The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age (review)

At the heart of this book is the belief that the West has never been the property of Westerners nor indeed the United States. Instead it belongs to the world. Neil Campbell tells this story through a useful theoretical lens that embraces the West with a fluid, global sensibility. This sensibility goes beyond Frederick Jackson Turner's regional exceptionalism, American studies' Myth and Symbol School, and the historically-defined and localizing West of the New Western Historians. Disturbing the rootedness of the West, Campbell offers a region of flows, cultural collision and mobility incorporating many of Arun Appaduria's themes of migration, media, tourism and capital.

Using the metaphor of Thomas Jefferson's controlling grid, which Campbell calls a powerful but constraining regionalizing tool, he challenges readers to explore a more layered, Baroque West represented in mid-to-late twentieth-century film, photography, literature, and music. Beginning with a thoughtful amalgam of cultural and architectural theory, Campbell turns to the literature of the southern borderlands and the "contact zone" literature of Ruben Martinez. Later in the book Campbell looks at the work of Canadian writer Douglas Coupland but is less interested in the northern "contact zone" than in Coupland's GenX texts.

In exploring the rhizomatic film West, Campbell begins with Sergio Leone's masterful spaghetti Western, Once Upon a Time in the West, before offering three more contemporary "genetic variations" of Leone's work: Dead Man (directed by Jim Jarmash 1995), The Claim (directed by Englishman Michael Winterbottom 2000), and Brokeback Mountain (directed by Ang Lee 2005). The rhizomatic photographic West is introduced with Robert Frank's (Swiss) semiotic landscape (1950s) with three more recent English photographers of the American West (Michael Ormerod, Nick Waplington, and Andrew Cross). His penultimate chapter focuses on Chris Eye's Native American counter-cinema and the book concludes with the hybridized complexity of the Tuscon-based band Calexico.

Campbell asks us to become critical regionalists by identifying and exploring the origins and limitations in the tools of thinking we use to make sense of region. He succeeds in offering a powerful articulation of new critical regional studies in his effort to maintain that tension between "mythic coherence and arrant mobility." One wonders if the rhizomatic West is an artifact of the late twentieth century, could we perhaps examine earlier cultural productions using Campbell's perspective? Though several geographers were included, it is surprising that only a few geographically-trained regionalist thinkers were included. Notable by their absence are theorists such as Anssi Paasi and Nicholas Entrikin. It should be noted that Entrikin edited a powerful reflection on regions published in the same year as The Rhizomatic West. The work of these geographers would have allowed Campbell to place his work within the larger context of regional theorists beyond the United States. Nevertheless, as an exponent of American studies, Campbell brings a breath of fresh and rhizomatically earthy air to the study of this region. This book is the second in what is planned as a trilogy beginning with The Cultures of the American New West, and Campbell's book joins that of other new critical regionalists such as Douglas Reichart Powell's work on Appalachia.