Settler Sovereignty and

The Rhizomatic West, or,

The Significance of the Frontier
in Postwestern Studies
Alex Trimble Young

Introduction: Big Frontier Tales in

Postwestern Scholarship and
Settler Colonial Studies
In his 1996 article Reclaiming the F Word, or Being and Becoming
Postwestern, historian Kerwin Klein imagined an ambitious agenda for
a then-unrealized postwestern scholarship:
Today, to define a work as a western history is to engage in a
process of exclusion. A western history is somehow not quite
fully American. American history still largely defines itself
through the experiences of the eastern United States. From this
perspective, postwestern optimistically imagines a return to the
big frontier tales of the European occupation of Native America
as a central event in our past, and a future in which histories
set in California or (dare we say it) Sonora are as American as
those set in Massachusetts and Virginia. (214)
For Klein, a return to big frontier tales, decoupled from the ethnocen-
tric triumphalism of Turnerian historiography, offered western history
an opportunity to free itself from what he saw as the regionalist parochi-
alism of many practitioners of the New Western History. Klein hoped
that, through a scholarly practice attuned to the metanarrative of the
European invasion of Native America, western scholarship could reori-
ent itself toward both the history of the nation and the transnational
processes of European settler conquests of indigenous peoples.
Ironically, in the sixteen years since the publication of Kleins con-
troversial article, the term postwestern has come into use in western
literary studies (the only field where it has taken root with any consis-
tency) to describe a scholarly project that moves in almost the opposite
direction from the one Klein envisioned: today the term postwestern is
loosely employed to describe a critical practice that champions both the
postmodern resistance to historical metanarratives (big frontier tales)

WAL 48.1 & 2 (Spring & Summer 2013): 11540

116 Western American Literature Spring & Summer 2013

and a commitment to a regional rather than national critical focus.1

William Handley and Nathaniel Lewis, citing Neil Campbell, suc-
cinctly articulate the case against relying on historical metanarratives
for understanding western culture in their introduction to True West:
Authenticity and the American West (2004):
As Neil Campbell writes, The American West has always been,
by the very nature of its mythic representations a simulation
reproducing images confronting some already defined, but pos-
sibly non-existent, sense of Westness. The most continuous
story of the West, then, is neither the (Old) clash of civilization
and savagery nor the (New) legacy of conquest, but competing
claims of cultural authenticity, even belongingin the sense
both of an original at home-ness and of possession. (2)
In Unsettling the Literary West (2008), Lewis makes the case for the West
as a space of historical contingency and representational uncertainty
even more stridently, suggesting that western literary culture serves as a
sort of antecedent to the postmodern: western writing may be the first
and most successful form of postmodern writing in American literary
history. Its apparent banality, reliability, and repetitive imitations cloak
its extraordinary achievement: the production of a hyperreal West (16).
For many postwestern critics (if they might be so called), repre-
senting the West as a region defined by the proliferation of competing
petits rcits rather than one shaped by a frontier metanarrative has been
an essential part of a western critical regionalism, aimed at, in the
words of Krista Comer, imagining the regional as not inevitably pro-
ductive of conservative nationalisms, masculine or white authority, or
essentialist definitions of place (32). For Campbell, this decentering of
the link between western regionalism and US nationalism is a key aspect
of a critical regionalist practice intended to offer new ways in which we
can conceive of the local as it interacts with the global and the implica-
tions of such an exchange; a new configuration of analytical and discur-
sive techniques with which to examine the transnational (Manifesto).
As critical regionalism has moved the field of western studies away
from big frontier tales in an effort to represent the West-as-region in
its transnational context, frontier historiography has made a surpris-
ing reemergence in the growing field of settler colonial studies, which
has heretofore had relatively little interaction with western studies.
Settler colonial studies puts a consideration of frontier processes at the
center of its study of settlement and indigenous dispossession in societ-
ies including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Israel, and the United
States. Instead of resisting historical metanarrative as a means toward
achieving a transnational focus, settler colonial studies has focused on
the comparative study of the frontier histories of settler nation-states in
order to push beyond the horizon of national historiography.2
 Alex Trimble Young 117

Charles Grogg. ASCENSION 1. 2010. Gelatin silver print, mud, and compost.
Reprinted with permission from the artist.

While settler colonial studies encompasses a broad array of view-

points (and is still marked by vigorous debate about what exactly con-
stitutes a settler colonial society), a quick gloss of the work of Australian
scholar Patrick Wolfe, who has articulated one of the most influential
theoretical models for understanding the processes of settler colonial
invasion, serves as a good introduction to the field.3 For Wolfe, settler
colonialism is a term for imperial projects in which the primary goal is
118 Western American Literature Spring & Summer 2013

to replace the local population on their land rather than exploit them
for their labor:
The primary object of settler colonialism is the land itself rather
than the surplus value to be derived from mixing native labour
with it. ... The logic of this project, a sustained institutional ten-
dency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range
of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct
invasion is a structure not an event. (Settler Colonialism 163)
By positing settler invasion as a structure not an event, Wolfe is able to
trace the logic of elimination through the frontier period of settlement,
during which settler societies engage in an active genocidal campaign
(often waged by both state and non-state actors) against indigenous
peoples, into the post-frontier era, in which whats to be eliminated
is Native societies, as autonomous polities originating independently
of the settler social contract, rather than necessarily individual human
beings (A Note from Patrick Wolfe).
In his analyses of contemporary neoliberal settler states, Wolfe
traces multiculturalist logics back to the binary of the frontier in order
to contest the strategic pluralism whereby the logic of elimination
has been implemented (Settler Colonialism 167). For Wolfe, there is a
parallel between nationalist historiography (such as that of Frederick
Jackson Turner), which imagines the frontier as the site where a diverse
assemblage of settlers is forged into a composite nationality (Turner
47), and the liberal multicultural rhetoric through which political iden-
tities formed by distinct and ongoing histories of resistance and oppres-
sion are imagined as mere cultural differences that contribute positively
to a pluralist yet ultimately unified national polity:
The truth of the frontier was that the primary social division
was encompassed in the relation between natives and invaders.
This notwithstanding, the suppression of divisions within set-
tler society was an ideological effect of the concept of the fron-
tier. Correspondingly, though the truth of present day mul-
ticulturalism is a racially divided society, the reduction of the
primary Indigenous/settler divide to the status of one among
many ethnic divisions within settler society is an ideological
effect of multiculturalism. (168)
Wolfes carefully bracketed truth here speaks to how we might posi-
tion his critique vis--vis postwestern literary scholarships insistence
on resistance to metanarratives. In Wolfes work, the recuperation of
the frontier binary between settler and indigenous is not an attempt
to recover a truth that carries a metaphysical authority but rather to
engage in a sort of strategic essentialism whereby scholarship might
come to identify, understand, and transform the structural inequities
 Alex Trimble Young 119

