Frontier Narratives Research Articles

A disappearing frontier?: An ethnographic study of the labour of imagination of SpaceX fans and space creators in South Texas

Outer space is often described as a frontier – an unsettled, mysterious or wild place that should be explored and eventually inhabited. The metaphor evokes a pioneer spirit and a sense of freedom, but it is also bound up with violent histories of settler colonialism and social injustice. Although the frontier narrative remains prevalent in political, commercial and media discourses in the United States and elsewhere, we know little about whether the public understands space exploration in this way. We also lack studies about how those working to popularise space exploration and make it comprehensible to a global audience understand and apply the frontier narrative. A long-term ethnographic study of their work shows that their understandings of the space frontier are refracted through everyday forms of sociality and experience that they cultivate near Boca Chica in South Texas, where SpaceX builds and tests Starship prototypes. The labour of imagination performed by SpaceX fans and space creators upends the problematic myth of the frontier and points towards alternative ways of understanding space exploration.

Frontier Narratives That Take on Flesh: Tracing Legacy, Labour, and Legitimacy in Outback Queensland, Australia

ABSTRACTIn this article, we explore the notion of legacy through the ways graziers in Outback Queensland, Australia, draw on material, narrative, and embodied traces of past ‘events’ to emplot their lives during times of uncertainty. Through an ethnography of pastoral work and storytelling on stations, or ranches, we show how settler‐colonial narratives of the frontier and legacy circulate as affective forces in pastoralists' daily lives and become embodied through labour. We argue that pastoral families respond to both the failure of modernist grand narratives and more personal events by renegotiating stories of the frontier to legitimate their ongoing presence in Outback Australia and give meaning to their lives. While these narratives are existentially useful for pastoralists, we argue that they remain tied to exclusionary and unsustainable structures and ideologies that prevent pastoralists from adjusting to contemporary crises.

Astroenvironmentalism as SF

AbstractThe New Space Age is awash with discourses about space colonization and resource exploitation, and these happily coexist with the age-old and curiosity-driven question, “Are we alone in the universe?” Astrobiology addresses this question and, at the same time, codifies knowledge useful for protecting our planet and other celestial bodies from harmful contamination. This article critically examines astroenvironmentalism as discussed within astrobiology and attempts to rescue it from becoming a principle of border creation in otherworldly ecologies. To do so, it merges astrobiology with visions and images from feminist postcolonial and decolonial theory, STS, and science fiction, and reflects on the enduring colonial tropes that provide the building blocks of current knowledge on outer space. The same colonial cartographic imagination at play in the much-debated frontier narrative animates the concept of planetary parks. These have gained increased popularity as a mechanism of environmental protection in space, but it is important to note how they entertain a settler future in outer space and legitimize claims to territorial property and extraction. In a dialogue that is contrapuntal to the codification of this form of transplanetary environmentalism, this article traces how Lynn Margulis’s cosmic symbiosis, Donna Haraway’s sympoiesis, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1976) intersect with concerns of astrobiological knowledge. Crucially, they enable the blurring of three types of borders: between science and fiction; planetary inside and outside; life and matter. This border-crossing can be generative of a process of creating more-than-human relationalities beyond Earth-centric geographies.

From From Knight Errant to Exploring Pioneer: The Influence of Medieval Romances on the Depiction of Human and Non-Human Others in John Filson’s “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon”

This article analyzes, through a comparative approach, a frontier narrative, John Filson’s “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon” (1784), in relation to selected medieval chivalric romances from an ecocritical perspective, exploring the way in which medieval patterns have been employed in the American mythopoeic process, especially in relation to the frontier and the wilderness myths. In fact, medievalist narratives have been often employed to justify an anthropocentric, expansionist, and imperialistic agenda with grievous consequences on the way in which Americans engage with nature and with nonhuman species. At the same time, this tendency is often accompanied by an androcentric and ethnocentric rhetoric, contributing to the marginalization from dominant national discourses of significant sections of the population due to their race and gender. For this reason, attention will be also given to how attitudes toward the nonhuman can reflect and bear an impact on those toward other humans. By investigating how narratives develop, evolve, and circulate across time and space, it becomes possible to reveal the harmful logic they carry, and stress the importance of shifting the narrative in the direction of more sustainable intra- and inter-species relations.

