(a submission for the seminar Feminist Critical Regionalism and the Climate of Western Studies)
In this paper I use frameworks by critics Krista Comer and Lucy Lippard to consider 19th century tourism in the Southwest, as both a means of hyper-local regional expression and as symptomatic of an economy of desperation. Southwestern landscapes were effectively redesigned by the tourist industry to both facilitate movement of large groups of tourists and to best “reflect” the story of the Southwest that the tourism industry upheld.
Krista Comer has proposed a study of place based “critical regionalism,” a framework that engages “different constituencies [which] come at […] questions from different stakes” by studying material history and lived regional experiences. In Lucy Lippard’s Undermining, she writes that “tourists’ values are both local and global” and that tourism “is the straw grasped by desperate economies ravaged by mining” and other extractive, exploitative industries. For Lippard, ecology and ecological crisis is hyper local; a blending of the lived experience of a place/people and the study of history and place.
By building Pueblo Revival and Colonial-style buildings to house and entertain tourists in the U.S. Southwest at the end of the 19th century, the tourism industry created a kind of historical artifice which determined the narrative of colonial history that circulated widely in the Southwest. Figuratively, the tourism industry helped cultivate a climate of settler-colonial ownership among visitors to the Southwest—travelers could play pioneer, Indian, or conquistador as they moved across a landscape that was at once sacred, tribal, and colonized. I turn to Comer and Lippard to contemplate the lasting effects of this frequently destructive form of place-making.
Feminist Critical Regionalism and the Climate of Western Literary Studies
