Narrating The American West

Conventional literary representations of Western American history repress the violent conquest central to U.S. westward expansion through images of open space, autonomous individualism, and masculine heroism. In particular, the genre of autobiography has traditionally reproduced autonomous, transcendent, and masculinist notions of selfhood. This book analyzes New Western autobiographical narratives that contest such colonial understandings of race, gender, and landscape. Through a comparative analysis of memoirs and multiform narratives by diverse Euro-American, Native American, and Chicana writers, this study explores the ways in which "New Western" writing both reproduces and transforms conventional representations of the American West. Through the lens of narrative form, this book closely analyzes contemporary texts that express contradictory historical visions and notions of selfhood, even as they push the boundaries of autobiography. The book's introduction provides a theoretical and historical overview of Western American historiography and literary representations. The book is then divided into four chapters, three of which compare contradictory visions of Western identity in texts by diverse Euro-American and Native American authors from the late twentieth century. The fourth chapter focuses on these issues in the work of a popular Chicana author. Drawing upon a wide array of methodologies and perspectives, Narrating the American West offers valuable insights to students and scholars in a variety of fields, including postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, the New Western History, Native American Studies, American Studies, gender studies, and autobiography theory.

The relation between narration and history from the perspective of the twentieth century – the century of criticisms – suggests a new outlook fit for the new millennium. We can no longer look at history and historiography naively, but must be aware of the rhetorical strategies that are at work in the writing. A research group based in Milan has been working on this topic for a few years, discussing authors and texts from different genres and epochs. The essays presented here deal with texts chosen because of their intrinsic relevance to the history of English-speaking cultures and recent critical perspectives – largely, but not exclusively, indebted to Hayden White. Thus the volume considers instances of narrativity and historical discourse in authors as diverse as S. Johnson, E. Chambers, C. Hill, J. Raban, V. Woolf, N. Mitchison, V. S. Naipaul, S. Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, A. Ghosh.

Recent debates about the Anthropocene have prompted a re-negotiation of the relationship between human subjectivity and nonhuman matter within a wide range of disciplines. This collection builds on the assumption that our understanding of the nonhuman world is bound up with the experience of space: thinking about and with nonhuman spaces destabilizes human-scale assumptions. Literary form affords this kind of nonanthropocentric experience; one role of the critic in the Anthropocene is to foreground the function of space and description in challenging the conventional link between narrative and human (inter)subjectivity. Bringing together New Formalism, ecocriticism, and narrative theory, the included essays demonstrate that literature can transgress the strong and long-established boundary of the human frame that literary and narrative scholarship clings to. The focus is firmly on the contemporary but with strategic samplings in earlier cultural texts (the American transcendentalists, modernist fiction) that anticipate present-day anxieties about the nonhuman, while at the same time offering important conceptual tools for working through them.

A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West presents a series of essays that explore the historic and contemporary cultural expressions rooted in America's western states. Offers a comprehensive approach to the wide range of cultural expressions originating in the west Focuses on the intersections, complexities, and challenges found within and between the different historical and cultural groups that define the west's various distinctive regions Addresses traditionally familiar icons and ideas about the west (such as cowboys, wide-open spaces, and violence) and their intersections with urbanization and other regional complexities Features essays written by many of the leading scholars in western American cultural studies

The literature of the African American West is the last racial discourse of the region that remains unexplored. Blake Allmendinger addresses this void in literary and cultural studies with Imagining the African American West?the first comprehensive study of African American literature on the early frontier and in the modern urban American West. ø Allmendinger charts the terrain of African American literature in the West through his exploration of novels, histories, autobiographies, science fiction, mysteries, formula westerns, melodramas, experimental theater, and political essays, as well as rap music and film. He examines the histories of James P. Beckwourth and Oscar Micheaux; slavery, the Civil War, and the significance of the American frontier to blacks; and the Harlem Renaissance, the literature of urban unrest, rap music, black noir, and African American writers, including Toni Morrison and Walter Mosley. His study utilizes not only the works of well-known African American writers but also some obscure and neglected works, out-of-print books, and unpublished manuscripts in library archives. ø Much of the scholarly neglect of the ?Black West? can be blamed on how the American West has been imagined, constructed, and framed in scholarship to date. In his study, Allmendinger provides the appropriate theoretical, cultural, and historical contexts for understanding the literature and suggests new directions for the future of black western literature.