Frontier Narratives: Liminal Lives in the Early Modern Mediterranean by Steven Hutchinson

Reviewed by: Frontier Narratives: Liminal Lives in the Early Modern Mediterranean by Steven Hutchinson Ana Laguna Keywords Mediterranean, Frontier, Slavery, Martyrdom, Renegades, Multiple Alterities, Ana Laguna, Steven Hutchinson hutchinson, steven. Frontier Narratives: Liminal Lives in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Manchester UP, 2020, 228 pp. When Fernand Braudel's monumental study of the Mediterranean was first published in 1949, little appeared to have escaped his masterly purview. Even the measured John H. Elliott noted that the French historian had obviously employed in his "total history" the mechanics of "total war," since they both require one to "throw in everything you've got" (25).1 Indeed, in combining its geopolitical shifts, demographic struggles, and financial systems, Braudel was able to tell us much of the history of the Mediterranean. What he left out, however, were many of its stories. Some seventy years later, Steven Hutchinson's impressive Frontier Narratives succeeds in filling that void, recovering not only these stories, but also the voices, identities, and life experiences of their protagonists. Like Braudel's, Hutchinson's study encompasses the whole Mediterranean in its scope and tackles the ever-changing crucibles of its plural and dynamic orbit. But Hutchinson's monograph moves beyond Braudel's, incorporating a wealth of historical and literary records not available to the French historian. Frontier Narratives's conceptual core revolves around slavery and religious conversion, central vectors that give way to the study's other related subjects, such as martyrdom and apostasy. While each section is revelatory on its own, in my opinion, the book's second chapter, on slavery, offers some of its most outstanding contributions. Hutchinson identifies three distinct modalities of enslavement sadly at play in the early modern world: the trans-Atlantic, the trans-Saharan, and what he calls the "Mediterranean frontier." He is obviously most interested in the Mediterranean variant, which he defines as the "enslavement of Muslims by Christians and Christians by Muslims within the Mediterranean region" (40). This form of bondage affected millions of people and emerged as a residue of the sporadic warfare between [End Page 322] political, trade, and religious rivals, and as a result of the constant coastal attacks that plagued the eastern and western Mediterranean banks. As Hutchinson explains, it is the "bilateralism" of these attacks and captures that "contrasts sharply with trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan slavery, even if there were common elements in all three kinds" (44). This bilateralism prompted the appearance of "mutually recognized procedures" that codified the traffic and exchange of captives. While "for some, slavery would turn out to be perpetual, for others it would end or evolve into something else, through escape, ransom, exchange of slaves, emancipation, conversion, social integration, and so on" (44). Hutchinson then proceeds to examine each of these outcomes—escape, ransom, exchange of slaves, emancipation, conversion, and social integration—in both female and male captives, and in each of the Muslim and Christian domains. In this sweeping examination of frontier captivity, it's striking to see the minimal role played by race, the most defining feature in other forms of slavery. Hutchinson is emphatic about this fact, noting that "Mediterranean frontier slavery had virtually nothing to do with race as such" (42). If he speaks of black and white slaves, it is to remind his readers of how differently those categories apply to the Mediterranean basin; while black slaves originate from sub-Saharan Africa and the Canary Islands, "white" ones not only come from Spanish coastal cities, but also from the territories in North Africa, the Levant, and Ottoman Turkey. Even the antagonized, dispersed demographic of Moriscos count in this context as white. It soon becomes apparent that, beyond arbitrary chromatic differences or perceptions, what is particularly distinct in frontier slavery is its reversibility, the fact that it could equally affect both sides of the Christian–Muslim equation. Early modern dwellers seemed to be aware of the reality that they "could be enslaved and commodified by … the other" (43), as exemplified in the comment of a renegade captor to one of his despondent new captives: "Have patience, brother, it's the fortune of war, today for you, tomorrow for me" (48). This potential reversibility disrupts the great operative power...

Steven Hutchinson. Frontier Narratives: Liminal Lives in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Steven Hutchinson. <i>Frontier Narratives: Liminal Lives in the Early Modern Mediterranean</i>

The Closed West: Rajneeshpuram and the Failure of Utopia in Antelope, Oregon

Abstract Settler colonialism lay at the heart of the dispute between Oregonians and the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who built a utopian community called Rajneeshpuram in central Oregon between 1981 and 1985. Rajneeshpuram’s inhabitants believed their environmentalist ambitions would align them with settler-spirited and eco-minded Oregonians. However, Oregon’s land use laws were rooted in the dispossession of Native land, a foundational theft that was reinstantiated in present-day hierarchies of land use and ownership. Many Oregonians simultaneously saw the residents of Rajneeshpuram as invaders and invoked frontier narratives in their defense, blending them with prevalent political and cultural concerns of contamination. Rajneesh and his followers’ disregard for zoning laws and inflammatory tactics brought about their community’s undoing. Rajneeshpuram thus challenged an arrangement that was the historical product of settler colonialism while replicating it. The conflict was mired in the idealistic—and incompatible—self-interest of opposing settler groups.

