A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West
Nicolas S. Witschi
Language: English
Pages: 569
ISBN: 1118652517
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
'A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West' presents a series of essays that explore the historic and contemporary cultural expressions rooted in America's western states.
• Offers a comprehensive approach to the wide range of cultural expressions originating in the west
• Focuses on the intersections, complexities, and challenges found within and between the different historical and cultural groups that define the west's various distinctive regions
• Addresses traditionally familiar icons and ideas about the west (such as cowboys, wide-open spaces, and violence) and their intersections with urbanization and other regional complexities
• Features essays written by many of the leading scholars in western American cultural studies
confine ourselves to novels and memoirs, much of the richness of the black West will be lost. To come to a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which African Americans have imagined the West, we need an expanded notion of the text, one that includes not just the novel, the memoir, and the periodical, but also other media. As Blake Allmendinger observes, the literature about the African American western experience includes “futuristic fiction and historical novels, Westerns and mysteries,
particular by Las Vegas, which represents middle-class consumerism, the appropriation of countercultural styles by mainstream America, and conservative politics. Rather than being removed and isolated from mainstream America, Las Vegas is the embodiment of late twentieth-century American culture, and Thompson’s Raoul Duke is a western hero disappointed by the modern, urban Southwest. While both Austin and Thompson frame the Southwest as a land out of time, their views of the region’s timelessness
ocean and shore, water and ice, human and animal, past and present, city and village, life and death. Much of the best writing by Alaska Natives inhabits a cultural and literary space that might be called “autoethnography.” Nora Dauenhauer uses that term to describe her mixed-genre collection Life Woven with Song, which includes drama and memoir as well as poetry. Beginning in the 1950s Emily Ivanoff Brown (Ticasuk) published a number of local stories from her Inupiaq community, beginning with
Mission school in “The Prize China Baby,” both are struck and killed by a butcher’s cart in the street (p. 117). Male immigrants also performed housework, in part because the labor movement protested the hiring of Asian workers for industrial jobs. The opening episodes of Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama’s Four Immigrants Manga (1931) depict four young Japanese men working as fashionable “schoolboy” servants in wealthy San Francisco households. Due to a series of comic accidents and cultural
Tacoma, Seattle, Oregon City, Albania, and Marysville. The demons of Tacoma packed all its chinamen into boxcars and sent them to Portland, where they were run out of town. (p. 148) In The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99, a Beat-inspired project first performed in 1977 at California State University, Long Beach, Garrett Hongo, Alan Chong Lau, and Lawson Fusao Inada present a more hopeful picture of mobility. The collection – which presents each poet’s responses to California’s Route 99 – begins