Comparative American Borderlands: The New Face of Western American Literatures

E s s a y R e v i e w Richard T. Buswell. HALF HOUSE. 2005. Silver gelatin print. Reprinted with permission of the artist. W o r k s R e v i e w e d Evans, Sterling, ed. The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the Forty-ninth Parallel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 386 pages, $29.95. Higham, C. L., and Robert Thacker, eds. One West, Two Myths II: Essays on Comparison. Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 2006. 232 pages, $34-95. Levander, Caroline F., and Robert S. Levine, eds. Hemispheric American Studies. New Brunswick, N J: Rutgers University Press, 2008. 356 pages, $70.00/$27.95. Sadowski-Smith, Claudia. Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. 187 pages, $57-50/$20.00. C o m p a r a t iv e A m e r ic a n B o r d e r l a n d s : T h e N e w F a c e o f W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e s S a n d r a L . D a h l b e r g The perception of an isolated United States with non-permeable borders is so ingrained in the U S public imagination that the Weather Channel portrays hemispheric weather patterns contained by the forty-ninth par­ allel and the forty-second parallel, effectively erasing Canada and Mexico from shared weather events. This cultural image serves as an apt meta­ phor for the American West and its myths that are retained, reinvented, and contradicted in academic discourses exploring borderlands. The scholars reviewed for this essay examine the North American borderlands through overlapping theoretical approaches variously termed hemispheric studies, comparative American studies, inter-American studies, transAmerican studies, and borderlands studies. These scholars interrogate the cultural construction of “American” in depictions of the North American Wests and the ability of the borders to isolate myth and identity and to deconstruct that isolation in the face of fluid border mobility. Three of the books included in this review are edited collections, each offering re-evaluations of the myths that undergird the discipline of western American literature. Hemispheric American Studies, edited by Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, reconceptualizes method­ ological bases for literary analysis in the Americas by recognizing the myths of border construction and maintenance only to erase those bor­ ders in order to “decenter the U S nation and excavat[e] the intricate and complex politics, histories, and discourses of spatial encounter that occur throughout the hemisphere but tend to be obscured in nation-based inquiries” (3). Levander and Levine present hemispheric scholarship as a “heuristic rather than a content- or theory-driven method” that “allows for the discovery of new configurations rather than confirmation of what we think we already know” (9). This hemispheric approach results in provocative reassessment of western American literary scholarship. Examples of questions raised by hemispheric American studies are evident in Jesse Alem an’s “The Other Country,” in which he compares Xicotencatl, an anonymously authored Spanish-language novel printed W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e 43.3 (F a l l 2008): 307-313 3 0 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F A L L 2 0 0 8 in Philadelphia in 1824, to Robert Montgomery Bird’s Calavar, or, The Knight of the Conquest (also 1824). Both novels depict the conquest of the Aztec empire by the Spaniards, but Alem án contends that in Calavar, “M exico’s history stands in for the history of the United States and in the process invokes the quintessentially gothic terror, race,” that “is unsettling because one national identity is buried within another” (84). O n the other hand, Xicoténcatl “collapses the distinctions of national histories...