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

This book deploys the term “New Western” in reference to revisionist regional narratives. In doing so, I am aware that the West has frequently been imagined as “new,” and that current versions of the “New West” will be replaced by future “New Wests.” However, the category remains useful because it encompasses a diverse variety of texts that revise colonial narratives on multiple levels. While New Western nature writers often emphasize ecological issues associated with particular landscapes, others focus on the experiences of ethnic, working-class, and female communities. Yet all are linked by their resistance to some aspect(s) of colonial discourse and their depictions of some kind of regional community. In this regard, even Native American and Chicana/o writers, for whom the “West” represents a colonial imposition, engage New Western debates by challenging conceptions of western writing as white, male, and rural.

While I regard these writers as “New Western,” their texts often demonstrate contradictory perspectives of the West. For example, Euroamerican authors such as William Kittredge and Annick Smith depict the West as “politically underempowered” because of the power of eastern corporations in their communities. These writers emphasize “the condition of the West as American colony” (Morris, Talking Up a Storm xiv). This vision is explicitly contested, however, by Native American stories of dispossession and cultural suppression, which often implicate the westerners figured as “colonized” by Kittredge and Smith in colonial practices themselves. In light of these conflicts, my definition of New West remains fluid and open, drawing upon Neil Campbell’s emphasis on New Western narrative as “not a unified and totalizing story but one in which many voices speak, many, often contradictory, histories are told, and many ideologies cross, coexist, and collide” (20). The New West is an inclusive term that imagines not “the American West, but only Wests—plural, multidimensional, imbricated, and contradictory” (20).

From within the many Wests that they inhabit, New Western writers respond to specific forms of “material and discursive colonialism” in order to write themselves into history (Aldama 3). Writers from colonized communities in particular draw upon collective cultural stories to rewrite myths of autonomous individualism; contest representations of their naturalized “savagism” and disappearance in the face of disease or incorporation into the dominant culture; and protest ethnographic “collection” and appropriation of indigenous cultures that erase ongoing social inequalities.