Western American Literature最新文献

{"title":"Don't Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones (review)","authors":"Mikael Gonzales","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937420","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Don't Fear the Reaper</em> by Stephen Graham Jones <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Mikael Gonzales </li> </ul> Stephen Graham Jones, <em>Don't Fear the Reaper</em>. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2023. 450 pp. Hardcover, $27.99; Paper, $18.99; ebook, $12.99. <p>The second novel in Stephen Graham Jones's (Blackfeet) fictional series Indian Lake Trilogy, <em>Don't Fear the Reaper</em>, continues to follow the events of Proofrock, Idaho, after the devastating Independence Day Massacre. The narrative, unlike in the first novel (<em>My Heart Is a Chainsaw</em>), cuts between multiple perspectives of the citizens of Proofrock as they are once again thrust into terror. Jones introduces the character Dark Mill South as the new antagonist to the arguable \"final girl\" Jade (Jennifer) Daniels, and the two proceed in a bone-chilling spiral of conflict until the novel concludes. Dark Mill South, a serial killer with a hook for a hand, represents the perfect catalyst to once again wreak havoc on Proofrock. Jade, traumatized from the events of the previous novel, deals with the aftermath of spending four years in custody following her murder of her sexually abusive father, Tab. Readers are immediately plunged in the novel's first chapter into following a mysterious yet devastating blood trail that continues to confound until its final pages. Jones is successful in weaving a narrative that feels fully fleshed out and earned, one that will allow readers to accept some of the major twists and turns the novel has to offer.</p> <p><em>Don't Fear the Reaper</em> extends Jade's journey to identify the new \"final girl.\" Those unfamiliar with this trope should be aware that Jones interacts with and examines major points of the trope in the novel through Jade's commentary. A key signifier of this trope is being the focal point of a murderous entity extinguishing unsuspecting youths in a close community. A major plot point is Jade's identification of the final girl, who continually changes as events transpire. Readers of <em>My Heart Is a Chainsaw</em> will be familiar with this storytelling device, as Jade previously utilized her slasher film knowledge in the first installment to solve the mysterious deaths surrounding Indian Lake. Involving the reader in the uncovering of a wide variety of slasher tropes, a trademark of Jones's, lets the reader feel engulfed in the sweeping fury of the chain of events while dropping nods to slasher film fans. Jade switches between being called Jennifer and Jade throughout the novel to signal her denial of her \"slasher girl\" <strong>[End Page 200]</strong> identity in what appears to be a coping mechanism for the trauma she experienced in the first novel. Furthermore, Jones's use of a multitude of perspectives throughout the novel helps advance the plotline in exciting ways as many of the ","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"65 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142251946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Boyhood Among the Woolies: Growing Up on a Basque Sheep Ranch by Richard W. Etulain (review)","authors":"Frank Bergon","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937415","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Boyhood Among the Woolies: Growing Up on a Basque Sheep Ranch</em> by Richard W. Etulain <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Frank Bergon </li> </ul> Richard W. Etulain, <em>Boyhood Among the Woolies: Growing Up on a Basque Sheep Ranch</em>. Pullman: Washington State UP, 2023. 151 pp. Paper, $19.95. <p>Over fifteen years ago in this journal Cheryll Glotfelty noted how \"one ethnic group continuing to elude sustained critical attention\" in the multicultural \"study of western American literature\" are the Basques (<em>Western American Literature</em>, vol. 43, no. 3, 2008, p. 329). That ongoing absence isn't due to the effort of Richard W. Etulain, a rarity as president of both the Western Literature Association and the Western History Association, who has written about Basques as an essayist and the author or editor of more than sixty books on the literature and history of the American West. Now in <em>Boyhood Among the Woolies: Growing Up on a Basque Sheep Ranch</em> we encounter his memories of the sprawling grasslands and scab rocks of the eastern Washington plateau where he experienced the rural magic and harshness of what he calls \"The Ranch.\"</p> <p>Etulain says he was inspired to write about The Ranch while preparing <em>Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature</em> and learning of Stegner's belief that our richest memories are formed between the ages of six and eleven. Actual writing didn't begin until after Etulain's retirement when he was asked to head up a library writing group and he came to biweekly meetings with his own five pages about The Ranch, a project that evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic into a book of short chapters with titles like \"Herders and Hired Men,\" \"Lambing Season,\" \"Off to School,\" \"Going to Church,\" and \"The Sheepshearers Are Coming,\" less a conventional memoir than thematic blocks of remarkable source material that destroy myths and stereotypes about Basque American rural experience.