Introduction: "What on Earth Has Happened to the New Western History? (original) (raw)
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The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
The American Historical Review, 1988
At the end of the recent television miniseries. Lonesome Dove,. Woodrow Call, the taciturn visionary, returns to his point of departure, the town of Lonesome Dove, Texas. Call had driven a herd of Texas cattle to Montana, creating an entire new industry for the West. In the epic journey, however, his only real friend and several other loyal followers had perished. Even the town of Lonesome Dove had suffered as a result of Call's vision: the saloon keeper, in despair over the defection of the resident prostitute to Call's party, had locked himself in the saloon and burned it down around him. As Call ponders the ruins, an eager reporter pleads with Call to tell the story of the cattle drive. "They say you're a man of vision," he beseeches the unresponsive Call. "Yes," Call finally replies regretfully, "a hell of a vision." Call's few short words express the American experience with its West. While the story was grand and ultimately successful for many, the cost was high. In the past, the popular image of the West, created by people like the news reporter in Lonesome Dove, emphasized the triumphs. The academic view was more balanced but acknowledged the overall virtues and successes of the past. Today, several academics are working to create a revised vision of the western past. Embarrassed by the popular West and disdainful of previous academic interpretations that saw the good in the struggle, the revisionists are creating their own bleak story of our past. To them it matters little that the Woodrow Calls in our history accomplished their goal and made it to their figurative Montanas. All they see are the bodies of the dead along the way. It is a hell of a vision. Patricia Nelson Limerick's book. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, has provided a central interpretive focus for the otherwise disparate work of other new revisionists in the field. In Limerick's western worldview, ethnocentrism, a universal attribute of human cultures, has become Eurocentric racism; frontier has been replaced with invasion, conquest, colonization, or exploita
Journal of American History, 2009
This book is a self-professedly nonacademic essay aimed at a broad audience. Eloquently translated from the German original, the work seeks to explain the causes of the substantial distance between the political institutions and socioeconomic conditions of the "West" and the "Muslim World." The author's analysis is conditioned by the explicit assumption that the last few centuries can be characterized as a "traumatic collision between two modes of life: the Western secular mode, based on an acceleration of time (that is to say modernity), and Muslim lifeworlds, which. .. are characteristically impregnated with the sacred and therefore based on the deceleration of time" (5). Scholarship that challenges the validity of such hermetically sealed cultural dichotomies, as well as those that ascribe primacy to the socioeconomic determinants of historical movement, are dismissed at the outset as part of "an apologetic
How the West Was Lost: The Decline of a Myth and the Search for New Stories
Terrorism and Political Violence, 2020
The notion that the West is in decline is not new but remains topical. It is the backdrop of disappointment in the vaunted post-Cold War "Peace Dividend," the shock of 9/11, and the trajectories of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Western decline is also marked by the failure to absorb Russia in the Western-defined "international community" and the emergence of China as a fullthroated rival to liberal institutionalist teleology and Western economic superiority. Whistlers past the graveyard cobble together statistics and logic to defend what Thomas Kuhn 1 might identify as the normal science of the tattered Western-centered multiculturalist paradigm. Nevertheless, everything from Brexit to Trump, structural inequality and racism, and, of course, Covid-19 management problems raises the question as to whether the era of Western dominance and normative hegemony is done. Ben Ryan captures the story of norms and narratives behind the idea of the West and its laments, but his book does not tackle issues of power and exploitation. Ryan's analysis thus exhibits a limited understanding of the historical depth and implications of the diachronic tectonics of Western decline. Ryan notes that the West became "the West" in the nineteenth century (5) and cites the importance of that era's discipline of anthropology as helping to differentiate the supposedly enlightened European mind from "backwards or decadent alternatives." For Ryan, the "West" is a "purely intellectual construct" (3) or-in Benedict Anderson's famous phrase-an imagined community. He says it is defined by three connected ideas developed through a "distinctively Christian, Enlightenment, European intellectual prism." These encompass the dream of a moral endpoint and inevitable progress toward it, linked slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity-which he calls the Republican (Ryan uses the upper case here) values of the Enlightenment, and Universalism, which he defines as the belief Western norms could be fostered in any part of the world (6-7). Ryan does well to capture the teleological bedrock of Western self-celebration, but he might have considered the overlapping programs for completing the Enlightenment offered by John Rawls (via law and legal institutions) and Jürgen Habermas (effective legal and affective engagement in the Agora)-Ryan does briefly cite Habermas on "constitutional patriotism" (244). After his conceptual introduction, Ryan identifies much of "what's been lost" in the West as involving faith and religion. He clearly feels strongly that the loss of faith and decline of Christian Democracy mark a real crisis of values. Given the stress he puts on this aspect of Western decline, it is surprising that his analysis of religiosity and secularity in the Western world does not appear to benefit from Charles Taylor's 2 much richer and historically anchored assessment of these issues. Taylor, like Habermas, merits only a passing mention in his book (256). Ryan also might have taken a look at James Turner's assessment of religious unbelief in America. 3 Ryan's focus on religiosity may be a reason he appears unaware of or uninterested in central, secular elements of Western-ness. First, the West is not just a set of republican and French revolutionary ideas. Not all the European powers then involved in developing the West were republics-and even the sortof constitutional monarchy of the United Kingdom had a fraught relationship with the Enlightenment as an idea or blueprint for governance and norm-based behavior. The anthropology Ryan cites helped rationalize what monarchical and republican Europeans believed was the superior development-or simply the superiority-of the Western subject compared to the not-Western other. This problem is deepened by Ryan's neglect of the distinction between the West as a whole and the various governments, intellectual constructs, security and economic policies, and imperial/postimperial programs of states falling under the term's conceptual umbrella.
