs, 18
lantern slides, broadsides, ledger drawings, graphic books, film, 19
and video, among others. Research into any of these forms requires 20
working deeply in place, as well as comparatively, in order to 21
understand their cultural resonances and affective power; as Lucy 22
Lippard writes in The Lure of the Local, the field of place-centered 23
art “is necessarily interdisciplinary” (278). Among many examples, 24
consider Martha Sandweiss’s interrogation of the “illusive realism” 25
of western photography and the disjuncture between original 26
and present acts of seeing in Print the Legend; Stephen Tatum’s 27
meditation on paintings and the epistemology of vision in In the 28
Remington Moment, a book that approaches viewing itself as an 29
opportunity to dwell in threshold spaces and challenges readers 30
to consider how “artistic simulations transform the very objects, 31
events, and figures under scrutiny” (13); Chadwick Allen’s vigorous 32
methods of engaging multiple Indigenous aesthetics in Trans- 33
indigenous; and Priscilla Ybarra’s decolonial approach to Mexican 34
American writing in Writing the Goodlife that identifies a common 35
ethical stance toward the environment as its defining feature. By 36
delving into local or culturally specific epistemologies of vision and 37
38
39
Audrey Goodman 93 40
1 reframing them in new and comparative contexts, each of these
2 studies elucidates the function of the forms through which we
3 visualize US wests.3
4 Such transformations in the orientation, concept, and practice
5 of visuality are wonderfully evident in Denise K. Cummings’s
6 Visualities; Perspectives on Contemporary Indian American Indian Film
7 Art. Renaming the keyword in its plural form and rethinking the
8 ethics of visuality in relation to contemporary Native experience,
9 this collection includes essays by key contributors to WAL’s fiftieth
10 anniversary conference (Susan Bernardin, Joanna Hearne, and
11 Dean Rader) and moves beyond the familiar genealogy of the term
12 to reimagine visuality from multiple Indigenous perspectives. The
13 volume poses essential questions that should continue to trouble
14 and engage our field: “How have indigenous artists examined,
15 intervened in, and (re)constructed the shifting pasts of visuality?
16 What is the role of art in the creation and/or contestation of real
17 and/or perceived identities? What is art’s role in contemporary
18 cultural revitalization?” (xvi). This volume— like our fiftieth
19 anniversary conference in Reno—exemplifies a critical shift in
20 our field’s cross-disciplinary alliances through its attention to the
21 current and future power of images in everyday life across the
22 territory we consider the US West.
23
24 Audrey Goodman is a professor of English and an associate chair at Georgia State
University. She has published two books on literature and photography in the US
25
Southwest, Translating Southwestern Landscapes and Lost Homelands, and contrib-
26 uted to Postwestern Cultures, Blackwell’s Companion to the Literatures and Cultures
27 of the American West, and Cambridge’s History of Western American Literature. Her
28 recent essays include “Willa Cather’s Acoustic Archive” (Miranda), “Pathways into
29 the Borderlands” (Five Points), and “New Bohemias, California Style” (Left in the
30 West).
31
32 Notes
33 1. To measure this distance, see Vision and Visuality, proceedings from a sym-
34 posium on contemporary culture at the Dia Art Foundation in 1988, organized by
art historians and edited by Hal Foster.
35
2. Groundbreaking studies like Jake Kosek’s Understories: The Political Life of
36 Forests in Northern New Mexico (Duke UP, 2006) and Lucy Lippard’s Undermining: A
37 Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West (New Press, 2014)
38
39
also perform critical visual reorientations, insisting that we look vertically through 1
layers of time and space to find new routes toward environmental justice. 2
3. While most of our scholarship circulates in printed form, current digital 3
projects offer exciting prospects for creative engagement with regional visuali- 4
ties. Consider Nicholas Bauch’s Enchanting the Desert, <www.enchantingthedesert
5
.com/home>; Kim Stringfellow’s Mojave Project, <mojaveproject.org>; Matika Wil-
bur’s Project 562, <www.project562.com>; Susan Harbage Page’s U.S.–Mexico Bor- 6
der Project, <http://susanharbagepage.blogspot.com/p/us-mexico-border.html>; 7
and the Postcommodity Collective’s A Very Long Line, <http://postcommodity.com 8
/AVeryLongLine.html>. 9
10
Works Cited 11
Allen, Chadwick. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. 12
U of Minnesota P, 2012. 13
Campbell, Neil. “Critical Regionalism, Thirdspace, and John Brinckerhoff 14
Jackson’s Western Cultural Landscapes.” Susan Kollin, editor. Postwestern
15
Cultures: Theory, Literature, Space, U of Nebraska P, 2007, pp. 59–81.
—. Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. U of Nebraska P, 2013. 16
—. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, 17
Global, Media Age. U of Nebraska P, 2011. 18
Comer, Krista. “Thinking Otherwise Across Global Wests: Issues of Mobility and 19
Feminist Critical Regionalism.” Occasion, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1–18. <http:// 20
arcade.stanford.edu/occasion/thinking-otherwise-across-global-wests-issues
21
-mobility-and-feminist-critical-regionalism>.
Cox, James H. Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexi- 22
co. U of Minnesota P, 2012. 23
Cummings, Denise K., editor. Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary Indian Film 24
and Art. Michigan State UP, 2011. 25
deBuys, William. River of Traps: A New Mexico Mountain Life. Trinity UP, 2007. 26
Elkins, James, Sunil Manghani, and Gustav Frank, editors. Farewell to Visual Stud-
27
ies. Penn State UP, 2015.
Foster, Hal, editor. Vision and Visuality. Dia Art Foundation/Bay Press, 1988.
28
Goeman, Mishuana. Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. U of 29
Graulich, Melody, and Nicholas Witschi, editors. Dirty Words in Deadwood: Litera- 31
ture and the Postwestern. U of Nebraska P, 2013. 32
Greiman, Jennifer, and Paul Stasi, editors. The Last Western: Deadwood and the
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End of American Empire. Bloomsbury Academic, 2012.
Hamilton, Amy T., and Tom J. Hilliard, editors. Before the West Was West: Critical
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Essays on Pre-1800 Literature of the American Frontiers. U of Nebraska P, 2014. 35
Haraway, Donna. “The Persistence of Vision.” Visual Culture Reader. 3rd ed., edited 36
by Nicholas Mizroeff, Routledge, 2013, pp. 356–62. 37
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Hearne, Joanna. Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western. State U of
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New York P, 2012.
2 Irwin, Robert. Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints: Heroines of Mexico’s
3 Northwest Borderlands. U of Minnesota P, 2007.
4 Johnson, Michael K. Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the
5 African American West. UP of Mississippi, 2015.
6 Kollin, Susan. Captivating Westerns: The Middle East in the American West. U of
Nebraska P, 2015.
7
Kosek, Jake. Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico. Duke
8 UP, 2006.
9 Lamont, Victoria. Westerns: A Women’s History. U of Nebraska P, 2016.
10 Lewis, Nathaniel, and Stephen Tatum. Morta Las Vegas: CSI and the Problem of the
11 West. U of Nebraska P, 2017.
12 Lippard, Lucy. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. The
13 New Press, 1998.
—. Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Chang-
14
ing West. The New Press, 2014.
15 Lynch, Tom. Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature. Texas
16 Tech UP, 2008.
17 Maher, Susan. Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains. U of
18 Nebraska P, 2014.
19 Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial
Options. Duke UP, 2011.
20
Mizroeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke UP, 2011.
21 —, editor. The Visual Culture Reader. 3rd ed., Routlege, 2013.
22 Sandweiss, Martha. Print the Legend: Photography and the American West. Yale UP,
23 2004.
24 Tatum, Stephen. In the Remington Moment. U of Nebraska P, 2010.
25 Ybarra, Priscilla. Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environ-
ment. U of Arizona P, 2016.
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methodologies 1
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Lines of Sight in the Western 3
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Joanna Hearne
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Let me start out by stating the most obvious possible fact about 10
cinema in general: it was made for our eyes and is organized around 11
our patterns of ocular attention, especially lines of sight, both in its 12
apparatus of exhibition involving machines, celluloid, and light and 13
also in its grammar of visual storytelling. Lines of sight orient us 14
to human actions, social relations, spatial relations, and relations 15
to that imagined environment, or landscape, that we call setting. 16
They inform the basic building blocks of film language, including 17
fundamental editing patterns of shot / reverse shot, eyeline match- 18
es, point-of-view shots, and reaction shots, as well as composition- 19
al conventions such as “eye room” and balance. Lines of sight also 20
direct our attention within static or mobile shots, often through 21
various kinds of suggestive mimicry of human vision such as sub- 22
jective shots or on-screen vision-enhancing props like binoculars, 23
telescopes, or rifle sights. Our movies are always telling us about 24
ways of seeing. 25
That quintessential, originary cinematic genre, the Western, 26
is built with the same tools as other kinds of cinema, but the 27
Western is unique in the way that it marries lines of sight to the 28
territoriality of its putative location. Of course this landscape 29
is symbolic, and places in the West are often represented using 30
practices of substitution (Monument Valley for Texas in The 31
Searchers, for example). The system of illusion involves backstage 32
production and an onstage that is “captioned” in order to activate 33
our imagined West. These imagined lands are the heart of this 34
storytelling genre—both the ground upon which its struggles take 35
place and the stake to be won or lost in that struggle, as Stuart Hall 36
says of popular culture. Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued 37
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11 Fig. 1. Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis), a settler colonial sharpshooter “gone Native”
in The Last of the Mohicans, 1992.
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14 that American character was defined through the frontier, the
15 “existence of an area of free land” (1), but of course Westerns, for
16 all their exaggerations, show us that the land was not free; rather,
17 it was taken by violence because Westerns, as a rule, are about
18 conquest, theft of land, and subsequent crises of settler legitimacy
19 on that stolen land.
20 I begin here with a discussion of how Westerns—a dominant
21 film genre if there ever was one—privilege certain forms of opposi-
22 tionality over other kinds of social encounters on the land. A quick
23 overview of some “looking relations” involving lines of sight in the
24 classic Western reveals its genealogical descent from imperial travel
25 writing, which, as Mary Louise Pratt demonstrated some time ago
26 in her book Imperial Eyes, has long relied on the vision of the colo-
27 nizing figure, the look wielded by the “Master of all I survey” upon
28 the New World landscape, whether that land is imagined as empty
29 or populated by Indigenous peoples. In Westerns, mechanistic ex-
30 tensions of human vision—occasionally survey transits or binoc-
31 ulars but most often the gunsights of a rifle—remake that human
32 vision into a form of domination, empowered with settler colonial
33 force. The power of visual storytelling itself is signified by the abil-
34 ity of the gun to translate a sharpshooter’s vision into destructive
35 action in the material world. The shooter’s gendered and racially
36 coded gaze, amplified by devices that are also metaphors for the
37 moving picture camera, is a structural part of the well-established
38 “gun/camera trope.”
