HIST 4650, US West (original) (raw)

Regionalism and the Humanities

In November 2003 nearly 150 poets, writers, geographers, musicologists, literary critics, and historians of all fields—from agriculture and architecture to women and immigration—gathered in Lincoln, Nebraska, at a national conference of the Consortium of Regional Humanities Centers to explore the general theme of “Regionalism and the Humanities.” The papers in this volume reflect the general perception shared by most of the humanists at the conference: in a modern world increasingly homogenized and standardized by the forces of globalization, the regionalist impulse is still very much alive. Once viewed as a reaction against the forces of modernism, it has emerged in a globalized world as a repackaged, more-aggressive endeavor to make a claim for the role of place and space—as opposed to gender, race, ethnicity, class, demography, or other cultural or physical distinctions— in the effort to understand ourselves and what it means to be human. What distinguishes regionalism from these other efforts at self-understanding is its focus on locating oneself in the space lived in, inhabited, made home, or traveled through. This emphasis is itself rooted in man’s fundamental interaction with nature: the land, climate, flora and fauna, and the physical environment.

Untaming the Mild Frontier: In Search of New Midwestern Histories

Middle West Review, 2014

This historiographical article addresses the Midwest as a cultural geography of colonial amnesia, explores the relationship between the Midwest and the field of U.S. western history, and calls for historians of the Midwest to substantially revise regional narratives in much the same manner that new western historians did during the 1980s and 90s.

Masculinity & Westerns: Regenerations at the Turn of the Millennium

2014

Despite the many announcements of its death, the western has recently reappeared in American cinema and literature, reinvigorating a tradition that spans from James Fenimore Cooper’s Hawkeye to the Lone Ranger and John Wayne. Among the many recent productions, this volume considers American films, literature, and music, produced between 1985 and 2011: movies such as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Roberto Ford, The Ballad of Little Jo, Brokeback Mountain, 3:10 to Yuma, Don’t Come Knocking, the TV series Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman, the novels Blood Meridian, God’s Country, and hick-hop music. Matching western, men’s, literary, and film studies, Bordin reads the western as a gendered cultural product, which comments on pivotal contemporary themes such as issues of fatherhood, homosexuality, gaze, and race and gender appropriations. Building upon Judith Butler’s notion of the performative nature of gender, Bordin analyzes how the western interacts with models of American masculinity, confirming the genre’s crucial role in the American cultural and ideological landscape at the turn of the new millennium.