Preliminary Material -- INTRODUCTION: WRITING RACE AND ASIA-PACIFIC MOBILITIES - CONSTRUCTIONS AND CONTESTATIONS /Robbie B.H. Goh -- VIVAN SUNDARAM'S “AMRITA”: TOWARDS A STYLE OF THE BODY /Tania Roy -- THE RETURN OF THE SCIENTIST: ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL TRIBALISM IN AMITAV GHOSH'S THE HUNGRY TIDE AND THE CALCUTTA CHROMOSOME /Robbie B.H. Goh -- ETHNICITY AND THE SOUTHEAST ASIAN DIASPORA IN LI-YOUNG LEE'S THE WINGED SEED /Walter S.H. Lim -- NARRATING RACE, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY IN R.K. NARAYAN'S THE PAINTER OF SIGNS /Chitra Sankaran -- CHINESE ETHNICITY IN POST-REFORMATION INDONESIAN WOMEN'S FICTION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TWO NOVELS BY AYU UTAMI AND DEWI LESTARI /Harry Aveling -- RESI(G)NIFYING THE CHINESE AND FILIPINO IN CINEMATIC NARRATIVES /Caroline S. Hau -- PERFORMING ETHNICITY, ETHNICIZING HISTORY: THE EURASIANS OF SINGAPORE IN REX SHELLEY'S THE SHRIMP PEOPLE /Lily Rose Tope -- PERFORMING THE SELF: RACE AND IDENTITY IN TWO HONG KONG ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PLAYS /Kwok-Kan Tam -- BORDER CROSSING: PLACE, IDENTITY AND DIS/LOCATION OF THE SELF IN XU XI'S THE UNWALLED CITY /Terry Siu-Han Yip -- HYBRID BROWN GAIJIN IS A “DISTINGUISHED ALIEN” IN SAKOKU JAPAN /Julie Mehta -- UGLY AMERICANS AND LITTLE BROWN BROTHERS: SPECTACLES OF IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY PHILIPPINE DRAMA /Judy Celine Ick -- DISAPPEARING RACE: NORMATIVE WHITENESS AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN AUSTRALIAN REFUGEE NARRATIVES /Wenche Ommundsen -- RACE IN ASIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH: ETHNIC, NATIONAL AND COSMOPOLITAN REPRESENTATIONS /Agnes S.L. Lam -- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS -- INDEX.

The test of western literature has invariably been Is it real? Is it accurate? Authentic? The result is a standard anything but literary, as Nathaniel Lewis observes in this ambitious work, a wholesale rethinking of the critical terms and contexts?and thus of the very nature?of western writing. ø Why is western writing virtually missing from the American literary canon but a frequent success in the marketplace? The skewed status of western literature, Lewis contends, can be directly attributed to the strategies of the region?s writers, and these strategies depend consistently on the claim of authenticity. A perusal of western American authorship reveals how these writers effectively present themselves as accurate and reliable recorders of real places, histories, and cultures?but not as stylists or inventors. The imaginative qualities of this literature are thus obscured in the name of authentic reproduction. Through a study of a set of western authors and their relationships to literary and cultural history, Lewis offers a reconsideration of the deceptive and often undervalued history of western American literature. ø With unequivocal admiration for the literature under scrutiny, Lewis exposes the potential for startling new readings once western writing is freed from its insistence on a questionable authenticity. His book sets out a broader system of inquiry that points writers and critics of western literature in the direction of a new and truly sustaining literary tradition.