</p> <p>In a chapter about Etulain's parents, \"A Faraway Basque Dad and a Saintly Mom,\" the myth crumbles that open-range sheep ranchers in the US West primarily sought Basque Country immigrants as the best herders because of their experience with sheep in the Pyrenees. In 1921 eighteen-year-old Sebastian Etulain, son of a Navarrese Basque stonemason and charcoal burner, arrived in Yakima, Washington, from the mountain town of Eugi, north of Pamplona. He had worked on a Basque farm with cattle but no sheep and found <strong>[End Page 189]</strong> himself isolated and depressed, without money, able to speak only Euskara and Spanish, sometimes in tears, with dogs as sole companions, trying to herd two thousand sheep in the rugged scablands of the Columbia Plateau. But he stuck with it, taking his pay in ewes. Seventeen years later when young Dickey, as the autho","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142251942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fight or Flight: Poems by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum (review)","authors":"Michael J. Beilfuss","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937418","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Fight or Flight: Poems</em> by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michael J. Beilfuss </li> </ul> Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, <em>Fight or Flight: Poems</em>. College Station, TX: Stephen F. Austin State UP, 2023. 88 pp. Paper, $18. <p>The poems in Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum's third collection, <em>Fight or Flight</em>, provide a loosely connected narrative of a \"Broken White-Boy Heart\" (as one of the poems is titled) that wades through a <strong>[End Page 195]</strong> slough of painful memories and desires before finally embarking, with some trepidation, into a new life and love. The book is divided into three named sections. The first, \"Forgiveness,\" largely exposes the aftermath of divorce. The second section, \"The Unborn,\" investigates encapsulated memories from throughout life, while also addressing a long-held fantasy of imagined future children—the \"unborn\" of the section title. The children were never generated because, as the speaker announces to one imagined unborn child, he \"failed to find / A mother with whom to make you\" (\"Confession\" 8–9). The final section, \"Beautiful Dreams,\" suggests reconciliation and the certainty that comes with newfound love. The three imagined unborn children find their substance in the three stepchildren that enlarge a new love and marriage. In the poem \"Lure\" the speaker professes, \"You are the last woman / I will love\" (32–33).</p> <p>The collection features a complex structure; a structure that is far more intricate than the above summary indicates. Throughout the book the poems refer back (or forward) to each other, enriching the experience of reading the entire work as one piece, rather than simply a collection of a poet's latest work. Each poem can stand alone, but they are all enhanced by their careful placement in the whole. There is a picture on McFadyen-Ketchum's website that depicts what appears to be a manuscript (the manuscript of this collection?) neatly laid out in three rows on a hardwood floor before a fireplace, with a pile of pages in the shadows waiting to be placed or discarded. The image suggests something of the care that went into organizing this work and its soft-spoken narrative. Later poems in the book illuminate earlier poems; the earlier poems seem to call forth the later poems. It's more than simply verbal echoes; there are refashionings and reimaginings of the memories and guilt and desires that the poet needles and examines throughout the collection.</p> <p>Many of the poems are deeply melancholic, especially in the first two sections. For example, \"Sea Lions\" provides a memory of the harmony and familiarity, practiced and unpracticed, that can develop in an intimate, long-term relationship. But the speaker situates the memory a \"decade before he finally gave up\" on the relationship (31). The cherished moment i","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"207 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142268722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Indigenous Homelands and Global Refugees: Unpacking Joy Harjo's Solidary Poetics in An American Sunrise","authors":"Ana M. Brígido-Corachán","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937406","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Indigenous Homelands and Global Refugees<span>Unpacking Joy Harjo's Solidary Poetics in <em>An American Sunrise</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ana M. Brígido-Corachán (bio) </li> </ul> <blockquote> <p>\"I returned to see what I would find, in these lands we were forced to leave behind\"</p> (Joy Harjo, <em>An American Sunrise</em> 5) </blockquote> <h2>Introduction<sup>1</sup></h2> <p>In <em>An American Sunrise</em>, published in 2019, Mvskoke poet Joy Harjo considers land redress, migration, mobility (in)justice, and home/land building from personal, tribal, and hemispheric perspectives. The Muscogee Creek or Mvskoke were violently removed from their lands in Alabama and Georgia in the early nineteenth century and these processes have deeply shaped their history. Vulnerability and enforced movement have also marked Harjo's personal life trails and travels, as a young teenage mother fleeing her home, and as a writer and artist building new homes and planting community roots in diverse landscapes around New Mexico, Arizona, Hawaii, and Oklahoma.