TY - JOUR
AU - Scofield, Rebecca
AB - In Rodeo: An Animal History, Susan Nance brings her expertise in animal studies to bear on rodeo. She analyzes the fraught relationships between humans and animals and the identities predicated upon these relationships. With this well-researched work Nance pushes rodeo historiography in the direction it needs to go. It will be an essential read for any scholar working on rodeo and, more broadly, will be useful for anyone working at the nexus of performance, identity, and the environment. Critiquing human “dominionism,” or the belief that human needs were destined to be supreme, Nance articulates how this ideology aided settler-colonialism and the expansion of western (or country) identities. Taking a case study approach that both re-narrates familiar stories and tells new ones, the work is broken into six chapters, three on horses and three on cattle (with a variety of other animal performers moving throughout the work). Moving chronologically from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, some of Nance’s most interesting observations are about the twenty-first century, especially as she chronicles the ability of rodeo to evolve on local levels to reflect (to some degree) modern sensibilities instead of calcify into a simple performance of nostalgia. One of the work’s greatest strengths is its broader call to action. Nance writes, “To be human is not normative, but just one of thousands of ways to experience the world. To me, all of rodeo’s animals have their own story to tell about the violence inherent in the sport” (p. 4). Much of the historiography on the performed West, whether rodeo, Wild West shows, or film, have given much needed attention to the experiences of marginalized performers in the past several years. Nance’s dedication to tracing the experiences of the rodeo’s animal performers, from star bucker horses to “anonymous and interchangeable” calves, honors that emerging commitment to marginalized individual narratives (p. 31). Furthermore, she provides the localized nuance necessary to understand the forces at work in both everyday experiences of the individual animal performer and the meanings that humans ascribed to its performance. One of the many question Nance poses: “[W]hat would rodeo history look like if we took it as a record not of human triumph and resilience but of human imperfection and stubbornness,” has been increasingly asked by scholars (p. 6). Her answers are particularly compelling because she calculates the cost of that imperfection in the pain and death of performers who could not consent to perform. A much-needed contribution on rodeo, Nance lays the groundwork for future research by a new generation of western historians. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Western History Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Rodeo: An Animal History. The Environment in Modern North America Series. By Susan Nance
JO - Western Historical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/whq/whab031
DA - 2021-02-28
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/rodeo-an-animal-history-the-environment-in-modern-north-america-series-Sqa0y7E3y7
SP - 234
EP - 235
VL - 52
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -