I was nervous about this one

Last week I had to review my own doctoral supervisor's work. Obviously that made me nervous. I'm still not happy with my writing here, but the prof who graded it (a different prof) liked it. 

Review: Kelm, Mary-Ellen. A Wilder West: Rodeo on Western Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011.

Mary-Ellen Kelm’s A Wilder West is at once a social and a cultural history, of sport, of native-newcomer relations, and of Western Canadian settlement. Using Richard White’s “middle ground” as a call to action, and Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone” as an analytical tool, Kelm engages with a range of issues, such as performativity, agency, representation, authenticity, hybridity, and hegemony, as they emerged in relationships implicated in rodeo. Her work covers the late nineteenth century through to present rodeos, and is focused examining small-town and reserve rodeos in Alberta and the British Columbia interior during the early to mid twentieth century. Her main concern is problematizing the narrative of settler hegemony in rodeo, and the binary of “cowboys versus Indians” that popular culture commonly ascribes to it. Ultimately, Kelm’s conclusion is unorthodox among historians who employ the contact zone, arguing that the history of Western Canadian rodeo was more gendered than it was racialized.

A key goal of Kelm’s introduction is situating the rodeo as a contact zone, on the basis that rodeos were sites of struggle between relational systems of meaning, showing both division and commonality (9). Colonial power, in such spaces, was present but not absolute, and was perpetuated and mitigated through material and discursive structures. Kelm’s text is based around a thematic rather than a chronological organization, although there is some chronological progression through the monograph as Kelm follows the professionalization of rodeo through the mid twentieth century. Rather than linking themes to particular dates, Kelm accomplishes a thematic analysis through examining particular locations and the individuals associated with them, considering a range of such places in each chapter.

Kelm’s first chapter outlines the impact of communities on local rodeos, and of rodeos on communities, considering how rodeo entailed a performance of values and history. She also outlines the challenges for Aboriginal peoples in participation in rodeos, noting that while Aboriginal participation was critical for the financial success of a rodeo, agents with the Department of Indian Affairs hindered this, particularly in Alberta, by limiting Aboriginal mobility outside of reserves. Kelm’s key argument in this chapter is that, despite being a performance of histories, identities, and values, rodeo was not the “ritual of conquest” that other historians have portrayed (25). Instead, it was an awkward joining of history and modernity to portray communities in positive combinations of progress and nostalgia (44-48). This portrayal worked for Aboriginal as well as settler communities, representing Aboriginal pasts within the present, to demonstrate the compatibility of Aboriginal culture with modernity (56). Ultimately, Kelm shows the multi-faceted role of rodeos in Alberta and British Columbia communities, and the various meanings that these events engendered.

Subsequently, Kelm considers, in her second chapter, how communities and individuals constructed their identities using rodeo. Rodeo thus served as a contact zone for building identities and the relationships that constituted these identities. Kelm emphasizes that these identities were highly gendered. A key part of this analysis thus involves the role of “rough masculinity” in rodeo culture, and how this expression of masculinity was complicated by, and overlapped with, ideas of rodeo men as engaging in a fraternity of sportsmanship. Kelm argues that, for some Aboriginal men, “cowboy” served as a position of status, indicating how gendered identities in this context were also racialized and circumscribed by class and place. Finally, Kelm turns to her aim of uncovering affective relationships within rodeo. This is largely accomplished by analyzing a series of photographs by Chow Dong Hoy, which Kelm sees as a destabilization of ethnographic images, as Hoy portrayed his subjects as they wished to be represented, and thus made visible the hybridity that formed within the contact zone. This last element of the chapter is effective in demonstrating hybridity, but less so in demonstrating affect; the expressions of the various individuals in Hoy’s portraits indicate how they wished to be depicted, rather than necessarily how they felt.

