The Theoretical (Re)Positions of the New Western History

JEROME FRISK The Theoretical (Re)Positions of the New Western History The new western history is now old enough to have a history. It has secured such stature (indeed, having arguably become the now dominant reading ofthe West) that many New Western historians have recently initiated a self-critical reassessment of the regulative metanarratives that structure the "new synthesis" they announced in 1987. The following analysis of the theoretical perspectives assumed and marshaled by the New Western historians is thus a two-part essay. The first section evaluates the founding texts of the movement, paying particular attention to Patricia Limerick's Legacy of Conquest, Donald Worster's seminal essay, "Beyond the Agrarian Myth," and William Cronon's Under an Open Sky. I argue that such narratives are determined by a "revolutionary trope" which proclaims the newness ofthese stories by reductively conflating the histories of their regional precursors . And perhaps more significantly, these originating proclamations function by implicitly denying the legitimacy of alternative culturally critical histories (such as those offered by Wallace Stegner) that do not conform to the tropes, rhetorics, and political subtexts of their projects. Further, in its original apotheosis the New Western histories were conspicuously marked by their disregard for postmodern theory. The second part of this essay is focused on more recent texts in which the New Western historians have begun, in compelling and often unexpectedly incisive formulations, to both address the challenges of "theory" and to propose (contemporaneously) their self-critical reviewings of their own discursive beginnings. My effort concentrates on a selection ofmajor essays: Limerick's "Turnerians All," Cronon's "A Place for Stories," Arizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 18 Jerome Frisk and Richard White's "Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?" I argue that these interventions (though sometimes oblique, deflected, and preliminary, to be sure) both confirm previous critiques ofthe New Western History and, ofgreater consequence, illumine the repositionings of these most commanding voices in contemporary western studies. But these most current self-critical moves are as yet more promising than influential or productive. The New Western historians, in spite of the clear implications of their recent reflections, seem unwilling to offer a direct critique of their own founding texts. Thus, their belated engagement with contemporary theory often seems more strategic than consequential.1 I. POSITIONING THE NEW WESTERN HISTORIANS Donald Worster's Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (1992) contains several essays that define the New Western History by dramatically distinguishing the projects of the "new" from those of the "old" historiographies. His first chapter, "Beyond the Agrarian Myth," commands special attention as a founding text of the movement. This essay was originally presented as the opening address at the 1989 Santa Fe "Trails" conference that launched the new school, and also appears in the important collection, Traiis: Toward a New Western History (1991). In a pivotal and typically polemical passage, Worster describes the difference between the old and the new as follows: During the past two decades a new western history has appeared with the express purpose of confronting and understanding those radical defects of the past. This new history has tried to put the West back into the world community, with no illusions about moral uniqueness. It has also sought to restore to memory all those unsmiling aspects that Turner wanted to leave out. As a result, we are beginning to get a history that is beyond myth, beyond the traditional consciousness of the white conquerors, beyond a primitive emotional need of heroes and heroines, beyond any public role of justifying or legitimating what has happened. (Trails 16, my emphasis) Though Worster clearly establishes a breach between previous and current histories, does he really mean to describe all earlier discourses as The Theoretical (Re)Positions19 "justifying or legitimating" the deeds and myths of "the white conquerors "? If only "as a result" of recent efforts are we "beginning" to move beyond an imperialistic consciousness, primitive emotional needs, and ideological practice—then how do we avoid hearing the implication that all regional histories before this new beginning are to be understood...