<sup>2</sup> This essay aims to unpack the land-centered mobility strategies displayed by Harjo in <em>An American Sunrise</em>—a collection of poems that render Indigenous homelands as an open refuge for the vulnerable and disenfranchised, and where the reciprocal relations traditionally established between human and more-than-human communities must be strongly acknowledged. Actively contributing to global conversations that are reconsidering human and more-than-human relations and conflicts through an ethics of care and relationality (Held; Elías and Moraru; Martínez-Falquina), Harjo examines the effects of Indigenous land eviction and dislocation <strong>[End Page 125]</strong> as a result of both local and global settler colonialist forces that are still shaping the planet in the twenty-first century.</p> <p>Through fifty-nine poetic texts (some of which draw from historical testimonies and other kindred literary works), Harjo's homeland first emerges as \"a site of contestation\" (Goeman 113) against colonialist policies that expelled the Mvskoke from their original territory nearly two hundred years ago. But she also considers the effects of Indigenous dislocation within a settler colonialist framework that continues to forcefully shape human mobility in the Americas; she brings attention to the displacement of Central American migrants, many of them Indigenous themselves, who are aiming to reach the US/Mexico border today. Setting Native American territorial dispossession and land redress in critical relation to global mobility (in)justice and to the contemporary refugee crisis, Joy Harjo reveals the tensions and complexities that arise when examining conflictive experiences of place that are rooted in irreconcilably polarized views. Challenging these binaries through juxt","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"65 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142251935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Little Bit of Land by Jessica Gigot (review)","authors":"Tagen Towsley Baker","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a937413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a937413","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>A Little Bit of Land</em> by Jessica Gigot <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Tagen Towsley Baker </li> </ul> Jessica Gigot, <em>A Little Bit of Land</em>. Corvallis: Oregon State UP, 2022. 150 pp. Paper $22.95; e-book, $11.99. <p>\"Love comes in many forms, and I realized I was longing for a place more than a person,\" Jessica Gigot writes in her meaningful <em>A Little Bit of Land</em> (106). Recounting her journey to becoming a farmer, Gigot blends family history, the works of Wendell Berry and other authors who inspire her writing, personal narrative, and observations of place that transport the reader into the rich landscape and rural life of the Pacific Northwest.</p> <p>Her experiences with intense physical work as an intern and later as a farmer help her learn how to navigate each environment and establish a relationship with the land. Discovering the farm as place, Gigot's work becomes healing as the varied landscapes offer solace and teaching experiences that help her gain new perspectives on her life and the place she resides. Sharing stories from her childhood, her parents' divorce, and a subsequent relationship trauma she experienced as a young adult, Gigot recounts how the land helped her <strong>[End Page 185]</strong> process grief, understand the many facets of love, and how living close to the earth and animals provides connection and comfort.</p> <p>Gigot observes the visceral connections to farming the land, traditional foods, and spirituality as she notes, \"Food is personal, spiritual, and essential to identity and place\" (131). Touching on her own journey as a scientist in academia, a farmer, and a teacher at Northwest Indian College, Gigot is honest in her accounts of the complex and exploitative nature of agribusiness. As she established rapport with the Swinomish people she gained a greater understanding of the importance of traditional knowledge as well as working in harmony to grow food for the wellbeing of the land, family, and community.</p> <p>The content of many of Gigot's passages initiates a conversation with the reader on the intricate relationship and history of chemical applications in farming and agricultural science. Gigot weaves together elements of her experiences as a researcher, applied, practical knowledge of place-based farming, and the emergence of organic farming in the early 2000s. Blending these elements of narrative, Gigot engages the reader in a dialog of the future of agriculture and how these varied approaches shape farming. Her storytelling is vivid, and her honesty is gripping. Her variable approach to agriculture and the cultural importance of growing and eating food leave the reader with a profound sense of place as well as complex questions on how identity is associated with the various landscapes encountered throughout life.