Ryan Tan Wander, "Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West" (Texas Tech UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Ryan Tanwander about his book titled Settler Tenses, Queer Time and Literatures of the American West, published by Texas Tech University Press in 2024.

This book is really intriguing for the investigation it provides of how some things that we may not think are related to each other, actually, as we're probably going to discuss, really very much might be. How things like U.S. nationalism and settler colonialism change.

actually really might be intersecting with things like queerness, with particular conceptions of masculinity, with religion, with race. There's a whole bunch of things here. And we're looking at all of this through the lens of late 19th and early 20th century literature focused on the American West. Given that focus in terms of time and type of text, some of these themes we maybe do kind of expect to show up, but maybe some of them are

I at least was quite intrigued to see the connections that are brought into through this book. So Ryan, thank you so much for joining me to tell us about your project. Thank you for that wonderful introduction, Dr. Melcher. I really appreciate you having me.

I'm very pleased to. To talk about my book. Yes. Sorry, go ahead. No, I was just going to invite you please to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about the sort of backstory of this. Like, how did you decide on this topic? Why did you choose to write a book about this?

Yeah. So obviously, Dr. Melcher has introduced me quite well in terms of some of the broad strokes of my name. I am an assistant professor of English at Valdosta State University in Georgia, in the United States. And the decision to write this book, the

The thing that really, I think, got me interested in this topic was actually, in many ways, very related to exactly what was happening in the country that I still live in, the U.S., and in the world back in 2016.

I was in graduate school. I was working on my PhD, and I was watching the rise of all kinds of right-wing nationalisms, not just in my own country, but elsewhere. And it really got me interested in some of

what I think of as the deeply white masculinist and white supremacist mythologies that continue to circulate in American culture and that circulate globally because of the global reach of American culture.

So I ended up getting really interested in a bunch of authors from the late 19th and early 20th century whom I describe in the book as white male settler authors. And they were all writing about the frontier, one of those sort of major, let's say, themes, topics, topoi in the settler colonial imagination and in the American imagination. And I started reading these texts and I realized that there was something

there were elements of these texts that weren't quite striking me as fitting in neatly with a lot of the sort of narratives about the tight fit between heteronormativity and nationalism, especially in the Western world. So I thought, huh, it might be an interesting and we might say even a kind of

perverse task to look at some of these texts that you might equate with a kind of deeply heteronormative, masculinist, American way of being and to think about all of the ways in which they're actually potentially not quite what they seem to be saying they are. And I ended up finding as I was going through graduate school, I was getting

more and more deeply immersed in some of the work on settler colonialism, some of the work in queer studies, I found that those lenses were going to be particularly generative for thinking about the sort of

The sort of queerness of settler nationalism is what I ended up sort of landing on after looking at all of these texts by these white male settler authors about this sort of valorized space in the American imagination, the American frontier.

All right, that's a very helpful introduction to the book, and I think probably our discussion as well. The next place I'd like to go is quite literally the title, because there's a really interesting phrase that starts this whole thing off. It's quite literally the first thing anyone would see. Settler tenses. Really interesting phrase. What do you mean by it?

Yes, and I should give credit where credit is due. I'm drawing

Much of the inspiration for this phrase actually came from a couple of folks who are, I think for most scholars, most closely aligned with the discipline of anthropology. But they're people who I think in a lot of ways, we'd also think of them as deeply interdisciplinary scholars. And I was thinking in particular of Elizabeth Pavanelli and Scott Morganson.

Um, and they're, they're sort of foci. They're, they're, they're areas that they're looking into are, are, are meaningfully different than, uh, the late 19th and early 20th century literary texts that, that, that I look at. But one of the things that, that these scholars and others have highlighted is that there is a kind of temporality or tense to, um,

what we might describe as nationalist formations in the US, as well as other settler nations like, say, Australia, like, say, Canada. And it's this tense wherein, generally speaking, indigenous people inhabit a kind of completed past.

And there's then a certain kind of bind that settlers need to sort of anxiously inhabit and reiterate over and over again. And really what it is, is it's a kind of tense that lays claim to existing at once as part of a sort of valorized past.

an ongoing present, and a sort of future that's fully colonized and owned by settlers. So when I was working through titles for the book, and obviously a project of this length, you end up going through numerous iterations of the title. And I ended up

settling on this phrase settler tenses in large part because I felt as though

What scholars like Pavanelli and Morgensen were saying was they were actually articulating the very sort of tensing of imagination and lived reality and tensing in the sense of sort of like verb tense of like who exists now, who no longer exists now, who is...

existing in a sort of present progressive who has a future, who will be at some point and who won't and what kinds of bodies and subjectivities are existing in a present progressive, which kinds of bodies and subjectivities have that kind of capacity for will be existing in the future.

