Rough Forms: Autobiographical Interventions in the U.S. West, 1835-1935

Abstract

Rough Forms analyzes U.S. Western autobiographies from 1835 to 1935, focusing especially on ways that Native and non-Native authors complicate settler-colonial narratives. In doing so, my project deeply engages with two interrelated questions: “What kinds of stories does the settler tell?” (to quote Alan Lawson) and “What kinds of stories does society tell about the settler?” Settler-colonial theory describes the process through which settlers physically and narratively displace Native peoples. Scholars such as Alan Lawson and Margaret Jacobs typically use this theory to demonstrate how Anglophone authors and historical figures ignore or erase Native traditions. Over an introduction and four chapters, I prove that settler-colonial theory applies to a range of autobiographical texts, including works by Jotham Meeker (a Euro-American missionary and diarist), George Bent (a Southern Cheyenne warrior-writer), Robert and Daisy Anderson (African American homesteaders and self-publishers), and Alice Gossage (a Euro-American newspaperwoman and diarist). The dynamic local figures that I study share networks with and often respond directly to better known American authors such as Charles Eastman, Booker T. Washington, and Hamlin Garland, but scholars have not yet considered their writings together in order to deepen our literary history of the U.S. West. By linking traditional settler narratives, efforts to recover Native agency, defenses of women’s rights and writing, and studies of alphabetic, visual, material, and spatial literacies, Rough Forms crucially reframes U.S. Western autobiographical texts as dynamic sites of cultural and textual exchange whose authors uniquely establish and/or complicate regional belonging. Far from being merely of local interest, their dynamic intercultural and multiformal texts greatly increase our understanding of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century American literary studies by critiquing settler-colonial erasure and providing vibrant archives of resistance rarely seen in more canonical works.