Western American Literature最新文献

{"title":"Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film ed. by Hervé Mayer and David Roche (review)","authors":"Daniel R. Adler","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a933081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a933081","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>Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film</em> ed. by Hervé Mayer and David Roche <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Daniel R. Adler </li> </ul> Hervé Mayer and David Roche, eds., <em>Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film</em>. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2022. 318 pp. Hardcover, $90; paper, $40; e-book, $39.99. <p>This collection of articles casts a transnational lens on the Western film and its mythos, from its origins in the work of John Ford to its modern global representations in Japan, South Africa, Australia, and other nations. Through transnationalism and imperialism, the authors that Mayer and Roche have collected contend that the Western genre retains its vibrancy through its incorporation of Otherness, rather than the settler-colonial ideology with which it is often associated.</p> <p>The collection is divided into thirds, and the first covers the North American Western in its subversions of Hollywood—describing the different intertitles used in the US version of <em>The Iron Horse</em> (1924) and its exported British version; how <em>Fort Apache</em> (1948) incorporates Irish songs and other depictions of Irishness; and how <em>Vera Cruz</em> (1954), filmed in Mexico and politically aligned with the rebel Juaristas, can be seen as a decolonial text. These elements are often overlooked, the authors argue, and can be interpreted in a regenerative capacity within the genre for their hybridity and subtle criticisms of the US imperialist project. The final essay in the first part treats the subject of the <em>frontera</em> in <em>Tejano</em> (2018), which complicates the stereotypes and traditional simplifications of \"border\" states.</p> <p>The collection's second part begins in Europe, with an article on the successful Yugoslav film <em>Kapetan Leši</em> (1960), which plays with the Western trope of the Indian as Other and repackages the US form with local ideology to depict the resistance of Kosovar Albanians in the face of a Yugoslav state-building strategy. The next article reads <em>Lawrence of Arabia</em> (1962) as an empire film and connects that genre to the Western as an example of transatlantic shared values. The <strong>[End Page 71]</strong> author highlights T. E. Lawrence as similar to Ethan Edwards in <em>The Searchers</em> (1956) in being a man caught between two cultures, which complicates a purely imperialist reading of both films. Next is an example of the savior film, <em>The Dark Valley</em> (2014), which doubles as a Heimat film, an Austrian anti-urban subgenre with origins in the late nineteenth century. Its director and writer, Andreas Prochaska, is cast as a <em>Nestbeschmutzer</em> and the film reads as a critique of repressed Austrians. <em>Adieu Gary</em> (2009) and <em>Les Cowboys</em> (2015) treat French t","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"110 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772111","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 Films of Wallace Fox ed. by Gary D. Rhodes and Joanna Hearne (review)","authors":"Courtney Fellion","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a933089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a933089","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 Films of Wallace Fox</em> ed. by Gary D. Rhodes and Joanna Hearne <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Courtney Fellion </li> </ul> Gary D. Rhodes and Joanna Hearne, eds., <em>The Films of Wallace Fox</em>. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2022. 280 pp. Hardcover, $110; e-book, $110. <p>This ambitiously wide-ranging collection of film essays examines and reevaluates the work of forgotten B-movie director Wallace Fox. The fact that Fox was also a registered member of the Chickasaw Nation adds interesting context to his body of work, though research in this regard is hampered by a lack of documentation or interviews with the director himself. And while the introduction suggests that one of the book's primary goals is to address the filmmaker's Indigenous background as part of his groundbreaking legacy, only the first three chapters make a concerted attempt to theorize about how this heritage may (or may not) have manifested across the director's vast career that includes an astonishing eighty-four films over the course of twenty-six years. The other essays in the book take a more traditional approach by examining genre motifs, plot/character devices, and latent social issues in Fox's films as compared to similar films of his era. The resulting scholarship covers a lot of different ground, and not unlike the filmmaker's own professional career, also leaves a lot of room for ambiguity.