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Fig. 2. Ringo Kid (John Wayne) in Stagecoach, 1939.
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For the sharpshooter—or even just your average Western gun- 19
slinger, for they are all good shots—the detecting gaze and the 20
use of force travel the same route. Like a camera, the rifle’s hyper- 21
bolic gunsights tell the story of our interaction with an imagined 22
landscape, characterizing that interaction as a form of subjugation 23
dependent upon the relationship of seeing to action. Characters 24
leverage surveying, aiming, and other forms of machine-enhanced 25
visual reconnaissance into narrative mastery through “shooting.” 26
This gun/camera trope has been understood by theorists such as 27
Susan Sontag, Donna Haraway, and Roland Barthes within a larger 28
theoretical framework associating photography with death. In On 29
Photography, for example, Susan Sontag calls the camera “a sublima- 30
tion of the gun” that functions as both “a predatory weapon” and a 31
“fantasy-machine” (14). Film historian Cynthia Erb, writing about 32
adventure films such as King Kong, connects the “camera-as-gun” 33
phenomenon (in which photographing substitutes for killing exotic 34
animals) with explorers’ expeditions into New World landscapes. 35
I am particularly interested in the way that the gun/camera trope 36
orchestrates a form of overdetermined oppositionality, resituating 37
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Joanna Hearne 99 40
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18 Fig. 3. Oppositional placement, Winchester ’73, 1950.
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29 Fig. 4. Elevation, Hombre, 1967.
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Fig. 5. Cover, Hombre, 1967.
human social relations within cinematic space (in the Western 1
this would be the frontier landscape). The Western’s encounters 2
are mediated by a machine that organizes and enforces directional 3
aim along a single line of sight. And since cameras only point in 4
one direction, we are always adopting oppositional patterns of 5
interaction in the cinema’s continual representations of encounter, 6
conversation, binarism, and dialectic. Hence, many discussions of 7
the Western are very schematic (including mine, here), which is one 8
reason the genre was a proving ground for structuralist analyses 9
in the 1970s. This oppositionality of the gun/camera influences the 10
meaning of actions depicted by cinematic shooting and editing, 11
including shot / reverse shot, reaction shots, and other forms 12
of film grammar as well as the on-screen gun. Of course as an 13
editing technique, shot / reverse shot can also work to bring two 14
characters into a more friendly relationship, fostering dialogue, 15
diplomacy, or even a sense of intimacy. But once a rifle comes into 16
the picture, these social relations of the camera take on the more 17
menacing tenor of the social relations of the gun, interjecting 18
a more antagonistic, violent set of narrative possibilities. This 19
element of force undergirds the Western’s much-noted structure 20
of opposites (the black hat and white hat, vigilante and sheriff, 21
garden and wilderness, farmer and rancher, etc.), while naturalizing 22
its representations of oppositional systems of justice involving 23
force against opposing force and frequent plots of vigilantism and 24
punitive revenge. 25
The visual dynamic of the “gun/camera” has several implications 26
for the development of the Western’s characteristic spatial relation- 27
ships. First, there is a pervasive emphasis on position and direction 28
(the elements of lines of sight), privileging the value of singularity 29
(the individual target), oppositional placement, elevation, and cov- 30
er. Second, the general importance of speed and accuracy along a 31
single trajectory emphasizes visual acuity and aim (shooting from 32
the hip or rifle sight). Accuracy requires a discerning and competent 33
gaze, skilled in detecting and tracking the position of a target and 34
then identifying and extracting the life of that target. Thus “aim” 35
also involves sorting targets from nontargets (and good from bad) 36
using both judgment and the translative force of the gun to enforce 37
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Joanna Hearne 101 40
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18 Fig. 6. Shooting wild horses in Billy Jack, 1971.
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Fig. 8. In the crosshairs of the rifle sight, Billy Jack, 1971. 18
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that judgment. Lastly, these mechanisms of aim, and the need for 20
the discerning accuracy and ability to read tracks on the ground, are 21
generally embedded in larger moral frameworks and imbricated in 22
operations of law or lawlessness. My point is not only that violence 23
in the Western is highly spatially organized but also that, whether 24
aggressive or defensive, the Western’s positional violence is freight- 25
ed with moral discourses of conquest, including ideologies of civili- 26
zation and savagery as well as criminality, vigilantism, and systems 27
of legal justice. (This larger significance reveals the singularity of 28
the sharpshooter’s target to be somewhat illusory). Viewers’ appre- 29
hension of the landscape in the Western are organized by these so- 30
cial relations of the screen, signaled by ocular attention. 31
The Western genre’s defining production of the “western” land- 32
scape and its occupants is mediated by the spatial and visual ele- 33
ments of the gun/camera, machines of vision and action. The work 34
of the sharpshooter’s bullet—to pluck the life of a single organism 35
from amid massive, open vistas—creates a relationship among 36
characters in the genre that is (to put it mildly) oppositional. This 37
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18 Fig. 9. Look’s arrow in The Searchers, 1956.
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21 pattern organizes the visual structure of settler colonial “encoun-
22 ters” with North American lands, Indigenous peoples, and animals
23 imagined in the genre as well.
24 Ultimately, the gun/camera trope organizing lines of sight con-
25 tributes to the way the Western genre transforms “landscape” into
26 a threatening unknown signified by another important element of
27 cinematic language, offscreen space—the implied space outside the
28 boundaries of the film frame. The construction of offscreen space
29 is important to cinema generally and to a number of different
30 kinds of genre films—not only Westerns but also, of course, hor-
31 ror and thrillers. To keep our focus on Westerns—Peter Lehman, in
32 his analysis of John Ford’s masterful use of offscreen space in The
33 Searchers, observes that, unlike a play, one could never understand
34 the action of the film just by reading the script (400). Offscreen
35 space is necessary to the film’s visual storytelling in that some of
36 the most suspenseful moments and revelations of narrative in-
37 formation happen not through dialogue but rather images that
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Fig. 10. Lucy (Pippa Scott), The Searchers 1956. 18
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knit together onscreen characters with that larger implied fron- 21
tier setting. Critic Armando José Prats, too, has thoroughly parsed 22
the way that offscreen space is associated with Indian characters 23
through synecdochical signs—such as arrows shot from offscreen 24
that indicate Indian presence while also visualizing their absence— 25
populating the offscreen (frontier) space with unseen threat (25). 26
André Bazin once wrote that “the Western has virtually no use 27
for the close-up, or even the medium shot” (147), but I disagree: 28
constructing this sense of landscape as offscreen space requires 29
another cinematic element organizing lines of sight—the reaction 30
shot (147). We understand the landscape and the threats it contains 31
by reading the faces of human figures as they apprehend the vistas 32
before them. Thus we imagine offscreen space not only by looking 33
at land but also by looking at people looking at land, as we regis- 34
ter characters’ assessments in reaction shots. Our understanding 35
of the cinematic landscape is a social rather than solitary phenom- 36
enon. Some of the Western’s characteristic reaction shots are com- 37
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1 mon to other genres, such as the terrified look offscreen that is so
2 essential to the horror film. For example, in The Searchers, Lucy’s re-
3 action shot tells us all that we need to know about what she fears is
4 outside the house, a scene dramatically withheld from the audience
5 through the ellipsis that follows. Reaction shots are all we get. In
6 Sergio Leone’s Italian Westerns, intense (and largely antagonistic)
7 social relations are indicated by the hyperbole of extreme close-ups
8 set off by long shots in vast desert landscapes, and these dramas
9 of frontier relations, criminality, and justice are heightened by the
10 context of isolation. New threats and surprises emerge from the
11 offscreen space, where, inevitably, hidden guns lurk as individuals
12 play games with binary systems of law and lawlessness in order to
13 skim off the bounty money.
14 In the Western, such close reaction shots and extreme long
15 shots work to suture offscreen space to settler colonial social rela-
16 tions and systems of law by implying a context of frontier land rife
17 with lawlessness and unfolding genocide. The constellation of film
18 grammars around the gun/camera line of sight in the Western also
19 supports variations in its narrative conventions, especially those—
20 in revisionist, pro-Indian, or “sympathetic” Westerns—that ac-
21 knowledge trauma. Settler women and youth are often the source
22 of reaction shots registering the damage of violence. As intermedi-
23 ary figures of colonial conquest over land and tribes, they function
24 narratively to justify (as threatened figures), enforce (as teachers),
25 and reform (as witnesses), a range of settler colonial projects on the
26 frontier. White women are both objects of and obstacles to white
27 male vision, while also possessing a settler gaze themselves, of
28 which Indians are the objects. Their mediating work is materialized
29 in their physical positioning between white men and Indian char-
30 acters in revisionist Westerns of the 1920s (The Vanishing American,
31 Redskin) and 1960s–70s (Cheyenne Autumn, Soldier Blue, Hombre).
32 In sympathetic Westerns, women’s gazes have a special social
33 function as the moral compass of reform for white subjects. In
34 these films’ “humanizing” discourse, Indian characters are “made
35 human” by white viewing subjects in various ways. However,
36 romanticized representations also do violence, by aggressively
37 defining and limiting what audiences understand to be Indigenous.
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Fig. 11. “Get out of the way, please get out of the way!” Hombre, 1967.
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Fig. 12. “Get that white woman outta there!” Soldiers drag Chresta (Candace
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Bergen) away from Cheyenne women and children and hold her back so they can
shoot without hitting her, Soldier Blue, 1970. 24
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Instead of hostile savages, Indians are positioned as victims via 27
a sympathetic gaze. White characters’ ways of looking in these 28
Westerns—the sympathetic gaze, the elegiac gaze, the curious 29
ethnographic gaze, the imperialist nostalgic gaze— are more a 30
mechanism for differentiating settlers from one another than for 31
presenting Indigenous perspectives. In the revisionist Westerns of 32
the 1970s, POV shots through a rifle sight are sometimes physically 33
blocked by a white woman in the midst of settler atrocities. An 34
example is Audra Favor (played by Barbara Rush) in the 1967 film 35
Hombre, whose presence as a hostage prevents a sharpshooter from 36
providing covering fire for the white Apache adoptee John Russell 37
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1 (Paul Newman) in a tense standoff. Another example of this mise-
2 en-scène is Chresta (played by Candice Bergen) in the 1970 film
3 Soldier Blue, who presents an obstacle to a clear shot during the
4 final massacre.