One of the things that I really was seeing in their work was this idea that it wasn't just that there was one kind of settler.

one kind of settler subjectivity, one kind of settler who inhabits a specific social location, but rather a sort of whole host of heterogeneous settler actors. And all of them, despite their sort of various emplacements within the settler structure, whether they were placed in a position of relative privilege or a position of relative powerlessness,

You could say that every single one of them in their own unique way, often unwittingly, was contributing to that process of basically producing each and every day indigenous pastness, a sort of past perfect or sort of perfect simple tense like these people were in the past.

And then producing a sort of present that belongs to this sort of heterogeneous mass of settlers and a future that also belongs to a kind of heterogeneous mass of settlers, some of whom you might not assume are necessarily sort of integral components of that settler future.

This is such a fascinating kind of combination, I think, of ideas because it's in some ways sounds like a really technical thing. Like, OK, tenses, verb tenses, like, OK, that's

That's a grammar lesson, right? It's like, well, actually, no, if we start to take a look at it seriously, then all sorts of other things become revealed by it. So thank you for explaining that to us. I'd love to continue talking about specific terms that might sound like very simple questions, but in a similar way, kind of unpack a bunch of things. Obviously, the subtitle of the book, then we've got settler tenses. We talked about that. Next up, we've got queer time.

Can you tell us about sort of your use of those terms as well as anything else sort of theoretical framework wise we want to clarify at this point? Yeah, absolutely. So I'll start with I'll start with the term queer and and.

The term obviously gets developed in a few ways in the book, but I think that when it comes to sort of broad strokes, exactly what I'm trying to get at in the use of that term queer, there are a lot of folks, obviously, when you think about the sort of broad swath of very

really, really interesting and robust work in queer studies. Yes, there's some of it that focuses on topics, on subjects that we might take as sort of proper objects of study for perhaps an older iteration of gay and lesbian studies.

Um, but for me, I'm, I'm really taking my, my inspiration when it comes to that term queer from, uh, some of the, the work that, that tries to think about, um, all of the ways in which so many, uh, ways of being in the world and so many forms of subjectivity that, um,

supposedly exist in those who are, let's call them straight, can actually be thought of as queer in the sense of falling a slant of a whole sort of ensemble of imperatives that you might associate with a sort of normal heterosexual life. So when I use the term queer, I'm thinking about

all of, and especially in the context of literature, I'm thinking of all of those figures, all of those characters, all of those plots who do not fall neatly into, go neatly along the kind of trajectory that you might associate with, say, the 19th century realist novels, marriage plot, all of those characters are

whose lives and affections are often captivated, often very much determined and moved by their attachments to other people and to ways of being in the world that very much fall outside of a kind of bourgeois heteronormative formation of get married, have kids, buy a house,

have a couple of cars, or I guess if you're in the US, have more than a couple of cars. All of these figures who sort of fall outside of the orbit of a so-called normal life. And the book ends up

really focusing on all these characters who, in a lot of ways, if you were to, if I were to describe them to you, you'd say, well, no, that's just, that just sounds like a sort of frontiersman type character. I would, I would not at all think of that figure as queer or, oh, that's a, that's a kind of cowboy figure well before the time of, of

Brokeback Mountain, and I would not assume that the term queer is appropriate for this figure. But I actually, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to sort of denaturalize that assumption that we can look at all of these sort of

let's call them lonesome types who do not live these quote unquote normal lives. I'm trying to suggest to us that these are actually these deeply queer figures that are nonetheless really closely aligned with the imperatives of US settler nationalism. And part of the way that they

part of the way that they sort of get aligned with US settler nationalism in the book is through that second term of time.

There's a lot of amazing work in queer studies that sort of thinks about temporality and the potentially revolutionary, the potentially revolutionary elements of queer temporalities. And I think one of the things that I'm trying to get at in my use of that term time is the way in which actually

narrative form is itself one of those media that informs our sense of our collective past, our collective present, our collective future. And this is by no means a new argument. But for me, the key thing is that this term time is a way of talking about how narrative organizes our sort of phenomenological sense of

of the past, of the present, of what's going to happen in the future, and who belongs in each of those parts of that tripartite structure. And I think if there's anything else from my theoretical framework that I think is worth sort of clarifying, and I won't give the

the most technical description. But I think that one of the key things is obviously for a lot of academics, especially those of us in the humanities and many of the social sciences, like the term settler colonialism has just absolutely exploded. And in many cases has, yes, a lot of analytical purchase. And for me, I'm using that term settlerism

settler colonialism, or rather I'm trying to modify it in the sense of thinking about exactly how narrative forms in the very production of them and in the reading of them can be part and parcel of reproducing as well as contesting the overall structure of settler colonialism.

