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cover of episode Ryan Tan Wander, "Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West" (Texas Tech UP, 2024)

Ryan Tan Wander, "Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West" (Texas Tech UP, 2024)

2025/1/23
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Ryan Tan Wander
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Miranda Melcher: 本书探究了看似毫不相关的几个概念之间的交集，例如美国民族主义、殖民主义与酷儿身份、男性气质、宗教和种族。通过对19世纪末20世纪初美国西部文学的分析，揭示了这些主题之间的复杂关系。 Ryan Tan Wander: 我对美国西部文学的研究发现，其中存在着与美国民族主义和殖民主义密切相关的酷儿元素，这些元素挑战了我们对酷儿身份与美国民族认同之间关系的传统理解。我的研究使用了“殖民者时态”和“酷儿时间”的概念来分析这些文学作品，并探讨了叙事形式如何在再现和对抗殖民者殖民主义结构中发挥作用。我选择研究布雷特·哈特、通俗小说、弗兰克·诺里斯、杰克·伦敦、赞恩·格雷和欧文·威斯特的作品，因为这些作品代表了19世纪末20世纪初美国文学和文化的主要潮流，并为运用酷儿理论和殖民者殖民主义理论提供新的视角。在布雷特·哈特的作品中，我发现既有对少数族裔的同情，也有对酷儿定居点的一种表达。通俗小说，特别是《死木迪克》系列，虽然表面上反对安家落户，但其情节结构和人物关系却创造了一个丰富的社会世界，以一种巧妙的方式展现了在没有传统异性恋规范标志的情况下，对殖民者社会生活的另类想象。我提出了“挪用情节”的概念来分析弗兰克·诺里斯和杰克·伦敦的自然主义作品，这些作品中，并非盎格鲁撒克逊人的胜利，而是他们的失败，而那些最终生存下来的人物往往是边缘化群体，这体现了殖民者对这些人物的挪用，以构建一个对原住民不友好的未来。欧文·威斯特的《维吉尼亚人》表面上是一个婚姻情节小说，但通过对人物关系和结局的解读，可以发现小说巧妙地将酷儿元素融入到异性恋规范的叙事中，使酷儿看起来像异性恋。 Miranda Melcher: 这本书探究了美国民族主义、殖民主义与酷儿身份、男性气质、宗教和种族之间的交集，并通过对19世纪末20世纪初美国西部文学的分析来展现这些主题。

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Chapters
This chapter introduces the book's core concepts: Settler Tenses, drawing from anthropological work on the temporality of settler nationalism, and Queer Time, exploring how narrative shapes our understanding of the past, present, and future. It also clarifies the theoretical framework, particularly settler colonialism and its connection to narrative forms.
  • Settler Tenses describes the temporality of settler nationalism, where Indigenous people inhabit a completed past, while settlers claim a valorized past, ongoing present, and colonized future.
  • Queer Time examines how narrative structures our perception of time and who belongs in each temporal category.
  • The author uses "queer" to encompass subjectivities that deviate from heteronormative expectations, even within seemingly straight characters and plots.

Shownotes Transcript

In today’s cultural and political climate of relative LGBTQ+ inclusion, Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West) (Texas Tech University Press, 2024) by Dr. Ryan Tan Wander provides a literary history that rewrites our understanding of when and how queerness began to align with US nationalism and settler colonialism, tracing the discursive production of masculinities in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literatures of the American West.

Current scholarly understandings often equate turn-of-the-century representations of the US frontier with hypermasculinity and heteronormativity. Simultaneously, scholars tend to view queer inclusion—that is, the civil and political inclusion of those who make up the “-Q+” of the initialism LGBTQ+—as a phenomenon of post–Civil Rights era activism. Settler Tenses provides a deeper history of queerness in US history by showing that literature created frontier masculinities that representationally yoked a range of queer bodies and subjectivities to national identity as the US consolidated its sovereignty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Reframing and explaining anew the provenance and significance of the links between queerness and US nationalism and settler colonialism, Settler Tenses will appeal to an audience of advanced undergraduates as well as researchers and scholars in American literary studies, gender, queer, and sexuality studies, settler colonial studies, and critical race and ethnic studies.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose* new book*)* focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.*

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