Neil Campbell is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of Derby in England. His many publications about the American West include the books Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West (2013) and The Rhizomatic West: Representing the West in a Transnational, Global Media Age (2008), both with University of Nebraska Press. He is also the editor of Under the Western Sky: Essays on the Fiction and Music of Willy Vlautin (2018), as well as the author of numerous articles and book chapters. Dr. Campbell’s most recent monograph is Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community (2022), published with University of Nevada Press.
Fronteras: Congratulations on the publication of your latest book, Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community, published by University of Nevada Press. Let’s begin with the verb worlding in the title of your study. What is worlding and how does it differ from globalization?
Neil Campbell: Thanks so much. It’s a book I’m very proud of because it was written during and around the pandemic. My sense was that the word globalization had become associated with specific meanings, to do with trade, geopolitics, and the flattening-out of differences into a certain sameness that reduced what the world might be and might become. Much of the book is an argument against reductionism of all kinds. Worlding is a way of putting back variety, complexity, and difference into our understanding of the US West as an entangled space of multiple relations rather than a mythic, one-dimensional version peddled by vested interests. I was influenced by many different theories of worlding, but most relevant were those of Edouard Glissant, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Rob Wilson. For me the West is indeed a diversity of different, entangled, interlocking worlds, and fiction can, I believe, bring this to life and articulate it. Worlding goes against the grain of globalization as a homogenous force and champions communities capable of relationality, care, and sharing. Indeed, as I argue in my book, a kind of love.
Fronteras: Several of the twenty-first century novels you foreground in Worlding the Western are suffused with grief and solitude rather than the sense of adventure that characterizes formula Westerns. What are some of the cultural and political forces that might be driving this mournful outlook in contemporary fiction?
Neil Campbell: There are several ways to answer this question. Initially, the book was a reaction to Donald Trump’s political reductionism, and the ways by which he used the mythology of the West (as politicians so often do) to bolster his various claims and ideologies. At the heart of his “Make America Great Again” is an exceptionalism rooted in the frontier dream. I noticed that many novels of the “Trump era” explored the West, but in ways that seemed to counter or “argue” with the closed and limiting thought coming from Trumpworld. There are, however, “adventures” in this fiction but adventures of challenging ideas rather than the more typical masculinist gunfighter nation expansionism of too much western fiction.
Too often lives are marginalized or discounted in reductionist views of the West, or to use Judith Butler’s phrase they are “ungrievable”. I found in much of this fiction lives brought to life in different ways, made to count, to be grieved and mourned yes, but in such a way as they were made to matter. Women’s lives, migrant lives, native lives, gay lives. As a consequence, all their varied worlds were significant in these novels. They are never easy, comfortable stories, but nonetheless they are vital to freshen our understanding of what the West might mean today. Fiction for me provides an agitated history.
Fronteras: Your analyses of fiction about the American West highlight the interpretive and political power of margins, fragmentation, and alternate temporalities and definitions of the real. These concepts criticize American exceptionalism and myth but can also allow for a healing or reparative vision. Can you tell us a little about how you see this dynamic at work in How Much of These Hills is Gold by C. Pam Zhang?
Neil Campbell: Zhang uses the phrase “terror and generosity” to describe Lucy’s view of the worlds of the West she has experienced, and I think this is a good place to start this answer. Like her own self, she refuses to see the region as a space for ownership nor to be defined by its value in gold. For her, both self and world, as she learns in the course of the novel, are unknowable spaces of being-with, whereby one does not claim the land or world but might be claimed by it in what she calls “The quiet way”. In living through her often terrible and generous journey across the West, Lucy moves beyond the trauma of what came before, and points tentatively toward the future. The novel’s final words suggest this shift, “She opens her mouth. She wants” – with no full stop, as if directing Lucy and the reader onward.
Fronteras: The protagonist of Hernan Díaz’s In the Distance hides in a cave for a period of time and burrows into the earth at another point. What are we to make about this drive to embed oneself into the earth, and how does it overturn our conventional ways of thinking about living “on” or traveling through a landscape?
Neil Campbell: This is important. As well as the reductionism I spoke of earlier, another concern in my book is ecology or the environment. Bruno Latour’s work in his Down to Earth was so significant and made me think about issues around moving “down to earth” or becoming “terrestrial”. To me this was also a kind of “worlding”. Latour points out that Trumpism was “out-of-this-world”, detached, and removed from the realities of everyday life, and that there had to be new thought that addressed this. In Diaz’s novel, which by the way was so important to the writing of my book and really provoked my thinking, the conventional “westward” journey of expansionism / settlement / progress is consistently undone and countered with these alternative movements – down, into, and across. It asks again and again, in different ways “What West?”, and this has mattered so much to all my writing over the years. Also, your question makes me think of Deleuze and Guattari in their book on Kafka explaining that “minor literature” burrows down, finding new language and new ideas, and ultimately “to hate all languages of masters” (p. 26). My worlding westerns strive against such “masters”.
Fronteras: In your chapter on Native American fiction you consider the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, LeAnne Howe, and Tommy Orange, and link the concept of tribalography to worlding. Can you tell us more about the relationship between these ideas in your chapter?
Neil Campbell: I am interested in tribalography because it seemed to have much in common with my sense of worlding. It’s about relations across cultures, between peoples and tribes. The West seems in Howe’s words a “tribal creation story” full of strange mixtures and contacts, but is too often diminished into a smaller thing, a narrow definition that wants to ignore or forget these connections. Tribalography sees other worlds than those associated with the narrow exceptionalist version trumpeted (pun intended!) by so many in the West. There is a way of seeing the world (worlds) as woven like a basket, with strands from all over: collaborative, intersecting, dynamic; past, present, and future; human, non-human, environmental …. Actively worlding.
Fronteras: Because of your extensive work about the American West, we are interested in knowing your thoughts about recent, critically acclaimed films about the American West, such as The Power of the Dog.
Neil Campbell: Sadly, I have yet to see Nomadland, so can’t comment on that, but certainly The Power of the Dog was a fascinating film based on a wonderful novel by Thomas Savage. What I liked about both is how they tell a different story about the West. This is a story aware of the myth and happy to examine it through the lives of its characters. Phil holds on to a heroic past embodied in the idea of Bronco Henry, twisting it into a cruel version of westness that helps him repress his sexuality. Peter is an errant figure whose “victory” suggests another West “a blueprint of the world to come” as the novel puts it. A world with a wider set of values, of sexualities, and representations that Phil detests, as he detests “Jews and shines” (as he puts it) and the movies. I think such films as these are adding to the anti-reductionist view of the West that my books have always try to show – Jane Campion and Chloe Zhao are outsiders to the US, but both wanted to examine the power of the region in all our minds and contribute in different ways to what Deleuze called the “invention of a people to come”. That is, something beyond the myth, beyond the trumpeted narratives, and beyond the static and dangerous rhetoric of narrow, framed versions of history. The authors I discuss in Worlding the Westernalso share something of this outsideness, whether Sebastian Barry from Ireland, Valeria Luiselli from Mexico, or Diaz from Argentina – and what they bring ultimately to the study of the American West is a complex, multifaceted, worlded view. To me this is what is always most exciting and revealing.
