Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West (review)

This is an ambitious volume of eleven essays loosely organized in three sections on transnational, postnational, and working-class approaches. The entries are uneven, but collectively the volume resonates with the sense of transience indicated in its title. It approaches the familiar problem of what, if any, identity the West has with restlessness born from the realization that western borders are permeable and persistent. The West that emerges is celebrated for its multivocal richness, but it is not necessarily fragmented. Rather, through the layering of multiple perspectives, the power differentials and strategic exclusions that support regional, national, and class borders are made visible in surprising ways.

Reginald Dyck’s introduction positions a similar sense of western space at the forefront of current work in the field. Eschewing the typical marquee structure, Dyck offers instead a compact argument for the adoption of new paradigms and new models for the study of the West. These promise to maintain the commitment of the New Western history to recovering the stories of repressed groups while also assuming the responsibility to reveal the hidden political and economic struggles that motivate discourses of various kinds. His contribution to the volume on Native poet Simon Ortiz is a model for such interdisciplinary work. It valorizes Ortiz’s allegiance to oral traditions and his literary inventiveness, his celebration of Acoma identity, and his “structural critique of economic relations and work culture” (97). The understudied intersections of class-consciousness and Native American identity also inform Renny Christopher’s essay on Louis Owens. The borders of race, class, and environmental studies are crossed in Steven Rosedale’s “American West in Red and Green.” Rosedale argues that proletarian literature offers new material and “a basic model from our cultural past” that can supplement nature writing as the basis of ecocritical study (149).

Highlights of the transnational and postnational sections include Robert McKee Irwin’s challenge to the tendency of American transnational studies to see the United States as the default territory for intellectual endeavor. Through a reading of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) that places the novel in the context of its reception by nineteenth-century Mexican and Latin American audiences, he argues that it is only through familiarity with intellectual traditions in other countries and in languages other than English that American scholars can make their field effectively transnational. The limitations of border crossing are explored, too, in Cheli Reutter’s comparison of Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune (2000) and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997). Admitting pleasure in reading both texts and exploring ways that each challenges the traditional hierarchies of western narratives, she nevertheless finds Morrison’s novel exceptional for its refusal to mark an ending. Reutter sees that it prefers “the continuity of life cut from the moorings of myths or even countermyths,” and so it refuses even a cathartic purge (211). Readers are left having “much to think about” (210).

There are a handful of similarly rich invitations to thought in this collection. Even those less inclined to the theoretical speculations of some of the essays will find them.