that continue to define the relationship between settler societies and the
indigenous peoples they colonize in the age of multicultural pluralism.4
My purpose in this essay will be to engage with the strategic essen-
tialism of settler colonial studies in order to explore the impact of a the-
oretical text that has been particularly influential in both postwestern
studies and contemporary American studies writ large: Gilles Deleuze
and Flix Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus (1980). The most ambitious
and nuanced application of Deleuze and Guattaris thought to the study
of the cultures of the US West has, as readers of this journal will know,
been carried out by Neil Campbell, primarily in The Rhizomatic West:
Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age
(2008). In this pioneering monograph, Campbell argues that embracing
Deleuze and Guattaris conception of the rhizomatic West as a paradigm
for transnational western studies could move the field beyond the famil-
iar frontier narratives that circumscribe Westness within a national
interpretive horizon.
In the readings that follow, I will argue the rhizomatic West, as con-
ceived by Deleuze and Guattari, is in large part derived from some of
the very frontier tropes Campbells work seeks to move beyond. My
aim in this effort is not to produce a symptomatic reading that would
dismiss A Thousand Plateaus, or the scholarship inspired by it, as some
sort of crypto-propaganda for US empire. Instead, by working to trouble
our understanding of the relationship between the rhizomatic West
and other frontier narratives, my goal is to illuminate a potential path
by which other young scholars might apply the fundamental insights
of Campbell and other postwestern critics who have sought to put
poststructuralist theory into conversation with the cultures of the US
West. As critics like Handley, Lewis, and Campbell readily acknowledge,
recognizing the West as a region defined by a multiplicity of compet-
ing cultural and historical narratives that have sought to lay claim to its
authentic story does not equate to a death knoll for historically and
politically engaged western scholarship.5 As critic Casey Shoop put it
in a recent article on Thomas Pynchons California, critical engagement
with poststructuralism must recognize that political consciousness
does not end with the recognition of hermeneutic uncertainty; rather it
marks its proper beginning (81).6

The Special Case:

US Exceptionalism and the Rhizomatic West
In order to understand how Deleuze and Guattari reproduce frontier
tropes in A Thousand Plateaus, it is useful to start with a careful consid-
eration of the oft-cited paragraph in which they introduce the notion of
the rhizomatic West:
120 Western American Literature Spring & Summer 2013

America is a special case. Of course it is not immune from

domination by trees or the search for roots. This is evident even
in the literature, in the quest for a national identity and even for
a European ancestry or genealogy (Kerouac going off in search
of his ancestors). Nevertheless, everything important that has
happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhi-
zome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, succes-
sive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside.
American books are different from European books, even when
the American sets off in pursuit of trees. Leaves of Grass. The
conception of the book is different: the search for arborescence
and the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there
is the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry, its
ever-receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers. There is
a whole American map in the West, where even the trees are
rhizomes. America reversed directions: it put its Orient in the
West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came full
circle; its West is the edge of the East. (19)
Before considering how this passage engages with a peculiar sort of Ameri-
can exceptionalism, it is necessary to take a moment to explain its idio-
syncratic vocabulary. As developed in A Thousand Plateaus, the rhizome
(literally meaning tuber or root) becomes a metaphor for modes of being
that refuse the structured rootedness of the arborescent. A rhizomatic
assemblagefor instance, a mode of cultural production or political
communityis liberatory, representing a becoming, a deterritorializa-
tion, a line of flight that resists the ordering impulses of power.7 In this
schema, power is always arborescent, and seeks out an origin, seed, or
center, and works to organize things in a circle, and the circle around a
center a system of points and positions which fixes all of the possible
within a grid, a hierarchical transmission (Deleuze and Parnet 25).8
As the metaphors suggest, the authors are not positing the rhi-
zomatic and the arborescent as binary opposites; the rhizome in its
most literal sense is of course a feature of the same botanical life that
can be expressed in arborescent form. The rhizomatic thus exists on the
same plane of immanence as the arborescent and is in constant danger
of transforming into it, just as, for Deleuze and Guattari, countercul-
tural formations or oppositional political movements do not represent
dialectical negations of the status quo but rather potentialities at con-
stant risk of becoming reified and co-opted.
There is something about the US West, as represented by Deleuze
and Guattari, that makes it a place that is especially rhizomatic, resis-
tant to the pull of the ordering impulses of the arborescent. While the
postwestern scholars cited in my introduction point to the proliferation
of ethnic and cultural narratives competing for claims to the authentic
as the forces that grant Westness its rhizomatic or hyperreal quali-
 Alex Trimble Young 121