5 As witnessing figures for the Western genre’s processing of
6 traumatic scenes of conquest, these settler women form obstacles
7 to rifle shots (and obscure the camera’s line of sight) while also
8 themselves viewing the scene of trauma as participants with, at
9 times, an affective colonial sympathy, interrupting the delivery
10 of one form of settler logic (the oppositional exertion of force)
11 with another form (the pose of colonial benevolence). In addition
12 to these “women-in-the-way,” young male characters, new to the
13 West, witness frontier atrocities and register their horror for
14 viewers—such as Frank Hopkins (played by Viggo Mortensen)
15 witnessing the aftermath of the massacre at Wounded Knee in
16 Hidalgo or Peter Strauss witnessing the massacre in Soldier Blue or
17 even (though not so young) Iron Eyes Cody, the Italian American
18 actor Oscar DeCorti, as the “Crying Indian” who provided the “face”
19 of witnessing and the tear of sympathy in the widely circulated 1971
20 anti-littering television PSA. The history of the Western genre’s
21 particular lines of sight, delineating aggressor and victim along
22 the violent oppositionalities of a gun, underpin these intersecting
23 politics of playing Indian and playing witness, poses of affiliation
24 but not of accountability, since the position of white witness is one
25 of helpless looking rather than action.
26 In light of this oppositionality of the gun/camera trope, as it has
27 been instantiated in the Western and the history of images of In-
28 dians, we can ask how, when Indigenous directors take up domi-
29 nant genres, their cameras and lines of sight engage this legacy of
30 the cinematic Western’s grammar of looking and of violence. The
31 metaphor of the “reverse shot” is an established part of minority
32 and Indigenous film theory, from bell hooks’s influential essay “The
33 Oppositional Gaze,” about Black cinema viewers and filmmakers, to
34 film theorist E. Ann Kaplan’s interrogation of how film can be used
35 to “construct a complete reversal” of the imperial gaze (295). Māori
36 filmmaker Barry Barclay describes Indigenous cinema as “Fourth
37 Cinema”—that is, cinema of the Fourth World—by using an im-
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age of encounter related to shot / reverse shot. He suggests that 1
First Cinema (or dominant Hollywood cinema) is represented by 2
a metaphorical “camera of the ship’s deck,” while the Indigenous 3
camera is the “camera ashore.” It is a Pacific Islands metaphor that 4
we can understand in the North American context of camera op- 5
positionality as well. In their new collection of critical work on In- 6
digenous film, aptly titled Reverse Shots, Wendy Pearson and Susan 7
Knabe describe their goal to “bring to bear the ways in which In- 8
digenous filmmaking reverses or modifies the relationship between 9
camera and subject.” Indigenous cinema, they argue, performs a 10
“re-valuation of human relationships to land” by “seizing the cam- 11
era and its attendant technologies . . . to create reverse represen- 12
tations as projects of unsettling and decolonizing settler-colonial 13
cultures” using “structural reversals” and “creating reverse shots” 14
(16–17). With these scholars we can ask about the ways that Indig- 15
enous films use—or change—genre-based lines of sight to situate 16
film characters in alternative relationships to the land, the law, and 17
the camera. What are the consequences of the generic patterns out- 18
lined above for Indigenous films involving witnessing violence out 19
on the land, tracking culprits, and negotiating systems of justice? 20
Take, for example, the repurposed lawmen in Cheyenne/Arap- 21
aho director Chris Eyre’s first two feature films—the sheriff in 22
Smoke Signals, played by Tom Skerritt, seems at first antagonistic 23
to the Coeur d’Alene protagonists but in fact correctly identifies 24
the criminality of the white drunk driver and releases Victor (Adam 25
Beach) and Thomas (Evan Adams) to continue their journey, play- 26
ing against type despite the setting of his office, complete with a 27
John Wayne picture in the background. In the 2002 film Skins the 28
sheriff is Indigenous—the Lakota police officer Rudy, played by Eric 29
Schweig—who learns all the wrong lessons from the Westerns that 30
play on his home television and takes up vigilantism when legal po- 31
licing proves too limited. His police work reveals both his dedica- 32
tion to his community and also his alienation from it (as one neigh- 33
bor succinctly observes, “Fuck you Clint Eastwood”). 34
A range of newer Indigenous shorts and feature films also en- 35
gage in various subtle and overt ways with the genre. Dustinn 36
Craig’s short experimental film 4wheelwarpony (2008) revisits the 37
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Fig. 13. Dustinn Craig’s 4wheelwarpony, 2008.
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16 history of the Apache Scouts through costumed reenactment; Ra-
17 mona Emerson’s narrative short film about a kids’ bike club, Opal
18 (2011), adopts the visual style and setting of the Western (shot on
19 the Navajo reservation); and Jacob Floyd reflects on representa-
20 tions of Indians in Westerns using film clips in his short personal
21 essay film Tonto Plays Himself (2010). Blackhorse Lowe’s feature film
22 5th World (2005) includes a long conversation about John Ford, and
23 Neil Diamond’s full-length documentary Reel Injun (2009) narrates
24 the history of the genre through interviews with actors, directors,
25 stuntmen, costumers, and others. Andrew Okpeaha MacLean’s
26 short film Sikumi (2008) and feature film On the Ice (2011) deliber-
27 ately mimic the shot structure of Westerns (including internation-
28 al iterations of the genre such as Sergio Leone’s films), contrasting
29 extreme close-ups with extreme long shots and shifting the nar-
30 rative between the tight social spaces of small towns in the Arctic
31 and the vast expanse of the sea ice beyond them. MacLean explores
32 how two different systems of justice come into play when a crime
33 takes place—the Iñupiat concept of paallaqtautainniq involves find-
34 ing ways to resolve conflict without antagonism, while the newer,
35 imposed justice system involves opposition and the use of force
36 against opposing force.
37 I have argued elsewhere that Indigenous films are often
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Fig. 14. Andrew Okpeaha MacLean’s On the Ice, 2011. 10
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politically oppositional but semiotically articulated with dominant 12
cinema, appropriating shared film grammars and sign systems 13
for Indigenous purposes. Indigenous films that instantiate visual 14
sovereignty as Michelle Raheja has defined it—a “reading practice 15
for thinking about the space between resistance and compliance” 16
(193)—have the power to make visible the environmental horizons 17
of Hollywood genres, their aesthetics of substitution and redfacing, 18
and the limited purview of Westerns in which the law resides at 19
one or the other end of a gunsight. Indigenous sovereignty of 20
the camera, as an adaptive aesthetic practice, helps us see both 21
Western cinematic grammar and its potential for Indigenization— 22
the transmission and survival of Indigenous knowledge and justice 23
within the very generic forms intended to represent their demise. 24
25
Joanna Hearne teaches film and media studies at the University of Missouri. She 26
has published articles and book chapters on Indigenous film history, animation,
27
digital media, documentary, silent film, and Westerns, and she guest edited the
May 2017 special issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL) on Digital In- 28
digenous Studies: Gender, Genre and New Media. She’s also written two books about 29
Indigenous film: Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (State Uni- 30
versity of New York Press, 2012) and Smoke Signals: Native Cinema Rising (Univer- 31
sity of Nebraska Press, 2012). 32
33
Works Cited 34
Barclay, Barry. “Celebrating Fourth Cinema.” Illusions, vol. 35, Winter 2003, pp. 35
7–11. 36
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard
37
Howard, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981.
38
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1 Bazin, André. “The Western: Or the American Film Par Exellence.” What is Cine-
2 ma? Volume II, U of California P, 1971, pp. 140–48.
3 Erb, Cynthia. Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture. Wayne State
UP, 1998.
4
Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular.’” People’s History and Social-
5 ist Theory, edited by Samuel Raphael, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, pp.
6 227–40.
7 Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New
8 York City, 1908–1936.” The Haraway Reader, Routledge, 2003, pp. 151–98.
9 hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992.
10 Kaplan, E. Ann. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze.
Routledge, 2012.
11
Lehman, Peter. “Texas 1868/American 1956: The Searchers.” Close Viewings: An An-
12 thology of New Film Criticism, edited by Peter Lehman, Florida State UP, 1990,
13 pp. 387–415.
14 Pearson, Wendy Gay, and Susan Knabe. Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media
15 in an International Context. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014.
16 Prats, Armando José. Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western.
Cornell UP, 2002.
17
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge,
18 1992.
19 Raheja, Michelle. Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Represen-
20 tation of Native Americans in Film. U of Nebraska P, 2011.
21 Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Picador, 1973.
22 Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. Henry Holt, 1921.
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Outbreak from the 3
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Vaudeville Archive 5
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Christine Bold 7
with Monique Mojica, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel 8
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Dakota historian Philip Deloria has called Native peoples’ mak- 12
ing of popular culture “a secret history” that must be fully recovered 13
if we are to appreciate the centrality of Indigeneity to modernity 14
(Indians 14). How might a settler scholar contribute to this recov- 15
ery, given the long fetch of caricature, trivialization, and erasure? 16
Initially at WLA’s fiftieth anniversary conference, then in revised 17
and expanded form at the Native American and Indigenous Studies 18
Association (NAISA) Conference in June 2017, I laid out my particu- 19
lar recovery project, probing its methodology in substance and pre- 20
sentation style. Stripped to print, this lightly edited version of the 21
NAISA presentation loses the sounds of the Guna-R appahannock 22
theatre artists in video and audio clips (their Brooklyn accents, em- 23
phases and hesitations, laughter along the spectrum from anger to 24
joy, which filled the room and electrified the audience) and most of 25
the visual archive (the photographs), which provoked these emo- 26
tions and acute analyses. Nevertheless, this piece remains a record 27
of some practical methodological steps—listening, exchanging— 28
emerging from one contribution to recovering an archive of Indig- 29
enous modernities.1 30
To begin, let’s listen to Gloria Miguel and her daughter Monique 31
Mojica, senior Guna-R appahannock theatre artists. Gloria began 32
her performance career as a young girl working with her family as a 33
“show Indian” in 1930s Brooklyn. She describes an occasion when, 34
performing at the Canarsie Carnival, she was on her lunch break in 35
her performance regalia: 36
37
38
39
40
1 GLORIA: I remember one time when we were having spaghetti
2 and we all had this great big pot of spaghetti in the middle and
3 we were all dishing out and we were all eating—men, wom-
4 en, and children—eating our spaghetti, very happy. And the
5 crowds came around—these were adults and children, white
6 people, black people—and they went: “Oh! Look at the Indi-
7 ans! Look at the Indians! They’re eating spaghetti! The Indians
8 are eating spaghetti!” And people were looking. And the kids
9 were laughing—hee, hee—and the mothers and the fathers
10 were looking at us all. And this was like we were part of the
11 freak show. I don’t know if the freaks ate outside. And it was
12 something for them to crowd around and look at all of us eating
13 spaghetti.
I don’t remember all of the looks on the faces; I just remem-
14
ber the crowd and the feeling I had, the feeling I had as a little
15
kid eating spaghetti. I just wanted to disappear. I didn’t want . . .
