Glimpses of Phoenix: The Desert Metropolis in Written and Visual Media by David William Foster (review)

In Glimpses of Phoenix: The Desert Metropolis in Written and Visual Media, David William Foster takes on a difficult task: to chronicle and analyze the cultural history of a city that has stubbornly—and often strategically—argued that it has none. According to Foster, the phrase “Phoenix has no history” circulates widely throughout the Valley of the Sun, spoken often by newly arrived transplants to the area as well as by longer-term residents. Foster identifies the roots of this claim, suggesting that disparate groups have adopted this unofficial slogan for a host of reasons, some less innocent than others. While some Phoenix residents, he contends, are merely accepting and echoing what they have heard, Foster argues that certain groups have strategically cultivated what he labels a sense of ana-narrativity: “the opposition to producing narratives” (79). One way to prevent a history of social and economic injustice from driving tourist dollars out of town is to deny the very existence of such a history. This denial of a past allows the city’s political and business leaders to continue profiting from Phoenix’s “blithely assertive nowness” (10). Foster articulates his project, claiming “this book represents the first attempt to suggest a cultural history for Phoenix” (11). By highlighting the presence of this cultural history, Foster seeks to combat the ana-narrativity that has allowed and continues to allow social inequality to persist in the Valley of the Sun.

The book stumbles somewhat out of the gate with the opening chapters seeming only partially to advance Foster’s ambitious project. Foster himself appears conscious of this. In his examination of the chronicles of Erma Bombeck, who lived in the Phoenix area for twenty-five years, Foster concedes that even after combing through Bombeck’s body of work, “little would be found that specifically indexes Phoenix” (33). The following chapter on The Wallace and Ladmo Show, a children’s program produced in Phoenix, figures similarly. Foster’s analysis of Wallace and Ladmo’s importance—its run of over thirty-five years stands as the longest in American television history among locally produced children’s programs—is engaging, particularly as Foster reveals the show’s casual irreverence toward the prevailing social norms of the day. Again, though, the ties directly to Phoenix seem few. The overall sense of the opening chapters is that Foster has identified and discussed cultural material created in Phoenix but that this material’s engagement with the city is occasional or incidental.

Foster’s work picks up speed quickly, though, in his subsequent chapters on the editorial cartoons of Steve Benson and the commentaries of Laurie Notaro. Benson, recipient of a 1993 Pulitzer Prize, focuses much of his work on issues central to life in the Phoenix area. Foster guides the reader through a selection of Benson’s cartoons, and the reader begins for the first time to see Foster’s full project come to light. Benson’s cartoons, and Foster’s explications of their significance, reveal the hidden power structures at play in the city. Benson seems the first of Foster’s subjects who is consciously countering the ana-narrativity of Phoenix’s cultural and economic powerbrokers. Notaro, Foster argues, does so as well, using her work specifically to target the forces of patriarchy entrenched in the Valley of the Sun.

The second half of the book continues this trend of identifying cultural works interested in investigating Phoenix’s past, present, and potential future. Foster examines the novels of mystery writer and native Arizonan Jon Talton, who also wrote Glimpses of Phoenix’s foreword. This chapter rates among the book’s most powerful, with Foster confidently defending his contention that Talton, who spent several years as a business editorial writer for the Arizona Republic, consciously uses his detective novels to reveal “that Phoenix’s history, both in its founding instances and current daily reality, is filled with dirty secrets simply waiting to be discovered and told...