Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre by Michael K. Johnson (review)

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• Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre by Michael K. Johnson
• Neil Campbell

Michael K. Johnson, Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2023. 273 pp. Hardcover, $99; paper, $30.

Michael Johnson's Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre begins with a scene from The Mandalorian, followed by one from The Walking Dead, to emphasize right from the beginning the book's interest in hybrid forms proving the Western has not withered away but has rather transfigured and reinvented itself. These "changeling westerns," argues Johnson, blend genres and temporalities to endlessly speculate upon themes vital to a fuller understanding of both genre and place (3). Thus, speculation within the book becomes "a mode of enquiry, reflection, conjecture, and experimentation," permitting Johnson to employ his detailed, interdisciplinary, analytical style to investigate his overriding concern, the "centrality of whiteness" in the Western, and how people [End Page 79] of color have used speculative work to challenge this position and to imagine new and different visions (4).

In the six chapters of the book, Johnson explores different ways in which artists "make use" of the Western by bending and shaping its forms to new ends, creating a "speculative regionality" that reinvests the West with imaginative, vibrant, and critical potential (18). By focusing on works by African Americans, Indigenous people, and people of color, Johnson maintains a sharp, critical lens permitting a clear concentration on his stated themes of "genre critique," "a history of trauma," and a "meticulous inquiry" into western history (21–22). This emerges in chapters on "Race, Time Travel, and the Western," "Trauma, Time Travel, and Legacies of Violence," "Alternative Cartographies of the West(ern) in Indigenous Futurist Works," "Speculative Borderlands I and II," and "Speculative Slave Narratives." Within these chapters, a variety of texts are used, ranging from more well-known writers, such as Rudolfo Anaya and Octavia Butler, to new voices such as Charlotte Nicole Davis and Rebecca Roanhorse, and from films such as John Sayles's The Brother from Another Planet to television shows like Watchmen and Undone. From this rich swirl of sources Johnson maintains an acute critical eye that both reinvigorates the study of the Western while surefootedly highlighting its ideological gaps and omissions. Speculative Wests is an impressive mining of interdisciplinary material, gathering up minor voices, in the Deleuzian sense, to show how the speculative Western challenges and expands what the genre is and can be. Hence, for example, his interest in time travel narratives allows traumatic past events to be revisited and reexamined so that these hybrid Westerns do not dwell in that past with all its colonial baggage, but speculate productively about a different and better future that has learned from such trauma.

In the "Afterword" Johnson refers to the "astonishing period of social and political action, reaction, change, and stubborn resistance to change" that occurred during the writing of his book (217). He has in mind, of course, the Trump presidency, Black Lives Matter, and the killing of George Floyd, as well as the outbreak of COVID-19. Given that the book makes a point of commenting on 2016 as its "contemporary chronological focus" (21), it might have made more earlier in the argument of the precise political context of the Trump election and its extraordinary impact on racial issues and subsequent [End Page 80] social and cultural division. On another point, I was interested in the number of texts that were aimed at a young adult audience and wondered if this might not have been addressed as a particularly charged political idea about the speculative, futurist thrust of the book's vision. Ultimately, Johnson's book finds hope in these diverse texts for a West that might be "inclusive and humane," offering not the old dream of manifest destiny but the "starting point" for a better, more optimistic future (224).

This is an important and timely book that opens a field of study simply because it is willing to speculate and to step outside the parameters of such a well-established, myth-laden genre as the Western. Speculative Wests proves what Jacques Derrida knew about genre, that...