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  • Claims and Reclaims in the American West
  • William Deverell (bio)
Jeff Roche , ed. The Political Culture of the New West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. xii + 384 pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $40.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Like the idealized American West, this book promises a lot. Setting aside its grasp for a moment, the volume's reach is impressive. In his editorial introduction, historian Jeff Roche notes the prevalence of opposing claims of authenticity, political or otherwise, in the public culture of the contemporary American West. Think, for example, of the variety of "I'm a native" boasts of westerners in memoirs; bumper stickers; stump speeches; hat, boot, and clothing choices; and the like. This book analyzes these "competing claims for legitimacy in the western public sphere" (p. 7) amidst a stipulated claim regarding the rising importance of western politics. Moving outward from this core concern, Roche and the volume's essayists ostensibly try to explain western political identity (and, we might hope, behavior) by way of focus on this prism.

In the analytical sense, this is, of course, anything but virgin land. These are age-old issues within regional and national identity—James Fenimore Cooper, anyone?—and for generations, we've witnessed both light and heat generated by those wrestling with such questions. What is the West? Where is the West? Who is a westerner? Beneath the often facile excavation of such themes lies rich material for thoughtful historical and cultural analysis. Though the characterization of the analysis is occasionally vague, a volume-length exploration of political authority by way of claims staked upon genuine regional traits is an exploration guided by an attractive, tried and true organizing principle.1

This promise extends to metaphor. In the editor's reckoning, the shifting ideological terrain of the West—is it tilting blue from red?—can be understood as a kind of "reclamation project" (p. 3) as to the region's ideological identities and loyalties. The metaphor is clever: reclamation remade and continues to shape landscapes across the West. As hydraulic, mining, and other environments are reclaimed, ecologies and the lives built or acted out upon them inevitably change in myriad fashion. So, too, as Roche suggests, does the reclaiming of western political ecology. Ideological ferment and the behaviors it induces roil western politics and the political expressions of westerners. Formerly easy [End Page 527] stereotypes—ranching or rural, conservative, anti-statist, reactionary, anti-urban, Republican—never regionally universal to begin with, now compete with blue-state proclivities and attendant ideological associations: expanding regard for sustainability and the environment, for example, or concomitant interest in non-fossil fuel energy sources. Again, the notion is a red/blue one, or at least that's the default pairing arrived at through reduction to the two-party binary. As the editor notes, western politics may be every bit as purple as red or blue: the on-going transitions in the way the West votes suggest that we pay some attention to the manner in which ideological loyalties bleed in such a way as to call for insightful studies of a heliotropic West.

The editor and the essayists suggest that the contests between individuals and constituencies alike are either drawn from, or can be interpreted as, struggles over western identity and western cultural or political patrimony; the "New West" is a tug-of-war political arena over claims upon the "real West." But here, in undoubtedly interesting analytical terrain, is where the volume gets hung up in promising more than it can deliver.

Let's quickly push beyond the easy fact of every collected-essay volume you've ever read. Some of the essays in this collection are better, thicker, wiser; some are weaker, thinner, not as wise. That's not an especially helpful observation. More important is to point out and then unpack a larger critical point. The whole of this book does not add up to more than the sum of its parts. In and of itself, this isn't damning: the dozen original essays in The Political Culture of the New West offer much in the way of individual takes on the shifting nature of western identity, political expression...

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