From Starved Rock to Cancer Alley: Simulated Violence and Representational Collapse in the American West

Abstract

The Louisiana Purchase created a complex landscape of cultures and ethnicities located at the peripheries of the Early Republic. Some feared that it would threaten (White) American identity while others imagined the frontier as a clean slate on which the nation could reform its core values. Throughout the nineteenth century, axiomatic regeneration through (violent) experiences dominated peripheral-yet-central discourses of the American space. Shedding new light on the role of representation in the placemaking of the West, this article interweaves a reading of James Hall’s “The Pioneer” with experiences recovered from travelogues and diaries, as well as their embodiments in material culture. I argue that violence was not only a hallmark of settler colonialism but also a crucial narrative device that bridged the gaps between reality and fiction as well as center and margin. These dynamics, the article suggests, regularly culminated in representational excesses of conspicuous and consumable spectacles of violence.