ties, the characteristics Deleuze and Guattari list as granting the West
its rhizomatic qualityits Indians without ancestry, its ever receding
limits, its shifting and displaced frontiersclearly refer to familiar
historical and mythic narratives of westward expansion. The imagery
feels as if it was borrowed directly from Leslie Fiedler, who Deleuze and
Guattari cite in their note on this passage as the source for their belief
that the West represents a line of flight combining travel, hallucina-
tion, madness, the Indians, perceptive mental experimentation, the
shifting of frontiers, the rhizome (Ken Kesey and his fog machine, the
beat generation, etc.) (520n18). Fiedlers frontierthe last horizon
of an endlessly retreating vision of innocence the margin where the
theory of original goodness and the fact of original sin come face to face
is stripped of its puritan rhetoric and recast as a space of pure postmod-
ern possibility (Love and Death 27).9 The references to Whitman and
Kerouac (whom Deleuze and Guattari laud elsewhere in A Thousand
Plateaus) further suggest that the rhizomatic is somehow related to the
mythic freedoms of westward expansion celebrated in Whitmans work
and nostalgically reimagined in Kerouacs. In the last sentences of the
passage, the Hegelian narrative of the heliotropic movement of empire
familiar to readers of Whitmans Facing West from Californias Shores
(1867) is invoked to imbue this rhizomatic West with the same world-
historical significance that so many boosters of manifest destiny had
granted it decades earlier in suggesting that the West representsor
at least acts as if it representsthe telos (where the earth comes full
circle) of western civilizations global movement.10
While source materials such as Beat generation novels and Fiedlers
myth-and-symbol-school criticism seem to locate Deleuze and Guattaris
West within a tradition that imagines the West as a site of national sig-
nificance, Campbell argues that the rhizomatic West offers a paradigm
for western studies that could break the synecdochal link between the
West and the US nation-state (i.e., the idea that the West is the site
where the significance of national history is located). Departing from
the work of Comer and Alison Calder, Campbell asks:
What if the West were not about Americathat is, if its narra-
tives were not always telling the nations story (Manifest Destiny,
progress, rugged individualism, frontier, entrepreneurialism,
etc.), imbued with what Alison Calder calls inside knowledge,
and endlessly refetishizing the national imaginary as exception-
alist, but were read differently, across traditions, to tell complex,
multiple stories and redraw the regions political maps?
I see this new critical regionalism as having to assert
outside knowledge too, defining westness as rhizomatic once
freed from the normalized interpretative use that dictates the
West as only about the United StatesAmerica only more so.
(Rhizomatic West 55)
122 Western American Literature Spring & Summer 2013

While Campbell makes a strong case against pursuing modes of scholar-

ship that would inadvertently re-inscribe exceptionalist narratives, in A
Thousand Plateaus, it is hard to shake the sense that Deleuze and Guattari
themselves represent the West as America only more so. In their formu-
lation above, the special case of America is not immune from domina-
tion by trees and the search for roots, but this malady of arborescence is
generally limited to the East, due to its proximity to the old world. The
American rhizome, on the other hand, is found in the rhizomatic West,
an environment of expansive possibility where even the trees are rhi-
zomes. Deleuze and Guattari imagine the West as America only more so
precisely and paradoxically because it is a space where the ever-receding
limit of the frontier seems never to have closed, where the introspective
search for national roots is rejected in favor of expansion beyond a nor-
mative conception of national identityor, perhaps more to the point,
contained national territory.
In his effort to put Deleuze and Guattaris theoretical tool kit in
the service of a transnational reading of the cultures of the US West,
Campbell argues that their fascination with the West was not rooted in
an affinity with the national frontier narratives of figures like Fiedler but
rather arose in part because of [the Wests] counter-cultural associa-
tions, but also because of the tensions between the apparent openness
of its space and the constant efforts to control and order it (Rhizomatic
West 32). The parallels to Handley and Lewiss reading of the West as a
space dominated by competing claims of at-homeness, or possession,
are striking: both of these postwestern formulations situate the West as
a unique region due to the presence of apparently (as Campbell con-
cedes) free land, marked by a proliferation of competing claims over sov-
ereignty and representation. The task of criticism, in this formulation,
becomes a reading of western culture that would not privilege any one of
those claims over another but rather would unsettle narratives that do.
Campbell reads Deleuze and Guattaris celebratory frontier rheto-
ric as a metaphor for this process of unsettling arborescent discourses.
Following, Campbell channels Deleuzes frontier rhetoric directly in a
passage describing the many American literary figures who are cited in
A Thousand Plateaus:
[These authors] experimental styles demonstrate that frontiers
[were] something to cross, to push back, to go beyond. These
writers cry, Go across, get out, break through, make a beeline,
dont get stuck on a point. Find the line of separation, follow it
or create it, to the point of treacheryand in so doing, offer an
alternative to essentialized, inward-looking, and rooted con-
tainment. (Campbell, citing Deleuze and Parnet in Rhizomatic
West 34)
 Alex Trimble Young 123

The dichotomy between Deleuzes celebratory frontier rhetoricdrawn

from a chapter in Deleuzes Dialogues titled On the Superiority of
Anglo-American Literatureand the essentialized, inward-looking,
rooted containment of arborescent power described by Campbell
exposes important questions. Which one of these formulations describes
the rhetoric of US empire? Has not the ideology of US imperialism always
celebrated pioneers who would go across, get out, break through new
frontiers? 11
If we acknowledge that rhetoric of US empire often privileges
expansivity and openness over inward-looking rooted containment,
we must also recognize that the rhizomatic lines of flight opened
by the deterritorializing processes of settler colonial expansion in the
western United States might have opened up new freedoms for settlers
but surely did not offer an alternative to or an escape from the sover-
eign power of the settler state for indigenous peoples. On the contrary,
these rhizomatic deterritorializations constituted a vital means of that
powers extension (Campbell, Rhizomatic West 34; Deleuze and Parnet
38). By viewing Deleuze and Guattaris frontier rhetoric through the
lens of settler colonial theory in the readings below, I hope to demon-
strate how Deleuze and Guattaris conception of the rhizomatic West
risks reproducing a discourse whereby an account of liberation is imag-
ined at the expense of the indigenous peoples for whom settler colonial
deterritorializations constitute a coercive expression of sovereign power
rather than an escape from it.

The Rhizome and Indians without Ancestry

In her 2011 monograph The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of
Colonialism, Chickasaw critical theorist Jodi Byrd addresses the rela-
tionship between US state power and the rhizome directly in a tren-
chant critique of Deleuze and Guattaris investment in frontier logics:
Drawing on the paradigmatic Indian wilderness to encapsulate an
America in which arborescence becomes rhizomatic, A Thousand
Plateaus performs a global, nomadic reframing in which the fron-
tier becomes, again, Frederick Jackson Turners site of transfor-
mation, possibility, and mapping. The maps of settler colonial-
ism were always already proliferative, the nation states borders
were always perforated, and the US lines of flight across treaties
with indigenous nations were always rhizomatic and fluid rather
than hierarchical, linear, and coherent, located not just in the
nation-state but within the individual settlers and arrivants who
saw indigenous lands as profit, fortune, and equality. (13)
For Byrd, the power exerted over indigenous peoples during settler
conquest is not always arborescent but rather expressed via the very
124 Western American Literature Spring & Summer 2013

rhizomatic lines of flight that transgress the coherent juridical order of

the settler state, here represented by the treaties that were supposed to
guarantee the containment of settler expansion. While these frontier
lines of flight did offer the potential of newfound material and formal
freedoms for settlers and arrivants, the rhizomatic expansion of settler
society also consigned indigenous lands and indigenous peoples them-
selves to the role of the apparently open space, the transit across
which settler empire expands.