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Okay, so that's very helpful then to lay out a number of the different kind of angles and lenses and tools that we're using to examine these pieces of literature in ways that, as you said, sort of may not be what is usually expected. Which ones are then we talking about? Which writers are you investigating and why and how did you choose these to examine these issues with? Yeah, that's a great question.

And there was, you know, there was, it was not exactly the sort of easiest, it wasn't the easiest route in terms of choosing all of these authors. But one thing that sort of helped me was as I was sort of looking at the sort of going through essentially the critical histories of late 19th and early 20th century American literature, there are

There are obviously the Edith Whartons of this time. There are the Henry Jameses of this time. There are the Mark Twains of this time. And for...

reasons that are probably now deeply buried somewhere in my mind and I can't quite access them. But for some reason I decided that I wanted to take on a project that was at once sort of looking at this very sort of valorized and present kind of mythology of the American frontier. But I also wanted to take on some authors and some texts that had

been sort of treated to some very serious scholarly treatment in the past, but many of them had kind of fallen out of favor. So the book looks at the work of Bret Hart, who at one point was actually the highest paid author, I believe in the US, if not potentially the sort of Western world at that point. The book also looks at

a selection of dime novels, Deadwood Dick dime novels that are attributed to the name Edward L. Wheeler is the author name put on these texts, but they were likely produced by various authors that were working in one of the sort of dime novel fiction factories.

I also look at the work of Frank Norris and Jack London, and I think of them as sort of exemplars of a kind of naturalist aesthetic as it's developing in the late 19th and early 20th century.

And they made sense because in a lot of ways, like Bret Hart, like the dime novels, these were authors, Frank Norris and Jack London, who were interested in these kind of homosocial frontier spaces, even if they sometimes portrayed characters who were very much completely alone sort of out there in the wilderness.

And then the sort of natural choice, the last couple of authors that I look at in the book are Zane Gray and Owen Wister. And they're authors who are in the critical history of the Western, which, as we all know, ends up sort of spawning this giant industry, including Hollywood film. Wister's text is often regarded as the sort of the first novel

the first real Western, the first real novelistic Western. Um, and then Zane Gray's, uh, Zane Gray's Western title titled Writers of the Purple Sage, uh, which is published, which was published in 1912, um, was like the best selling novel of the first half of the 20th century. So, um, very, very popular Westerns. Um, and yet these were texts that as I was doing my research, I found that

They're texts that have been kind of not necessarily completely abandoned, but in a way sort of taken as relatively uncomplicated with, of course, scholars here and there picking them up and saying, well, there's actually quite a lot more to these texts than anyone seems to want to admit, than anybody wants to realize.

And I kind of realized that these texts were perfect because they fit with the sort of American frontier focus. And they also represented some of the major movements in terms of literary culture in the late 19th and early 20th century. So I started looking into the work of Bret Hart and I found that all of these, what are usually referred to as local color or regional writers, you could actually take Bret Hart as one of the

sort of originators, one of the first figures to really practice this kind of writing that becomes a hallmark of late 19th century American writing. I was looking into the dime novels and I found that they were massively popular and that according to scholars, these are texts that were read not just

by the working class audiences that they were ostensibly originally intended for. These were actually texts, these dime novels that were read by everybody, according to scholars. I

When it came to Jack London and Frank Norris, I was like, oh my God, these are central figures in naturalist writing, which is itself the sort of poor relation, if you will, of the sort of realism of William Dean Howells in the late 19th century. But nonetheless, one of these major aesthetic developments, aesthetic innovations, and

in American literature around the turn of the 20th century. And then, of course, I think I don't need to say a whole lot about the Westerns by Owen Wister, titled The Virginian, as well as Zane Gray's, the one I mentioned before, his Western titled Writers of the Purple Sage. These are texts that

absolutely, they absolutely captured, I think, in a lot of ways, the American imagination in this historical moment in the early 20th century, just like literally like a decade or, and in the case of

Gray's text about 20 years after the U.S. Census Bureau had in 1890 declared that the frontier was closed. And all of a sudden there was this absolute mania for this kind of nostalgic mania for this sort of mythologized space in the American consciousness that supposedly no longer existed. So I ended up

I ended up choosing these writers in large part because they felt sort of representative of some major currents in American culture around the turn of the late 19th and into the early 20th century. And I also felt like they were writers that

deserve to be sort of picked up again. And this is not to, you know, I have to give credit to all of the scholars who have kept scholarship on these writers' works, you know, going, kept it going, kept it building, kept it developing, but it just, it felt like time as I was working on this project, you know, over the last 10 or so years, it felt like time to

to pick up these writers again. And I was particularly taken by the idea of treating these authors to some of the

really fascinating kinds of theoretical treatments that were coming out of the scholarship, focusing the scholarship in queer studies, the scholarship in settler colonial studies. I just felt like these were texts that deserved another look through some of the really fascinating currents moving through contemporary scholarship. Yeah.

