West

The keyword “west” typically has two referents. On the one hand, it refers to the western United States or the area west of the ninety-eighth meridian where arid country begins; on the other hand, it invokes a global geographic division between the “west” as a center of global colonial powers in Europe and North America and the non-West. The two referents—the “American West” and Western colonialism—intersect in a system of stories and images popularized in US literature, cinema, visual culture, and video games. The search by Columbus for a trade route from Spain to the East Indies sets the keyword in motion as a tale of colonial ambition. Landmarks like Monument Valley and the Oregon Trail, and iconic figures like cowboys, Indians, and pioneers, become generic players in stories about Anglo-American nationalist hopes, character, and history. Mainstream understandings of these narratives and images position the “Old West” or “Wild West” of the nineteenth-century frontier as the West, a space where the colonial values of expansion and settlement meet with national identity as “American.” Critical approaches to the same archive reposition these artifacts as belonging to a larger history of colonial thought, relinking the national and global genealogies of “west.”