Speculative Wests

Popular Representations of a Region and Genre

Michael K. Johnson

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781496233509
• eBook ISBN: 9781496234810
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2024 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award Looking across the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, its literature, film, television, comic books, and other media, we can see multiple examples of what Shelley S. Rees calls a "changeling western, " what others have called "weird westerns, " and what Michael K. Johnson refers to as "speculative westerns"—that is, hybrid western forms created by merging the western with one or more speculative genres or subgenres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and alternate history. Speculative Wests investigates both speculative westerns and other speculative texts that feature western settings. Just as "western" refers both to a genre and a region, Johnson's narrative involves a study of both genre and place, a study of the "speculative Wests" that have begun to emerge in contemporary texts such as the zombie-threatened California of Justina Ireland's Deathless Divide (2020), the reimagined future Navajo nation of Rebecca Roanhorse's Sixth World series (2018–19), and the complex temporal and geographic borderlands of Alfredo Véa's time travel novel The Mexican Flyboy (2016). Focusing on literature, film, and television from 2016 to 2020, Speculative Wests creates new visions of the American West.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Race, Time Travel, and the Western
• 2. Trauma, Time Travel, and Legacies of Violence
• 3. Alternate Cartographies of the West(ern) in Indigenous Futurist Works
• 4. Speculative Borderlands I
• 5. Speculative Borderlands II
• 6. Speculative Slave Narrative Westerns
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index
• About Michael K. Johnson
• Series List