Haunting Presences and the New Western History: Reading Repetition, Negotiating Trauma

CARL GUTIERREZ-JONES Haunting Presences and the New Western History: Reading Repetition, Negotiating Trauma s a principal contributor t?, and spokesperson for, the kNew Western History, Patricia Limerick has engaged critical problems that speak not only to the grounding assumptions of U.S. Western history, but also to ideas about what constitutes proper historiography more generally. From the outset, the New Western historians have attempted to negotiate a thick ideological context in which Western history writing has, according to them, too often served highly charged political purposes. The hallmark, synthesizing pluralism that one finds in New Western History (nwh) texts thus constitutes a strategic response to previous historiographie trends, trends which presumably failed in large measure because of their contribution to imperialistic nostalgia and other uncritical modes of nationalistic celebration. In turn, a logic of inclusiveness is a central component of the New Western History's intervention. However, the multicultural, feminist and environmental thematics which have been both praised and vilified by reviewers of the movement are not, for the most part, understood by these New Western historians to be expressions of special interests or particularly focused political interventions. These more obvious engagements of ideological issues are instead posed as part of a larger program with significant methodological implications. One of the most explicit statements in this regard may be found in Arizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 136Cari GutiéneZ'Jones an essay by Patricia Limerick, "Turnerians All: The Dream of a Helpful History in an Intelligible World" (1995). Most obviously, this essay struggles against numerous "misreadings" of the nwh, including errors directed at Limerick's own highly influential contribution to the movement , Legacy of Conquest: TL· Unbroken Past of the American West (1987). At the same time, the essay's purpose extends beyond a defense of Limerick's particular project, or for that matter the ostensibly regional concerns ofher fellow New Western historians. As controversial as the nwh's "revisionist" efforts have been, the response to the movement 's reception that Limerick crafts in "Turnerians All" raises the stakes by arguing that the movement is defining a crucial "cutting edge" for the historical profession as a whole. As the New Western historians themselves frame the issue, the most pressing methodological question has become: how should historiography change in response to the inclusion of experiences that have heretofore constituted our "blind spots," spots created when "elements of our social identity . . . limit our vision as sternly as racial assumptions limited Frederick Jackson Turner's vision" ("Turnerians AU" 715)? Turner's exemplary failure is a central one for Limerick, as she "revisits" the nwh to date, because of a responsibility she acknowledges that would require her simultaneously to distance herself from, and to posit a proximity to, his work. Most explicitly, this complicating of Limerick 's relation to Turner signals a response to. critics, as well as to popularizes of the nwh, who would read the movement as a "trashing" of Turner's frontier thesis—in a very real sense the thesis upon which the study of U.S. Western history was founded. For those who have followed the booming rise of the nwh, the effort is bound to spark curiosity , if only because Turner has been treated with, at the very least, a great deal of ambivalence by the revisionists. While Limerick herself goes to great lengths in Legacy of Conquest to posit historical continuities where Turner would posit a radical break with the closing of the frontier, a number of Limerick's compatriots virtually refuse to acknowledge Turner's existence at all. Given this situation, one can easily understand why the popular media in particular has read the nwh's offerings as most importantly a dismissal of Turner. Intervening in this situation, Limerick uses the "Turnerians All" essay to explore the different, and at times contradictory, strands of thought about the frontier in Turner's writing. Most importantly, ac- Reading Repetition, Negotiating Trauma137 cording to Limerick, Turner had sufficient evidence to deeply challenge his frontier thesis and yet he refused the task. Despite changing ideas about agrarianism, and the rise of the factory, Turner apparently chose not...