But for his dog: Companion Animals in American Frontier Narratives

The exploitation of the beasts took hunter and trader to the West” ——Frederick Jackson Turner In his study of the growing middle-class interest in hunting in the early national period, historian Daniel Herman identifies popular figurations of Daniel Boone as particularly adept at harnessing anxieties about masculinity and self-possession and consequently driving an interest in rural sports. Herman argues that these representations of Boone and his life on the frontier, flourishing during a period of urban growth, presented the therapeutic potential of an arduous lifestyle and mastery of nature, an “unfettered autonomy” that found its keenest expression in paintings, poems, and prose describing the famous frontiersman (Hunting 100). Herman’s study pays close attention to the frontier trappings that these representations describe, such as Boone's famous buckskin clothing and Kentucky rifle, because they serve as prescriptions for an interested audience. But in attending to the material culture that surrounded, produced, and reproduced Boone, Herman also passes over an important element in these representations that this essay will pause to reconsider: the dog. Analyzing the elements of the Boone hagiography, the images and texts that made the man into “America's first mass culture hero,” Herman produces this blind spot in presenting William Allan’s 1839 portrait (“Other Daniel Boone” 432). The historian sees this painting as evidence of popular reverence for “self-possession,” and captions the image, “Boone poses in Byronic fashion, a chivalrous figure alone, but for his dog, in a sinister cave-like wilderness” ( 431–32) (see fig. 1).1 In this small moment, Herman provides us with an important and enduring contradiction, naming the heroic state of isolation via an exception so small it does not affect the primary idea of “alone.” It is in the “but for his dog,” a presence that is quickly passed over and never again mentioned, that I locate an opening to reevaluate precisely that idea of individual autonomy that frontier narratives contributed to so decisively in the rapidly expanding republic.

Rewriting the Western: Transnational Dimensions and Gender Fluidity in Sebastian Barry’s Days without End

The present essay will explore the Irish writer Sebastian Barry’s transnational rendering of the American West in his novel Days without End (2016), emphasizing his representation of neglected western questions and realities and his revision of traditional western tropes and archetypes. Barry’s approach to the American West in Days without End moves beyond the regional and national imagery of this territory, revealing its international and hybrid properties and its multiple and overlapping cultures. It is argued that Barry’s recreation of a different reality from the traditional western monomyth of masculinity, individualism, and Anglo-American conquest allows him to challenge classical frontier narratives and to address international and transcultural issues, such as gender fluidity. The novel, whose main protagonist and narrator is a poor, homosexual Irish immigrant, embraces a different West, questioning romanticized versions of the westward expansion and drawing interesting connections between the Irish immigrants in this region and the Native Americans. Overall, Days without End may be viewed as an acute depiction of the transnational dimension of the American West, proving the power of the Western to overcome its traditional formulaic and mythic boundaries and to travel across global spaces.

The Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary: Terraqueous Territorialization and Māori Marine Environments

This paper interprets the disrupted establishment of the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary, a 620,000 square kilometre marine protection area, as a crucial moment in Pacific frontier making. The development of large-scale protected marine areas is a politically charged frontier tool, in which states garner international recognition and environmental renown by setting aside large swathes of their exclusive economic zones. In the Kermadec Sanctuary, this enclosure hit against an assemblage of Indigenous histories, ecologies, repatriated fishing rights, and privatized fishing quota challenging the oftmarginalized agency of Indigenous people in frontier narratives. This paper argues that three factors are fundamental to untangling this conflict: first, the historical trajectory of terraqueous territorialization in the Kermadec region, second, the post-Treaty of Waitangi settlement dynamics of Maori marine environments, and third, the common ecosystem services model underlying conservation and extraction.

Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond ed. by Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips

Reviewed by: Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond ed. by Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips Cathryn Halverson Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips, eds., Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond. Oxford: U of Mississippi P, 2020. 256 pp. Hardcover, $99; paper, $30. Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond is an engaging collection of fourteen essays contributed by scholars at all [End Page 393] stages of their careers. The book grew out of a roundtable at the 2015 meeting of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) inspired by the publication of Wilder's memoir, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. Editors Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips explain that rather than simply celebrating Wilder the group wanted to critically analyze her books and influence. Acknowledging that her racial views have made her a controversial writer, they argue for why we should continue to read and study her nonetheless. Grouped into four sections—"Wilder and 'Truth,'" "Wilder and Constructions of Gender," "Wilder, Plains Studies, and the American Literature Canon," and "Cultural and Intercultural Wilder"—the book's many excellent essays complement each other without growing repetitive. Their diverse subjects include, among others, the antimodernist dimension of Wilder-related tourism (Anna Thompson Hajdik), Wilder's and Rose Wilder Lane's differing political views (Dawn Sardella-Ayres), Wilder's perspective on rural women's education (Jericho Williams), and Wilder's use of horses to imagine "Anglo-Indian Womanhood" (Vera R. Foley). Examining Laura's "two terrible mistakes" in respect to both Indians and the "abundant nonhuman world" around her (192), Margaret Noodin's "A Little Place in the Universe: An Ojibwe, Osage, and Dakota View of Laura Ingalls" is a highlight. Full of precisely expressed readings, the book offers many fresh insights: that Little House on the Prairie can be read as a captivity narrative, with Charles Ingalls the terrifying captor (Christine E. Farnan); that Laura's infamous desire to possess a black-eyed Indian baby builds on her attachment to her button-eyed rag doll (Jenna Brack); that the historical record upholds the fictional portrayal of the Wilders' equitable marriage (Melanie J. Fishbane); that Laura's fate in becoming a white mother is to acquire an aversion to Indians (Sonya Sawyer Fritz); that the "ceaseless acts of repetition" generated by the series are the source of its "semblance of truth" (Katharine Slater, 3). One might expect a book on this topic to include several scholars who specialize in western studies or at least make reference to established, influential works in the field. That expectation, [End Page 394] however, is not fulfilled, and as a consequence the collection lacks essays that deliberately situate Wilder within regional literary traditions while engaging with the existing scholarship to theorize her work. Even Annette Kolodny's classic The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers and Amy Kaplan's essential "Manifest Domesticity" are not invoked, nor is Nina Baym's more recent, quantitative Women Writers of the American West. Ann Romines's Constructing the Little House and Frances W. Kaye's "Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve" are critical touchstones throughout the volume, but a study like Linda Karell's Writing Together/Writing Apart: Collaboration in Western American Literature would have provided specific regional insight into the Wilder and Lane partnership that interests so many of these scholars, as would Christine Bold on gender and western cultural production, Susan Rosowski and Brigitte Georgi-Findlay on women's frontier narratives, Krista Comer on landscape, Victoria Lamont on Westerns, and many others that readers of this journal are surely familiar with. While the editors maintain that the relative critical neglect of Wilder is "emblematic of the way critics have historically dismissed many commercially successful women writers" (xv), it is also symptomatic of the widespread tendency to read and write about western women writers in isolation from each other, which in turn reflects the marginalization of western studies at large. Lamont's review essay in Legacy (SSAWW's home journal), "Big Books Wanted: Women and Western American Literature in the Twenty-First Century," explores the cluster of factors that have led...

Pursuing the Zionist Dream on the Palestinian Frontier

This paper critically examines Theodore Herzl’s canonical Zionist novel, Altneuland /Old New Land as a frontier narrative which depicts the process of Jewish immigration to Palestine as an inevitable historical process aiming to rescue European Jews from persecution and establish a multi-national Utopia on the land of Palestine. Unlike radical Zionist narratives which underlie the necessity of founding a purely Jewish state in the holy land, Altneuland depicts an egalitarian and cosmopolitan community shared by Jews, Arabs and other races. The paper emphasizes that Herzl’s Zionist project in Altneuland is not an extension of western colonialism par excellence. Herzl’s narrative is a pragmatic appropriation of frontier literature depicting Palestine as a new frontier and promoting a construct of mythology about enthusiastic individuals who thrived in the desert while serving the needs of an enterprising and progressive society. Unlike western colonial narratives which necessitate the elimination of the colonized natives, Herzl’s novel assimilates the indigenous population in the emerging frontier community.

