The Intimate American West: Space, Race, and Settler Colonialism

Catalog description

The American West is a region that has long occupied a special place in the collective historical identity and cultural memory of the United States. Seeking to overturn popular images of the West that have obscured the diversity and complexity of western lands and peoples, historians have increasingly recognized the American West as a place of empire and indigenous dispossession. This course will explore how settler colonial policy manifested in the everyday lives of westerners by looking closely at the intersection of state power with intimate matters on America's multicultural frontier during the long nineteenth century. Each week, course materials and lectures will focus on different spaces or "sites of production" throughout the West where ambiguous concepts like race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship were formed and contested. By engaging with the region's most intimate spaces--missions, mining camps, homes, Indian boarding schools, railroad cars, and Wild West shows--we will attempt to uncover and understand not only the dreams and aspirations of a variety of westerners but also the power, hierarchy, and violence of the settler colonial context.