</p> <p>As several authors in this book suggest, B-movie directors are not typically studied as auteurs but rather as technicians that can work with a tight budget and strict timeline. Given this economy of means, most of the analysis within this book hews toward story and dialogue, rather than formal or stylistic commentary (although there are some interesting exceptions that are noted in Fox's prudently planned camera direction to reduce the amount of editing needed for the finished film). In addition, most of the authors situate their arguments within a particular genre, such as horror, Westerns, and <strong>[End Page 87]</strong> science fiction, and spend much of their arguments elucidating historical threads tied to the rising popularity of each genre, including the real-life events and literature that spawned these projects.</p> <p>As to research exploring Indigenous film history, Andrew H. Fisher's essay first provides a detailed summary of Fox's career that is grounded in relevant historical events and policy changes for Indigenous communities in Hollywood. Fisher compares Wallace Fox's career with that of Nipo Strongheart, as two vastly different but fascinating (and inspiring) film professionals with personal connections to Indigeneity. By comparison Strongheart's fervent activism for and within Native communities underscores the ambiguity of Fox within his own, despite the efforts of his brothers Edwin Carewe and Fini","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772116","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":"Post Nature Ecology in Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 and Nightland","authors":"Todd Francis Tietchen","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a933079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a933079","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 --> Post Nature Ecology in <em>Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57</em> and <em>Nightland</em> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Todd Francis Tietchen (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Over the past fifteen years, the concerns and perspectives of ecocriticism have taken a turn toward Post Nature methodologies. The work of ecocritics and environmental philosophers such as Stacy Alaimo, Timothy Clark, Timothy Morton, and Rob Nixon has been at the forefront of this evolution toward Post Nature critical methodologies in the environmental humanities. Two of the defining characteristics of those methodologies involve: 1) The representation of environmental concerns, or our precarity, through cataclysmic landscapes, those territories and spaces that have already undergone—and in many cases are still undergoing—pronounced ecological crisis and decimation, and 2) the insight that environmental crises are radically internal to the human form or physiology; the notion that such crises often manifest as epidemiological crises. Working from these two foundational suppositions, Post Nature methodologies typically eschew Transcendentalist or Romantic appeals to the beauty and sanctity of the natural world, and instead foreground the health risks, existential precarity, and cataclysmic environmental destruction attributable to industrialization, mining, anthropogenic pollution, and the aftereffects of military conflicts and toxic weaponry. Characteristically, then, Post Nature methodologies tend to decouple ecocritical engagement from depictions of purity, or of an unsullied wild, tropes that have long played an integral role in environmentalism, environmental criticism, and environmental literature.</p> <p>As such, Post Nature approaches intrinsically undercut the categorical distinction between nature and culture at work in traditions such as pastoralism, or as we see in the long history of Euro-American <strong>[End Page 31]</strong> environmentalist nonfiction rooted primarily in Transcendentalist concerns. Clark has helpfully pointed out that environmental nonfiction in the Transcendentalist mode—exemplified by writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Wendell Berry—engages and celebrates nature as \"the non-artificial\" and \"the uncontrived,\" associating \"sites of minimum or only benign cultural interference, with wilderness and the wild\" (78). While this rigid configuring of the nature/culture divide has obviously been able to generate significant histories of ecological critique and activism that imagines itself involved in a primary defense of what remains of unsullied nature or the wild, Clark rightfully wonders if the advance of our planetary problems in an age of general toxicity and environmental cataclysm destabilizes that divide as a workable concept or category of thought (75–76).</p> <p>Environmental crisis is not just \"out there\" in the vanish","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":"141772109","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":"Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre by Michael K. Johnson (review)","authors":"Neil Campbell","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a933085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a933085","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>Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre</em> by Michael K. Johnson <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Neil Campbell </li> </ul> Michael K. Johnson, <em>Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre</em>. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2023. 273 pp. Hardcover, $99; paper, $30. <p>Michael Johnson's <em>Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre</em> begins with a scene from <em>The Mandalorian</em>, followed by one from <em>The Walking Dead</em>, 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 <strong>[End Page 79]</strong> of color have used speculative work to challenge this position and to imagine new and different visions (4).</p> <p>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 <em>The Brother from Another Planet</em> to television shows like <em>Watchmen</em> and <em>Undone</em>. 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. <em>Speculative Wests</em> 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. Hen","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772114","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":"American Energy Cinema ed. by Robert Lifset, Raechel Lutz, and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre (review)","authors":"Micah Donohue","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a933088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a933088","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>American Energy Cinema</em> ed. by Robert Lifset, Raechel Lutz, and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Micah Donohue </li> </ul> Robert Lifset, Raechel Lutz, and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre, eds., <em>American Energy Cinema</em>. Morgantown: West Virginia UP, 2023. 360 pp. Paper, $29.99; e-book, $29.99. <p>The editors of <em>American Energy Cinema</em> explain that this volume, which collects the work of scholars and industry professionals, analyzes how Hollywood \"filmmakers have portrayed energy and energy industries across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century\" (3). The contributors evaluate an impressive array of US films (and one miniseries), which range from well-known early classics like <em>Wings</em> (1927) and <em>Boom Town</em> (1940) through films reflecting—and reflecting on—the oil crises of the 1970s to contemporary energy-themed films like <em>There Will be Blood</em> (2007), <em>San Andreas</em> (2015), and <em>Deep Water Horizon</em> (2016). (The most contemporary work discussed is the 2019 HBO miniseries <em>Chernobyl</em>.) Methodologically, the essays employ historical \"methods and foci\" to survey the sociopolitical contexts informing more than a century's worth of cinema telling the highly ambivalent story of the United States' fraught relationship to electricity, hydropower, nuclear energy, and, above all, oil. Each chapter is essentially a case study, spotlighting one or two films. The overall effect of <em>American Energy Cinema</em> is like that of a bustling film festival exhibiting works sure to be of interest to historians, film scholars, energy scholars, and environmental studies scholars.</p> <p><em>American Energy Cinema</em> divides into five chronologically organized parts that follow the same basic structure. Each section begins with a chapter on a film from the early or middle-part of the twentieth century, and it concludes with a chapter on a film from the end of the twentieth century or the start of the twenty-first century. Part 1, \"When Disaster Strikes,\" addresses filmic depictions of energy <strong>[End Page 85]</strong> catastrophes (or near catastrophes) such as cascading power outages, nuclear reactor meltdowns, and oil spills. Part 2, \"Energy and Nature,\" focuses on the environmental effects of energy extraction/use and the relationships between energy cinema and environmental movements. Part 3, \"Critiquing the Western,\" details several intersections between energy cinema and the western genre. Part 4, \"Energy and Morality,\" explores the ambiguous ethical dimensions of US energy films and how those films register changing moral attitudes about energy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume concludes with \"Energy and the State,\" which foregrounds the role of governmental policies and political ideologies in US h","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772119","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":"California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal by Monique McDade (review)","authors":"Margaret Doane","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a933087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a933087","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>California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal</em> by Monique McDade <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Margaret Doane </li> </ul> Monique McDade, <em>California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal</em> Lincoln U of Nebraska P 2023. 