16
I just followed my own feelings . . . I went into myself . . . I didn’t
17
like the idea of people looking at me eating spaghetti. (Summer
18 2010)2
19
20 MONIQUE: And I carry that. She transmitted that. (9 Novem-
21 ber 2015)
22
The scene that Gloria describes and Monique bears in her bones
23
carries the legacy of an earlier group who also “played Indian” un-
24
der conditions not of their own making.3 These were the “vaude-
25
ville Indians”: Indigenous entertainers who traveled global circuits
26
of vaudeville, variety, and Varieté between the 1880s and 1930s,
27
seizing the first transnational system of mass entertainment, the
28
quintessentially modern form, as one route to survivance in a time
29
of genocide. As a community, they have gone under the scholarly
30
radar; my aim is to follow their traces in institutional and digital
31
archives, ultimately to contribute to the recirculation of their in-
32
tersecting stories. The “vaudeville Indian” community constitutes a
33
key, still-missing piece of Deloria’s secret history.
34
In the development of and critical reflection on my contribution
35
to this recovery, two cautionary paradigms stand out. Australian
36
Aboriginal scholar Henrietta Fourmile has identified the unequal
37
38
39
power relations when the non-Aboriginal “broker” enjoys access 1
to “official” archives and resources, while “the historical Indian [re- 2
mains] the captive of the archives” (1). Deloria has analyzed how 3
Buffalo Bill Cody positioned himself in and beyond the Wild West 4
arena as orchestrator of Indigenous display by exploiting the per- 5
ceived threat of Indigenous “outbreak” (Indians 21, 60). In these cri- 6
tiques lie challenges to the process and presentation of this project 7
by this researcher. How to reshape brokerage into exchange— 8
discursive exchange grounded in material exchange (what Indige- 9
nous research methodologies call “relational accountability”)?4 How 10
to present archival recovery without showcasing or hiding the role 11
of the settler scholar? How not to become the Buffalo Bill of Indig- 12
enous archives? 13
The principles of Indigenous research methodologies are often 14
summarized as respect, responsibility, relevance, relationality, and 15
usefulness. Plains Cree and Saulteaux scholar Margaret Kovach 16
parses the last term: “Giving back involves knowing what ‘useful’ 17
means, and so having a relationship with the community, so that 18
the community can identify what is relevant, is key” (82). The com- 19
munity with whom I have been building relations of research ex- 20
change consists of Indigenous theater artists with deep links to 21
vaudeville, in familial legacy and performance techniques. My most 22
sustained conversations, and most profound debts, have been with 23
founding members of Toronto’s Turtle Gals Performance Ensem- 24
ble (1999–2008)—Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock), Mi- 25
chelle St. John (Wampanoag), and Jani Lauzon (Métis)—and of 26
New York’s Spiderwoman Theater (1976–)—Muriel Miguel (Guna- 27
Rappahannock); Gloria Miguel (Guna-R appahannock); and Lisa 28
Mayo (Guna-R appahannock), who sadly passed away in 2013.5 The 29
Miguel sisters, Monique Mojica’s mother and aunts, were born into 30
a Brooklyn show business family, going on to found the longest- 31
running Native theater company in North America and the longest- 32
running feminist collective in the world. All these artists have long 33
worked with archival and embodied research as part of their story- 34
weaving and creative practice. I’ve also recently entered into con- 35
versation with the Indigenous digitization project The People and 36
37
38
39
Christine Bold et al. 115 40
1 the Text, led by Cree-Métis scholar Deanna Reder, which will even-
2 tually facilitate the wider recirculation and, where appropriate, re-
3 patriation of “vaudeville Indian” stories.
4 Methodologically, I’ve moved back and forth between archives
5 and exchanges—following archival trails halfway across the world,
6 returning with materials and stories that I tell to Indigenous art-
7 ists. On the best of days, they tell me stories back. For the rest of
8 this piece, I’ll give a sense of this process in practice by sharing snip-
9 pets from conversations with Monique Mojica, Gloria Miguel, and
10 Muriel Miguel. I foreground two arcs over a six-year span. The Mi-
11 guel family’s responses go from showing how to read archival pho-
12 tographs to breaking them out of archival captivity through pro-
13 found acts of kinship reclamation. Threaded through this activity
14 is the ongoing and always incomplete negotiation of relationship,
15 from me nervously talking over Gloria, I’m embarrassed to say, to
16 learning to listen and look as a kind of proximate witness.
17 The performer who introduced me to “vaudeville Indians” was
18 Princess Chinquilla, the self-identified “Only US Reservation Indian
19 in Vaudeville.” I first encountered her through her 1904 letter to
20 Owen Wister, which lies, unanswered, in his institutional archives.
21 I took this letter to the Turtle Gals, who folded Chinquilla into their
22 show-in-development and shared, in turn, the historical performers
23 whom they were researching and re-embodying on stage. They also
24 introduced me to Gloria Miguel, whose life in Brooklyn overlapped
25 chronologically with Chinquilla’s in Queens. My burning question
26 for Gloria, motivated partly by the institutional context in which
27 I encountered Chinquilla’s archival remains, was: “Was Chinquilla
28 Indigenous or not?” and I brought an 1887 photograph to her
29 hoping for an answer.
30 This was Gloria’s immediate reaction:
31
32 CHRISTINE: This was the vaudeville card, you know the . . .
33 GLORIA: It’s the sell card; my father used to sell cards . . .
34
35 CHRISTINE: [talking over Gloria] OK. That’s her and A. B. New-
ell, the guy she married later, in that card.
36
37 GLORIA: She’s a good looking lady.
38
39
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5
6
7
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19
20
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22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Fig. 1. Princess Chinquilla and Ed Newell 16 December 1887, W. H. McGown 29
Collection of Theatrical Photographs. Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and 30
Manuscript Library/University of Georgia Libraries.
31
32
CHRISTINE: Yes, she is a good looking lady. (14 January 2012) 33
34
In this exchange lie at least two significant disconnects: Gloria is 35
trying to communicate the relevance of her father to this search and 36
I can’t hear it; her immediate frame of reference is not the classifi- 37
38
39
1 cation of Chinquilla’s Indigeneity but her beauty. This was the small
2 beginning of me learning to read these photographs otherwise.
3 Next is another case in which I asked for help—of Monique—
4 in reading signs of “Indianness” on the face in an early twentieth-
5 century publicity portrait:
6
7 CHRISTINE: Who would paint like that?
8 MONIQUE: [soft laughter] That’s not on his face, that’s not on
9 his face . . .
10
CHRISTINE: You’re right.
11
12 MONIQUE: . . . it’s on the photograph.
13 CHRISTINE: You’re absolutely right. That’s amazing. I can see it
14 now. It doesn’t curve round on his face.
15
[Laughter] (17 June 2013)
16
17 (I’ve since learned that he was Pawnee, billed elsewhere as “The
18 Versatile Indian.”) This instance embodies with peculiar directness
19 the overwriting of Indigeneity with colonialist fantasy and the
20 difficulty for the settler scholar (or at least this settler scholar) of
21 reading through that layer of fantasy.
22 In a later conversation, Monique puzzled over the inscription
23 on a 1903 cabinet card signed by Seneca performer Go- won-
24 go Mohawk. Monique’s reaction provides a tiny glimpse into
25 the creative process by which she regenerates archive through
26 performance:
27
28 MONIQUE: What does that say? “Aboriginally . . .
29
CHRISTINE: . . . yours”
30
31 MONIQUE: [laughter] That’s really funny. “Aboriginally yours.”
32 Sounds like a good name for a . . . a show. (9 November 2015)
33
34 A turn came in the process of research exchange when Monique
35 showed me a photograph from her own family archive. In it, her
36 grandfather—Lisa, Gloria, and Muriel’s father, who performed as
37 Eagle Eye—strikes a stock pose, bare-chested save for strands of
38 beads, his brow shaded with one hand, his other gesturing ahead.
39
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5
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23
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28
Fig. 2. Unidentified performer, Theater Biography Collection. Credit: Harry 29
Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 30
31
Among other points, Monique reflects on his costume, including 32
the traditional Guna fabric—the Mola: 33
34
MONIQUE: But, what I do see when I look at those older pho- 35
tographs, the family photographs of my grampa doing snake oil 36
shows or posing for tourists, what I see that here he is a Guna 37
man in a big Plains headdress with again a lot of Lakota bead- 38
39
1 work on him, but he always wore Molas, even if he was in the
2 style of breechcloth, which Molas would never be worn as. There
3 was something, there was some way where he subverted the
4 template to say, “Well, maybe you won’t notice, but this is who I
5 really am.” (9 November 2015)
6
7 Unexpectedly, that move by Monique triggered another phase
8 in the outbreak from the vaudeville archive. Several months on, I
9 was sitting in the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, at the end
10 of a long, unproductive day, flipping aimlessly through a collection
11 named the New York Journal-American Photographic Morgue. What
12 a waste of time, I thought, opening a folder labeled “Indian sign-
13 language,” and, with a shock of recognition, I found myself looking
14 at a photograph of Monique’s grandfather. What I’d considered two
15 research paths, archive and exchange, had converged—her grandfa-
16 ther was in “my” archive.
17 There turned out to be over forty photographs of what another
18 folder labeled “Brooklyn Indians,” which I copied and returned to
19 Monique, Gloria, and Muriel. In the ensuing exchanges, all three,
20 in their different ways, broke the bonds of archival captivity. In tak-
21 ing these photographs out of the morgue and reattaching them to
22 lived community, they transformed focus and framing, zeroing in
23 on details of costume; performance technique; inventiveness and
24 virtuosity; relationship; and identity while speaking back to the
25 newspaper captions.
26 Here is some of the analysis that Monique brought to this
27 photograph:
28
29 MONIQUE: That’s Plains sign language. He’s “playing Indian”
30 because that sign language has nothing to do with Guna any-
thing. It’s what he has learned to do as the act of playing Indi-
31
an . . . But it’s layered, isn’t it, because he’s performing and per-
32
forming for the camera but at the same time he’s engaged with
33
that child and that’s what’s beautiful about it is the engagement
34
with the child and the child’s engagement with him and on that
35 level it’s totally real. But it’s like the struggle to have that within
36 all the accoutrements, the prerequisite accoutrements . . . and
37
38
39
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3
4
5
6
7
8
9
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13
14
15
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18
19
20
21
22
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25
26
27
28
29
30
Fig. 3. Antonio Miguel/Chief Eagle Eye and Daybreak, New York Journal-American 31
Photograph Morgue. Credit: Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at 32
Austin. By permission of Gloria Miguel and Muriel Miguel.
