Paul Conrad: “My favorite recent book in Southwestern Studies is Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. It is fascinating in that it very much takes up Frederick Jackson Turner’s premise that “the frontier” explains much about American history and identity, but with a more critical tone and with an analysis that extends to the present. How do we understand the push for a border wall? The appeal of ending “unending” wars? How does isolationism compare to Americans’ previous embrace of ever ending expansion and imperial interventions? I won’t spoil it, but encourage folks to read it.”
Christopher Conway: I have spent the last five months reading, rereading, and thinking about Téa Obreht’s 2019 novel Inland, a magical realist tale about the United States Camel Corps. Widely hailed as a critical or countercultural Western, Inland is an entertaining read that transgresses the myth of westward expansion. For example, it is an “immigrant” Western that values and highlights the Middle Eastern experience in the American West, and also a feminist meditation on the meaning of family, home, memory, and place. I was fascinated by how Obreht weaves ghosts into the symbolic terrain of the Western, and how she embeds camels and cameleers into some of it pulpy formulas. Like Hernán Díaz’s In the Distance, Valeria Luiselli’s The Lost Children Archive, and C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold, Obreht’s novel is a daring reconceptualization of the West in American literature.
Erin Murrah-Mandril: “The collection of essays in Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland, edited by Vanessa Fonseca Chávez, Levi Romero, and Spencer Herrera, contemplates the relationship between space and identity through a uniquely New Mexican lens. “Querencia” can be difficult to translate; it is the place(s) in which you feel both comfort and strength, the places of familiar remembrance. Essays in the collection are incisively analytic and deeply personal as writers examine their own querencia. Editors Vanessa Fonesca-Chávez, Levi Romero, Spencer R. Herrera have adeptly built a collection of essays that are enticing in their variety—exploring everything from the 1954 film Salt of the Earth to the 2015 TV series Manhattan from the folk tale La Llorona to the 4th of July Fiestas of Las Vegas New Mexico—yet consistency grounded in a sense of place and belonging. Even the book’s cover invokes a sense of querencia for this New Mexican reader, beautiful in its blue sky and sparse desert ironically framed by an empty, graffitied scenic historic marker sign. Querencia is something one feels and the essays in this collection not only share the querencias of its writers, it also invite readers to find their own querencia in the process. “
Gerald Saxon: “I am always looking for new books to integrate into my history courses. One that I recently considered for my upper-level Texas history course, History 3346: Texas after 1845, was Adolphe Gouhenant: French Revolutionary, Utopian Leader, and Texas Frontier Photographer (2019) by Paula Selzer and Emmanuel Pécontal. This is a well-researched and engagingly written biography of Adolphe Gouhenant, an individual that most people will know little about, unless they are familiar with the early history of the North Texas region, especially Dallas, Denton, Fort Worth, and Pilot Point. Gouhenant, born in 1804 in the small village of Flagy in revolutionary France, had a remarkable life, which authors Selzer and Pécontal divide into three parts as noted in the subtitle of the book. First, he was a French revolutionary and artist/scientist, who pushed for workers’ rights and was briefly imprisoned for his political activities. He emerged later to become a Utopian leader, who led the vanguard of an attempt to establish a communist settlement, Icaria, in North Texas in 1848. After the attempt failed and he was blamed for the settlement’s failure, he stayed in North Texas and reinvented himself yet again, this time as a photographer, teacher, doctor, landholder, and owner of the first cultural institution in Dallas. He died in 1871. The authors argue that Gouhenant was as an “outrageously complex character, who wandered around grasping at the edges of a successful career, and staking small claims along the way.” (336) He was “complicated and misunderstood,” and his motives were sometimes “unclear” and “tested the limits of the law in both France and America.” (337) He had a penchant to reinvent himself after personal and professional failures and a resilience to try again—to try anything again! The authors found that the major challenge in researching Gouhenant was the fact that documents, manuscripts, official records, and newspapers have spelled his last name at least twenty-four different ways, which made research a challenge in both France and the U.S. Selzer is a third generation granddaughter of Gouhenant and Pécontal is a French historian of astronomy, and their styles blend seamlessly in the narrative. While I decided not to incorporate the book into my students’ assignments for the course, I will certainly use some of its content to enhance what I have to say about the Icarians and the early growth and development of Dallas and Fort Worth.”
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