252 pp. Hardcover, $55; Kindle, $39.99. <p>Monique McDade's <em>California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal</em> \"establishes a genealogy of western American women writers publishing between 1870 and 1945 to argue that both white women and women of color regionalized dominant literary trends to negotiate the contradictions between an American liberal individualism and American equality\" (book cover). McDade analyzes works by Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–85); María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832–95); Edith Maude Eaton, writing as Sui Sin Far (1865–1914); Eva Rutland (1917–2012); and Joan Didion (1934–2021) to show how these writers were able to \"adapt dominant literary forms to create critical reflection\" (203). While some wrote in additional genres, all \"wrote for magazines and … contributed to a journalistic regionalism in some of the day's leading newspapers and periodicals\" (22). In order to gain publication, many of the works initially appear to follow acceptable plots and accepted gender and racial expectations, yet these writers are able to assert \"alternative definitions and narratives for liberal personhood through rearticulations of popular genres and literary modes\" (23).</p> <p>The first two chapters \"trace the ways sentimental narratives serve María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Helen Hunt Jackson in reimagining the nation's liberal foundations\" (25). McDade shows how Ruiz de Burton \"takes up the sentimental tradition to demand western American and Mexican American representative autonomy\" (25), how her \"complex network of female characters exposes the false promises the nation serves both women of color and white women through a rhetoric of domesticity as the growing nation further entrenches itself in exclusionary traditions to secure white male privilege\" (26). Helen Hunt Jackson initially addressed \"the U. S. government's mistreatment of Native American tribes across the United States\" directly in her treatise, <em>A Century of Dishonor</em>, but was far more successful in gaining the country's attention with her \"sentimental adaptation\" of her views in her novel, <em>Ramona</em> (83, 84). Jackson \"pivots her literary agenda to meet the expectations of her <strong>[End Page 83]</strong> established readership\" by using the sentimental tradition, \"a cornerstone [of which] is that regardless of who the novel appears to be about, it is always about the Anglo-American reader\" (84).</p> <p>Chapters on Sui Sin Far and Eva Rutland show how their writing reveals \"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":"141772117","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":"Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and Just Transition by Matthew S. Henry (review)","authors":"Surabhi Balachander","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a933083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a933083","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>Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and Just Transition</em> by Matthew S. Henry <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Surabhi Balachander </li> </ul> Matthew S. Henry, <em>Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and Just Transition</em>. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 232 pp. Hardcover, $99; paperback, $30; e-book, $30. <p>In the introduction to <em>Hydronarratives</em> Matthew S. Henry cites historian Christopher Jones's concept of \"petromyopia,\" a term for the \"oil-centricity\" of the energy humanities (17). To counter it Henry insists upon centering water in the energy and environmental humanities, as well as in just transition frameworks, which are central to his argument. \"Water is arguably just as important as fossil fuels to the functioning of the global capitalist system,\" he writes, which means that to truly achieve an anti-extractivist, sustainable, and socially equitable climate transition, stakeholders must reimagine water as well as oil (3). As a humanist scholar Henry examines such reimaginings in creative works of various forms, seizing upon their narrative potential to argue \"that narrative interventions are necessary for a just transition\" (6). Henry simultaneously argues for and demonstrates through his analysis the importance of humanistic methods in meeting the twenty-first century's pressing climate challenges.</p> <p>Henry opens his introduction with an anecdote about the anti-pipeline protests at Standing Rock (where the rallying cry, of course, was \"Water Is Life\") and in the four chapters, delves into four other recent, well-known, and water-related environmental crises in the United States: in chapter 1, disputes over dwindling Colorado River waters; in chapter 2, the Flint water crisis; in chapter 3, water contamination as a result of coal mining in Appalachia; in chapter 4, the specter of sea level rise and its relationship to proposals for a Green New Deal. The events around which Henry organizes his chapters are almost obvious, but the obviousness is precisely the point: it brings into relief the comparative obscurity and creative potential of associated narrative interventions. \"The cultural representations I consider throughout this book,\" Henry writes, \"are not merely diagnostic or critical but also generative,\" alternate forms of engaging with topics that have perhaps been over-diagnosed (16). \"Cultural spaces have long been sites of reflection, refraction, and rupture of dominant narratives and power structures,\" and thus, the novels, fashion shows, performance pieces, poster designs, and more that <strong>[End Page 75]</strong> Henry examines here actively reframe dominant narratives about water crises using methods uniquely available to creative forms (6).