ABSTRACT |
Guy Vanderhaege’s fiction The Englishman’s Boy (1996) engages the
fabrication of a national American consciousness through a manufacture
of otherness embodied by the west frontier and territories. The travel,
expansion, conquest and settlement of the North American West created a
feeling of common target in the taming of the wild, which allowed in
parallel the emergence of ideals of Eastern and European issues of
culture, civilisation and nation. Analysing Vanderhaege’s novel in the
light of contemporary postcolonial theory proves a telling exercise,
inasmuch as traditional views of nation and the national spirit are
unveiled as a conglomerate of relations founded on pedagogical
and performative impulses.
This paper investigates the contribution of westering to the
filing of an American national self. First, in its narration on the film
making of an epic, intervened western expansion, the novel tackles the
performative creation of an individual and collective national
consciousness. Then, in consonance with a postcolonialist reading of any
national myth, the westward displacement modifies its early image to
appear in turn as a premise of cultural reification to define self and
nation by opposition.
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