Charles Grogg. SUBTERRANEOUS. 2010. Gelatin silver print. Reprinted with

permission from the artist.
 Alex Trimble Young 125

For Byrd, the danger of embracing Deleuzian rhizomatics as a

paradigm for cultural studies lies in Deleuze and Guattaris tendency to
imagine countercultural assemblages as modeled on the rhizomatic form
of settler expansion, as well as in their penchant for citing questionable
ethnographic evidence regarding American Indians in their work. Byrd
argues that Deleuze and Guattari perform multiple acts of cultural appro-
priation, scholarly performances akin to those outlined by Philip Deloria
in Playing Indian (1998), whereby the left intellectual steps forward to
ventriloquize the speaking Indian by transforming the becoming- into
replacing-Indian (Byrd 16). Byrd goes on to perform readings of the
many such acts of ethnographic ventriloquism in A Thousand Plateaus,
lingering on a consideration of their enthusiasm for the work of the
fraudulent anthropologist and the new age guru Carlos Castanedas
writings on Yaqui spirituality.12 Byrd warns that multiple cultural
studies works inflected by Deleuzian thought flow from the phrase
Experiment, dont signify or interpret! that Deleuze and Guattari read
as the central injunction of Castanedas work (18). This slogan functions
as a call for transformational new worlds of relation and relationship
that move us toward a joyously cacaphonic multiplicity and away from
the lived colonial conditions of indigeneity within the postcolonizing
settler society (Byrd 18). Byrd goes on to argue that this motif, even if
it acknowledges all the divergent discourses that come into race, gender,
sexual, and class assemblages, smoothes the social field once again
into uncultivated wilderness that allows any trajectory or cultivation to
enter it, but not arise from it (18).
In Byrds reading, for cultural studies to embrace Deleuze and
Guattaris slogan experiment, dont signify or interpret! is to risk an
overly sanguine critical practice whereby transformational new worlds
of [political] relation are imagined in a manner that once again predi-
cates liberatory potential on the erasure of indigenous peoples.13

The Rhizomatic West (Bank):

Frontier Complexity and the Settler State
To better understand Byrds somewhat recondite point about Deleuze
and Guattaris rhetoric of rhizomatic lines of flight and the smooth-
ing of social space, it is useful to consider a contemporary example of
how one settler society has put these concepts to use in the field, as
it were. The work of Israeli scholar Eyal Weizman famously explores
how the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) employ the writings of Deleuze
and Guattari in training their field commanders. In an interview with
General Shimon Naveh, Weizman reveals how A Thousand Plateaus has
proven an especially fruitful text for the IDF:
126 Western American Literature Spring & Summer 2013

[Naveh said that] several of the concepts in A Thousand Pla-

teaux [sic] became instrumental for us. Most important was
the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of
smooth and striated space. In the IDF we now often use the
term to smooth out space when we want to refer to operation in
a space as if it had no borders. Palestinian areas could indeed
be thought of as striated in the sense that they are enclosed by
fences, walls, ditches, road blocks and so on. When I asked him
if moving through walls was part of it, he explained that, In
Nablus the IDF understood urban fighting as a spatial problem.
Travelling through walls is a simple mechanical solution that
connects theory and practice. (The Art of War)
In the IDFs application of Deleuze and Guattaris notion of the smooth-
ing of spacewhich Byrd employs to describe the process whereby
Deleuzian cultural studies metaphorically erases and replaces indig-
enous presencesmoothing is used to describe the IDFs urban war-
fare strategy of destroying and moving through the walls of civilian
homes in order to facilitate unfettered military mobility through a space
striated by the infrastructure of the local people, allowing the IDF to
imagine battle plans modeled on the Deleuzian swarm, freed from the
grids of classical space.
While discussion of Weizmans work on the Israeli militarys use of
A Thousand Plateaus has almost become a commonplace in contem-
porary critiques of Deleuze and Guattari, his less-discussed work on
the spatial forms that Israeli settlers have employed in their efforts to
colonize the West Bank since 1967 offers an equally important analysis
of the relationship of rhizomatic assemblages to settler state power. In
a chapter titled Frontier Architecture in his 2007 monograph Hollow
Land: Israels Architecture of Occupation, Weizman tracks the growth
of a single Israeli settlement in the West Bank, the illegal outpost
of Migron. In Weizmans description of the elastic geography of the
development of this Israeli frontier, the rhetorical parallels to Deleuze
and Guattaris description of the rhizome are striking:
The frontiers of the Occupied Territories are not rigid and fixed
at all; rather, they are elastic, and in constant transformation.
The linear border, a cartographic imaginary inherited from the
military and political spatiality of the nation state has splin-
tered into a multitude of border-synonyms. These borders
are dynamic, constantly shifting, ebbing, and flowing. The
anarchic geography of the frontier is an evolving image of trans-
formation. (67)
Like so many settler colonies on the United States nineteenth-century
western frontier (the Deadwood camp perhaps being the most familiar
 Alex Trimble Young 127