</p> <p>To illustrate Henry's methods, I look to chapter 1, \"Decolonizing Drought: Indigenous ","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772112","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":"Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth, and Violence in the Video Game West ed. by John Wills and Esther Wright (review)","authors":"Chad Beharriell","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a933092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a933092","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>Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth, and Violence in the Video Game West</em> ed. by John Wills and Esther Wright <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Chad Beharriell </li> </ul> John Wills and Esther Wright, eds., <em>Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth, and Violence in the Video Game West</em>. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2023. 240 pp. Hardcover, $65; paper, $29.95; e-book $24.95. <p>The <em>Red Dead Redemption</em> video game series, produced by Rockstar Games, is the most influential digital experience of the Western genre to date. This collection of eleven essays, part of The Popular West series published by the University of Oklahoma Press, is a comprehensive examination of those games, particularly their narrative structure and game-play, with a focus on <em>Red Dead Redemption II</em> (2018) and <em>Red Dead Redemption</em> (2010). Whether lauding or finding fault, the contributors acknowledge the cultural reach of this Western series.</p> <p>Following an excellent introductory section, which includes a history of Western-genre storytelling (from dime novels to video games) and a survey of the study of western history itself, the essays are divided across three chapters; \"Mechanics and Genre,\" \"Outsiders and Slow Death,\" and \"Representation and Meaning.\"</p> <p>The collection has three prime strengths; contextualization of the <em>Red Dead</em> series within the longer history of Western video games; sustained application of theoretical frameworks to series examples; and detailed analysis of various game portrayals ranging from law enforcement, disease, and ecological change to familial, gender, and racial relationships, including with the Indigenous presence. Several <strong>[End Page 93]</strong> contributors also coherently map out how the <em>Red Dead</em> game-world and mechanics draw upon the revisionist Western films of the 1960s. The more convincing viewpoints incorporate game dialogue to illustrate critiques, as Ashlee Bird (Western Abenaki) does, noting the moral dissonance between Rockstar's conservation message in one mission of the 2018 game and the subsequent option to take animals as the player-avatar desires.</p> <p>Among the numerous interesting ideas is Sören Schoppmeir's notion of <em>Red Dead Redemption</em> (I and II) functioning as a \"database Western\" to let gamers create a self-selected playable Western outside of the main narrative. John Wills (co-editor) claims <em>Red Dead II</em> gives a partly successful period experience by digitally combining sublime western views with the mundane of \"grinding\" work. Soraya Murray's essay, which concludes the book, contends <em>Red Dead II</em> will become known for a specific political feeling.</p> <p>Notably, <em>Red Dead Revolver</em>, the 2004 offering seen by Rockstar as distinct from its latter two games, is argued by co-editor E","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"245 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772118","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":"We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration by Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura (review)","authors":"Mika Kennedy","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a933090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a933090","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>We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration</em> by Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Mika Kennedy </li> </ul> Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura, art by Ross Ishikawa and Matt Sasaki, <em>We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration</em>. Wing Luke Museum and Chin Music Press, 2021. 151 pp. Paper, $19.95; e-book, $9.95. <p><em>We Hereby Refuse</em> begins with a series of sharp intrusions into the lives of three Japanese Americans coming of age on the West Coast: a domestic afternoon is interrupted by the FBI; a traffic stop turns into an accusation of espionage; and a shopping trip stalls after an accusation of loyalty to the Japanese emperor. These three protagonists, Hajime Jim Akutsu, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, and Mitsuye Endo, are all historical figures who were forcibly removed and incarcerated in the United States' Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II. As one of the most heavily documented topics in twentieth-century western history, Japanese Americans have been able to shift the incarceration narrative from the state's notion of an unfortunate but inevitable wartime necessity to a story of active injustice perpetrated by the United States. But this was not a historical repair executed in hindsight, after the war was over. It has always been ongoing. With its three interwoven stories, <em>We Hereby Refuse</em> spotlights critical early examples of Japanese American resistance—and most importantly, the multitudinous, even contradictory visions of what that \"resistance\" looks like.