Frontier Narratives: Liminal Lives in the Early Modern Mediterranean by Steven Hutchinson

Reviewed by: Frontier Narratives: Liminal Lives in the Early Modern Mediterranean by Steven Hutchinson James Iffland (bio) Steven Hutchinson. Frontier Narratives: Liminal Lives in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2020. 228 pp. ISBN: 978-1-5261-4642-7. Steven Hutchinson's prominent place within the field of Cervantes scholarship has been slowly but surely consolidated over the last several decades through major works such as Cervantine Journeys (1992) and Economía ética en Cervantes (2001). With Frontier Narratives, he has bolstered his stature even further through a ground-breaking approach to the enormously complex cultural, political and economic dynamics of the early modern Mediterranean world. In many ways, Frontier Narratives could be described as a worthy companion volume to Fernand Braudel's classic The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, a work Hutchinson recognizes as a major source of inspiration for his own ambitious project. It complements the French historian's contribution in that sense that it maps, in depth, the cultural tapestry woven through the multiplex interaction between Christian and Muslim political powers, one in which Jews also played a significant role. As Hutchinson puts it with admirable succinctness: "My strategy in this book consists in part of being attentive to writing and speaking in the early modern Mediterranean world, to how people characterised the modalities of relationships and communicability of that world across ethnic, religious, geographical, linguistic and racial boundaries. The texts themselves, in a wide array of discursive genres in many languages, embody writers' and narrators' voices, but also convey other voices, all of which in one way or another characterise their world and bring us into it almost as witnesses, depending on our ability to read and listen" (1). As a scholar whose research centers largely on Cervantes, I only wish that Hutchinson's analysis had appeared much earlier in my career. My own approach to teaching Cervantes's oeuvre is now being reframed in the light of all that I have learned from reading Frontier Narratives. Though in many ways Cervantes figures as the study's unstated "protagonist," its remarkably broad compass will prove valuable not only to Hispanists working on other authors of the period (e.g., Lope) but to comparatists and even historians. [End Page 235] I say so because Hutchinson's work is truly interdisciplinary—unlike so many research efforts that appear under the interdisciplinary "brand" despite the fact that their authors have not invested the substantial effort necessary to gain command of the disciplines they are allegedly melding together. (The same might be said of much published work currently sold under the "cultural studies" moniker.) Hutchinson has done his homework, as evidenced, for example, by the book's massive bibliography which includes both primary and secondary sources in multiple languages. He has carried out the type of deep and thorough research that is becoming increasingly rare as the 21st-century academy inexorably ratchets up the demand for faculty "productivity," in turn fostering what we might call the "fast food" approach to scholarship. One can imagine that given the ambitious scope of Hutchinson's analysis and his proclivity toward exhaustive research, Frontier Narratives could well have ended up being twice as long (an untenable option within the current strictures in the academic publishing field). Hutchinson's study, however, has approached what could be considered exactly the right dimensions. When exploring the subjects that form part of his general argument he delves into enough detail so as to satisfy most readers; at the same time, they will be left with the sensation that our author could have extended himself further. Put differently, many doors have been opened in Frontier Narratives, inviting scholars to continue exploring in fertile directions. The book, I should stress, is admirably well written: its prose flows in a pleasantly accessible fashion while simultaneously being crisp and to the point. When dealing with complex theoretical matters, Hutchinson avoids arcane terminology. There are many points at which he could have easily jumped on one or another of the theoretical band wagons in vogue in literary studies, but refrains from doing so—not out of unfamiliarity with current critical trends (Bakhtin, Hayden White, and...