33
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35
36
37
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40
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29 Fig. 4. As captioned and overwritten for newspaper publication, New York
30 Journal-American Photograph Morgue. Credit: Harry Ransom Center, The
31 University of Texas at Austin. By permission of Gloria Miguel and Muriel Miguel.
32
33 it’s staged. That part, the way that they are interacting, their en-
34 gagement with each other, isn’t staged, it’s real. (15 April 2017)
35
36 The forging of real relationship is also audible in the refrain that
37 accompanied Gloria’s response to group photographs of Brooklyn
38 Indian dances, performances, get-togethers: “connection.”
39
GLORIA: And it’s so nice, you know, to make that kind of con- 1
nection . . . there was such a nice connection . . . That’s the nice 2
thing about connections. I have a lot of enjoyment nowadays 3
in that realm. So it’s fun doing this, looking back at the old life, 4
that I was connected in some way, not to everybody . . . 5
Back there, in the Thirties, . . . my father was a song-and- 6
dance man; . . . he was really interested in the people. . . . He 7
rescued [people who] were isolated. They had no money, they 8
were abandoned, and several families stayed at our house. And 9
I guess my father, while he sang and danced with those groups 10
too—the social, the powwow groups—they all came to our 11
house and we all went out. We worked at Canarsie, we worked 12
on Coney Island, did John Wayne ballyhooing for the John 13
Wayne movies. It was in Brooklyn, we were on a big float, and
14
the whole family was on the float, and the family posing and
15
saying, “Go to see John Wayne . . . !” [laughter] Ah, we did crazy
16
things—we used to have Indian Day celebrations and the social
17
clubs and the Cowboy and Indian Club—we all really knew each
other. (9 May 2017) 18
19
The knowing and remembering of each other were most vivid 20
in Muriel’s reactions. When she looked at the photographs, names 21
and nations spilled out in a cornucopia of specificity: He’s Mohawk; 22
she’s Cherokee from Oklahoma; that family was Hopi and Ho- 23
Chunk; and so forth. Rather than transcribe her innumerable 24
stories, I’ll record what I understand to be the sound of Muriel 25
Miguel’s memory, as triggered by these photographs: 26
27
MURIEL: Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god . . . 28
CHRISTINE: [laughter] Is that good or bad? 29
30
MURIEL: . . . oh my god. [Full-throated laughter] 31
Isn’t this amazing? [More laughter] 32
That it? Oh, this is so much fun. (4 May 2017) 33
34
This, then, is the soundtrack to “Indians” breaking out of the 35
archive—Muriel’s laughter at the end as significant as Gloria’s and 36
Monique’s sadness at the beginning. Their responses reaffirm rela- 37
38
39
1 tionality across historical time and the fissures of commercial cul-
2 ture. And they teach me that in the moment of giving back—not
3 piously, but literally giving back—the settler scholar learns most.
4 The last word is Muriel’s. The night before this conversation, at
5 a celebration of her work at La MaMa, Muriel had voiced a long
6 list of Indigenous women performers who had gone out into the
7 world and come back, making Spiderwoman Theater and later gen-
8 erations of Indigenous artistry possible. Now, in a noisy restaurant,
9 she mulled over these names again, including three who passed
10 through vaudeville:
11
12 MURIEL: Molly Spotted Elk. And Lucy Nicolar Poolaw. Lily St.
13 Cyr, which is Red Wing. Yah, when I said these names out loud
14 I really meant it you know, that I felt like, yah you can honor
15 me, but there’s so many that came before me and at the same
16 time as me that were on the front lines. I just want to hear their
17 names out loud, hear the sound of their names in the room.
18 That to me is really important in acknowledging them. Just, you
19 know, the names should be on the air, echoing back to another
20 generation. That’s how I feel. You say the name, you acknowl-
edge it, and you send it out. And it’s going to come back, and
21
my grandchild will maybe, you know, know these names. (4 May
22
2017)
23
24
25 Christine Bold is a professor of English at the University of Guelph. She has
26 published six books and many essays on popular culture and cultural memory, in-
cluding the award-winning The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Pow-
27
er, 1880–1924. Currently she is researching “Vaudeville Indians” on global circuits,
28 1880s–1930s.
29
30 Acknowledgment
31
This work would not be possible without funding from the Social
32
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a Harry
33
Ransom Center Fellowship supported by the Andrew W. Mellon
34
Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment, and the University
35
of Guelph. Deep thanks to Monique Mojica, Gloria Miguel, and
36
Muriel Miguel for their permissions, their memories, and their
37
38
39
generosity and to Deborah Ratelle, Eric Colleary and HRC staff, and 1
Ric Knowles. 2
3
Notes 4
1. More scholars are recovering Indigenous performers than can be acknowl- 5
edged here: among them, Bellin and Mielke; Flint; Galperin; Maddox; McBride; 6
McNenly; Simpson; Thrush; Troutman; Ware; Weaver. For examples of my contri- 7
butions, supported by methods documented here, see Bold. 8
2. Gloria Miguel’s opening words are from an interview conducted by Monique 9
Mojica for the show Side Show Freaks & Circus Injuns, co-written by Mojica and
10
LeAnne Howe (Choctaw). All other quotations are excerpted from interviews and
conversations with Christine Bold. 11
3. See Deloria, Playing; Green. 12
4. Among others, see Kovach; Smith; Wilson. 13
5. For more about these artists, see <https://performancewiki.ca/Turtle_Gals 14
_Performance_Ensemble>; < www.chocolatewomancollective.com/bios/>; <www 15
.spiderwomantheater.org>.
16
17
Works Cited
18
Bellin, Joshua David, and Laura L. Mielke, editors. Native Acts: Indian Perfor-
19
mance, 1603–1832. U of Nebraska P, 2013.
Bold, Christine. “Did Indians Read Dime Novels?: Re-Indigenizing the Western at
20
the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Popular Fiction: Genre, Distribution, Repro- 21
duction, edited by Ken Gelder, Palgrave, 2016, pp. 135–56. 22
—. “Early Cinematic Westerns.” A History of Western American Literature, 23
edited by Susan Kollin, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 225–41. 24
—. “Performance, Print, and the Popularization of the Pre-Cinematic 25
American West.” Once upon a Time . . . The Western: A New Frontier in Art and
26
Film, edited by Mary-Dailey Desmarais and Thomas Brent Smith, Montreal
Museum of Fine Arts/Denver Art Museum, 2017, pp. 49–57. 27
—. “Princess Chinquilla.” The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural 28
Power, 1880–1924. Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 209–15. 29
—. “Violence, Justice, and Indigeneity in the Popular West: Go-Won-Go 30
Mohawk in Performance and Print.” America: Justice, Conflict, War, edited by 31
Amanda Gilroy and Marietta Messmer, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016, pp.
32
99–115.
Deloria, Philip J. Indians in Unexpected Places. UP of Kansas, 2004. 33
—. Playing Indian. Yale UP, 1998. 34
Flint, Kate. The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930. Princeton UP, 2009. 35
Fourmile, Henrietta. “Who Owns the Past? Aborigines as Captives of the Ar- 36
chives.” Aboriginal History, vol. 13, no. 1, 1989, pp. 1–8. 37
38
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1 Galperin, Patricia O. In Search of Princess White Deer: A Biography. Vantage Press,
2 2012.
3 Green, Rayna D. “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and
Europe.” Folklore, vol. 99, no. 1, 1988, pp. 30–55.
4
Kovach, Margaret. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and
5 Contexts. U of Toronto P, 2009.
6 Maddox, Lucy. “Politics, Performance and Indian Identity.” American Studies Inter-
7 national, vol. 40, no. 2, 2002, pp. 7–36.
8 McBride, Bunny. Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot in Paris. U of Oklahoma P, 1995.
9 —. Princess Watahwaso: Bright Star of the Penobscot. Charles N. Shay, 2001.
10 McNenly, Linda Scarangella. Native Performers in Wild West Shows: From Buffalo
Bill to Euro Disney. U of Oklahoma P, 2012.
11
Simpson, Leanne. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation,
12 Resurgence and a New Emergence. Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2011.
13 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples.
14 Zed, 1999.
15 Thrush, Coll. Indigenous London: Native Travellers at the Heart of Empire. Yale UP,
16 2016.
Troutman, John W. Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879–
17
1934. U of Oklahoma P, 2009.
18 Ware, Amy M. The Cherokee Kid: Will Rogers, Tribal Identity, and the Making of an
19 American Icon. UP of Kansas, 2015.
20 Weaver, Jace. The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern
21 World, 1000–1927. U of North Carolina P, 2014.
22 Wilson, Shawn. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood,
2008.
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1
2
Book Reviews 3
4
5
6
Daniel Robert King, Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution: Editors, 7
Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author. Knoxville: U 8
of Tennessee P, 2016. 232 pp. Cloth, $42. 9
10
Daniel King’s work with Cormac McCarthy’s papers at the Witliff 11
Collections in Texas and Albert Erskine’s papers at the University 12
of Virginia has resulted in an excellent book that describes the 13
symbiotic relationship McCarthy has had with his editors and 14
how these relationships have driven the development of his 15
novels. McCarthy entered the publishing world in the early 1960s 16
just as the old-time publishers were becoming corporate giants. 17
McCarthy was lucky to land under the tutelage of veteran editor 18
Albert Erskine at Random House. Erskine was well connected 19
in literary circles— Louisiana State University Press, Southern 20
Review, married to Katherine Anne Porter—and his relationship 21
with his authors resembled Maxwell Perkins’s relationships with 22
his writers. In addition to guiding and editing McCarthy’s writing, 23
Erskine would secure foreign publication rights immediately upon 24
American publication. He nominated McCarthy for numerous 25
grants, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, a Rockefeller grant, 26
and eventually a Guggenheim fellowship. He promoted McCarthy’s 27
work by sending copies of The Orchard Keeper (1966) to writers 28
like Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, James Michener, Robert Penn 29
Warren, and Eudora Welty for their review and backing. He wrote 30
Saul Bellow requesting support, which paid off in later years when 31
Bellow was on the MacArthur Foundation selection committee, 32
McCarthy attaining a MacArthur Grant in 1981. All of these activities 33
were aimed at getting McCarthy enough money to continue writing 34
without interruption. McCarthy didn’t have a large commercial 35
success until twenty-six years later with All the Pretty Horses. 36
Rapport between Erskine and McCarthy was friendly and 37
strong. They negotiated large issues, such as including or removing 38
39
40
1 passages, possible endings to novels, and title selections—Toilers
2 at the Kiln, for example, was the title right up until publication
3 when Erskine and McCarthy settled on The Orchard Keeper. Their
4 discussions even involved word choices. In a letter to Erskine, for
5 instance, one small issue concerned a color description. McCar-
6 thy contended that “compound colors need to be hyphenated be-
7 cause ‘there is no way of knowing whether the color is blue-green or
8 green-blue’ because ‘one word complements but does not act as an
9 adjective’” (50). Ultimately, a mutual level of trust for each other’s
10 judgment evolved. McCarthy even trusted Bertha Krantz, a line ed-
11 itor at Random House, to do the right things with his writing.
12 The publishing world changed again in the 1990s when many of
13 the tasks that had been done by editors became the jobs of literary
14 agents. When Erskine retired, McCarthy was transferred to Gary
15 Fisketjon, a senior editor with Alfred A. Knopf, which was wholly
16 owned by Random House. He was a different kind of editor. Since
17 Fisketjon recognized McCarthy’s abilities as a reader and self-editor
18 of his work, he concluded that McCarthy didn’t need considerable
19 or focused guidance. Things Erskine had done to support McCarthy
20 financially were taken over by his newly acquired agent, Amanda
21 “Binky” Urban. She got him better pay for his books, his films, and
22 his magazine work. With his shift to the Southwest, McCarthy also
23 started working at the Santa Fe Institute as a writer in residence.