</p> <p>In a graphic narrative like <em>We Hereby Refuse</em>, to \"look like\" is both a discursive and literally visual quality. Joining an exciting plenitude of recent incarceration graphic texts, among them George Takei's <em>They Called Us Enemy</em> (2019), Kiku Hughes's <em>Displacement</em> (2019), and Molly Murakami's <em>Tide Goes Out</em> (2022), <em>We Hereby Refuse</em> features the work of two different artists with dynamically different illustration <strong>[End Page 89]</strong> styles. Their work in concert emphasizes the polyvocal quality of the text, through which <em>We Hereby Refuse</em> makes clear that however remote the camps or \"alien\" their inhabitants, the state is always present. To experience incarceration is to be in constant negotiation with the many faces of the state, and these negotiations must be met by as many faces of resistance.</p> <p>In Endo's and Akutsu's stories these negotiations are rendered with clean lines, flat colors, and rectangular panels as the US state attempts to put Japanese Americans in boxes both figurative (legislative management) and literal (prison), and Endo and Akutsu respond by using the United States' boxes against itself. Endo brings a court case against the US govern","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772125","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 North American West in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Brenden W. Rensink (review)","authors":"Michael Brickey","doi":"10.1353/wal.2024.a924882","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2024.a924882","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 North American West in the Twenty-First Century</em> ed. by Brenden W. Rensink <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michael Brickey </li> </ul> Brenden W. Rensink, ed., <em>The North American West in the Twenty-First Century</em>. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 380 pp. Hardcover, $99; paper, $30; e-book, $30. <p>Historian Brenden W. Rensink's edited collection of essays introduces new research on major problems facing the American West in the twenty-first century through \"a cohesive set of research questions as explored through a handful of case studies\" (xxv). The book is conceptualized as a foray into \"Modern West\" studies, which is made up of \"many intersecting subfields\" that follow the New Western History trail blazed by Patricia Nelson Limerick in the 1980s (xxi). The essays herein arose from a 2019 workshop at the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University, and the contributors offer new questions, new findings, new trajectories, and new narratives across the book's five overlapping thematic problem areas.</p> <p>In Part One, \"Environmental Reckonings,\" Jennifer Dunn looks closely at cultural and economic challenges associated with Superfund site designation in Libby, Montana, while David Vail discusses ecological threats facing vast stretches of farmlands across the Great Plains. In Part Two, \"Indigenous Lands and Sovereignty,\" Marcus Macktima discusses problems associated with the politics of place and identity in and around the ancestral homelands and colonial reservation boundaries of the San Carlos Apache Nation in southeastern Arizona. Soni Grant's ethnographic work with the Diné in New Mexico examines how \"land relations established over the course of colonial settlement shape contemporary experiences of extraction\" (82). In various ways these authors help us reconsider how places are conceptualized and experienced across multiple spatial and temporal scales in the US West. <strong>[End Page 379]</strong></p> <p>Part Three, \"Urban and Rural Transformations,\" covers the social and cultural impacts of recent economic trends. Stuart Leslie and Layne Karafantis show how the high-tech economy has produced patterns of social inequality that merit comparison between today's tech barons and Gilded Age robber barons. Lindsey Passenger Wieck's essay brings this story street level, to San Francisco, where tech workers' search for urban authenticity has gentrified the working-class Latino Mission District. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Widener's essay on agritourism in Colorado's Grand Valley demonstrates that the tourist desire to consume rural authenticity is helping some small landholders remain in place. The information and tourism economies are modifying western landscapes, social relations, and cultural practices.</p> <p>Part Four provides new ways of thinking about \"Migrant ","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"194 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140616300","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}