“Now for the Indian Story”: Reconceiving George Bent as a Warrior-Writer

"Now for the Indian Story"Reconceiving George Bent as a Warrior-Writer Rachel Linnea Brown (bio) When advertising its upcoming October 1905 issue, the Colorado Springs periodical The Frontier: A Journal of Early Days and Their Thrilling Events declared, "We have read the other side of the story. Let us see what the red man has to say about it." The "red man" in question was George Bent (1843–1918), a sixty-two-year-old Southern Cheyenne writer, historian, translator, Confederate veteran, Crooked-Lance (or Bone-Scraper) Society warrior, and Sand Creek Massacre survivor.1 His "story" was "Forty Years with the Cheyennes," a six-part autobiography that ran as the Frontier's leading article from October 1905 to March 1906.2 Despite his literary ambitions, "Forty Years" is one of just two publications that appeared in Bent's lifetime; the University of Oklahoma Press published the more widely-known Life of George Bent (1968), a book-length expansion of "Forty Years," fifty years after Bent died.3 Though rarely read today, "Forty Years" greatly complicates our understanding of early twentieth-century Native and non-Native collaborative writing. Among its diverse interventions, "Forty Years" centralizes Bent's authorial agency (especially in contrast to Life); establishes his tribal belonging by engaging with Southern Cheyenne, Northern Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota warrior culture and communal identity; critically addresses narratives by white writers like Hamlin Garland; and privileges Southern Cheyenne orature.4 More closely studying Bent's early writing and editing—particularly surrounding his development of "Forty Years"—thus crucially defines Bent as one of the "active agents in history, innovators of new ways, of Indian ways, of thinking and being and speaking and authoring in this world created by colonial contact," to quote Creek-Cherokee scholar Craig Womack (6). Bent's "Indian" way of authoring and editing reveals that US Western history and literature [End Page 111] are not simply defined by straightforward conquest. Rather, the Euro-American, Southern Cheyenne, Northern Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota perspectives that Bent interweaves in "Forty Years" form a provocative international narrative that resists essentialist views of Native and non-Native collaborations of the assimilation era. In the end, Bent's unique serialized autobiography radically refigures the US West as a narrative landscape deeply shaped by Native orature, kinship, and persistence. Many contemporary readers—both Native and non-Native—valued George Bent's Southern Cheyenne vantage. In a letter dated April 17, 1906, Bent tells his longtime collaborator, amateur Euro-American ethnographer George Hyde (from Omaha, Nebraska), that "people down here [in Indian Territory, or present-day Oklahoma, where Bent lived in the early 1900s] wanted more Frontier Magazines. of this month they think our accounts in it were good" (Beinecke, box 1, folder 7).5 This account of praise for Bent's Frontier narrative is supported by Transactions of the Kansas State Historical Society, 1905–1906. A footnote to Kansas State Historical Society President Robert M. Wright's autobiographical "Reminiscences of Dodge" article in Transactions describes "Forty Years" as a "story… well told, and without passion," seemingly admiring Bent's fact-oriented approach and restrained tone (73).6 Prominent Euro-American ethnographer James Mooney further proclaimed "Forty Years" a "valuable series of papers of personal recollections" in 1907 (429). National recognition followed with the 1921 publication of the Cambridge History of American Literature, which announced that the "Indian side of much of the trouble of the years following 1861 may be read in 'Forty Years with the Cheyennes'" (Dellenbaugh 148). A few Mountain West figures, however, lambasted "Forty Years" for casting Euro-Americans as antagonistic—particularly in Bent's account of the Sand Creek Massacre. Their responses reveal the racism and uneasiness about diverse views that contextualize Bent's turn-of-the-twentieth-century Frontier writings. The Frontier magazine circulated among a mostly white audience of first-and second-generation Colorado settlers. Its readership at the time was not large. When Part Six of "Forty Years" appeared in 1906, the Frontier had just 4,875 subscribers (Ayers 85).7 Part One, which addressed the Sand Creek Massacre, reached a wider audience when reprinted by the Denver Times on November 2, 1905.8 An anonymous editorial accompanying the...