Kelm’s third chapter is the first of three that examines the professionalization involved in rodeo’s transition into a sport, and the impact of this transition on racialized and gendered participation. The thrust of this chapter is an examination of the professional organizations that regulated rodeo and cowboys, generating a public image of cowboys as respectable athletes rather than fun-seeking amateurs. Kelm cautions that these organizations were not as “revolutionary” as they might seem to observers, as they still excluded women; Aboriginal participation, though technically permitted, was constrained by social, economic, and political structures (129-130). Kelm carries this analysis through her fourth chapter, a continued consideration of professionalization. Through the increasing bureaucratization and standardization entailed by professionalization, the rough masculinity that Kelm accounts earlier transitioned such that sporting respectability became a more dominant representation of cowboys. This was part of the Cold War masculinity that was prominent in the mid-twentieth century, emphasizing family-oriented responsibility. Rodeo families thus moved in a “liminal contact zone” with a distinct subculture that included intergenerational Aboriginal and settler families (135). Although this liminal contact zone gave somewhat more space for femininity, women had to carefully deploy concepts of femininity and family to be accepted within pro rodeo circuits (151-153).

The theme of professionalization continues in Kelm’s fifth chapter, which examines rodeos that were not part of the professional rodeo circuit, and how professionalization affected them. Rodeo served as an escape from modernity. As such, Aboriginal culture became associated with the past, and thus commodified for the tourist market. Some communities expressed concern that the move towards professionalization was excluding local rodeo participants, including Aboriginal peoples, who had a complex and declining position in the modernizing Western Canadian economy. Aboriginal women’s participation as rodeo or stampede “queens” indicated the contested representation of authenticity that rodeo organizers attempted to promote. These women, who occasionally spoke of First Nations struggles rather than merely serving as ambassadors, indicated how rodeo was a space, though restricted, that gave voice to social forces. According to Kelm, community rodeo participation, rather than being neutral, was segmented and contested.

Kelm’s final chapter is also her most compelling. This chapter emphasizes how reserve rodeos served as an expression of identity, history, and values, as contact zones grounded in a discourse of discrimination (208). The emphasis here is on affect and intimacy, through the creation of an “intimate public” and an “affective community” that sustained hope for Aboriginal cultures by deploying a hybridized “Indian cowboy” identity (206, 216). This identity disrupted the myths and binaries that characterized rodeo in popular culture, with the wider implication of indigenizing rodeo. Kelm argues that, by destabilizing the binary that separated “cowboys” from “Indians,” Aboriginal peoples were able to subvert other categories, blurring tradition with modernity, and culture with nature. This analysis grants reserve communities significant agency from their position of marginality in popular culture, and demonstrates a flexibility that is not present in usual metanarratives of conquest (217).

Beyond summarizing her argument and the empirical content of her work, Kelm’s conclusion considers the implications of her analysis, highlighting how a multiplicity of meanings, often conflicting, can come from a subaltern cultural analysis, and suggesting that historians go beyond discourses of difference to analyze individual identities. She acknowledges that some of her findings may be perceived as problematic, and therefore takes care to emphasize that, despite ultimately arguing that small towns were less racially troubled than is usually assumed, this is a disruption of the stereotypes upon which racism is based, rather than a denial of racism. Whereas some scholars emphasize racial difference in work grounded by postcolonial theory, Kelm uses such approaches to show that racialization, while important, can also render marginalized participants invisible. By emphasizing social memory, Kelm troubles many of the meanings that historians ascribe to contact zones.

There are some gaps in Kelm’s study. As an analysis of rodeo in Western Canada, it seems amiss that events such as the Calgary Stampede do not figure in this work. While this is primarily a study of small-town rodeo, it is puzzling that Kelm did not take up the opportunity to consider the potential of a contact zone between rural and urban environments in larger urban rodeos. Similarly, Kelm’s work is a transborder history, intentionally focused on Canadian rodeos. A comparative chapter would be welcome, given the involvement of American riders on the Canadian rodeo scene; to what degree did rodeos function as contact zones across the border, and what identities were constituted in American rodeos?

Some novel elements of Kelm’s work in A Wilder West include her simultaneously regional and microhistorical focus and her discussion of affect. The latter seems experimental in this work; Kelm does not apply this affective analysis through her monograph, instead considering emotional connections and intimacies only at specific points. Her engagement with the affective turn is thus effective, but exploratory rather than exemplary. It is in her combined micro-level and regional work, building connections between communities and wider rodeo culture, that Kelm’s analysis is particularly strong. This, alongside nuggets of analysis of affect, enables her to foreground the hybridity of identities of rodeo participants, and to disrupt the binaries that are produced by racialization within rodeo.