Why exactly, would you say, does the West loom so large in the imagination of many Americans?
‘Wilderness. The word itself is music’ (Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, Simon and Schuster, 1968, p. 166). Consider the idea of wilderness in contemporary representations of the American West.
‘Angry as one may be at what heedless men have done and still do to a noble habitat, one cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope’ (Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water, Penguin, 1997, p. 38). As you consider representations of the American West now, do you find hope, not pessimism?
Jane Tompkins argues that in Westerns ‘horses fulfil a longing for a different kind of existence. Antimodern, antiurban, and antitechnological, they stand for an existence without cars and telephones and electricity’ (West of Everything, Oxford UP, 1992, p. 93). Explore the meanings of the horse in American Westerns, both old and new.
The South
On the basis of the contemporary cultural materials you have studied, is the South still fighting the Civil War?
Southern distinctiveness, writes James Cobb, ‘has often been defined in response to our larger national self-image’ (Away Down South, Oxford UP, 2005, p. 8). To what extent, and in what ways, is the South still ‘distinct’ from or ‘other’ to the rest of the United States?
In 2024, Scott Romine published a study of Southern culture with the memorable title, The Zombie Memes of Dixie. Explore representations and meanings of the monstrous in the culture of the South you have studied.
Research either the idea of the Global South or the Nuevo South (there are areas of overlap between them). To what extent is the South now either ‘Global’ or ‘Nuevo’, and with what effects?
Critical regionalism
What do you understand by the adjective ‘critical’ in ‘critical regionalism’? What are the challenges and what are the rewards of maintaining a critical regionalist approach to American cultural texts?
Study Activities
The West
Contesting traditional histories of the American West that privilege the activity of whites, more recent scholarship has offered a multicultural account of the region. To make your own contribution to this vital intellectual work, choose a minority racial group and fashion a timeline of its significant interventions in the West. Given our discussions in the book of the social, cultural and political inputs of Native American nations, you might venture elsewhere, exploring the history of African Americans in the region, say, or of Chinese Americans or Japanese Americans.
As well as documenting white hegemony in the West, our chapter considers the region’s masculinisation. This, too, is a baleful tendency to be challenged. Play a part in uncovering and validating women’s history in the West by curating your own mini-exhibition. Choose ten artefacts that, for you, are expressive of women’s situations and activities in the region. Be as creative and wide-ranging as possible in your selection of cultural texts and materials.
When we think about the American West, rural landscapes may still come to mind first: the Rocky Mountains, perhaps, or the South-western deserts. But reflect instead on the urban West and identify five cultural texts that represent interestingly a Western city of your choice. Cities to select from include Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Dallas, Houston, etc.; your texts might range from novels to songs, films to photographs, paintings to plays, etc. What sense of urban space in the West do these give?
The South
In the wake of recent racialised atrocities in the US, especially the murder of George Floyd in 2020, many Southern towns and cities have taken down their statues of heroes from the Confederate (slaveholding) side in the Civil War. With plinths now standing empty, choose six figures from Southern history who you think it is important to commemorate instead. What leads you to your selections?
Choose one of the following from the rich inventory of types of Southern music and explore its history and its politics: a) African American spirituals; b) Delta blues; c) Cajun; d) zydeco; e) gospel; f) bluegrass; g) rock ’n’ roll; h) Southern soul; i) Southern hip-hop.
In this chapter we take as one of our subjects Southern cuisine, focusing on the complex history of two iconic dishes: collard greens and fried chicken. Choose another dish associated with the American South – options include beignets, grits, hushpuppies and jambalaya – and explore its history and its significance. Has the meaning of this dish shifted across time (analogously to how the meaning of a literary text is not definitively fixed, but fashioned and refashioned by successive generations of readers)?
As with the West, so with the South: i.e. there are many versions of the South, competing for discursive power. Take one of these double bills of films and compare and contrast each work’s representation of the region: a) Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991); b) Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Chinonye Chukwu’s Till (2022); c) Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939) and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012).
Critical regionalism
In working with the idea of critical regionalism, Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis reject ‘sentimental’ or ‘chauvinistic’ accounts of a particular region: rather than viewing it as turning its back on what lies beyond its boundaries, they conceive of the region instead as bound into ‘engagement with the global, universalizing world’ (Critical Regionalism, Prestel, 2003, pp. 10, 34). We adopt this approach during the chapter in our analyses of the West and the South. Vary the geographical focus, however, and bring a critical regionalist outlook to bear on another region of the United States: the Midwest, perhaps, or New England.
Online Resources
The West
American West – administered by Brown University, Rhode Island, but offering access to collections of documents and images held by a host of institutions (historically wide-ranging, if with a slant towards older materials)
The West – attached to the 1996 PBS TV series, directed by Stephen Ives: helpful sampling of documents and images
American West Photographs – a rich repository of images held by the National Archives, spanning the period from the 1860s to 1912 and searchable by multiple categories (e.g. ‘Soldiering in the West’, ‘Bonanzas from the Earth’, ‘Towns Out of Dust and Rock’)
U.S. West: Photographs, Manuscripts, and Imprints – hosted by DeGolyer Library of Southern Methodist University, Dallas: excellent complement to ‘American West Photographs’ above, similarly focusing upon the late nineteenth century
Mountain West Digital Library – like ‘American West’ above, a very useful portal to a host of publicly available resources, including photographs, maps, oral testimonies, government reports, etc.
The Willa Cather Archive – excellent scholarly resource, developed by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to support work on the novelist whose feminist reimagining of the West we consider in this chapter
The Bill Lane Center for the American West – valuable resource maintained by Stanford University: includes not only archive materials, but details of ongoing campaigning work (e.g. for improved digital healthcare services in the West)
The South
Documenting the American South – hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and comprising ‘sixteen thematic collections of primary sources for the study of southern history, literature, and culture’ (collections are wide-ranging, e.g. ‘North Carolina Maps’ and ‘The Church in the Southern Black Community’)
Unsettling Histories of the South – insightful essay by US historian Angela Hudson on the frequently neglected Native American imprints in the region
Photographs by Walker Evans – scan the digitised holdings of the Library of Congress for images of the rural South during the Depression by this important photographer whose work we discuss in the chapter
William Eggleston – as a vivid counterpart to Evans’s monochrome images from the 1930s, browse this selection of saturated colour photographs by Eggleston (born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1939): poetic transcriptions of the everyday South, from diners and sheds to freezer compartments and motel bedrooms
Southern Oral History Program – fascinating collections of oral testimony held by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: topics covered include regional labour activism, as well as struggles for racial justice
Southern Documentary Project – website of a partner institution to the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture and especially interesting for its diverse collection of recently made films on life in the region
Southern Spaces – homepage of a lively open-access journal maintained by Emory University, Atlanta: often contemporary in focus and multi-media in presentation
The Southern Foodways Alliance – website of another partner institution to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture (consult alongside our chapter’s discussion of collard greens and fried chicken)
Critical regionalism
Critical regionalism – stimulating collection of online articles produced in 2011-12 (some by our book’s co-author Neil Campbell): productive, still, in showcasing a critical regionalist approach to examples of popular American culture)
