Narrating the American West: New Forms of Historical Memory By Jo ...

The notion of the palimpsest, which Daniel Cooper Alarcon describes in The Aztec Palimpsest as “a site where texts have been superimposed onto others in an attempt to displace earlier or competing histories” (xiv), illuminates these struggles. Importantly, Alarcon emphasizes that the palimpsest’s “process of erasure and superimposition…is never total; the suppressed material often remains legible, however faintly, challenging the dominant text with an alternate version of events” (xiv).⁶ As Alarcon notes, the palimpsest emphasizes the “unique structure of competing yet interwoven relationships” that exist in relation to one another (xvi).

Alarcon’s model of the palimpsest highlights how the regional de-scriptor of “the West,” which is traditionally figured as rural “white space,” is only relevant in relation to the urban, multicultural East. Popular conceptions of the West, influenced by notions of individualistic progress, freedom, and the masculine hegemony celebrated in formula Westerns, affirm the notion that the West “has historically defined itself through exclusion” (Klein 6). In this regard, the process of labeling writers “western” may represent a form of colonization. Yet despite the potentially colonizing implications of “West” and “western,” the terms remain useful because, as Krista Comer points out, the very application of these categories to those conventionally excluded from them revises the tendency to view western literature as a “white thing.” Because western regional discourse has been “racialized white,” maintaining a regional focus expands conventional boundaries of western writing by “[e]xposing the racial and gendered assumptions that comprise the discourse” (9).

These assumptions lie at the heart of Frederick Jackson Turner’s seminal address at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which initiated debates over colonial discourse in western historiography. The “Turner Thesis” exemplifies several key tendencies of palimpsestic “old” histories. In declaring that the “existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development” (31), Turner’s thesis resonated with popular images of an empty western landscape that was “free” for the taking. Moreover, Turner presupposed an “evolution” of the American character from its “primitive” to “civilized” stages in the process of westward expansion.