“Helt Texas, Morgan Kane!”: Notes on the Pedagogies of Finding, Documenting, and Teaching the American West in Norwegian Backyards
Applying transnational/global Wests methodologies, this article is predicated on an admittedly polemic claim: the American West can be found on many (if not all) foreign shores. This article showcases the pedagogies employed in teaching graduate-level cultural studies seminars on the American West...
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Main Author: | |
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
CBS Open Journals
2024-12-01
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Series: | American Studies in Scandinavia |
Subjects: | |
Online Access: | https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/assc/article/view/7382 |
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Summary: | Applying transnational/global Wests methodologies, this article is predicated on an admittedly polemic claim: the American West can be found on many (if not all) foreign shores. This article showcases the pedagogies employed in teaching graduate-level cultural studies seminars on the American West in a Norwegian context. American studies students were tasked with locating and retrieving traces/echoes/spores of the American West in their proverbial backyards. They conducted cultural geography fieldwork with a view to generating generation-specific content in the form of short video reels. The resultant documentary archive gestures at rather clear patterns. For example, the students’ findings included but were not limited to country-specific (re)imaginings of the mythic West in different media, heterotopic spaces of performance, play, consumption and the hyperreal, instances of ‘playing Indian,’ iconographic scatterings, cowboy/Western poetics in music, and more. Ultimately, this article illustrates how that which we study from afar may be found in more local(ized) Norwegian contexts, imaginaries, and cultural practices.
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ISSN: | 0044-8060 |