A Concise Companion to American Studies, 2010
Westward expansion is central to American Studies for the very simple reason that the object of study (the United States) has been constituted by successive processes of westward migration and territorial expansion. At the same time, the rhetoric of American Studies as a discipline, in terms of both the vocabulary of American selfhood and of the US nation, has been grounded in migration histories. From the corporate expansionism of the 1630s, which Perry Miller fixed into the paradigm of "the Great Migration," American Studies has been characterized by disciplinary metaphors like Sacvan Bercovitch's powerful analyses of "the Puritan origins of the American self" (1975) and a foundational understanding of the US as formed by the Americanization of (European) migrants. In the wake of groundbreaking work by Ronald Takaki, Gary Okihiro, and others, Americanists have been encouraged to look not across the Atlantic but across the Pacific, from and to "a different shore," to borrow Takaki's phrase. But this proposed change of direction from West to East has transformed not the rhetoric of migration and Americanization so much as extended the remit of western expansionism to Hawai'i, the Pacific islands, and into Asia. Richard Drinnon's account of American conquest, Facing West (1980), begins in early seventeenth-century Massachusetts but ends in Indochina, with a chapter appropriately titled "Closing the Circle of Empire." The West, particularly western imperialist expansion into the Americas, across the continental US and beyond, continues to provide the basis upon which later revisions of the disciplinary paradigm are based. As Raymond Williams (1983) points out, in his Keywords definition of "Western," thinking about the wider significance of a global North/South polarity is modeled upon existing meanings of East/West relations. Even the shift to Transpacific or East Asian histories in American Studies inscribes the West as the primary point of comparison. Williams observes that the concept of "the West" is no simple geographical concept. In our current usage, and in the period since the Cold War, the West has been largely identified with free-enterprise or capitalist states and their political or military allies, while the East is identified with socialist or Communist societies (334). Williams sees this as a development arising out of ancient East/West divisions of the Roman empire and the early Christian church, and draws attention to the politicization of geography that complicates efforts to think about "Western civilization." A consequence of this discursive history is that when we think about the importance of the West and westward expansion in the US context we must keep in mind the wider global context within which the idea of the West operates. The very notion of the continental US as organized into East and West is a European conceptual imposition. The indigenous peoples of the Great Plains, for example, did not think of themselves as living on "western" lands. The description of those lands as "western" also carries a strong Eurocentric association, such that the land is identified with the West of Williams's definition-a free-enterprise or capitalist state-which is emphatically European rather than indigenous. As Raymond Williams warns, the language we use to describe concepts like "the West" in fact prescribes the object we would study. The West as an object of study is slippery for more than terminological reasons. In what follows, I want to begin by asking "where is the West?" because this location has changed both in historical terms and in disciplinary terms, and continues to be debated. I then
Choice Reviews Online, 2014
In Global West, American Frontier, David Wrobel embraces a far-reaching approach which blends critical regionalism with transnationalism and post-colonial critique. Central to his thesis is the understanding of the West and the Frontier as global phenomena, rather than quintessentially American ones. This argument is supported by evidence from a survey of nineteenth and twentieth century foreign travellers to the American West, as well as a number of notable American commentators who searched for "frontiers of adventure well beyond the geographic borders of their newly frontier-less nation" (86). This combination effectively covers the intersections between history and literature and manages to give a new span of life to Frontier history and travel writing. The first part of the book showcases the "neglected voices" of travellers who challenged "the common notion of American West as an exceptional place" (22). Wrobel restricted his study to independently published texts and as such he omits manuscripts, promotional pieces and the abundant material from religious missions. This rather narrow spectrum reflects the author"s primary interests, which lie in the "interplay" of ideas on the American West among liberal thinkers. Accordingly, Wrobel"s perceptive analysis juxtaposes contributions from nineteenth century "globetrotters" of enduring notoriety with other less familiar ones, such as: George Catlin, German novelist Frederick Gerstäcker, Mark Twain and Isabella Bird. These travellers employed their experiences in the American West as an interpretive lens to assess colonial enterprises comparatively and often to critique them. Their "global views", Wrobel maintains, reminded "Americans that they were thoroughly connected to the world of empire building and that their western frontier served as the primary stage for imperial endeavours" (67). In this section, Wrobel"s merging of * Alessandra Magrin is a PhD Student in American History at the University of Strathclyde, where she researches the influence of American Western culture in Italy between the 19 th and 20 th century. She collaborates in a research project about Buffalo Bill, "The Papers of W.F. Cody", led by the Buffalo Bill Center of the West (Cody, USA).
Global West, American Frontier
Pacific Historical Review, 2009
This article questions the common assumption that nineteenth-century audiences in America and around the world viewed the American western frontier as an exceptional place, like no other place on earth. Through examination of travel writings by Americans and Europeans who placed the West into a broader global context of developing regions and conquered colonies, we see that nineteenth-century audiences were commonly presented with a globally contextualized West. The article also seeks to broaden the emphasis in post-colonial scholarship on travel writers as agents of empire who commodified, exoticized, and objectified the colonized peoples and places they visited, by suggesting that travel writers were also often among the most virulent critics of empire and its consequences for the colonized.