Very interesting always to understand sort of how cases are selected, how investigate, you know, things like that, whether it's writers, whether it's case studies, it's always really interesting to understand the kind of reasoning behind it. So thank you for giving us the outline of the different people you focus on and sort of why you chose their work.

I am of course now going to ask you to tell us a bit more about some of them in detail, though worth highlighting to listeners, less detail than the book. So we're going to do sort of a highlights tour here of some of the main points for some of the writers in the book, but anyone who wants to get into all of the details, I promise you there are a lot more and they're quite interesting. But in the interest of time, we will sort of do a bit of a highlights tour of those sections of the book.

The first person I'd like to ask you to tell us a bit more about, Ryan, is Bret Hart. You talk about in the chapter that focuses on his work that he is often portrayed by critics as being, quote, a misunderstood advocate for the rights of racialized minorities and Native Americans.

I think this is probably a chapter that especially speaks to what you were just mentioning of putting these writers' work up to some of the more recent scholarship around settler colonialism, queer studies, et cetera. Given that then, what view do you take of his work? Yeah, and I think that this is actually something that I kind of struggled with as somebody who's actually quite fond of

Bret Hart's work. And just to give a little bit of background, one of the reasons that Bret Hart was sort of, his work kind of fell by the wayside because he used to show up in American literature anthologies all the way up through sort of roughly the first half of the 20th century.

He sort of fell out of favor when new critical and very formalist methods in literary studies became really popular sort of early to middle of the 20th century. He sort of fell out of favor because he kind of became known as the writer of

poorly cobbled together, overly sentimental fictions. And one of the things that he actually, I think, is able to do, if you're looking at him from a certain angle, one of the things that he's able to do with these sort of, and I don't know if I fully agree with the whole poorly cobbled together description. I mean, some of them are sure not great, but I do agree that there is this kind of high sentimentalism

to his work. And oftentimes that sort of high sentimentalism takes the form of these sort of melodramatic relationships between men, usually taking place in spaces like the, say, the California mining camps in the middle of the 19th century, around the time of the California gold rush.

he has these portrayals, these deeply sort of sentimental, sappy, melodramatic portrayals. And sometimes they go well beyond that sort of

that's sort of just focusing on two euro-american mining camp folks sort of having a kind of complicated relationship with one another and and it'll go beyond that and what he'll do is instead of going into that sort of overly sentimental mode he'll actually tell stories about the plight

of racialized minorities and Native Americans in various spaces in the American West. So I don't talk about racism

All of the stories where he's doing that. I don't talk about those stories in the book, but he does have stories that will, for example, like a story titled Three Vagabonds of Trinidad. I don't discuss it in the book, but I'll use it as an example just so I'm not spoiling anything that I write about in the book.

In that story, he gives a rather sympathetic portrayal of a Chinese man and a Native American man who are essentially targeted by the white community.

That they live, I don't even want to say in, the white community that they sort of live around or that they are on the outskirts of. And I think for somebody like Bret Hart writing in the second half of the 19th century to essentially cast a critical eye on

on an almost exclusively Euro-American community in the American West and to sort of suggest that the way that they were treating Chinese immigrants, the way that they were treating Native Americans was really not befitting of quote unquote civilized people. I think that if we are

Looking at Bret Hart from one angle, we go, that's really important work and it's something to be commended. And I want to commend him for doing that. I think that we need to remember that when we read a Bret Hart and we see things that might strike us as, wow, that feels deeply anachronistic, if not even potentially racist, we also need to remember that he wrote stories like this.

Three Vagabonds of Trinidad, that was pretty clearly advocating for the rights of Chinese immigrants and Native Americans. But I also, as I was looking at the work of Bret Hart, I was thinking about him through the lenses of queer studies and settler colonial studies. And as I was thinking about scholarship that tries to get us

sort of passed the idea that there isn't a way of sort of making queerness and nationalism cohere. One of the things that I found was that he was actually

suggesting, I think, and not consciously, but I think if you read his work from the lenses that I'm using in my book, one of the things that you end up seeing as you look at the stories, especially where he's focusing on these kinds of tender relationships between Euro-American men out in these American West frontier spaces,

he was well aware that these were spaces that demographically did not have many women. And he ended up portraying these sort of really tender and loving relationships between men, these relationships that are so tender and loving that

