U.S. Ethnic Literature

Pathways West
English 230
Winter 2023

Course Description

In 1845, John O’Sullivan coined the term “Manifest Destiny” in an essay that argues for the U.S. to continue to conquer lands west of the territories gained in the Louisiana Purchase. O’Sullivan’s arguments ultimately gave birth to an American exceptionalism that posits that Anglo-America was better equipped to manage land, people, and resources on the continent than Indigenous and Mexican communities. O’Sullivan’s essay ignited a Western-American history that has come to dominant the national imaginary through cowboy (in)justice, pioneers in their covered wagons, and dramatized depictions of Indigenous and Mexican populations.

Eventually the American West came to represent the American promise. Dominant narratives suggest that in the West freedom and equality are finally realized. The West was, after all, inducted into the official nation as “free” states (meaning there was never legal slavery in the American West) and, given the isolation from the nation’s capital, there was a certain amount of freedom for women and people of color to assert themselves in ways that were not possible in the American South or Northeast.

However, as this course will evaluate, the story of the American West has become flattened through the very process of creating this narrative of Western-American freedom and equality. We only need to look to contemporary television series such as the Yellowstone franchise or HBO’s West World to understand just how pervasive these manipulated if not fully fabricated histories of westward travel and settlement are to us even today, nearly two centuries later. For, as we will see, the West was largely settled by the underprivileged in American society. Immigrants, communities of color, and the extreme impoverished sacrificed all they had in order to try for the American promise again but this time, in the West.

“Pathways West” is a course that rearticulates and visually renders the pathways by which communities of color and immigrants found themselves in the American West. We will read autobiographical and semi-autobiographical texts to better understand the ways these communities found themselves West, what the West meant to them, and how the West treated them as they settled in to call it home. We will also use these narratives to reconstruct maps that depict westward travel. I am sure we have all seen images of pioneers and their covered wagons, played the game, Oregon Trail, and watched a John Wayne-inspired western film or two. But these Western stories are, as we will see, just a fraction of what the West is. Underprivileged communities from the mid-19th century to our contemporary moment find the West in alternative ways, using alternative technologies, and battling underrepresented obstacles and violence. We will map these pathways West to critique the geopolitical narratives that undergird the American West and its histories of “Manifest Destiny,” American exceptionalism, and freedom.

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs):

• Identify the geopolitical and literary pathways by which people “arrived” in the American West.
• Discuss the identity formations and narratives derived from different “pathways” and the various environmental, social, and political implications therein.
• Understand the multivalent histories that inform the “pathways” taken west and the legacies, both the unreconciled and the overinvested—that continue to inform a “Western American” culture.
• Engage in the complimentary work of close reading and digitalization of Western American “pathways” to realize and visualize nuanced connections and dialogues between authors, texts, and communities of people.
• Demonstrate critical awareness for the complicated histories of westward travel through synthesis of digitalized mapping content.
• Reflect on what digital maps do for literary criticism and how it can serve a larger community outside the academic classroom.

Grading Scale

A	A-	B+	B	B-	C+	C	C-	D+	D	D-	F
100-94	93-90	89-88	87-84	83-80	79-78	77-74	73-70	69-68	67-64	63-60	59-