</p> <p>The progressi","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142251941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"A Convenient Hallway for Men to Pass Through\": Chicana Adolescence and the San Diego City Space in Patricia Santana's Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility","authors":"Cristina Herrera","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a933078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a933078","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> \"A Convenient Hallway for Men to Pass Through\"<span>Chicana Adolescence and the San Diego City Space in Patricia Santana's <em>Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Cristina Herrera (bio) </li> </ul> <p>In her seminal study <em>¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement</em> Maylei Blackwell reminds scholars that investigating Chicana contributions and their presence during the heyday of activist struggle requires us to \"look more closely at localized political spaces so that we can put women back into a history they had a role in shaping\" (34). Rather than look solely at what she dubs \"hero narratives\" (34), which obscure, bury, or otherwise erase Chicanas' crucial roles in liberation movements, anti-Vietnam War efforts, and educational activism, Blackwell asks us what it means to delve into those spaces occupied by women, including homes, local neighborhoods, and barrios, to glimpse those histories and experiences that have always existed. Further, as this article underscores, to acknowledge the multitude of Chicana youth experiences during a politically fraught period in Chicanx and US history, such as the Vietnam War era, we must be willing to examine regions that are critical to Chicanx activist histories but are often overlooked, much as young Chicanas are seldom seen as important subjects in their own right. For example, in Chicana young adult (YA) literature, Chicana protagonists often make sense of their subjectivities through and within the navigation of their neighborhoods and urban or rural home spaces, narratives that privilege youth as a lens to understand themes of community, activism, family, and history.<sup>1</sup> The YA novel explored in this article, <em>Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility</em>,<sup>2</sup> reverts to the year 1969 in the border city of San Diego, California. Time and space occupy much of this <strong>[End Page 1]</strong> text's tensions, as I will discuss. <em>Motorcycle Ride</em>'s classification as a Vietnam War narrative offers a distinct imagining of issues such as gender, mobility, and space, factors that are undergirded by the text's central tension: the Chicana teen protagonist's navigation of her home and urban space during a politically tumultuous moment in Chicanx, US, and broader global history.<sup>3</sup></p> <p>This article focuses on Patricia Santana's 2002 novel <em>Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility</em>, a YA text that uses the genre of historical fiction to offer a critical examination of a teenage Chicana's fraught coming-of-age set against the backdrop of her beloved brother's return from service during the Vietnam War in April of 1969. <em>Motorcycle Ride</em> remains a rich addition within the context of Chicanx narratives of war, which have a long tradition in Chicanx literat","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California by Matthew D. Stewart (review)","authors":"James Barilla","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a933084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a933084","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California</em> by Matthew D. Stewart <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> James Barilla </li> </ul> Matthew D. Stewart, <em>The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California</em>. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2022. 241 pp. Paper, $29.95. <p>Stewart's book focuses on the poignant connections between Wallace Stegner's writing about the value of building a lasting sense of community in the American West and his experiences of life in the hills overlooking Palo Alto, California, a landscape defined today by its proximity to Silicon Valley. Stegner, Stewart contends, was far less sanguine about the future of the West as the \"Geography of Hope\" than is widely assumed from his published writing. Drawing upon Stegner's written correspondence as well as close readings of his novels, Stewart argues that near the end of his life, Stegner arrived at a view much closer to despair over the burgeoning of what he saw as \"formless non-community\" in the West (174). Instead, Stegner found solace in the contours of small-town life in rural Vermont, where in accordance with his wishes, his ashes were \"spread in a grove of ferns\" in the town of Greensboro, a community he'd studied, written about, and lived in part-time (176). In Stewart's reading, this final gesture was the culminating expression of Stegner's lifelong search for a model of lasting commitment to place and community, even as it belied his written commitment to western possibilities.