You could say they're homosocial, but they end up becoming homoerotic in many moments. And it made me think about the ways in which that's actually a sort of way of articulating

in the absence of the sort of typical signs of settlement. I think that we think of the process of that sort of American mythology of taming the wilderness has this kind of progressive story where settlement actually takes place when you've established all of the things that sort of follow from heaven's

heteronormative relationships, quite literally in a very sort of like brutally biological sense, the reproduction of children, the building of schools, the establishment of all of these institutions that flow sort of directly from heterosexual relations. I saw the ways in which Hart's work can actually be read as suggesting a kind of

queer settlement, if you will. And I don't use that phrase in the book, but I think that it's perhaps best described as a kind of queer settlement where what you're getting is the establishment of Euro-American sovereignty in a space that at Hart's time was not necessarily a fully settled space. You're getting this articulation of Euro-American

Euro-American sovereignty in the absence of all of these signs, all of these sort of heteronormative signs that are usually taken as the symbols of having established and enacted sovereignty. So as much as I appreciate Hart's work of being an advocate for a lot of dispossessed people in the American West in the second half of the 19th century, I

I think that on a, you know, it's not a conscious level. His work nonetheless is engaging in this kind of production of a vision

of this kind of queer settlement of the American West that doesn't even need to wait for all of these signs that we would normally take as, well, ownership has passed over to Euro-Americans who now own the present and own the future. A very interesting reading indeed.

I would love to ask you next to tell us about the dime novels. As you mentioned, they were incredibly ridiculously popular at the time. And I wasn't hugely surprised to read that in the book. I was like, yeah, dime novels. The whole point is that they're meant to be really popular, right? But I suppose I had also in my head had a bit of an assumption that the ways in which these themes that we're talking about show up in a dime novel would be somehow different from

to the way that they'd show up in sort of a novel that's not a dime novel, right? A novel that's maybe trying to do something a bit different. Is that true? I mean, are there ways in which all these things around settler tenses and queer and time that you've been talking about so far, do they show up distinctly in the dime novel? Or is that kind of idea of them being different in some way, like just completely ridiculous and not worth an ounce?

No, I think that one of the things that is sort of fascinating about the dime novels, and it's this kind of, one of the things about them is that because they are effectively the, we can refer to them as a sort of very, they're like a 19th century version

version, at least, of sort of popular television where the hero of the show, the protagonist, needs to sort of show up at the beginning of each installment in more or less the exact same guise. And by guise, I mean, essentially, these are like...

these kinds of protagonists cannot have any single narrative arc. Let's say they can't have any single episode, they can't have any single dime novel in this case.

where they sort of play out the kind of standard timeline of settling down. And again, I'm thinking of this in terms of the dime novel in relationship to what we might describe as more sort of bourgeois forms of the time period that were very relentlessly often focused on the marriage plot, on the sort of textual

task or problem, if you will, of ensuring that the main characters get married and settle down. One of the things that became a kind of preoccupation of mine as I was

Looking at these dime novels as I was thinking about what they were doing was I was kind of thinking about how how do I talk about these in relation to say the work of of a Bret Hart and the dime novels are not necessarily known for being quite as let's say sentimental or focused on the affects and the emotions as the work of Bret Hart and

And yet I found that one of the things that these texts, these dime novels seem to be doing, given their episodic structure, given the fact that the main characters could never quite settle down, one of the things that they ended up doing was they ended up creating these really sort of expansive social worlds where...

protagonists as well as relatively small or side players, they ended up having these really sort of surprisingly deep and rich, at least for the novels, deep and rich relationships

with a whole host of people that could not be sort of reduced to or described as, say, a wife or somebody that you would start a sort of typical nuclear family with. And I started seeing that there were actually surprisingly, even though Bret Hart was trying to write fiction that would be taken as kind of genteel and highbrow,

There was a surprising resonance between the kind of what I describe in the book is the kind of queer sociality that you see in the work of, of Bret Hart, where you have these really sort of close and affectionate relationships between Euro American men. I started seeing some things similar to that happening in the dime novel. And I thought that there was this kind of interesting,

interesting opening for thinking about this form that, this dime novel form that seems so resolutely hostile to that idea of, of sort of settling down. For example, Deadwood Dick gets, gets married and divorced and loses wives over and over and over again. By losing wives, I mean literally like sometimes his wife will be

murdered in an installment in the Deadwood Dick dime novel series.

even though there's this sort of hostility to that notion of like sort of settling down and having your sort of nuclear family, the sort of bourgeois model of settling down, there was still this way in which the Deadwood Dick Nye novels were creating these really kind of rich social worlds that were essentially figuring out how to envision

Euro-American sovereignty in the absence of, and again, going sort of back to Bret Hart, in the absence of the sort of signs of sovereignty, the things that we would associate with the enactment of sovereignty, the sort of formation of families, the sort of establishment of schools and all the institutions that follow from that. And I think that that was sort of one of the moments where I started to realize that

Yes, these dime novels are there at once. Yes, they're picking up on sort of something that I've seen in the work of Bret Hart, but they're also doing it in this almost, I don't want to say underhanded, but this sort of sly way almost that you might almost miss where

They seem to be resolutely against the idea of settling down, and yet they're constantly imagining alternatives, alternative forms, essentially, of settler social life in the American West. Just that social life doesn't rely on all of the...

