Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community by Neil Campbell (review)

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• Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community by Neil Campbell
• Christopher Conway

Neil Campbell, Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2022. 227 pp. Paper, $45.

In a scholarly terrain defined by continuous reinvention, the critical practice of decentering remains as vibrant today as it did forty years ago, during the heyday of the so-called postmodern turn. Neil Campbell's ample body of scholarship on Westerns and the American West has been remarkably consistent in its commitment to bearing witness to histories of dispossession and oppression, and to recovering alternate ways of knowing. Using various devices, such as dialogism (Bakhtin), thirdspace (Edward Soja, Henri Lefebvre), the rhizome (Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), and critical regionalism (Kenneth Frampton), Campbell has repeatedly shown how contemporary Westerns decenter oppressive and exclusionary discourses. In previous books like The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age and Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West he wove together sharp readings of films, novels, and nonfiction with an interdisciplinary synthesis of poststructuralist critical theory to show how texts can talk back to the myth of the American West. His latest book, Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global, adds another rewarding chapter to this decades-long critical project, as well as providing scholars with a valuable roadmap for interpreting twenty-first-century literary Westerns.

Campbell anchors his new book in the concept of worlding, which unlike globalization is not associated with unidirectional and homogenizing processes. Worlding represents dynamic, unsettled, and resistant processes of signification that bind multiple spaces and identities together without reifying sameness or bounded categories. Campbell uses this frame to read fiction produced in the Trump era, which saw the prideful apotheosis of a monological nationalism nostalgic for the American 'frontier' and its exclusionary myths. Campbell presents the twenty-first-century novels and fictions that constitute the core of his book as literary challenges to this repressive ideology. These works are Hernán Díaz's In the Distance, Sebastian Barry's Days Without End, Téa Obreht's Inland, C Pam Zhang's How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Valeria Luiselli's Lost [End Page 289] Children Archive, and Tommy Orange's There, There and other "tribalographies" by Robin Wall Kimmerer and LeAnne Howe. Campbell's interpretations of these works, intertwined with his definition of worlding, paints a powerful portrait of how twenty-first-century literary fiction is challenging the hoariest stereotypes of the Western.

Campbell's skill in synthesizing critical theory and secondary scholarship is evident in the pages of the book, alongside his inventive, clear, and economical close readings of literary works. In his chapter on Hernán Díaz's In the Distance, Campbell uses the work of Édouard Glissant and Bruno Latour to show how the novel is infused with concepts like relationality, interrelativity, and correspondence, all of which dissolve the mythical frameworks associated with the West. Campbell's treatment of Téa Obreht's Inland, for example, begins with an inspired meditation on the nineteenth-century stereoscope as a metaphor for different ways of looking at the West. In his chapter on How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Campbell uses the concepts of friction and collage to argue that the novel foregrounds ambiguity, multiplicity, and traumatic discontinuities while rejecting unidirectional or teleological frames of patrilineality. A chapter on Native American fiction underlines how writers like Robin Wall Kimmerer, LeAnne Howe, and Tommy Orange underline the connective and collaborative dimensions of worlding by "retaining and sustaining tribal histories, ceremonies, and humor, while also reaching outward" (133).

Campbell is a generous scholar who orchestrates a broad chorus of critical voices, critical theory, and secondary literature. Much like the novels he writes about, he dialogues in unbounded ways, cutting across and through various theoretical labels and conversations, finding value and resonance in more than one location. His book is also arguably the first to group the most celebrated, twenty-first-century fictions about the American West into a coherent corpus for further study. In this, as with his commitment to dialogism, Campbell has made an invaluable contribution...