example), the rhizomatic nature of Israels frontier outposts often defies

containment by its juridical order: the founding of Migron was not
sanctioned by the arborescent power structure of the state.
That said, the pioneers of this frontier, equally influenced by the
myth of rough and rugged Western heroes as by the Israeli myth of the
pioneering Zionist settlers of the early twentieth century, while acting
outside the law, could hardly be said to be acting in a manner contrary to
the interests of the expanding settler society itself (4). The Israeli state
has long cast a blind eye on the expansion of illegal settlements such
as Migron, and many once-illegal frontier outposts have been incor-
porated into Israels legally sanctioned network of West Bank settle-
ments.14 Weizman argues that the plenary power of the Israeli state is,
in fact, extended by the rhizomatic nature of frontier settlement even as
the letter of Israeli law condemns it. This selective absence of govern-
ment intervention promotes an unregulated process of violent dispos-
session (5), in which
the erratic and unpredictable nature of the frontier is exploited
by the government. Chaos has its peculiar structural advantages.
It supports one of Israels foremost strategies of obfuscation:
the promotion of complexitygeographical, legal, or linguis-
tic. Sometimes, following a terminology pioneered by Henry
Kissinger, this strategy is openly referred to as constructive blur-
ring. This strategy seeks simultaneously to obfuscate and natu-
ralize the facts of domination. Across the frontiers of the West
Bank it is undertaken by simultaneously unleashing processes
that would create conditions too complex and illogical to make
any territorial solution in the form of partition possible. (8)
Through this process of constructive blurring, settler sovereignty is not
established through a gridding process of rationalizing space but rather
through chaotic and often extralegal acts of expansion: settlers follow
lines of flight made possible by the smoothing of indigenous space.

Settler Sovereignty and Frontier Nostalgia

Wolfes recent work on representations of the settler colonial frontier in
the post-frontier era can help us bridge the gap between Weizmans
insights on the rhizomatic nature of the settler colonial frontier and our
consideration of contemporary applications of Deleuze and Guattari in
American studies. In a discussion with Delaware scholar Joanne Barker
last year, Wolfe succinctly sums up how post-frontier settler states
represent the frontier:
The frontiers ideological significance is not so much as a line
in space as a line in timespecifically, in the time of the set-
128 Western American Literature Spring & Summer 2013

tler nation-state. The frontier represents the pre-national time

that is nonetheless the post-Native time. This contradictory
representation is a way of talking about the disorder of violent
dispossession (if you must, the space of the exception) without
allowing that disorder to compromise the settler rule of law.
The settler state both traces itself back to the frontier and dis-
avows the frontier, which is disowned as the work of irregular
mavericks rather than as the primary means of settler expan-
sion (as Ive put it, when the dust settles on the frontier, settler
officials characteristically deplore its violence while helping
themselves to the fruits of dispossession). (A Note to T. S.)
As Wolfes comments imply, and other recent scholarship makes more
explicit, the settler colonial frontier marks a key antecedent to the states
of exception, whereby liberal states suspend their own constitutions in
order to bring extralegal violence to bear against their enemies.15 Just
as places like Guantanamo Bay exist in a liminal transnational space
that stands outside the jurisdiction of US law yet also serves as a pri-
mal site of the US states expression of power, so the frontier exists at
a spatiotemporal point (the pre-national time that is nonetheless the
post-Native time) that stands outside the arborescent structure of the
states juridical order while still serving as the spearhead of the settler
politys exercise of violence against indigenous peoples. On the level of
representation, the paradoxical nature of the frontier allows the settler
state to [trace] itself back to the frontier (imagined as a site of struggle
against the so-called wilderness), as the origin of the national character,
yet also disavow the fundamental fact of frontier processesthe violent
expropriation of indigenous landsas the work of irregular mavericks.
Contrast Wolfes take on the representation of the frontier with that
of Campbell, who considers the issue of historiographic representations
of the frontier in a reading of Turners frontier thesis in The Rhizomatic
West:
In displacing the uncertainty and fluidity of migration [Turner]
asserts a rhetoric of essential, rooted identity as the focus for
the epic narrative giving coherence and authority to the west-
ward urge of nation building, providing America with a distinct
creation myth. Fluidity is thus converted into solid organs
and rooted, settled identity, metaphors of glaciation halted
to become stable human landscape. The multiplicities and
mobilities of the prismatic West momentarily acknowledged
are brought under control in the service of a coherent national
narrative with a gridlike neatness. (7; emphasis added)
For Campbell, Turner momentarily acknowledged the rhizomatic
nature of frontier processes in describing the fluidity and hybridity
 Alex Trimble Young 129

of the frontier life. Turners representation of the frontier process as a

migration that promotes a social fluidity is not fundamentally at
odds with Campbells conception of the rhizomatic West. In Campbells
reading, Turner doesnt go wrong by whitewashing his representations
of the frontier process but through his use of his celebratory repre-
sentation of the frontier in the service of national allegory: Turners
fluidity of American life that begins his thinking about expansion
and frontier mobility falters because it follows only a single line (the
frontier), believing it leads inevitably to one destination (nationhood,
union, a fixed identity) (89).
While this criticism certainly speaks to Turners tendency to read
national significance into the pre-national time of the frontier, it does
not address the nostalgia at the heart of Turners representation of that
frontier. As Handley argues in his reading of the frontier thesis, in order to
incorporate the frontier into a national allegory, Turner first had to imag-
ine it as a symbol (60), a symbol not of dispossession achieved through
violent conquest, but of fluidity and perennial rebirth achieved
through a sort of deterritorialization. Campbell appropriates Turners
mode of frontier symbolism even as he rejects Turners national allegory.

Conclusion: The Rhizomatic West On the Road

Deleuze and Guattari themselves attempt a similar decoupling of fron-
tier symbolism from national allegory in their writing on Jack Kerouac,
the American writer who, in their words, possessed
the soberest of means, who took revolutionary flight, but who
later finds himself immersed in dreams of a great America,
and then in search of his Breton ancestors of the superior race.
Is this not the destiny of American literature, that of crossing
limits and frontiers, causing deterritorialized flows of desire to
circulate, but also always making these flows transport fascisiz-
ing, moralizing, Puritan, and familialist territorialities? (Anti-
Oedipus 277)
Here Kerouacs potentially revolutionary literary practice is metaphori-
cally described as crossing the frontier, a movement that causes deter-
ritorializing flows of desire to circulate. Kerouacs failure is attributed
to the arborescent structuresfascisizing, moralizing, Puritan, and
familialistthat reterritorialize the metaphorical country Kerouac
has opened into familiar discursive structures of power (the superior
race, the nuclear family, Puritan morality, etc.) in his later work. While
convenient for a reading that would seek to decouple the significance
of Kerouacs literary pioneering from his American nationalism, this
emplotment of Kerouacs career does not withstand careful scrutiny: at
what point was Kerouac not immersed in dreams of a great America,
and at what point did he cease to cross frontiers?
130 Western American Literature Spring & Summer 2013