24 While writing there he even edited books scientists at the Institute
25 were publishing.
26 For a writer who told Oprah Winfrey that a writer should be
27 writing books, not talking about writing them, King’s book clarifies
28 who was influencing the development of McCarthy’s books (though
29 not his scripts) and how and when. For a writer who has always
30 had four or more books in progress at once, King sorts out when
31 McCarthy’s books were started, which were being drafted next to
32 each other, what bits and pieces of a draft of one book showed up
33 in another, and when they were finally finished. King also docu-
34 ments McCarthy’s meticulous research and describes his trips to
35 gather background information, such as his multiple visits to the
36 areas where the core events of Blood Meridian (1985) occurred. And
37 adding pieces of biographical information that may not be com-
38
39
mon knowledge, this book is a superb resource for scholars and 1
fans alike. 2
Herb Thompson 3
Emory & Henry College 4
5
6
Jennifer Sinor, Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe. 7
Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2017. 168 pp. Paper, $19.95. 8
9
In confronting the striking qualities of the western American land- 10
scape, Georgia O’Keeffe did not trust words to render her feeling. 11
It may seem paradoxical, then, that Jennifer Sinor should turn 12
to words—her own analysis of O’Keeffe’s letters—to make sense 13
of the artist’s life in place. Well aware of this dissonance, Letters 14
offers a deft handling of the gap between experience of place and 15
the words that attempt to capture it, omitting traditional analytic 16
structure in favor of narrative-driven scholarship that places the 17
author’s own experiences of place alongside O’Keeffe’s iconic works 18
and the experiences that inspired them. 19
Sinor strikes a balance between narrator and participant in 20
the text’s nine essays, direct in framing the work’s structure and 21
her intent, but more a collaborator in the specific themes of each 22
essay. Through this approach, she develops a synthesis of archival 23
evidence, interpretation, speculation, and creative imagination. 24
Some essays, notably “Holes in the Sky” and “Cleaving, 1929,” 25
demonstrate how Sinor attempts to understand O’Keeffe as a peer, 26
a fellow artist, and a fellow contemplator of the western landscape. 27
At the same time, Sinor’s essays are introspective and reveal the 28
tension between connection and isolation common to O’Keeffe’s 29
letters and paintings. A series of essays, including “A Walk into the 30
Night” and “Taking Myself into the Sun,” are most exemplary in this 31
respect, tracing the love triangle formed from O’Keeffe’s long love 32
affair with sensual experience of landscape and with her lover and 33
husband, Alfred Stieglitz. These essays reveal a deep engagement 34
with place that O’Keeffe’s paintings only suggest, a mark of Sinor’s 35
accomplishment in making the artist’s own words resonate as 36
clearly as her brush strokes. As the text progresses, O’Keeffe ages 37
38
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Book Reviews 129 40
1 and increasingly seeks solitude in the nonhuman world. Sinor’s
2 essays mirror her demeanor, becoming more contemplative and
3 less analytic. These essays are more pointedly preoccupied with her
4 intent to find “the emotional truth in a subject” and less occupied
5 with the “translating” of that truth for others (14). No matter her
6 priority, Sinor skillfully employs narrative scholarship that models
7 the kind of meaning making we accomplish in conversation and
8 contemplation—sometimes meandering, often cyclical, and never
9 truly complete.
10 Though a lyrical and striking read, Letters is perhaps most im-
11 pressive for its versatility. As a work of creative nonfiction, Sinor’s
12 voice is evocative and unrestrained in exploring the complexity of
13 life experienced in place. Through the same medium, however, her
14 essays chart new spaces in multimodal scholarship of landscape
15 and place in the American West, merging critical and contempla-
16 tive consideration of subjectivity and historicity in a narrative
17 compelling for its lack of finality. Her work here may prove valu-
18 able to archival work and studies at the intersection of literature
19 and art history, but more significantly, Letters models ways to chart
20 the gap between language and experience that so often disinhibits
21 our engagement with the nonhuman world. With those boundaries
22 marked, it will perhaps prove easier to render in aesthetic forms the
23 complexities of feeling and knowing place.
24 Luke Morgan
25 Texas Tech University
26
27
28 Pete Fromm, The Names of the Stars: A Life in the Wilds. New York:
29 St. Martin’s P, 2016. 254 pp. Cloth, $25.99.
30
31 Pete Fromm, a five-time Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association
32 award winner, has long been prominent in the canon of contempo-
33 rary Montana literature. He’s published several short story collec-
34 tions and three novels, but his early memoir, Indian Creek Chronicles
35 (1993), remains his best-known book. In those Chronicles, Fromm,
36 a naive wildlife biology major from Missoula, famously winters
37 over in Idaho’s and Montana’s Magruder Crossing, guarding about
38
39
2,500,000 salmon eggs. This coming-of-age memoir demonstrates, 1
early on, his mastery of self-mockery, an essential part of his perso- 2
na that in no way masks his tight, lyrical prose that often takes us 3
into the backcountry. 4
Many books later, Fromm was approached about spending a late 5
spring month in Gates Park, way up the Sun River’s north fork, in 6
the middle of Montana’s legendary Bob Marshall Wilderness. Af- 7
ter his wet month (May–June 2004), Fromm spent years on what 8
ultimately became his memoir of early middle age. In The Names 9
Fromm writes his personal story, easily switching from the four- 10
week drama to various chapters of his Wisconsin childhood and 11
adolescence, his Indian Creek season, and his career as a seasonal 12
river ranger, after college, in Grand Teton National Park. 13
The composite portrait, the threads of his past that lead to his 14
one-month sojourn guarding buckets of Arctic grayling eggs in two 15
locations, defines a family man insistently drawn to backcountry. 16
In contrast to Chronicles’s ignorant twenty-year-old narrator, foot- 17
loose and fancy free, now Fromm lovingly evokes his wife and two 18
sons, then nine and six. In fact the ache of his missing his sons con- 19
stitutes the emotional core of this moving memoir. He collects ar- 20
tifacts in medicine bags and sews moccasins from hides he brought 21
in for them. 22
Fromm makes a sweet case for wilderness as he narrates some of 23
his mishaps and glorious moments. We feel the cold rain trickling 24
inside his raingear and the mud crawling up his boots and waders 25
(it rains most of the month). But over his days Fromm tilts from 26
loneliness to a sense of luxurious solitude, even as he monitors 27
local wildlife. The ways in which he describes the nearby presence 28
of grizzlies sustains narrative suspense. But his eyes and ears also 29
record whitetail deer, elk herds, black bears, big beavers in a big 30
pond, and lots of birds, from a robin who nests at the cabin to snipe 31
swooping at nightfall. 32
In some spare hours Fromm explores with his fly rod, and those 33
scenes echo Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories in upper Michigan, 34
which Fromm rereads during his stay. 35
His retreat enables him to take stock of his life, and he persuasively 36
sorts out his competing loves. He and his wife are already teaching 37
38
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Book Reviews 131 40
1 the sons hiking, river rafting, fishing, and camping, and he hopes
2 their futures hold the kinds of wilderness ecstasy he has known.
3 As he reviews his life, he generously credits not only the woman
4 he ultimately married but his father and his park service mentor,
5 Sage DeGroot. These men push him to walk down and up trails
6 of his choosing, to pursue his love of the worlds beyond the built
7 environment, and to follow his imagination and passion as a writer.
8 By the time Fromm’s final week rolls around, time speeds up as
9 he tries to slow it down, grateful for his ten-miles-a-day idyll. In
10 The Names Fromm teaches us again how love of family ultimately
11 blends with love of backcountry. The physical separation belies the
12 fundamental unity, and we can’t read or write or live that lesson
13 often enough.
14 O. Alan Weltzien
15 University of Montana Western
16
17
18 Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart’s Starling. New York: Little, Brown,
19 2017. 288 pp. Cloth, $27; paper, $16.99; e-book, $13.99; audiobook,
20 $24.98.
21
22 Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s most recent book of nonfiction, Mozart’s
23 Starling, uses the European starling as a point of departure to
24 explore human and avian entanglements. Haupt, a bird enthusiast
25 and professional writer, describes adopting and living with a
26 starling named Carmen in her Seattle home. Interwoven into this
27 personal narrative about the joys and challenges Carmen brings
28 to home life is a story about a starling nicknamed “Star” that
29 lived with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Vienna for three years,
30 inspiring several of his musical compositions. Mozart’s Starling uses
31 the insights gained from Carmen and Haupt’s relationship to tell
32 “the tangled story of Mozart and his starling” (11). While Haupt
33 adopts Carmen to learn about Mozart’s relationship with Star, her
34 new companion teaches her much more. Indeed, as Haupt explains,
35 “Carmen turned the tables. She became the teacher, the guide, and
36 I became an unwitting student—or, more accurately, a pilgrim, a
37 wondering journeyer who had no idea what was to come” (13–14).
38
39
Among the most intriguing issues discussed in Mozart’s Starling 1
is Haupt’s personal dilemma of raising a member of avian species 2
she despises yet grows to love. Attempting to justify these mixed 3
feelings, she decides she can simultaneously hate starlings as a 4
group while still loving Carmen and then learn to extend that love: 5
“Do I want starlings gone? Erased from the face of North Amer- 6
ica? Yes, unequivocally. Do I resent them as aggressive invaders? 7
Of course. And do I love them? Their bright minds, their sparkling 8
beauty, their unique consciousness, their wild starling voices? Their 9
feathers, brown from one angle, shining from another? Yes, yes, I 10
do” (74). Despite her continued resentment toward starlings, Haupt 11
ultimately solicits us to reevaluate our treatment of “pest” species 12
and to recognize the beauty, intelligence, and creativity of the com- 13
mon starling. 14
In addition to loving, humorous stories about Carmen and a rich 15
historical narrative about Mozart, Haupt’s book features a stun- 16
ning collection of images and an impressive array of explanatory 17
footnotes. Among the book’s most memorable passages are a dis- 18
cussion of Carmen’s acquired household language and Haupt’s vis- 19
it to Vienna to view Mozart’s Domgasse apartment, his grave, and 20
Star’s burial location. 21
Mozart’s Starling makes two important contributions to the 22
growing corpus of contemporary multispecies literature. First, 23
Haupt demonstrates how a nonhuman being can provide new 24
insights into the human condition. Indeed, Haupt uses her first- 25
hand knowledge of European starlings to open up a new reading of 26
Mozart, portraying him as a strange, clever, curious, and disorderly 27
man. Second, Haupt uses an “invasive” species to teach about 28
the “tangled complexity” of multispecies worlds (210). As Haupt 29
reminds us, “In the creatures that intertwine with our lives, those 30
we see daily and those that watch us from urban and wild places— 31
from between branches and beneath leaves and under eaves and 32
stairwells and culverts and the sides of walks and pathways—we 33
share everything” (208–9). 34
Nathaniel Otjen 35
University of Oregon 36
37
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39
Book Reviews 133 40
1 Jennifer Sinor, Ordinary Trauma: A Memoir. Salt Lake City: U of
2 Utah P, 2017. 279 pp. Paper, $19.95.
3
4 In a Texas hospital, a young Vietnam veteran was told to choose
5 between the lives of his wife and baby. One would have to be sacri-
6 ficed to save the other. He chose to save his wife. The baby’s body
7 was disposed of in a bucket after being extracted from the mother,
8 a procedure expected to kill the infant. However, a doctor noticed
9 the baby breathing, and Jennifer Sinor was saved.
