Remediating the West

deadline for submissions: 
February 28, 2025
full name / name of organization: 
Elena Lamberti (Università di Bologna), Mattia Arioli (Università di Bologna)
contact email: 

XXVIII AISNA Biennial Conference

“Facing West: Thinking, Living, Outliving the American West”

(Bergamo, Italy, 11-13 September 2025) Deadline: February 28 2025

 

Panel 16

Remediating the West

Coordinators:
Elena Lamberti (Università di Bologna), elena.lamberti@unibo.it
Mattia Arioli (Università di Bologna), mattia.arioli2@unibo.it

As the scholar, and Pulitzer Prize Winner, Viet Thanh Nguyen (2024: n.p.) discussed in a recent article, “The West is a euphemism for colonialism and empire, but most Westerners are not aware of the euphemistic connotations. This is particularly true in the United States, where the invocation of freedom evokes deep mythological feelings.” America’s aspirations and the divine obligation of Americans to be both exemplary and exceptional supported their commitment towards freedom, at all costs, as well as justify the nation’s impulse to export it anywhere. This logic of conquest created, as we all know, the basis for genocidal practices, that endangered the survival of Native peoples, who were often engaged in forms of self-defense. However, it is worth remarking how this logic has not framed exclusively the (past) encounters of Native peoples with settler societies, as the expansion to the West, and the closing of the Frontier opened up new warfronts. This expansionist drive was entwined with the myth of the ‘western pilgrims finishing the great circle’. As pointed out by Hellman (1986:5), “the new country America, positioned between Europe and the Orient, appeared destined to expand westward to the Pacific before completing in Asia the progress that had begun there thousands of years
earlier.” The expansion in the Pacific and the distancing from the European colonialism were complementary parts of the same nation-building rhetoric known as ‘Manifest Destiny’. Despite their specificities, the new conflicts, and their meaning have often been “remediated” (Erll, 2009) through images originated in the American West. Therefore, through time, the West has become a palimpsest through which explain and tame new colonial projections. Nonetheless, even though the use of the myth of the “regeneration through violence” (Slotkin, 1973) and the suppression of guilt through a “perpetual turn to innocence” (Nguyen 2024: n.p.) have often sanitized the memory of contemporary conflicts, the remediation of Western imageries have also allowed the
opportunity to articulate new counter-narratives capable of disrupting, or at least challenge our representation of the past but also the present, through a series of temporal echoes, capable of questioning America’s imperial projections, but also allow the emergence of new voices, neglected stories, and missing elements.

Therefore, this panel wishes to the explore, from different angles, the interplay of “remediation” and “premediation” practices to observe how the West has become a palimpsest capable of articulating and intercepting several different discourses. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• The West and US imperialist projections
• The West as an interpretative palimpsest
• Remediation of Western narratives in contemporary war narratives
• New interpretation of the West triggered by contemporary wars
• Uncanny temporal echoes
• Old and new practices of settler colonialism
• Counternarratives of the West
• Experiences marginalized/retrieved due to remediation practices