A brief reading of Kerouacs On the Road (1957) will demonstrate

how thoroughly intertwined Kerouacs investment in national allegory
and Euroamerican identity were with his literary acts of pioneering;
while also allowing me to offer some concluding thoughts about how the
issues raised in this essay about frontier historiography and Deleuzian
rhizomatics might be applied to literary scholarship. As Deleuzian
critic Marco Abelwhom I will cite throughout my reading as both a
reference and a counterpointeffectively argues, the parallels between
Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy and the novels of Jack Kerouac go
deeper than their sporadic references to Kerouac would suggest (230).
These parallels are even more apparent when a work like On the Road,
which deals so explicitly with frontier themes, is considered in relation
to their conception of the rhizomatic West.
On the Road opens when Sal Paradise starts planning his journey
west in search of Dean Moriarty, a figure Sal constructs as a symbol of
western authenticity: My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene
Autrytrim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accenta
side-burned hero of the snowy West (4). Even in this first reference to
Westness, however, there is a hint of irony in the retrospective narra-
tion: Dean is compared to a man (Gene Autry) who never worked a day
as a cowboy but instead made a fortune imitating cowboys on film and
television.
As this ironic reference would suggest, Sal finds his search for western
authenticity to be more difficult than he imagined. In one of the most
Deleuzian moments in the novel, Sal describes how his initial dream of
westering was misconceived: Id been poring over maps of the United
States in Paterson for months, even reading books about the pioneers
and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron and so on, and on the
road-map was one long red line called Route 6 (11). Sal soon realizes
that his dream of hitchhiking Route 6 all the way across the continent
is impossible and that his lines of flight cannot be overdetermined: It
was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would
be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of try-
ing various roads and routes (12). The notion of westering as a linear
process, which Sal dreams up reading books about the pioneers, is
abandoned in favor of a more rhizomatic mode of travel. As Abel says,
it is precisely the physical following and aesthetic mapping of the vari-
ous roads and routesor Deleuzean lines of flightthat characterize
the entire narrative. From the beginning, On the Road produces the
road narrative as rhizomatic (230).
While he abandons the idea of linear travel, Sal does not give up on
the idea of the West: even when he witnesses its vulgar commodifica-
tion during Wild West Week in Cheyenne: I was amazed, and at the
same time I felt it was ridiculous: in my first shot at the West I was see-
 Alex Trimble Young 131

ing to what absurd devices it had fallen to keep its proud tradition (30).
Sals failure to find the sense of authentic Westness he is seeking in
places like Cheyenne leads him eventually to deterritorialize his notion
of Westness altogether, when he is inspired by an old man (whom he
christens the Ghost of the Susquehanna) hitchhiking in Pennsylvania,
who is confused about which way is east and which way is west:
I thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the
Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different. No, there is a
wilderness in the East; its the same wilderness Ben Franklin
plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as
it was when George Washington was a wildbuck Indian-fighter,
when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and
promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and
men whooped her up in log cabins. (95)
This passage clearly illuminates the stakes in Sals pursuit of Westness:
Sal is not looking for a particular locale; his journey west is about
seeking out the masculine forms of freedom embodied by the frontier
heroes he read about in those books about the pioneers. 16 Sal gives up
on his dreams of linear westward migration he reads about in allegori-
cal frontier histories, but he never gives up on the frontier as a symbol.
Sal finds his modern-day wilderness not in a Turnerian encounter
with nature but through acts of class and racial abdication that take him
into social spaces previously hidden to him and his middle-class white
friends. In On the Road, the skid rows and jazz clubs of Americaand
finally the highways and brothels of Mexicoare reimagined as a wil-
derness in which white men can realize a freedom made impossible
by the strictures of the conventional lives they are rejecting. This mode
of literary pioneering was, of course, not performed exclusively in
Kerouacs novels. Norman Mailer uses similar rhetoric in his infamous
essay The White Negro (published the same year as On the Road,
1957). In exhorting his fellow white hipsters to imitate the primitive
lifeways of African Americans, Mailer warns (in a rhetoric that feels as
Deleuzian as it is Turnerian) that one is a frontiersman in the Wild
West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totali-
tarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one
is to succeed (339). Kerouacs protagonist in On the Road takes Mailers
advice: the line of flight that takes Sal out of the arborescent tissues
of American society takes him into subaltern social spaces that he rei-
magines as a wilderness in which he can allow his deterritorialized
flows of desire to circulate.
Sals frontier fantasy is most clearly articulated in the narration
of his journey through the mountains of Mexico, where he and his
American traveling companions encounter a people Sal declares the
132 Western American Literature Spring & Summer 2013

essential strain of the basic primitive unmistakably Indians. [T]hey

had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not
fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were
the source of mankind and the fathers of it (252). Sal imagines these
Indians not only as fathers of humanity but, in a sweeping Orientalizing
gesture borrowed from Oswald Spengler, as the inheritors of human-
itys apocalyptic future: For when the destruction comes to the world
of history and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so
many times before, people will stare with the same eyes from the caves
of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where Adam was suckled and
taught to know (252).17
As Sal and company progress farther into the mountains (high on
the highest peak, as great as any Rocky Mountain peak), they encoun-
ter Indians along the road who began to be extremely weird. They
were a nation in themselves, mountain Indians, shut off from every-
thing else but the Pan-American Highway (267). These Indians, selling
rock crystals along the newly constructed transcontinental trade route,
inspire Sal to mystical visions, as if they held the secret to the IT that
he has been searching for: Their great brown, innocent eyes looked
into ours with such soulful intensity. They were like the eyes of the
Virgin Mother when she was a child. We saw in them the tender and
forgiving face of Jesus (268). Sals projection is suspended, however,
when the Indians begin to speak: When they talked they suddenly
became frantic and almost silly. In their silence they were themselves.
Sal and Dean attribute the Indians unfortunate locutional abilities
to the penetration of the very highway they are traveling on: Theyve
only recently learned to sell these crystals, since the highway was built
about ten years backup until that time this entire nation must have
been silent! (269). After this dubious anthropological assessment, Sal
watches Dean trade his wristwatch to one of the Indian children. As
Dean is concluding the transaction, Sal fixes him in a momentary tab-
leau: He stood among them with his ragged face to the sky, looking for
the next and highest and final pass, and seemed like the Prophet that
had come among them (269). As Dean and Sal leave, the Indians
chase after their car for as long as they can keep up.
Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization,
marching single file. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century
later, and see the same procession (Turner 39). Stand at an unnamed
pass in the Sierra Madre a century after that, and, according to Kerouac,
you will witness the same process. Just as Turner imagines Indians as
savages whose historical significance was defined by the role they
played in transforming the European into the American frontiersman,
so Kerouac imagines the Mexicans he encounters as a screen upon
which he can project his own mystical fantasies. In Kerouacs narra-
tive, they represent an authentic past (the source of mankind and the
 Alex Trimble Young 133