Frontiers of Boyhood: Imagining America, Past and Future by Martin Woodside

Reviewed by: Frontiers of Boyhood: Imagining America, Past and Future by Martin Woodside Kenneth Kidd (bio) Frontiers of Boyhood: Imagining America, Past and Future. By Martin Woodside. University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country." Martin Woodside opens his excellent study Frontiers of Boyhood by reflecting on this famous exhortation by Horace Greeley in 1865. Indeed, many young men and even boys did go West, some literally and still more in their minds and hearts. As Woodside emphasizes, the "frontier" of the American West was understood in the late nineteenth century as the place where boys could become the right sort of men: rugged, self-reliant, demonstrably masculine. And, just as important, the presence and activities of boys on the frontier would ostensibly help the nation grow up. Reflecting also on Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, Woodside emphasizes how boyhood and the frontier thus "develop through exposure to one another" (11). Including seventeen illustrations, Frontiers of Boyhood adds richly to a body of existing scholarship on American literary boyhood across and slightly beyond the nineteenth century: see, for instance, Marcia Jacobson's Being A Boy Again, Ken Parille's Boys at Home, Lorinda B. Cohoon's Serialized Citizenships, David I. Macleod's Building Character in the American Boy, and my own Making American Boys. Woodside is the first to focus on the frontier's particular importance for boyhood and vice versa. The book contributes not only to children's literature studies and American literary studies but also to studies of the American West, which have neglected the importance of youth on and to the frontier. Woodside's volume appears with the University of Oklahoma Press as part of its William F. Cody series on the history and culture of the American West. The book's placement in the series makes superb sense, as the organizing figure of Frontiers of Boyhood is William F. Cody himself, aka "Buffalo Bill," buffalo hunter, Indian scout, and consummate showman—architect of the world-famous Buffalo Bill's Wild West stage show, launched in 1883. Three of the book's five chapters take up Buffalo Bill and his show and their ongoing legacy. Woodside details how Buffalo Bill's persona and show [End Page 286] were fashioned for a child-friendly audience and thus had to navigate concerns about the show's sensationalism. The focus on Cody as a broker of American youth culture is one of the book's key strengths. Another is Woodside's persuasive account of the dime novel as a form of children's and adolescent literature. Woodside also engagingly explores the role of actual children in frontier mythology. That's not surprising, as Woodside earned his PhD in childhood studies from the (dare I say it?) pioneering program at Rutgers University-Camden. Woodside's introduction nicely sets the stage for the entertaining show that follows. Woodside draws on important work about American adolescence and gender norms by Joseph Kett, Kent Baxter, Sarah Chinn, and Gail Bederman. He makes the case that frontier narratives position the West as a space for white male development through a rhetoric of both "peril and promise" and by delineating "proper" from "improper" boyhood (14). The book proper begins in familiar territory, with a discussion in chapter 1 of the Bad Boy book as practiced by Mark Twain and Hamlin Garland and as approximated by Cody in his autobiography The Life and Adventures of Buffalo Bill (1879). Turns out, the bad boy book went West too. The chapter offers strong treatment of both Twain and Garland—and trust me, it's hard to say anything new about Twain. But Woodside does it in his engaging commentary on Huck and Tom Sawyer among the Indians and Other Unfinished Stories. However, as Woodside stresses, "it is Cody, not Twain, who successfully integrates the dime novel hero with a literary model of successful American boyhood" (42). Building on this insight, chapter 2 reframes the dime novel as a frontier form that walks the same tightrope that Buffalo Bill did with his show. Dime novel authors had to titillate without seeming to endorse violence or glamorize running away, all the more so...

Ideology of Land Ownership: Homesteading Practice and Frontier Narratives of Glynn Bennion

Ideology of Land Ownership: Homesteading Practice and Frontier Narratives of Glynn Bennion

Indigenizing the (final) frontier: the art of Indigenous storytelling through graphic novels

When Indigenous artists and writers entered the graphic novel genre, they opened up the world of ancient tribal tales, traditions, and customs to a new generation of readers, thus allowing the past to relay important cultural knowledge to our youth while Indigenizing a Western-dominated art form. In this paper, I seek to contribute to the dialogue about Indigenous concepts of space, time, and the oral tradition, to include present and future iterations of our knowledge systems in Indigenous sci-fi and speculative storytelling graphic novels. I contend that Indigenous artists are reimagining an older pictorial tradition that relayed cultural ways of knowing the stars and the universe to our youth, and charting new ways forward by connecting the past to present in the process. These specific genres ‘retell’ and ‘re-understand’ traditional narratives with culturally grounded speculation about Indigenous futures and space, revealing a persistent cultural continuity that is deeply connected to our traditional terrains in fluid and exciting forms of artistic expression. I argue that Indigenous science fiction can, and does, critique and resist the continuation of settler-colonial endeavors by exploring and re-indigenizing a space that we have always been connected to, but is also customarily part of the settler frontier narrative in this genre.

Neo Frontier Cinema: Rewriting the Frontier Narrative from the Margins in Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010

This article discusses Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Chloe Zhao’s Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017) as contemporary rewritings of the Western genre and frontier mythology. I argue that the three films play the mythologies of the American West against the realities and consequences of settler colonialism, provide alternative perspectives on the politics of empire, construct the Western frontier as a contact zone, and challenge the original epic story of linear conquest by redefining what it means to travel or live in the Great American desert. I also underline how these films differ in their preferred focus for cultural and political rewriting: Meek’s Cutoff mainly centers on its alternative feminine perspective and on a deflation of the myth in its original historical terrain, while Zhao’s films are more about producing a postcolonial perspective on the contemporary West as a marginalized yet fascinating frontera.

