Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space (review)

If the title is not a sufficient clue to the intellectual terrain traversed in this collection of thirteen wide-ranging essays, a short list of the repeatedly invoked critics/theorists should help: Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, James Clifford, Edward Soja, Gayatri Spivak. Triangulating among literary, historical, and geographic perspectives on the American West, the essays collectively enact for Western Studies the by now familiar movement toward the anti-essentialist thinking that productively informs much of Cultural Studies today. The wholesale turn toward transnational fluidities, globalization of capital and social identity, critical reassessment of basic concepts such as nature, place, region, border, and the local, and of course the crucial, if often suppressed, discourses of class, race, gender, and sexuality are all variably at issue in this volume.

“Big umbrella” essay collections such as Postwestern Cultures always face the problem of balance between unity and variety, both in the topics addressed and in the levels and styles of engagement. That the scales here tip toward variety is not surprising, and perhaps inevitable, since the broad intellectual movement this collection reflects is devoted precisely to shaking up prior assumptions, deconstructing comfortable categories, and destabilizing taken-for-granted frames of analysis. Although the field of Western Studies has effectively assimilated the salutary lessons of the “new western history” of the 1980s and 90s, the essays here call for and illustrate a more radical paradigm shift that, pushed to one kind of conclusion, might be seen as calling into question the very idea of Western Studies as a tenable field of inquiry unto itself. If there is one thread that weaves its way through most of these essays, it is that the seeming “facts” of historical inquiry and the seeming groundedness of geographical specificity are always floating off and reforming anew in the solvents of discourse, story, and the imaginary.

One of the pleasures of this collection is that it includes both essays, mostly placed up front, that provide the theoretical map (e.g., the essays by Stephen Tatum, Lee Clark Mitchell, and Neil Campbell, along with editor Susan Kollin’s introduction) and essays that hike particular case study trails (e.g., the contributions from Beth Loffreda, Melody Graulich, Audrey Goodman, Capper Nichols, and Nancy Cook). Other contributors do some of both (Krista Comer, Michael Beeler); and still others key on particular texts or genres as vehicles of discourse (David Oates, Susan Kollin, John Streamas). The array of particular analyses is, to say the least, diverse. Three brief examples must suffice to suggest the range.

Krista Comer (“Everyday Regionalism in Contemporary Critical Practice”) takes as her window on “transregional circuits” of western image and identity the simultaneously subcultural and globally commodified icon of the “surfer girl” as a fluid enactment of the “postcolonial conundrums” that are occasions for political critique but also for a kind of hopefulness. Global flows of imagery, commodities, and bodies, though subject to immense disparities in the distribution of wealth and power, are also possibilities for alternative and resistant alliances.

John Streamas (“Frontier Mythology, Children’s Literature, and Japanese American Incarceration”) shows how the genre of children’s literature has generated a recurring trope that constructs the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II as a falsely consoling replay of rugged individualism and overcoming adversity on the western American frontier.

Nancy Cook (“The Romance of Ranching”), with the refreshing concreteness of an insider’s perspective, sets out a typology of the real estate categories according to which the idea of ranching is literally being bought and sold today. Though left beneath the surface of this seemingly straightforward account of contemporary economic conditions, the connections to theoretical issues such as Edward Soja’s idea of “thirdspace” are easy to make and compelling.

Diverse and rich as this collection is, one cannot leave unmentioned that, except for a nod here and there, it leaves Native American topics largely out of view. This is somewhat troubling because indigeneity is one place where the relentlessness of anti-essentialist critique comes up against a resistant politics that...