</p> <p><em>The Most Beautiful Place on Earth</em> follows a roughly biographical arc, beginning with Stegner's arrival in the Los Altos Hills near Palo Alto in 1945 after joining the faculty at Stanford. Stewart's stated aim is to \"place Stegner's characters in conversation with Stegner himself, the historical record, and his many readers\" (5), and he does so effectively and persuasively through close readings of several key novels combined with biographical details and a parsing of the many letters sent from readers in response to each of these works. The first chapter, for example, describes Stegner's attempts to settle into the nascent Bay Area suburbs while exploring the concepts of regionalism in both essays and fiction. The chapter includes an extensive close reading of Stegner's early forays into \"suburb fiction\" set in the Los Altos Hills, such as the short story \"A Field Guide to Western Birds.\" Stewart traces the development of a protagonist, Joe Allston, who would make repeat appearances in Stegner's later novels, and <strong>[End Page 77]</strong> seeks connections between the portrayal of community and belonging in the fiction with the biographical features of Stegner's own attempts to inhabit the region.</p> <p>By the mid-1950s Stegner was developing comparative studies of place-based communities t","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos by Myrriah Gómez (review)","authors":"Carolyn Dekker","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a933086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a933086","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos</em> by Myrriah Gómez <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Carolyn Dekker </li> </ul> Myrriah Gómez, <em>Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos</em>. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2022. 163 pp. Paper, $30; e-book, $30. <p>In <em>Nuclear Nuevo México</em> Myrriah Gómez provides a history of the development of the atomic bomb and the ongoing impacts of the entire nuclear industry on New Mexico through the lens of nuclear colonialism and from the perspective of the <em>vecinos</em>, the Nuevomexicana/o neighbors and community members who were displaced for the creation of the Los Alamos National Lab on \"the Hill\" and who have been, and continue to be, the majority of its labor force and a large portion of the victims of its contaminants. She distinguishes nuclear colonialism from New Mexico's first two waves of settler colonialism because \"nuclear colonialism … targets not only Indigenous people but also other ethnic minority groups in poor economic situations that have become disenfranchised because of state occupation of their homelands\" (5).</p> <p>The book is rich with the experiences of the <em>vecinos</em>, including stories of the author's great-grandparents' displacement from their ranch in 1942 and the experiences of multiple generations of laboratory <strong>[End Page 81]</strong> workers within her family. Gomez's careful work of both mining and expanding the existing archive of Nuevomexicana/o experiences of Los Alamos is one of this book's greatest strengths. She uses new interviews conducted with laboratory workers and their families, recorded interviews from the Los Alamos Historical Archives, and internal documents from the lab to establish that workers like Candelario Esquibel, Leo Guerin, Raymond Means, José Corsinio Cordova, Sevedro Lujan, Escolastico Martinez, and Leopoldo Pacheco, all killed in three explosions in the 1950s, were working at tasks more dangerous than their positions or training warranted. Thus, they were intentionally recruited as unwitting lab rats in the development of safer protocols.</p> <p>These are vital histories, particularly framed against official histories that erase the wasting of life and theft of land by framing Nuevomexicana/o workers as \"unsung heroes\" of the nuclear age and the erasures and glamorizations of pop-cultural memory as exemplified in the television show <em>Manhattan</em>, to which she devotes an entire chapter. Throughout the book Gómez makes good on her promise to \"highlight the ways that Nuevomexicanas/os were marginalized before, during, and after the Manhattan Project\" (14).</p> <p>The fourth chapter, \"Environmental Racism in the Tularosa Basin,\" argues that environmental racism ","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the American West by Bryce Andrews (review)","authors":"Jennifer Schell","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a933091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a933091","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the American West</em> by Bryce Andrews <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jennifer Schell </li> </ul> Bryce Andrews, <em>Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the American West</em>. New York: Mariner Books, 2023. 256 pp. Hardcover, $28.99; e-book, $12.99. <p>Ever since its release in 2018 <em>Yellowstone</em> has increased in popularity, accruing viewers and spinoffs at a rapid rate. Though this gritty neo-Western contains compelling characters—John, Beth, and Rip—and addresses complex issues—land, history, and family—it is perhaps more noteworthy for its refusal to grapple with the problematic connection between firearms and certain forms of American masculinity. In his thoughtful and perceptive memoir, <em>Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the American West</em>, Bryce Andrews is willing to do what the creators of the series are not. For this reason his book represents a welcome antidote to <em>Yellowstone</em> and its depiction of Montana as a brutal, violent place filled with murderous, armed men.