fathers of it; the tender and forgiving face of Jesus), and an apocalyp-
tic future (the apocalypse of the Fellahin), but as soon as they take on
agency through speech, they are rendered absurd, mere children in the
thrall of the frontiersman/prophet who ushers them into history with
the barter of his wristwatch. Mexico becomes the mythic frontier where,
as the young Turner once put it, the wilderness presents the Indian
to the frontiersman like untutored children to wonder at his goods
and call him master (Turner cited in Klein, Frontiers 135). Through
a process Wolfe calls repressive authenticity, the authentic being of
the indigenous subject is represented by Kerouac as always already
absent, whereas living indigenous peoples are portrayed as having been
compromised and fated to assimilate into settler society on the settlers
terms.18 For Kerouac, the authentic ethnic Other is the imagined Indian
on the other side of that endlessly retreating frontier of innocence that
he pursues beyond the boundaries of both region and nation (Fiedler,
Love and Death 27).

Ralph Hutchings. RESIN CAST OF CORONARY ARTERIES OF THE HUMAN

HEART. 2012. Photograph. Ralph Hutchings/Visuals Unlimited.
134 Western American Literature Spring & Summer 2013

Clearly, Kerouacs and Mailers frontier fantasies of crosscultural

interaction, well-intentioned though they might have been, do not pro-
vide a promising model for postwestern studies attempt to represent
the West as a multicultural and transnational region. Yet Deleuze and
Guattari, who rarely face the scrutiny to which Kerouac and Mailer have
so often been subjected, are deeply invested in similar logics whereby
lines of flight are imagined as analogous to the frontier processes
through which indigenous peoples are not engaged as agents but rather
imagined as a transit across which the rhizomatic possibilities of set-
tler colonial expansion can be realized.
If we acknowledge that the frontier logics of settler colonial societ-
ies like the United States are in a sense rhizomatic and that indigenous
peoples in the contemporary moment remain colonized as an ongoing
lived experience that is not commensurable with the stories the postco-
lonial, pluralistic multiculture wants to tell of itself, we must reconsider
the relationship between historical metanarratives and our critical
politics (Byrd 6). In a chapter in which he introduces the concept of
the rhizomatic West in The Cultures of the American New West (2000),
Campbell opens with an epigraph from A Thousand Plateaus: The
abortionists of unity are indeed angel makers (164). Despite its shock
value, this line might serve as a slogan for any number of contemporary
examples of postwestern literary scholarship that work toward the goal
of imagining a transnational, multicultural, feminist, and queer West by
celebrating cultural production that wages a war on totality through
its resistance to metanarrative (Lyotard 82).19 While sharing these broad
political goals, settler colonial studies offers a powerful counterpoint to
this critical strategy, suggesting that while the binaries produced by big
frontier tales can be put in the service of structures of oppression and
exclusion, they can also serve as incisive critical tools that might help
us understand and overcome the inadequacies of neoliberal pluralism.
In calling for a scholarly practice that recenters its focus on the
European occupation of Native America, understood as both a central
event in our past and a structuring principle of our present, my goal is
to recontextualize rather than reject the pluralist aims of current post-
western scholarship. As that scholarship has decisively demonstrated,
Westness has taken on liberatory meanings in communities radically
opposed to the conservative nationalisms and discourses of white
and masculine authority with which the US West is so often associated
(Comer 32). Too often, however, as Deleuze and Guattaris conception
of the rhizomatic West demonstrates, these other Wests uncriti-
cally reproduce some of the very discourses of exclusion that these
alternative conceptions of Westness were intended to oppose. By fore-
grounding the structures of power through which settler sovereignty is
exercised on indigenous lands, settler colonial studies offers a model
 Alex Trimble Young 135

that potentially avoids the pitfalls of an overly celebratory reading of

a region that, in all its complexity, continues to be defined by the in-
equities produced by settler conquest. Through an engagement with the
strategic essentialism of such big frontier tales, the next generation of
western literary scholars could inaugurate a project of reading through
the network of competing narratives of Westness and the frontier in
order to illuminate how these rhizomatic signifiers have functioned to
produce new forms of both freedom and oppression.

N otes
1. The group of critics I am using as examples of postwestern
scholarship, though they have all been associated with the University of
Nebraskas Postwestern Horizons series, represent diverse and distinct
critical viewpoints. The two critical tendencies I outline here as central
trends in postwestern worka commitment to a scholarly understand-
ing of the West that privileges the regional in its transnational context
(championed by critics such as Campbell and Comer) and a commit-
ment to representing the West as a region shaped by competing petits
rcits rather than one shaped primarily by a national metanarrative
(championed by critics such as Handley and Lewis)are related but not
always overlapping critical projects.
2. One interesting effect of this project has been a consideration of
the Turnerian historiography vis--vis national historiography outside
the United States. For an example of such work, see Uri Ram, The
Colonization Perspective in Israeli Sociology (2007).
3. For a more comprehensive overview of the history and current
state of the field of settler colonial studies, see Lorenzo Veracinis Settler
Colonialism: An Overview (2010). As with my grouping of postwestern
critics, the scholars I identify as engaged with settler colonial studies
represent a diverse array of theoretical and political positions even as
they have all published scholarly work engaged in the comparative study
of settler colonialism.
4. In the 1980s, Spivak introduces this term in essays such as
Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography, in which she advo-
cates for the strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously
visible political interest (214). Later in her career, she often expressed
frustration for the ways in which the phrase simply became the union
ticket for essentialism. As to what is meant by strategy, no one won-
dered about that. So, as a phrase, I have given up on it. As to whether I
have given up on it as a project, that is really a different idea (Interview
35). Political scientist Michael Kilburn summarizes Spivaks evolving
position on the practice well: Essentialism is bad, not in its essence
which would be a tautologybut only in its application. The goal of
essentialist critique is not the exposure of error, but the interrogation of
the essentialist terms. Uncritical deployment is dangerous.
136 Western American Literature Spring & Summer 2013

