Decentering the Cowboy, Critiquing the Canon: On Kiara Kharpertian's "We Who Work the West"

Kiara Kharpertian | We Who Work the West: Class, Labor, and Space in Western American Literature | University of Nebraska Press | 2020 | 288 Pages

Work defined the American West. Workers themselves, including miners, ranch hands, lumberjacks, farmers, sex workers, railroad laborers, freighters, laundry workers, and soldiers, populate past and present historical studies and literary accounts of the West. Their labor to extract natural resources, lay rail, raise townsites, and maintain order supported the United States’ settler project, the dispossession of native peoples, and reshaped the West’s cultural, social, and economic geography. That labor also shaped the rest of the country by fueling the growth of industrial capitalism. Indeed, the West’s resources transformed cities like Chicago, to borrow Carl Sandburg’s famous description, into the “Hog Butcher for the World / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat.” As a result, depictions of work frequently appear in fictional narratives of the region from the nineteenth century through to the present.

Visions of this imaginary West were and are buried deep in the national mythos, populating dime novels, films, and novels with cowboys, settlers, and hard-pressed outsiders. According to Kiara Kharpertian’s We Who Work the West: Class, Labor, and Space in Western American Literature, these fictions and the histories underlying them were constructed and reconstructed from the identities, social experiences, and geographic locales of workers themselves. Completed shortly before her death, We Who Work the West is an audacious rereading of Western literature broadly understood that raises important questions about the function of identity, belonging, and modernity within the region. To that end, Kharpertian asks “whether belonging does not always belong to the winners of history but to those who lose as well.” This questioning of belonging and the construction of history contributes a new reading of the West as neither a closed nor open frontier, but rather a locale where “the process of opening” was regularly occurring in response to new historical conditions.

In attending to these questions, Kharpetrian attempts to peel back the “layered West, thick with the skin of history, unfolding through the pages of its literature.” Drawing on the writing of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Frank Norris, Sanora Babb, Cormac McCarthy, and Philip Meyer, in conjunction with the New Western history and spatial theory, Kharpertian advances a dynamic vision of the West as made and remade along the fractured lines of class, labor, and space by those on the margins. Her reading reveals a West built by “those who lose,” as noted above. Specifically, Kharpertian frames class, labor, and space as mutually constitutive elements that define the contours of class boundaries, ethnic and racial belonging, the line between tradition and modernity, and durability of claims to land ownership. Together these elements point toward a West that was never closed but continuously reimagined by the region’s inhabitants.

Kharpertian’s sharp reading of Great Depression literature decenters the public and scholarly preference for narratives about groups uniting to overcome financial hardships, a genre symbolized by John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Instead, she emphasizes works by Sanora Babb, Frank Waters, and John Fante that more accurately account for the limited choices and repeated failures of those attempting to survive. Moving away from The Grapes of Wrath provides a “more historically precise, zoomed-in literary portrait of those who failed in the West.” Instead of overcoming hardship through collective action, Kharpertian argues that class in these texts “locks characters in spaces and to forms of work” that inhibit the individual’s attempts at survival; the conditions of their hardship produce a “feedback loop,” through which those very conditions are sustained. This loop forecloses the possibility of community organization. Instead, it creates characters subject to the full force of brutal working conditions set against the backdrop of ecological and economic collapses in the 1930s.

The aftershocks of the Depression’s economic and ecological degradation reverberate in the postwar cowboy novels analyzed by Kharpertian. In Larry McMurtry’s Horseman Pass By, Elmer Kelton’s The Time It Never Rained, and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, ranch and range work not only define the cowboy but provide the “protagonists identity and intimate connection to their land and its patterns.” However, this was a form of labor on the decline. Rather than read cowboys as unidimensional representations of masculinity and individuality on the range, Kharpertian aims to “resituate” them within their Western mythology. Illuminating these connections in literary accounts of the 1940s and 50s is critical. At that time, when oil fields replaced ranges, cowboys worked a declining industry in which their skills became increasingly performative. The cowboy’s labor was rendered a matter for memorialization rather than economic necessity as spaces emerged to commemorate their work. Through rodeos, where Kharpertian contends that cowboys’ labor-based identity became “a disposable spectacle,” cowboys reimagined their labor for urban audiences in the postindustrial age of the 1950s. By describing such a complicated relationship between work, class, and space, Kharpertian forces readers to reimagine the cowboy in decline.

Cumulatively, We Who Work the West is a deftly argued reevaluation of Western literature. Kharpertian’s book exhibits the value of academic work examining the complex relationships between class, labor, and space in Western writing, and even when these categories are not readily apparent. The text is not without limitations; among them, it lacks a summative conclusion underscoring the author’s overarching argument, methodology, and contribution to the field. Nonetheless, Kharpertian’s study is a nuanced and engaging work on work in all its complexities. It marks a necessary intervention that historians, literary scholars, and working-class studies scholars of the American West will find worthwhile.