</p> <p>Andrews begins his memoir by describing those life events and cultural artifacts that helped to define his initial perception of and relationship with the US West. Thus, in chapter 1 he discusses learning to shoot prairie dogs at the age of eleven on the ranch of a family friend. Later he describes his fascination with Clint Eastwood's movies and Charles Marion Russell's paintings, many of which portray proud, self-reliant men, riding their horses across vast stretches of <strong>[End Page 91]</strong> rugged rangeland. Noting that guns were always a part of this \"Western fantasy,\" Andrews explains,</p> <blockquote> <p>The actual weapons are heavier than most people imagine and more beautiful. They glint and shine: refined machines with trigger, sear, springs, and hammer arranged in hidden synchronicity; marvels of engineering that fit the human hand better than a glove. In many of the stories I heard when I was young, such guns were magic wands, instruments of justice, and protection against the wilderness. They were blued-steel links to our heroic past.</p> (9) </blockquote> <p>Striking for its aestheticized description, this passage captures the seductive appeal of guns, the mysterious attributes that make them so attractive to so many Americans. It also serves to further define the contours of certain popular and enduring cultural myths about the role of violence in the settlement of the US West.</p> <p>After Andrews inherits a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum revolver from his grandfather, he begins to experience a series of epiphanies that prompt him to reconsider his appreciation of firearms and their place in the American cultural and historical imagination. Recognizing the legacy of violence that he inherited from his settler colonial ancestors, he decides to seek reco","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Garden Palimpsest: Space, Time, and the Anthropocene in Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes","authors":"Dylan Couch","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a933080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a933080","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Garden Palimpsest<span>Space, Time, and the Anthropocene in Leslie Marmon Silko's <em>Gardens in the Dunes</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Dylan Couch (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Leslie Marmon Silko's third book, <em>Gardens in the Dunes</em> (1999), matches the scale and breadth of her earlier novel <em>Almanac of the Dead</em> (1991) and expands on themes of identity and perseverance central to her first, <em>Ceremony</em> (1977). It starts with the fictional Sand Lizard, a southwestern desert tribe for whom home is the spring-fed oasis called the \"old gardens.\" This transnational tale—which shifts from the Arizona desert to several European gardens and a South American jungle—exposes readers to a wide range of garden spaces, practices, and corresponding worldviews. The viewpoints presented in the novel illustrate just how tightly entwined gardening is with westward expansion in the United States and colonial incursions writ large. Indeed, while colonization and its enduring effects weave through her entire oeuvre, Silko distinguishes <em>Gardens in the Dunes</em> from her other books by displaying an acute knowledge of the history surrounding gardens and its connection to global imperialism.</p> <p>The portrayal of colonization in the novel falls along botanical lines, which suggests that, generally speaking, every \"garden\" bears the material consequence of entangled histories that merge botanical colonialism with precolonial traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). As the character Aunt Bronwyn mildly affirms, \"the kitchen garden was the modern garden as well. … Plants from all over the world—from the Americas, tomatoes, potatoes, pumpkins, squash, and sweet corn; and garlic, onions, broad beans, asparagus, and chickpeas from Italy—grew with peppers from Asia and Africa\" (Silko 240). Sketching the historical paths these diverse plants took <strong>[End Page 49]</strong> to arrive at the present-day garden would unravel a wide-reaching colonial narrative, and <em>Gardens in the Dunes</em> accomplishes this very imaginative feat by positioning fictional characters and actions within a real-seeming picture of the final decade of the nineteenth century at the height of westward expansion.</p> <p>It's with Aunt Bronwyn's quote in mind that we can appreciate the garden as a material palimpsest that inscribes colonial attempts to erase Indigenous peoples and exploit and monetize traditional ecological knowledge. Palimpsests can portray a range of things, including built landscapes, like gardens, \"where history accrues in layers over time, or as assemblages, sites where things 'gather'\" (Ladino 20). I find Daniel Cooper Alarcón's book <em>The Aztec Palimpsest</em> helpful in considering the palimpsest as a theoretical paradigm to, in his case, foreground the construction and representation of Mexican cultural identity thro","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"350 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}