Filipinos settle in the Canadian North: unsettling a gendered frontier

This paper explores how contemporary accounts of Filipino settlement in the Yukon articulate with the imaginative project of a ‘frontier Yukon.’ Since 2007, Whitehorse, Yukon has been as a prominent site of settlement for Filipino newcomers to Canada. This has been supported by the implementation of a new immigration policy–the Yukon Nominee Program (YNP)—inaugurated to address shortages in the territory’s service sector labour market. What happens, we ask, to frontier narratives when they are put into conversation with bodies, peoples, places, and collective experiences that they were never meant to narrate? We discuss how hegemonic notions of race, gender, and frontier masculinity are reworked and unsettled in emerging narratives of Filipino settlement. In working through multiple and contested notions of the frontier, we play on varying meanings of the verb “to settle.” Frontier mythologies seek to settle the disruptive potential of Filipino workers and families as they newly inhabit borderline spaces. At the same time, the hard work of “settling" into a foreign environment is set both within and against the hegemonic facade of frontier mythology. We find that while the examined discourses of arrival in the Yukon reinforce hegemonic accounts of the Yukon’s settlement, and obscure histories of settler colonialism through their celebration of multiculturalism and diversity, they also contain moments of ambiguity that “unmap” hegemonic frontier narratives.

Ernest Haycox and the Western by Richard W. Etulain

Reviewed by: Ernest Haycox and the Western by Richard W. Etulain Daniel Worden Richard W. Etulain, Ernest Haycox and the Western. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2017. 200 pp. Cloth, $29.95. A productive author of Western fiction, Ernest Haycox wrote twenty-four novels and over two hundred short stories. Most notably for scholars of Western American literature and film today, Haycox's 1937 story "Stage to Lordsburg" was adapted into John Ford's landmark 1939 film Stagecoach. In his engaging biographical study, Richard W. Etulain chronicles Haycox's career as a Western writer, from his prolific work for pulp magazines to his later interest in breaking out of the Western formula he helped to define. In so doing, Etulain offers not only a valuable study of Haycox and his [End Page 261] work but also a model for how neglected Western writers can be approached as both literary figures and laborers within a publishing industry that thrived on the Western genre. Etulain's book begins with a brief account of the Western genre's emergence, from frontier narratives and Cooper's Leatherstocking saga to the Western genre's solidification into "something of a morality play" by the first decades of the twentieth century (18). This sets the scene for Haycox's entrance into literary culture in the 1920s, when he devotes himself to "learning and practicing the formula of the Western" that had become ubiquitous in pulp and middlebrow magazines (19). After establishing the literary context Haycox would encounter as an adult, Etulain then tells Haycox's life story, from his birth in Portland, Oregon, to a family that struggled financially and moved around a great deal, to high school, and to service overseas during World War I. Attending college first at Reed, then at the University of Oregon, Haycox wrote for campus newspapers, and in so doing, Etulain notes, Haycox would begin to articulate his worldview: "He held that one should be independent in beliefs and actions but not to such an extent as to isolate one's self from society" (34). This perspective has a clear affinity with the Western genre, in which isolated individual Westerners are often compelled to act heroically, in the interests of a larger good. In a brief foray into Haycox's politics, Etulain also remarks that Haycox's worldview would reach beyond his fiction writing and "helps explain why Haycox stood against Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and became a strong advocate of conservative Republicanism in the 1930s and 1940s" (34). This is a rare gesture in the book to the broader social and political currents that surrounded Haycox and the Western in the twentieth century. The book's major focus is on the development of Haycox's literary career, from his short stories and serialized novels in pulp magazines such as Western Story Magazine, his later publications in the more prestigious and better paying Collier's, and his novels. Etulain details Haycox's vision of writing, which differs from more romantic conceptions of the profession, noting that "Haycox considered himself more of a craftsman than an artist. He was convinced that writing could be compared with plumbing, [End Page 262] carpentering, or any other such skill" (71). Gradually, Haycox began to depart from the Western genre formulas he honed in the pulps, perhaps most notably in his 1944 historical novel about the Battle of Little Big Horn, Bugles in the Afternoon. He would continue this focus on history, instead of formula, with the posthumously published The Earthbreakers in 1952. In this novel, Etulain sees evidence of a broader conception of novelistic form, a more complex representation of character, and a nuanced engagement with history. Unfortunately, Haycox would not complete the trilogy that The Earthbreakers was supposed to begin. Ernest Haycox and the Western portrays the life of a working Western writer, devoted to craft and the market yet not without literary ambitions. In the book's epilogue, Etulain reflects on Haycox's place, or lack thereof, in the canon of Western American literature and whether we should think of Haycox among genre writers like Max Brand, Zane Grey, and Louis L'Amour or among more "literary" figures such as Walter...