10 Hawaii was the place where Sinor’s conscious memory appears
11 to have formed. Sinor’s father, after graduating from law school at
12 the University of Nebraska, was stationed at Pearl Harbor as a na-
13 val attorney. Although there were no visible physical scars from her
14 near-death experience at birth, even as a three-year-old she was at
15 least “dimly aware that the oily black water . . . concealed an un-
16 known number of bodies and sunken ships” from the bombing of
17 Pearl Harbor, a historic national trauma (8). There was Hawaii’s vi-
18 brant beauty, while the family’s backyard offered both a tire swing
19 and a bomb shelter, a juxtaposition paradoxically emblematic of the
20 Cold War, unremarkably normalizing the threat of actual war.
21 Children born into the Cold War absorbed its collective national
22 anxiety, and those years were almost certainly harsher for military
23 families, acutely aware of the threat and of “risks those in the mili-
24 tary took” (188). But as a child and “daughter of the military,” Sinor
25 “believes order and regulation will defeat evil and disarray” (64).
26 Ordinary Trauma is a layered, complex, elegantly written memoir of
27 individual and collective trauma.
28 Despite its title, for me part of the conundrum of Sinor’s grip-
29 ping book became untangling extraordinary from ordinary trauma,
30 while wondering if this endeavor served any purpose. Sinor’s seems
31 a memoir not only of ordinary but extraordinary trauma as well.
32 Most American children born into the Cold War were not almost
33 killed at birth to save their mothers, and repeated instances of ex-
34 traordinary trauma punctuated Sinor’s life: a serious injury while in
35 the care of a negligent babysitter, a baby brother scalded by a nurse
36 at birth, another who nearly drowned.
37 Surely the landscape of most family life, if probed, would reveal
38
39
reservoirs of sorrow beneath the surface, which seems particularly 1
true for Sinor’s Nebraskan paternal lineage. Her father’s father, a 2
farmer, sadistically mistreated his animals and his children, includ- 3
ing sexually abusing a daughter and at least one granddaughter. 4
These events raise the vexed question of ordinary versus extraordi- 5
nary trauma again, although sexual abuse and other family violence 6
remain far too widespread. Perhaps trauma is normalized into ordi- 7
nariness for most people who experience it. 8
As major forces in her life, Sinor’s parents are important char- 9
acters in her memoir. Whatever his weaknesses as a parent, her fa- 10
ther offered considerable strengths and gave incomparably better 11
fathering than he received. Sinor notes that the same hands that 12
were forced to drown farm kittens when her father was a child, 13
“rocked me to sleep as a baby, held me when I skinned my knee” 14
(37). It is impossible to imagine her abusive paternal grandfather 15
comforting a child with a skinned knee or rocking a baby to sleep. 16
Her own father advised Sinor to shut bad memories in a dresser 17
drawer and not reopen it. 18
In addition to experiencing frequent military transfers, instill- 19
ing a lack of a sense of home, Sinor presents the military child as 20
riding “the backs of deactivated missiles” and ingesting “mutually 21
assured destruction with her breakfast cereal.” Such ordinary mo- 22
ments may have passed “unnoticed” but “undid you nonetheless,” 23
leading to the eventual realization that “the peace we experience in 24
the United States is one achieved by force” (69–70, 195). At fourteen 25
she wrote in her Holly Hobbie diary, “I think there may be a nuclear 26
war which we will deserve because the world is falling apart” (197). 27
Such moments seem slightly offset by the Star Wars trilogy, paral- 28
leling Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program in Sinor’s teen years and 29
offering a temporary, superficial cinematic respite in which “no one 30
dies who isn’t supposed to” (124). 31
Relationships among members of any family are complex, as 32
was certainly true of Sinor’s, especially the particular complexities 33
of her relationship with a loving, although sometimes unreason- 34
ably demanding, father. However, when she graduated as valedic- 35
torian from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Sinor’s speech was 36
“about the gift her father gave her—the strength to do the hard 37
38
39
Book Reviews 135 40
1 thing” among the lessons learned in “bartering loss against love”
2 (271, 279). Ordinary Trauma is intense, thoughtful, and thought
3 provoking.
4 Gaynell Gavin
5 Claflin University
6
7
8 Melvin R. Adams, Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the
9 Hanford Reservation. Pullman: Washington State UP, 2016. 144 pp.
10 Paper, $22.95.
11
12 This personal narrative consists of vignettes that embody author
13 Melvin Adams’s conflicted and complex relationship with the
14 Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the reservation’s relationship
15 with the local environment. Adams describes this tension as a
16 paradox, insisting that “to deal with and control the radioactive
17 waste sites at Hanford, the analytical mind of an engineer and
18 scientist is essential. But the site also cries out for poetic treatment
19 and understanding— the analytical approach by itself being
20 inadequate to express the meaning of Hanford” (7). His words
21 capture exactly what makes this book unique and difficult to
22 characterize.
23 Adams divides the narrative into an introduction and six parts.
24 He considers the geography, paradoxical nature, challenges, and
25 timeline of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in his introduction,
26 then, in engineer-like fashion, methodically takes on the next six
27 parts. Part 1 describes Hanford from Native American beginnings
28 through the reservation cleanup today. In part 2, Adams uses illus-
29 trations and specific details to describe the engineering challenge
30 he faced as possibly Hanford’s first environmental engineer. Quick
31 to state that his personal reflections contain no footnotes, he pro-
32 vides instead a list of references. Perhaps this part’s most interest-
33 ing aspect for literary people is his discussion about designing and
34 placing markers meant to communicate the area’s hazard across
35 thousands of years, through climate and cultural change. Part 3 of-
36 fers stories about anomalies and events from the seeming paradise
37 of a highly contaminated former 216-U Pond to a man exposed to
38
39
radiation to a Japanese balloon that shut down nuclear production. 1
Some events occurred during Adams’s tenure as an engineer; some 2
persisted as stories from before his time. 3
Part 4 details the philosophy behind building government 4
homes along with Adams’s personal experience living in one, while 5
part 5 elaborates on some of the flourishing environmental aspects 6
of the reservation, such as an elk herd and rare and new plant spe- 7
cies. Adams’s literary and poetic responses to his experiences are 8
the substance of part 6. His poems can increase in resonance with 9
readers who now know their context from the previous parts. The 10
last lines of “Burial Ground” seem to sum up Adams’s stance on the 11
Hanford Nuclear Reservation: “The earth is full of artifacts, fossils, 12
and ghosts. / The earth does not regret, only remembers” (13–14). 13
This narrative will interest people focused on environmental his- 14
tory and the ways the United States has used western regions as areas 15
of experimentation and containment for nuclear production. People 16
interested in memoir will be intrigued by the way the book’s isolat- 17
ed parts come together in the poetry reflecting Adams’s conflicted 18
relationship with the reservation. He insists that “[his] years at Han- 19
ford were the safest of [his] working life” (62). Proud description of a 20
maintenance-free containment barrier reveals his belief that he par- 21
ticipated in good work at Hanford and that the best combination of 22
economy and effectiveness is addressing the contamination there. 23
His poetry and sentiment toward the flourishing flora and fauna on 24
the reservation show a deep relationship to this controversial site. 25
His narrative tries to capture the entirety of this paradox. 26
Max Frazier 27
US Air Force Academy (retired) 28
29
30
Michael P. Branch, Rants from the Hill: On Packrats, Bobcats, 31
Wildfires, Curmudgeons, a Drunken Mary Kay Lady, and Other 32
Encounters with the Wild in the High Desert. Boulder, CO: Roost 33
Books, 2017. 208 pp. Paper, $14.95. 34
35
Michael P. Branch’s new collection of essays, Rants from the Hill, is 36
drawn from his regular column (with the same title) for High Coun- 37
38
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Book Reviews 137 40
1 try News. Roost Books seems to be marketing the book as comic
2 writing, and, while it’s indeed funny, to do so is to overlook some of
3 what the book does best. Branch writes with a truly local sensibil-
4 ity. He admits to being a transplant—a former dweller of hills and
5 swamps moved to the high desert. He does not completely fit in
6 with the natives, as he reveals in “Customer Cranky,” in which some
7 of his hifalutin literary magazines are, presumably in his best inter-
8 est, kept from him by possibly well-meaning postal employees. But
9 if he is an invasive species, he is certainly a well-established one.
10 In what may be a perfect metaphor for his rootedness in Nevada,
11 Branch writes in “Wild Christmas Pinyon” of his family’s tradition
12 of finding their Christmas tree in the native scrub. A tradition that
13 began far from the high desert is reinterpreted in a regionally ap-
14 propriate manner. Instead of using a picture perfect tree imported
15 from somewhere with rain or, worse, an artificial tree, the family
16 bends their traditions to their current environment, rather than
17 the other way around. (In fairness to Branch’s humility, see “Lawn
18 Guilt” and “Balloons on the Moon” for moments in which he admits
19 to not conforming to the land.)
20 At its best this book lends to Nevada the sort of sacred quality
21 that good stories give to places. Reading it left me caring about a
22 place I did not know and have never seen. In this sense, Branch’s
23 work seems best positioned next to the work of authors like Roy
24 Bedichek, Archie Carr, and John Graves—writers who tell good
25 stories about specific places. The majority of the essays are not
26 reaching for the stars; they’re simply amusing, thought-provoking
27 explanations of life in Nevada. “Planting the Dog,” “Singing
28 Mountain,” and “Out on Misfit Flats” all shine in this regard.
29 Branch’s admiration for this particular place bleeds through. But
30 there are moments of profundity, too. A description of one elder’s
31 understanding of the world and his people in “After Ten Thousand
32 Years” is beautiful and has played around in my mind ever since I
33 read the book. And while “The Ghosts of Silver Hills” is a lightly
34 written piece, it does a fine job of drawing connections between us
35 and those who came before us.