All of the things that flow from heteronormativity that usually get associated with the sort of establishment of a kind of normatively European style society.

I find this really interesting to think about, as you said, the kind of structure of the genre, right? They can't quite have everything close off because then what else would you do with it, right? That in and of itself sort of opens up interesting possibilities to do some compare and contrast as you've just done for us. But of course, there are also other writers you discussed that I'd like to move our conversation onto. Frank Norris and Jack London, who

I wonder if we can talk about this in terms of sort of analytical categories, I guess. We have lots of them to think about sort of what different novels might be doing. You suggest that these writers might need to go into a new category, plots of appropriation. Can you tell us about this idea? Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I use this phrase, plots of appropriation, and it's actually a takeoff on

The scholarship on American literary naturalism has come up with these two phrases as a way of describing two of the sort of dominant plot types that critics have seen in naturalist writing of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And those two phrases, one of them is plots of triumph and the other one is plots of decline. And plots of triumph are

is usually, it's used as a way of describing a lot of naturalist writing that's set sort of in frontier spaces. So actually texts that are like the ones that I look at in the chapter on the naturalist authors Frank Norris and Jack London. Usually that plots of triumph designator is used for those texts.

And it's used as a way of signaling just how frequently naturalist writers would write about the frontier as this space that sort of shows off the supposedly inherent superiority of Anglo-Saxons. The naturalist writers were deeply influenced by some very strange reasons

You can either call it racialist or racist thinking of the late 19th and early 20th century. And they often use the frontier as the space for staging the sort of inherent superiority of what we might describe as Anglo-Saxon supermen.

Plots on Decline, on the other hand, would get attached to texts that take place in urban spaces. And they'd be texts that would sort of show the almost like inevitable, the inevitable decline of our protagonists, of a text protagonist, as they're sort of dealing with the complexities and the depredations of urban spaces. And I think that you can think of

you can think of something like let's say Dreiser's like an American tragedy or Sister Carrie as like good examples of that sort of plot of decline that scholars have located in a specific subset of American naturalist writing. So we had this kind of

polarized or binary conception of the two sort of plot types that run through naturalist writing, American naturalist writing in particular, of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And I sort of like this specific kind of typology. I think it's fine. I think it works in a lot of cases. But as I was looking at the work of Frank Norris and Jack London,

I actually found that it wasn't quite fitting. I was looking at a number of texts by Norris in London set on the frontier, including texts that are sort of

Really well known texts like Jack London's The Call of the Wild. And I was like, it's not quite fitting. I don't feel like I'm quite seeing what scholars have described as plots of triumph unfolding in these frontier spaces. I think it's a little bit more complicated than that.

And what I actually ended up finding was that plots of appropriation made more sense because what we were actually seeing in a lot of these texts by Norris and London set on the frontier was not the triumph of Anglo-Saxon supermen, but their demise. They're quite literally their death because of their, in many cases, because of their own shortcomings. And in that sense, right?

they're then not sort of inherently superior figures. Who did end up surviving, thriving, sort of making it out, becoming, right, within the sort of logic of these stories, plots, those who actually have a future,

Those who actually survived were often these figures that you might take as the late 19th and early 20th centuries others. Some of them would be part native folks, part indigenous folks. Some of them would be racialized figures. Some of them would be in the case of the Call of the Wild, quite literally a dog. And there were a lot of

There was a sort of ongoing argument about the sort of hierarchization of humans and species and dogs would have been sort of placed as in a spot that would that would sort of render them a specific kind of other to the sort of Anglo-Saxon male population.

And I found that these were the figures that were actually making their way out of these stories. They were the ones who were sort of the agents, you might even say the authors of a kind of future.

And they were the agents and authors of futures that often were not exactly hospitable to, if not outright hostile to, Indigenous people. And it seemed to me like what Norris and London were actually doing was they were sort of almost like appropriating these figures. And that's why I use that phrase, plots of appropriation.

