Even as these works reproduce damaging tropes, however, some contemporary Westerns are endeavoring to reconstruct the genre. These new Westerns draw energy from broader public and scholarly efforts to expose the scale and violence of settler colonialism. As Mark Asquith observes in Lost in the New West (2022), their unconventional plots and characters invite “sophisticated consumer[s] to enjoy the Classic Western whilst simultaneously subverting the genre codes it celebrates” (195). Jordan Peele’s NOPE (2022) is a prominent example. The film challenges assumptions about the fictional West by integrating elements from science fiction and TV sitcoms. As Michael Johnson, Rebecca Lush, and Sara Spurgeon theorize in the edited collection Weird Westerns (2020), by foregrounding its “audacious generic joinings” NOPE encourages audiences to “recognize genre conventions as conventions and actively participate in their interrogation” (11).

This panel analyzes recent attempts to reimagine the American West in fiction, poetry, film, and visual and multimedia art. It seeks to raise questions and prompt discussion about whether and how transforming the Western’s conventions might contribute to reparative and decolonizing ends. How can the complex realities of life in the American West be disentangled from the Western’s limiting stereotypes? To what extent do the genre’s conventions persist within even the most ambitious and weird reconstructions? Why do the social and political myths encoded in Westerns remain so seductively influential? The panel includes four 12-15 minute presentations in order to allow speakers and attendees to consider how these questions resonate across media. The chair will ensure that 15-20 minutes are held for active discussion.

The first speaker, Amy Sara Caroll, turns the classic Western the inside out. Her presentation focuses on Mexican-Chinese artist Chantal Peñalosa’s multimedia installation Atlas Western (2021), a work that critically examines the facades of Cine Pueblo, a now-abandoned film set constructed in the 1970s near Tecate, Baja California. Drawing on concepts from Greg Grundin’s The End of Myth (2019), Caroll argues that Atlas Western interrogates the ruined auras of US Manifest Destiny, running East to West, and its Mexican counterpart, el norteño, radiating South to North by critically juxtaposing the project of continental development with the violently cleaved border biome.

The second speaker, Christopher Spaide, expands Caroll’s cross-cultural analysis by surveying the surprising recent history of Asian American and diasporic poets rewriting the American West. Considering poems from Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) to Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire (2012) and Paisley Rekdal’s West: A Translation (2023), Spaide suggests that these rewritings demonstrate the West’s enduring mythos (and its inversions) while at the same time encouraging readers and scholars to turn to irony, parody, and racial caricature to rethink its reliance on labor imported from the East.

Next, emerging scholar Heleana Bakopoulos presents a comparative reading of two Western novels, one classic and one contemporary: Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915) and Hernán Diaz’s In the Distance (2017). Both novels portray Swedish immigrants as confused and culturally opaque white settlers. Their cacophonies of cultural, racial, and ethnic encounters unravel the often-tidy generic opposition of whites/Anglos/proto-Americans against racialized Others. Drawing on Weird Westerns and other recent scholarship, Bakopoulos concludes that the contrasting itineraries of Cather and Diaz’s novels–from east to west to the former and west to east in the latter–show that westward immigration was less orderly and systematic than the Western genre would lead us to believe.

The final speaker, Kristin Jacobson, returns the panel to its originating questions about the risks and possibilities of reimagining the American West. Examining HBO’s streaming series Westworld, Jacobson highlights the Western’s enduring appeal and critiques the uneasy postmodern dream of escaping its imperialist and misogynist foundations. Jacobson analyzes the series’ speculative reproduction of “nationalist empire,” a concept adapted from Krista Comer’s influential Landscapes of the New West (1999), and argues that Westworld ultimately does more to ground feminist and decolonial struggles in violence than to propose a liberated or liberating new Western reality.