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Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre ed. by Kerry Fine et al.

2021; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.2021.0027

1948-7142

Travis Franks,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Reviewed by: Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre ed. by Kerry Fine et al. Travis Franks Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, and Sara L. Spurgeon, eds. Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2020. 468 pp. Hardcover, $70; paper, $35; e-book, $35. According to coeditors Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, and Sara L. Spurgeon, weird Westerns "utilize a hybrid genre format, blending canonical elements of the western with either science [End Page 180] fiction, fantasy, horror, or some other component of speculative literature" (2). As the subtitle suggests, Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre is primarily concerned with the archetypal western figure—a straight white man—violently displacing or erasing minoritized groups, particularly women, Natives, and Blacks. Yet Weird Westerns convincingly demonstrates that, for all of the ways that its traditional conventions persist (many of which are problematic) the Western is also remarkably adaptable. (It should be noted that I have the pleasure of serving the Western Literature Association alongside the editors, as well as having briefly been Kerry Fine's colleague at Arizona State University.) The chapters collected here reveal that the inherent limitations of the Western are not simply addressed by introducing speculative elements. As stated by the editors, Weird Westerns endeavors to "explore how the weird western challenges the representation of race and gender in the conventional western but also how the weird western can serve as a way to reinforce its existing gender and racial paradigms" (25). By doing so, Weird Westerns marks a fascinating point in the genre's history, one in which seemingly unlimited potential and undeniable growing pains are simultaneously evident. Comprised of fourteen essays, Weird Westerns is divided into five parts. Part one, "The Weird West, Past and Present," considers generic Western conventions and their use in various hybrid forms, from short stories and novels to the tabletop game "Deadlands." Part two, "Native Reclamations and Representations," and part three, "Surrogate indians and Other Indigenous Metaphors," deal with Indigenous representation in weird Westerns, first, in terms of how Indigenous authors write back against stereotypical tropes and, second, how these stereotypes are reinscribed in the depiction of aliens-and-monsters shows like Firefly, Wynonna Earp, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Part four, "The African American Presence in the Weird Western," is similarly concerned with race and representation, though, as the editors note in the introduction, where Native peoples are often ubiquitous in popular Westerns, Blacks are depicted much less often despite long, complex relationships with the American West. The chapters in part five, "The Undead in the Weird [End Page 181] Western," consider how the West's violent legacies of colonialism, racism, and patriarchy haunt steampunk-style alternative histories and zombie apocalypses alike. Weird Westerns concludes with an afterword from Stephen Graham Jones, who was honored with the WLA's Distinguished Achievement Award at the 2020 annual conference organized by two of the anthology's editors, Fine and Lush. In a likely first for an academic anthology, Jones writes that reading an advanced copy of Weird Westerns inspired him to begin writing a novel he had long put off. Jones's breakthrough novel Mongrels is also the subject of Joshua T. Anderson's chapter, which argues that Jones breaks from several literary conventions to reimagine processes of kinship and placemaking in and beyond the West. While Indigeneity and Blackness account for three of the anthology's five parts, concerns about gender are addressed throughout Weird Westerns, often via intersectional analyses. Scott Pearce's chapter, for instance, attends to The Walking Dead's characterizations of Carol and Michonne as much as that of Glenn Rhee and Rick Grimes. Eric Meljac and Alex Hunt discuss gender and sexuality in Robert Coover's parodic takedown of hypermasculine popular Westerns. And Jacob Burg's analysis of Stephen King's The Dark Tower centers on Odetta Holmes, a Black woman struggling with schizophrenia. The range of primary texts critiqued in Weird Westerns—chapters by Domino Renee Perez, Joshua D. Smith, and Meredith Harvey are particularly relevant here—makes it, like the genre itself, highly adaptable, addressing the varied mediums and subgenres through which western tropes persist and are often challenged. This...