Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space / Edited by Susan Kollin

Postwestern Cultures Postwestern Horizons general editor William R. Handley University of Southern California series editors José Aranda Rice University Melody Graulich Utah State University Thomas King University of Guelph Rachel Lee University of California, Los Angeles Nathaniel Lewis Saint Michael’s College Stephen Tatum University of Utah Postwestern Cultures Literature, Theory, Space Edited by Susan Kollin UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS LINCOLN AND LONDON Publication of this book was assisted by a grant from Montana State University. © 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Postwestern cultures: literature, theory, space / edited by Susan Kollin. p. cm.—(Postwestern horizons) Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-8032-1114-8 (cloth: alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8032-6044-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. American literature—West (U.S.)— History and criticism. 2. American literature—History and criticism. 3. West (U.S.)—In literature. 4. Popular culture in literature. 5. Ecology in literature. 6. Homosexuality in literature. 7. Multiculturalism in literature. I. Kollin, Susan. ps271.p57 2007 810.9Ј978 2 22 2007011384 Set in Quadraat by Bob Reitz. Designed by R. W. Boeche. Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Postwestern Studies, Dead or Alive ix Susan Kollin Part 1: Newer New Wests 1. Spectrality and the Postregional Interface 3 Stephen Tatum 2. Everyday Regionalisms in Contemporary Critical Practice 30 Krista Comer 3. Critical Regionalism, Thirdspace, and John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s Western Cultural Landscapes 59 Neil Campbell 4. Architecture and the Virtual West in William Gibson’s San Francisco 82 Michael Beehler Part 2: Nature and Culture 5. What’s Authentic about Western Literature? And, More to the Point, What’s Literary? 97 Lee Clark Mitchell 6. Some Questions about Sexless Nature Writing 115 David Oates 7. Backpacking and the Ultralight Solution 127 Capper Nichols 8. Survival, Alaska Style 143 Susan Kollin Part 3: Contested Wests 9. Scheduling Idealism in Laramie, Wyoming 159 Beth Loffreda 10. Frontier Mythology, Children’s Literature, and Japanese American Incarceration 172 John Streamas 11. I’m Just a Lonesome Korean Cowgirl; or, Adoption and National Identity 186 Melody Graulich 12. Cultivating Otowi Bridge 206 Audrey Goodman 13. The Romance of Ranching; or, Selling Place-Based Fantasies in and of the West 223 Nancy Cook References 245 Contributors 265 Acknowledgments Over the years I have been fortunate to discuss postwestern studies with a number of colleagues; thanks especially to Robert Bennett, Rachel Bryson, Nancy Cook, Melody Graulich, Capper Nichols, and Steve Tatum for keeping me on track. For their fi nancial and emo- tional support of this book I am grateful to Sara Jayne Steen, former Dean of the College of Letters and Science at Montana State Univer- sity; and Michael Beehler, former Chair of the English Department. A Research Enhancement Award from Montana State University’s Col- lege of Letters and Science and a Scholarship and Creativity Award from the Offi ce of the Vice Provost for Research also enabled me to fi nish this project. I am likewise indebted to Michael Becker, com- puter guru and patient proofreader, who played a key role in mak- ing sure the manuscript was completed on time; and to Jonathan Lawrence for his care and attention during the copyediting process. Ladette Randolph, my editor at the University of Nebraska Press, has been great to work with and always “gets it.” My appreciation to her for her endless humor, patience, and wisdom in the production of this book. In his pedagogy, parenting, and professional life, my phi- losopher/fi lm scholar husband, Dan Flory, has been doing his best to help usher in the post-patriarchy. I could not have fi nished this project without his support and willingness to discuss western fi lm and culture at all hours of the day and night. With much gratitude, I dedicate this book to him. Introduction Postwestern Studies, Dead or Alive susan kollin The region seems to be an indestructible entity that tran- scends and survives history to remain everlastingly the same. [I]f regionalism is the nostalgia for a past state, it is also the certainty of the survival of that past. The past be- comes a place . that we can bring back, ideally, in our un- derstandable present as a moral prescription. Roberto Dainotto, “‘All the Regions Do Smilingly Revolt’: The Literature of Place and Region” Artists and critics must fi nd a way to care about both the distant and the local—to analyze regional communities without losing sight of the larger global community that re- quires and enables the production of regions. Hsuan L. Hsu, “Literature and Regional Production” In May 2006 at a press conference with British prime minister Tony Blair, President George W. Bush offered a surprising