Memory and the West

Introduction

“Memory and the West” is a subject we have collectively been studying, thinking, and writing about for well over a decade. So, when we were invited to guest edit a special issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies on this theme, we enthusiastically agreed. It was an opportunity to see what and how others were wrestling with this topic and the concerns it raises and to reflect on our own work in this area. This has been, for us, a rewarding enterprise. It has reminded us just how deeply memory and the West (both the West writ large and the American West specifically) are entwined. It has also highlighted the many and diverse ways that memory is activated and experienced. The articles in this issue indicate that memory is mobilized symbolically and materially, spatially and temporally and that is an embodied experience that often works affectively. Working from the assumption that memory is best studied through its concrete places, particular practices, and specific performances, each of the articles that follow engage distinct memory enactments.

We begin the special issue with haunting memories of war. Though it seems extraordinarily difficult to create war memorials that do not glorify or justify war, it is not impossible. Built out of the ruins of one of the bloodiest battles of World War I, Blair, Balthrop, and Michel argue that Fleury-devant-Douaumont, a memorial site, imagines war otherwise. This article is an ideal way to begin this special issue on memory in the West, for it introduces many of the themes that occupy the rest of the essays. Blair, Balthrop, and Michel’s assertion that Fleury marks World War I through unusual modes of address introduces the reader to the possibility of remembering differently. Their argument reminds us that memory sites and practices are both material and temporal, its rhetorical consequentiality goes far beyond what the symbolic dimensions alone might suggest. While concerned with a memory site in the Western world, their essay offers a foundation for thinking carefully about the entailments of remembering with regard to the American West.

The temporal, affective, and material dimensions of memory sites noted by Blair, Balthrop, and Michel, for instance, inform the second essay on The Whitney Gallery of Western Art. Buffalo Bill Cody, Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki contend, orchestrates a sacred hymn that resolves affective dissonances, harmonizes diverse visions of the West into a unified theme, and does so through embodied rhetorical action. Their analysis depends on focusing on the body-in-motion, as the gallery moves the body through the space with material and visual rhythms that set the stage for the production—or at least representation—of a Western Sublime. Dorst continues the exploration of memory’s affective materiality in his article “Skin Remembers.” By comparing the famous Chadwick Ram—“the best big game trophy this continent has produced”—to premodern modes of memorializing the killing of monsters and beasts, Dorst argues that in modernity memory’s materiality morphs. Unlike Beowulf, who prominently displays the grisly detached arm of Grendal to commemorate his victory over the beast, the modern big game trophy with its technical judgment of symmetry, size, and blemishes, has lost visceral affectivity. And yet, skin remembers as taxidermists work not so much to reproduce the living animal but to let the animal’s living form (re)appear, thus producing a doubled material memory: that of the once-live animal and the traces of the taxidermist’s own body.

Moving us from material and affective modes of memory, Lewis investigates the memory practices performed in Grace Raymond Hebard’s commemorative speeches. Historian and member of the Wyoming Daughters of the Revolution, Hebard spoke at numerous memorial ceremonies marking important trails in Wyoming. Hebard’s speeches concocted a version of Wyoming history in which the violent conflicts with Native Americans, the struggles that confronted settlers along the Oregon Trail, grounds the myth of the West, while Wyoming’s integration of nonpolitical women into public life proved Wyoming’s modernity. These mnemonic performances at once urged audiences to imagine Wyoming as an integral part of the nation and, at the same time, asserted that the nation may best be imagined as the West.

While Hebard’s mnemonics produce a dominant narrative of the relations between Native Americans and Whites and offers a familiar story about western domestication, Denzin stages direct confrontations with these received images. Denzin’s article is itself a transformation, resisting the traditional academic argumentative form by offering a play in which George Caitlin—19th-century painter and self-described chronicler of a dying Indian culture—engages in a fictional conversation with some of his most trenchant critics: novelist and essayist Louis Erdich, visual and performance artist Kent Monkman, and a handful of characters Monkman created. While Caitlin’s paintings and prints are still taken seriously—indeed Caitlin’s works appear almost without comment in the Whitney Gallery of Western Art—Denzin’s play renders a critique of the racial, gender, and sexual politics of Caitlin’s canvases and prints.

This brief introduction to this special issue’s articles indicates that they are diverse in questions asked, the communicative and cultural performances engaged, and the research methods used. And yet, because of their diversity, the articles well exemplify the complex and important conversations surrounding memory and the West. As Cindy Spurlock, one of the special issue reviewers, wrote after reading the articles,

From the present absences of silence and loss at Verdun to the re/presentation of the American West, these essays invite readers to reflect upon the ways in which the mythic chords of modernities’ memories and national imaginaries are echoed, sampled, and remixed—articulated, performed, consumed, and resisted—and to consider how these experiences work to re/write histories and subjectivities. Indeed, these essays make a compelling case for ways of “reading against the grain” that simultaneously refuse to reify the obscure or dismiss the popular: they provide a strong intellectual justification for articulating traditional practices of textual interpretation to site-based inquiry, archival research, and ethnographic modes of analytical expression.

We believe the articles collected here indicate the rich and nuanced ways memory places, practices, and performances constitute and are constituted by the West.

Editing this special issue was made possible by the support and assistance of a number of friends and colleagues. The authors were amazingly responsive and capable. Reviewers Bernard Armada and Cindy Spurlock carefully read and responded to the essays. Norman K. Denzin, Editor of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, provided the space and latitude to produce the special edition we envisioned and offered helpful insights in the final stages. Finally, a grant from University of Colorado Denver supported the production of the special issue.