Reappraising Regionalisms and the American West: A Roundtable

Reappraising Regionalisms and the American West: A Roundtable Chair: Sam Sommers, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, UCLA Benjamin Beck, UCLA Andy Doolen, University of Kentucky D. Berton Emerson, Whitworth University... [ view full abstract ]

Reappraising Regionalisms and the American West: A Roundtable

Chair: Sam Sommers, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, UCLA

Benjamin Beck, UCLA

Andy Doolen, University of Kentucky

D. Berton Emerson, Whitworth University

Keri Holt, Utah State University

Anneke Schwob, UNC Chapel Hill

Joshua D. Smith, Biola University

Erin Sweeney, UC Irvine

With Albuquerque in mind, this roundtable explores how a focus on the American West challenges many existing heuristics about region and nation in the long-nineteenth century. We consider “west” broadly. It is a region, but one that shifted geographically, from western Pennsylvania and Ohio in the early national period to Illinois and Texas just decades later, and by mid-century marking the vast space that stretched across a continent. It is also a mindset, one that served for decades as future safety valve to sectional discord and one that Frederick Jackson Turner contentiously identified later in the past tense. The West became a voluntary home for many seeking new riches in land and in mines and for religious communities seeking reprieve from religious discrimination. At the same time, the West became an involuntary place of detention as federal government policies forcibly relocated American Indians and continued to redefine the border line for slave states and “free” states. With shifting conceptions of such a wide open space, the West repeatedly complicates master narratives of nation and regions and their respective developments across the nineteenth century.

We have chosen a roundtable format because our goal is to consider broadly the advantages and limits of regionalisms for studies of America in the long nineteenth century. Topics span the nineteenth century as well, from Revolutionary-era US (Doolen) through mid-century (Smith), to the late nineteenth century (Schwob). Additionally, the roundtable focuses on different formulations of Western regionalisms: the old Northwest/new Midwest (Emerson), Texas (Smith), Nevada (Holt), and California (Beck and Schwob). The overlaps as well as broad distribution, both chronologically and geographically, offer a synoptic perspective on the question of region, nation, and the many permutations of the American West.

During the roundtable, speakers will have seven to eight minutes to deliver their statements, leaving at least thirty minutes for discussion. We offer a series of paper pairs that will develop mini-themes across the larger discussion to encourage more specific discussion among participants and audience members: material studies (Beck and Sweeney), democracy studies (Emerson and Doolen), Native studies (Doolen and Holt), and race and identity (Smith and Schwob).

Benjamin Beck kicks off the discussion with the efforts of “historical drinking society” E Clampus Vitus to construct paper and stone monuments that memorialize and mythologize the American West. His paper revisits the Clampers’ moment of resurrection in the late 1920s and early 1930s to ask a comparative historicist question: what salient aspects of a Gold Rush Era burlesque fraternal organization spoke to Californians in the interwar period? Erin Sweeney continues with questions in material culture by reading Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) and its disclosure of the underlying power structures of the complexly-rendered Moreno rancho, which dramatizes in its inhabitants’ experience the conditions of racialization and surveillance that created such grand dwellings under the feudal Mission and encomienda landholding systems. Sweeney draws on archival images and blueprints of the fictional rancho’s historical prototype to map how architecture frames and directs human interaction in the narrative.

Taking a democratic turn, in a reading of A New Home, Who’ll Follow (1838), Berton Emerson assesses the ways Caroline Kirkland’s narrative of the Old Northwest/New Midwest fail to fit neatly in a typically nation-scaled liberal-oriented literary history. Calling such failures “misfits,” Emerson argues that misfits’ vernacular aesthetics call for a democratically-inclined criticism that not only recovers oft-forgotten texts but also develops alternative critical sensibilities with which to read them. Andy Doolen follows with an exploration of the range of Native articulations of democracy during the early United States. In their understudied contributions to political discourse, Native authors adroitly negotiated a process of transculturation, of appropriating and re-inventing the settler nation’s foundational texts. Native political discourse presents an intriguing alternative to the democratic practices organized by the US nation-state. Indigenous assertions of peoplehood fused together Native peoples throughout a widening diaspora in the American West, and imagined democratic practices rooted in Native intellectual sovereignty, lived realities, and national aspirations. Keri Holt continues in the area of native studies with comments on Sarah Winnemucca’s newspaper and magazine writings, her public performances as the “Paiute Princess,” and her 1883 autobiography, Life Among the Paiutes.

These documents reveal Winnemucca’s complicated engagements with the concept of region, focusing specifically on the ways she manipulated, celebrated, and undermined this concept to illuminate how region was a tool for defining and contesting assumptions about race.  

The last two papers turn to questions of race and identity in the west. Joshua Damu Smith considers the impact of Nat Turner’s slave revolt on western expansion. Unpacking the racialized phobias around the Turner revolt that helped fuel President John Tyler’s campaign to annex Texas, Smith’s paper locates the political backlash to Turner’s rebellion at the very center of the America’s effort to forge its identity and expand its territory. Anneke Schwob argues that Muir re-presents his vision of idealized, imaginary wilderness landscapes for Western and Eastern audiences, underscoring the publishing and political acumen behind Muir’s seemingly-naïve wilderness imaginary. Schwob reads the evolution of Muir’s rhetoric of land use across three thematically-linked pieces published under the same title–“The National Parks and Forest Reservations”–in Harper’s Weekly, the Sierra Club Bulletin, and ultimately as the first chapter of 1901’s Our National Parks

.

This roundtable thus brings a fresh perspective to an abiding concern for C19 Americanists: the question of scale. Given this aim and the range of topics, we anticipate that the roundtable will attract broad interest.