confession to news reporters when he admitted his political mistake in using “tough talk” shortly after 9/11. At issue for the president was his choice of language, particularly the western vernacular of bounty hunting epit- omized by that “old poster out West,” which he recalled in outlining his plans for capturing Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.” “I learned some lessons about expressing myself,” the president explained, especially about the need to adopt a more “sophisticated manner” in his speeches on terrorism.1 For those of us studying and teaching x | susan kollin in the fi eld of western American culture, the president’s unexpected attention to the power of words—to the political consequences of rhetoric and imagery—reminds us of precisely what is at stake in our intellectual labors. What does it mean for critical regional studies when the popular idioms that have often defi ned the American West in narrowly conceived ways are called into question in such a public manner? Is it a sign of our postwestern moment that the president himself sees the limits of frontier discourses and recognizes the ur- gency of reframing his political language? Many of us remember how the president’s earlier post-9/11 speeches set off a maelstrom of national and international criticism that blasted America’s new “Lone Ranger foreign policy,” its “cow- boy diplomacy,” and the administration’s reliance on Old West–style “frontier justice.” As part of the political fallout, student antiwar dem- onstrators carried signs reminding the president, “It’s the Middle East, not the Wild West.”2 Yet if social commentators, international political leaders, and antiwar protesters were outraged at the rhetori- cal framing of U.S. foreign policy in the post-9/11 period, in many ways the administration’s use of Wild West imagery should have come as no surprise. Campaigning for the nation’s highest offi ce both times as an earthy, no-nonsense Texas rancher, the president traded on some of the most enduring images of American national identity. Indeed, the allure of the Old West with its promises of personal freedom and collective renewal has proven to be a central means for political self-fashioning for a long line of U.S. presidents. For scholars in the fi eld, such uses of western American imagery in political discourse are a powerful reminder of how particular images and sentiments associated with the West move well beyond the con- fi nes of regional boundaries to provide explanatory power for the nation as a whole. Such moments remind us how important it is to con- tinue carefully assessing and evaluating the political burdens placed on western spaces in national discourse. The fi eld of critical regional studies offers important tools for examining the deployment of such regional imagery, and in doing so it insists that we remain aware of how the spatial meanings and identi- Introduction | xi ties surrounding regions may indeed be powerful constructs that are not in any way self-evident or predetermined. Cultural critic Hsuan L. Hsu, for instance, calls for a fl uid and fl exible understanding of regions, suggesting that they “may administer or fi x social and eco- nomic relations in a given area, but they are themselves produced or transformed in relation to—and often in the service of—larger domi- nant spaces.”3 National and transnational concerns always infl ect the meanings regions are given and the uses to which they are put. Hsu thus argues for an understanding of regions as both “productive” and “continually produced,” not bounded eternally to a set geography, but “dynamic and fl exible . neither isolated nor fi xed . their constitutive and necessary interactions with other scales suggest that space, in its various and contradictory relations, can be as dialectical as time.”4 This collection of new essays on postwestern cultures likewise insists that we understand the region not as a closed or bounded space but as a continually changing and evolving entity in both content and form. The larger aim of this study is to examine a particularly contested space—the American West—and the highly charged and continually shifting meanings that have become associated with it. To say that the West is a multiply infl ected terrain whose identity is always in fl ux and revision is to recognize that the political uses of western American iconography discussed above do not lay claim to all the possible meanings associated with the region. Indeed, the essays in this collection testify otherwise by examining a wide range of regional practices and forms of signifi cation and by drawing on a va- riety of critical approaches, including global studies, feminist theory, cultural studies, environmental criticism, cultural geography, queer studies, and critical race theory. As an emerging critical approach, postwestern studies work against a narrowly conceived regionalism, one that restricts western cultures of the past and present to some predetermined entity with static bor- ders and boundaries.

Load more