36 In short, this book fits in well with the hyperlocal tradition
37 of nature writing. Branch knows about something beautiful and
38
39
wants to share it. Given that it’s drawn from a collection of col- 1
umns, it lends itself well to reading in snatches—something that 2
can be enjoyed in brief bits of time, not a tome that demands to be 3
dramatically processed. Rants from the Hill might fit well on a west- 4
ern nature writing syllabus, or selected essays might find a home in 5
a broader course, but it’s mostly just a pleasure to read. 6
Jeremy Elliott 7
Abilene Christian University 8
9
10
Brit Bennett, The Mothers. New York: Riverhead Books, 2016. 278 11
pp. Cloth, $26; paper, $16; e-book, $11.99; audio CD, $40. 12
13
Brit Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers, is a compelling story that 14
draws the reader into the world of a tight-knit community in coastal 15
California. Like many examples of contemporary fiction involving 16
youth, the narrative rests on intrigue, staccato dialogue, troubled 17
characters (some more developed than others), toxic romantic 18
relationships, and oblivious adults. On the surface, the novel is about 19
Nadia Turner, a high school senior growing up in Oceanside. Nadia is 20
smart, beautiful, determined, but emotionally troubled. Her mother, 21
Elise, recently committed suicide for unknown reasons, and to numb 22
the pain her father immerses himself in the church community. 23
Nadia is left to pick up the pieces on her own and prepare to enter 24
college in Michigan. During this time she clings to peers who give her 25
much-needed romantic attention (Luke Sheppard) and friendship 26
(Aubrey Evans). However, while sorting through the various parts of 27
her life she makes a personal decision that affects everyone around 28
her, long after she has departed for college. 29
While the narrative focuses largely on Nadia Turner’s life, we 30
learn from the book’s opening lines that this story is not only 31
Nadia’s to tell. And this is where the author proves her brilliance. 32
Bennett taps into the lives and experiences of a group normally 33
overlooked in American fiction—the conservative, middle-class 34
Black western community. Bennett depicts Oceanside as populated 35
with diverse working-and middle-class families. Many have newly 36
relocated to the area because of the nearby military base (Camp 37
38
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Book Reviews 139 40
1 Pendleton), and others, like the families central to the novel, have
2 been residents for several decades, attracted to stability and social
3 freedom. The networks in the community are connected through
4 the church, which serves as a place of refuge and a meeting place for
5 new residents.
6 Bennett masterfully blends the messiness of older gossiping
7 “church folk” with origin stories that hint at California’s promise
8 as “paradise” for one and all. As in Walter Moseley’s southern
9 California, Bennett’s adult African American characters all come
10 from somewhere else. Bennett’s specific focus, however, on the
11 millennial generation, who have “never lived outside California,
12 never gone on exciting vacations, never left the country,” provides
13 the reader with a different, contemporary perspective (70).
14 Important to the novel is Bennett’s rejection of a stereotypical
15 setting. Instead, The Mothers is as much about the banality of
16 growing up in a California that is not San Francisco or Los Angeles
17 as it is about characters’ choices.
18 In The Mothers, women’s intimate decisions drive the novel’s
19 action and conflict, partly because they contradict the communi-
20 ty’s perceptions. For example, Elise is regarded as a doting wife and
21 mother, while her daughter is a studious, obedient child. Aubrey is
22 a naïve, God-fearing proselyte, and the church mothers she adores
23 are aged, protective, and wise. But we learn all the women have se-
24 crets and wrestle with inner turmoil resulting in extreme choices,
25 loss, and regret. As the novel progresses, other characters begin
26 to reveal hidden pasts that also belie popular opinion. The Mothers
27 maintains a healthy dose of suspense due to several twists, while
28 the initial introduction of ancillary characters proves important
29 at later points in the novel. Bennett is impressive in her ability to
30 hook readers with tidbits of information that require us to turn the
31 page. Although much is revealed fairly early in the novel, Bennett
32 makes us want to know what happens after.
33 As a storyteller, Bennett’s literary influences are clear. She uses
34 the “we” collective narrator, a nod to luminaries like Gwendolyn
35 Brooks, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison, and certain phrasing is
36 reminiscent of the sensory descriptors present in folk speech (e.g.,
37 “All good secrets have a taste before you tell them” [2]). But again,
38
39
Bennett does not rely solely on dated approaches to writing fiction. 1
The Mothers always feels very current and relevant—because it is. 2
Bennett also rejects the urge to provide an unnatural conclusion. 3
No one character is flawed beyond redemption, but she still leaves 4
room for issues to remain unresolved or “in progress.” 5
Overall, in The Mothers Brit Bennett gives us a superior contem- 6
porary story that reminds us that even in the rush of the twenty- 7
first century, classic texts are still being born. 8
Kalenda Eaton 9
Arcadia University 10
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Book Reviews 141 40
1
2
3 Call for Nominations
4
5 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award
6 To honor outstanding, single-author scholarly books on the literature and culture
7 of the North American West, the Western Literature Association presidents invite
8 nominations for the annual Thomas J. Lyon Book Award.
9 To qualify, a book must have a 2017 publication date and be a single-authored,
book-length study on the literature and culture of the North American West.
10
Please find information about the procedure to nominate a book on our
11 website: <www.westernlit.org/thomas-j-lyon-book-award-in-western-american
12 -literary-and-cultural-studies/>
13
14 Deadline for nominations: June 15, 2018.
15 Don D. Walker Prize
16
The Don D. Walker Prize is given annually to the best essay published on western
17 American literature during the previous calendar year. “Western” in this context is
18 defined broadly and refers to all of North America that historically or critically has
19 been considered “West,” as well as to comparative studies of the American West
20 that cross regional or national boundaries.
21 The Western Literature Association invites nominations from presses and
journals as well as from individuals. Self-nominations are accepted. Please find
22
more information at <www.westernlit.org/don-d-walker-prize/>. Questions can
23
be directed to Susan Kollin, chair of the award: <susan.kollin@montana.edu>.
24
25 Deadline for nominations: May 15, 2018.
26 The Louis Owens Awards for Graduate Student
27 Presenters at the WLA Conference
28
29 The WLA honors the great writer and scholar Louis Owens for his contributions to
western American and American Indian literary studies and for his unfailing gen-
30
erosity as a colleague, teacher, and mentor. The goal of the Louis Owens Awards is
31 to build for the future of the Western Literature Association by modeling Owens’s
32 own support and encouragement of diverse graduate student engagement in west-
33 ern literature and culture studies.
34 The Owens Awards are intended to foster ever-greater diversity within the
35 WLA membership, to help broaden the field of western American literary studies,
and to recognize both graduate student scholarship and financial need.
36
Your paper must be approved by the WLA presidents before you can apply
37 for the Owens Award. Information on the application procedure can be found on
38 our website: <www.westernlit.org/the-louis-owens-awards-for-graduate-student
39 -presenters-at-wla-conferences/>. Please direct any questions to Lisa Tatonetti,
40 chair of the awards committee: <tatonett@ksu.edu>.
CALL FOR PAPERS 1
2
2018 Western Literature Association Conference 3
Indigenous Hubs, Gateway Cities, Border States 4
St. Louis, Missouri 5
October 24–27, 2018 6
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The 2018 annual conference of the Western Literature Association will take place
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October 24–27 at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. “Indigenous 25
Hubs, Gateway Cities, Border States” is derived from this location. This region, at 26
the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, has been urban for thou- 27
sands of years: Cahokia, directly across the river from today’s St. Louis, housed the 28
largest pre-Columbian civilization north of Mexico and was long a hub for trade, 29
communication, and transportation throughout Indigenous North America. To-
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day it is well known for its impressive earthen mounds, which the Osage Nation,
among other tribal groups, counts as an important ancestral site. Long before St.
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Louis was known as the “Gateway to the West,” it was nicknamed “Mound City.” 32
St. Louis would become a North American borderland, shaped by French, 33
Spanish, and US contact and conquest. With Missouri’s 1821 entry into the nation 34
as a slave state, St. Louis became envisioned as a gateway to western freedom 35
even while it maintained southern bondage. This position made it possible for 36
hundreds of enslaved people, including Dred Scott, to attempt to sue for their
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freedom in St. Louis. During the Exoduster movement, St. Louis indeed became a
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gateway to freedom for many African Americans migrating away from postbellum
1
southern oppression. An emblem of white flight and urban disinvestment in the
2 twentieth century, today St. Louis is home to newer immigrant communities and
3 central to the Black Lives Matter movement. It continues to serve as a microcosm
4 of US racial histories and of both stubborn divisions and promising coalitions
5 across lines of race, class, region, and nation. “Indigenous Hubs, Gateway Cities,
6 Border States” is meant to evoke these confluences and crosscurrents.
7 We welcome proposals on any aspect of the literatures of the North Ameri-
can West but especially encourage panels and papers that explore the following
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topics:
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• St. Louis (or other western places) as Indigenous Hubs, Gateways, or
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Borderlands
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• The African American West
12 • Jazz and Blues and the American West
13 • The Art and Literature of Black Lives Matter
14 • St. Louis Freedom Suits
15 • The Work of Distinguished Achievement Award Winner Percival Everett
16 • The Critical Legacy of Distinguished Achievement Award Winner José
E. Limón
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18 Proposals for panels and roundtable discussions should include an abstract
19 for each paper or presentation. The deadline for submissions is June 15,
2018. Please submit questions to Michael K. Johnson or Emily Lutenski at
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<WLAConference2018@westernlit.org>.
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For more information,
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see <www.westernlit.org/wla-conference-2018/>.
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25 Photo credits: Mural at Ponderosa Steakhouse, W. Florissant Ave., Ferguson, MO.
26 2014. 6’x8’. Image courtesy of COCA—Center of Creative Arts. Photo © Michael
Kilfoy.
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Submissions 3
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Since 1965 Western American Literature has been the leading peer reviewed journal
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in the literary and cultural study of the North American West, defined broadly to
include western Canada and northern Mexico. We are constantly looking for new
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theoretical approaches to canonical figures as well as studies of emerging authors, 7
filmmakers, and others who are expanding the canon of western literary and cul- 8
tural production. 9
While remaining rooted in the geography of the North American West, we will 10
continue to explore new approaches to literary and cultural studies more broad- 11
ly, such as our groundbreaking work in ecocriticism and scholarly support for the 12
Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage project. In our desire to further this 13
tradition of integrating western studies into global scholarly conversations, we 14
are especially interested in publishing theoretical and critical articles that address
15
western North American literature and culture from perspectives such as these:
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• critical regionalism • ecomemoir • postpastoralism 17
• bioregionalism • place pedagogy • food studies
18
• place studies • ecocriticism • cinema and new media
• global wests • gender and queer • critical materialism
19
• Native American studies • petrocultures 20
studies • feminist place studies • affect theory 21
• global indigeneity • digital humanities • animal (and plant) 22
• settler colonialism • borderlands studies studies 23
• postwesternism • new agrarianism • critical race theory 24
Articles should be submitted via our online portal at <http://wal.edmgr.com/>. 25
For additional information see <www.unl.edu/plains/western-american 26
-literature>. 27
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The Indigenous Erotics of Riding Barebac

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Volume 53, Number 1, Spring 2018 2

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