It's as if Norris and London, these white male settler authors of the late 19th and early 20th century, were figuring out how to sort of representationally recruit these racialized and sometimes indigenous figures in the name of a settler futurity that is, like I said, either not hospitable to or outright hostile to indigenous people. And it felt to me like

This was one of those things where, like so many sort of critical categories when it comes to the scholarship on a significant body of writing in any literature, any national literature, I was like, we need to add something. We need to add something more here. I need to build on the sort of categories, the very useful categories that other scholars have come up with for understanding literature.

sort of typical narrative patterns in this type of writing. I need to add another one because there are enough texts by these two major authors, Frank Norris and Jack London, that seem to fit into this kind of appropriative logic.

This is, I think, a really interesting way of analyzing books of sort of, and similar to what, I mean, on a very small level, I almost do with my own personal collection of books of like, how do they go together? What are they saying to each other? And what are they not? How do our ideas about which things are meant to go together, you know, in quotes meant to, how does that actually sort of stack up when we poke at those texts in more detail? So thank you for walking us through your thinking with those two writers in particular. And

I wonder though if we can turn now to discussing Owen Wister's work.

I wonder if we can talk about this to some extent, comparing what you were saying earlier about Bret Hart, about looking at things that maybe at first glance we'd go, oh, well, that's just settler narratives. That's frontier narratives. That's not queerness. You go so far as to say that in Owen Wister's work, it does kind of do this thing of looking on the face of it like, well, that's a marriage plot novel. Okay, we know what that is.

And yet, if we do some of that poking, looking more deeply into it, you argue that it goes so far as to make, quote, queerness look straight. Can you tell us what you think is going on here? Yeah. And I should be very fair to everybody who's come before me. I think in a lot of ways,

And it's something that does come up in the, in the Worcester chapter in a lot of ways. You know, I, I, I do think, right. Spoiler alert. I'm going to do a little plug for my own book. I do think that I'm saying some, some very, very new and interesting things in my book, but I am also in a lot of ways drawing on work that's been around for a long time. I think of the work of

of like Leslie Fiedler, where he talks about the sort of, let's describe it as sort of the great American novel, or you might think of it as the white male canon as this space that's full of these kind of deeply homosocial, if not homoerotic relationships where what you have are a bunch of male characters who are essentially trying to escape from

We'll use Huck Finn's Civilization here. And that when you actually look at the sort of quote unquote traditional American literary canon, what we take as sort of main lines, what we might take as itself kind of the sort of straight literary canon, if I may, is actually this sort of deeply

queer space that's full of these homosocial and homoerotic relationships between men. And I remember looking at Fiedler's work and thinking, wow, this has been around for such a long time. I think the first time I came across his work, it was probably, I don't know, 15 years ago. Maybe I'm dating myself at this point. But maybe it was 15 years ago. So it had already been around. His work had already been around for at least

at least 50 years at that point. And I was like, wow, there's been this sort of strand in Americanist literary criticism has been around for a long time. And I started thinking about

All of the ways in which we might go well beyond this kind of I'll describe it as a kind of high canon, high white male canon that includes authors like Mark Twain, like Herman Melville. What if we take...

some of what Fiedler's saying about the sort of queerness of these major American literary texts. What if we take that idea and look at an author like Wister, who sure has his own sort of critical establishment, folks still, we all still write about his work, we still read him, we still talk about him.

Obviously. But what if we bring that sort of idea that Fiedler had and apply it to a text that seems almost like unapologetically

let's say regressive in its politics. And I don't want to sort of say that like a whole host of things sort of line up lockstep when we use the word regressive, but I think that in a lot of ways, Wister's text is trying to articulate what we might take to be these very sort of restrictively traditional roles, these sort of restrictive conceptions of like what a man ought to be like,

what a woman ought to be like. This was a text where I again took the kind of deconstructive energy that I had brought to so many of the texts that I read earlier in the book. I brought that sort of deconstructive energy and I started looking at all of the ways in which the

the outcome for this, our main character in Owen Wister's The Virginian, right? The Virginian. The ways in which that outcome, yes, in William Handley, a scholar, somebody I know personally, a friend of mine who wrote a fantastic book where he discusses Owen Wister's The Virginian,

William Hanley describes what happens to the Virginian as a kind of sacrifice. And I was like, well, okay, so if the sacrifice is also this sort of sacrifice of, it's the work of essentially sacrificing all of the kinds of relationships and all the kind of joy that the Virginian had before he died.