5. Lewis provides an extended consideration of the relationship of

his postwestern scholarship to historicism in Unsettling the Literary
West (1618).
6. Shoops Thomas Pynchon, Postmodernism, and the Rise of the
New Right in California (2012) is a reading of Pynchons Crying of Lot
49 (1966) that situates this quintessentially postmodern novel in the his-
torical context of the rise of the New Right in 1960s Southern California.
Shoop makes a strong case for reading Pynchons novel not as a celebra-
tion of postmodern hyperreality but as a warning that the paranoid
style of the New Right was successfully exploiting anxiety about the
welter of competing postmodern projections in order to advance its
own metanarrativethe big frontier tale (to borrow Kleins phrase)
that promoted Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan as Americas cowboy
heroes (65).
7. While Deleuze and Guattari avoid an explicit rhetoric of libera-
tion, and, as Eyal Weizman notes in The Art of War (2006), anticipate
that rhizomatic war machines might be appropriated by state power, it
cannot be contested that the rhizomatic is conceived, at the very least, as
a mode of escape from the strictures of arborescent power structures.
8. I owe this parsing of the rhizome via Deleuze and Parnets Dia-
logues largely to Campbells work in The Rhizomatic West (34).
9. For more on Fiedlers sexual and racial politics, see Kerwin
Kleins Frontiers of the Historical Imagination (25660). Klein notes how
Fiedlers famously queer readings of American frontier narratives in The
Return of the Vanishing American (1968) were as misogynist as they were
homoerotic and reproduced the myth of the vanishing American he
inherits from sources like D. H. Lawrence and Claude Lvi-Strauss even
as he places a spotlight on the role of Native Americans in US literature
(25859).
10. For more on the heliotropic movement of empire, see Beck
313n38. Michael Davidsons Guys Like Us (2003) has an extended read-
ing of the significance of the inversion of cardinal directions performed
in this passage (78).
11. Campbell cites from the passage in Deleuze and Parnets Dialogues
in which Deleuze contrasts the Anglo-American literary tradition to the
French, one of Deleuzes most explicit invocations of frontier rhetoric,
in which he makes it clear that the qualities he and Guattari will later
associate with the rhizomatic West in A Thousand Plateaus he read as
being exceptionally apparent in the Anglo-American (as opposed to a
multicultural American) imagination (Deleuze and Parnet 3637).
12. The most complete debunking of Castanedas anthropological
work was performed by Richard de Milles Castanedas Journey: The
Power and the Allegory (1976); a more succinct overview of Castanedas
legacy can be found in Robert Marshalls The Dark Legacy of Carlos
Castaneda (2007).
 Alex Trimble Young 137

13. Byrds extensive critique of Deleuze and Guattari in The Transit of

Empire, which Ive only been able to briefly gloss here, also extends into
a discussion of political theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri who take up Deleuze and Guattaris frontier rhetoric (2045).
14. Just days before this essay was revised for publication, the Migron
outpost was finally evacuated by the Israeli government thanks to the
persistent activism of a coalition of Israeli and Palestinian activist groups
(including BTselem, an organization with which Weizman has long
been affiliated). The illegal settlers, however, were simply relocated to
other settlements: The tens of millions of shekels that the government
invested in establishing alternative settlements for the Migron evacuees
shows the public that in the land of the settlers, crime pays (Haaretz).
15. For further analysis on the settler colonial frontier as the state
of exception, see David Lloyd, Settler Colonialism and the State of
Exception: The Example of Israel/Palestine or Erik Altenbernd and
Alex Young, A Terrible Beauty: Deadwood, Settler Colonial Violence,
and the Post-9/11 State of Exception (2012).
16. This passage inspires Abel to a commentary that embodies the
potential exceptionalist pitfall of reading frontier narratives through
Deleuze and Guattari. Abel claims this passage demonstrates that it
took Sal a full-blown cross-country trip to arrive at this recognition that
emerges for him only as a result of having (been) affected (by) the deter-
ritorializing forces of the American earth (242). The rhetoric of this
passage is exemplary of Abels strangely autochthonic invocations of the
rhizomatic structure of the American earth, a formulation he takes as
a given throughout his article (236).
17. In Kerouac among the Fellahin: On the Road to the Postmodern
(1995), Robert Holton analyzes Kerouacs indebtedness to Spenglers
Decline of the West (1918) in a reading in which he argues, In Kerouacs
Beat classic On the Road there is, on one hand, the expression of a radi-
cal desire to challenge the existing social order through a foregrounding
of the conventions and limitations of racial identity; and, on the other
hand, there is a misrecognition of those conventions and limitations so
profound as to justify the claim that ultimately On the Road legitimates
as much as it challenges the master narratives that postmodernism
seeks to undo (266).
While this article does not address the relationship of On the Road
to the frontier themes explored in my analysis, it covers some of the
same concerns about Kerouacs racial politics and the postmodern
thinkers (including, in a brief reading, Deleuze and Guattari) whom
Kerouac inspired (267).
18. For more on repressive authenticity, see the chapter of the
same name in Wolfes Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of
Anthropology (163214).
138 Western American Literature Spring & Summer 2013

19. Shoop discusses this same Lyotard slogan in his article, writing
that in a world in which the image has become an ordering principle
of reality, it is not enough for progressive postmodern politics to wage
a war on totality: the paranoid style of the New Right concedes the pos-
sibility that there are other orders of being which threaten and perhaps
already control this one, so that it needs actively to cultivate its own
images in order to compete (6465).

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