Mary's, Molly, Molly Wood, and they all, and they settle down and they have a family, all of that. If he is sacrificing sort of a whole lot, what exactly is it that he, that he sacrificed? And what are the sort of effects of that on, on, on us as,

as readers. And one of the things that I realized is that, well, if we're going to take sort of the Virginian as this kind of, in many ways, sort of larger than life,

you might even say prototypical kind of American figure, everything that he articulates for us as like what he actually wants in his life, what he wants in his relationships with people, what he wants for himself actually feels sort of

for lack of a better way of putting it, deeply, deeply queer. And there's this almost like narrative trick that the Virginian, the novel, the novel pulls off where what it does is it figures out how to sort of take all of that and make it part and parcel of, essentially confuse all of that with the very process of becoming heteronormative, becoming the kind of

masculine hero, masculine archetype that the Virginian essentially is. And that's sort of where that phrase came from. I was like, really what this novel seems to be doing perhaps first and foremost is it's figuring out how to

take all of these energies that we might describe as queer, all of these affects and emotions that we might describe as queer, all these relationships that we might describe as queer and figuring out how to sort of co-opt them into this sort of archetypical story of a kind of almost like, he's not exactly an Anglo-Saxon Superman, but in many ways he has that kind of vibe to him as a character.

I don't know if I want to pick a favorite chapter, but this one was very intriguing. I don't know if you have a favorite chapter. I would say, oh my gosh, that's so hard because- That's fair. Yeah. I think that's fair. You're allowed to say all of them. Yeah. I think, well, I do think that like the, I think especially because part of the, a big part of the project's kind of goal was to,

be, um, and not to say that a lot of other scholars don't do this, but I was really, I was really trying to figure out like how, how do I find out, um, how to articulate everything that's sort of counterintuitive and very unexpected about these texts. And I think that the Westerns chapter, the one that focuses on Owen Wister, um, and, and, and Zane Gray is, is definitely the one that's sort of my favorite insofar as, um,

I sometimes felt like that was the space where the most, even to me, sort of counterintuitive and unexpected ideas came.

they came out of that chapter. And I think it's in part because of the kind of baggage, I think, especially as somebody who was born in the U.S., has lived in the U.S. my entire life, and has a sort of like interesting relationship to a lot of sort of Western and American mythologies. Like I grew up on the West Coast and

Um, it was looking at Westerns. You always have these kind of expectations about what they're going to do and what they're going to say. Um, and I just felt like that was the chapter where, um,

With the Hart chapter and the dime novels chapter and the Frank Norris and Jack London chapter, I felt like, yeah, I can sort of see how these things. It wasn't it wasn't like it was such a stretch at the beginning to think that this is where I might have ended up with those three chapters. I think that the chapter on Westerns, I was like I was expecting something.

not to be able to say a whole lot of what I end up saying in that chapter. And then once the chapter made it to its present form, I was like, wow, it actually does turn out. And this was obviously, I was with the help of other scholars work that sort of set the stage for what I'm doing. Yes, if the Western's doing anything, and I love that you highlighted that phrase of mine, if the Western is doing anything, it's doing a really good job and it's working hard.

to make queerness look straight. So fascinating. Thank you so much for telling us about it. And of course, for listeners who want to get into more of what we've been discussing, there is, of course, the book itself. And the reason that they get to read it is because you're no longer working on it. It's off your desk. So as a final question, Ryan, what might you be working on now that it's done? I am actually at work on a book-length project that is on...

Asian American literary engagements with Asian indigenous relationality. So a bit of a turn from the work that I do in settler tenses, although to be fair, there is a kind of geographical connection insofar as many of the Asian American literary texts that I

I look at are set, either set in West Coast spaces, Western American spaces, or written by authors who are from the Western part of the U.S.,

But it's a book that in a lot of ways is trying to contribute to some of the really fascinating conversations that are currently going on around the really thorny complexities of belonging when you're somebody who, and this is a project that's personal to me in many ways. I am the son of somebody who is,

from Southeast Asia after the changes in US immigration law in 1965. And I myself have a really sort of complicated relationship as an Asian American to sort of living and the prospect of belonging in a nation that, for lack of a better way of putting it, is quite literally built on stolen land. So I'm working on this project. It's provisionally titled

the intimacy of others, Asian settler structures of feeling. I'm working on this book and it's really trying to suss out the ways in which Asian American authors all the way from the late 19th century to the present have been trying to think through forms of what I'll describe right now as kind of

ethical affiliation and sort of obligation to indigenous people, given that as diasporic populations, there is at once this sort of desire to belong, especially in the context of restrictive immigration laws historically and the perpetual foreigner stereotype that continues to plague us. There's on the one hand that desire to belong, but

But there's also that sort of responsibility. I think that many of the authors I'm looking at are well aware of that responsibility and trying to think through how literature can become a way of sort of engaging in that kind of responsibility to acknowledging and trying to redress the history of genocidal violence against indigenous people in North America.

Yet again, tackling a whole bunch of interesting, tricky things altogether. Best of luck with that project. Thank you. In the meantime, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Settler Tenses, Queer Time and Literatures of the American West, published by Texas Tech University Press in 2024. Ryan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Miranda, thank you so much for having me.