Chapter One examines Rogers’ youth in the Cherokee Territory of Oklahoma. It stresses his upbringing as the scion of a prominent Cherokee family and the ongoing tension with his father over the boy’s dislike of schooling and reluctance to pursue a traditional career as a rancher/businessman. Young Rogers cherished the free life of the cowboy riding the range. The chapter also explores Rogers’ "double consciousness" as an American Indian outsider who expressed pride in his lineage and culture, sought to succeed in white America, but betrayed a subtle resentment about the need to do so.

Chapter Ten analyzes Will Rogers the private individual. Looking at the real person behind the celebrity entertainer and writer, it focuses on several personal qualities that defined his adult life. He manifested a great loyalty to his wife, four children, and the idea of family. He maintained his rural roots, sustaining a lifelong attraction to riding and roping, horses and cattle that culminated in his beloved ranch domicile outside Los Angeles. He developed a cadre of close friends from the worlds of entertainment, journalism, and politics. Possessed of abundant nervous energy, he became addicted to travel, both nationally and globally. A man of common tastes in food, clothing, and entertainent, he nonetheless harbored an intense desire to succeed. At the deepest level, Rogers displayed a certain bifurcated quality: essentially reserved, earnest, moody, and sometimes ill-at-ease in private, but tranforming into a witty, charming entertainer and pundit when dealing with a group. Thus the private man balanced an authentic, common man persona with the popular, down-home, humorous image of "Will Rogers" that he crafted throughout his adult life.

Chapter 3 shifts the focus to the US East Coast. Roy Harris was one of several young Americans who studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger in the 1920s; Symphony 1933 was his breakthrough work after returning home. Commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, who anecdotally asked for a ‘big symphony from the West’, Symphony 1933 teases out the relationships between those expansionist discourses associated with the symphony indicated by Paul Bekker (1918), liberal ideology, and the imagined spaces of the American West. Examining the reception of Symphony 1933 and its music, the chapter raises questions about how the discourse around Harris’s symphony and liberalism’s spatial narratives colluded in establishing the political hegemony of white Americans and the supposed naturalness of their right to occupy the West, an acute anxiety given the disenfranchisement of white working-class Americans during the economic collapse of the early 1930s.

This chapter derives from empirical research I conducted in Texas, California, and beyond, the first to investigate Mexican American fan relationships with country music. My Mexican American fan-interlocutors illuminated distinctive practices of country loving, in two senses of the phrase. Contrary to critical takes on patriotic US country songs as exclusionary, these listeners described cherished bicultural, binational engagements with them. Pointing to the Mexican origins of cowboys and the US Southwest and to country music’s expression of “Mexican values,” fans also attested not that country music affords belonging but that it belongs to Mexican American listeners, and they reckoned their love for it inevitable. Relatedly, I consider country music’s life as border culture, shaped by continual exchange at the 2,000-mile US-Mexico contact zone. Elaborating the hybridic, migratory, transcultural bases of music often termed “quintessentially American,” I argue that it is even more quintessentially American than has been imagined.

I see feminism as a commitment to the full humanity of all women and all men, and a dismantling of the patriarchal values that inhibit this.

My essay is interested in David Foster Wallace’s complex and evolving relationship with feminism and the feminine, as well as in how this relationship has been figured over time within the literary community. This investigation involves an account of how critical practices surrounding Wallace have transformed over the past decade—from readings that take as universal the “human being” of Wallace’s work, instead of reading it as emblematic of a particular nexus of privileged observer-positions, to intersectional readings that acknowledge Wallace’s embodiment as a white middle-class American male whose work reflects that embodiment in important ways, to, finally, #MeToo-era readings that foreground the actual misogynistic violence inflicted by Wallace in his personal capacity, which, morally and politically, would seem to foreclose the possibility of further reading and set up an existential crisis for the burgeoning field of Wallace Studies.

As I engage with each of these critical approaches in my essay, three central questions emerge. First: How has the history of feminism in America shaped Wallace’s work and its reception? Second: If feminism is “a commitment to the full humanity of all women and all men,” where does Wallace’s empathy expand in this regard and where does it break down, on the page and in the flesh? Third: In our present historical moment, does acknowledging Wallace’s ultimate betrayal of this commitment in the form of his abuse mean a complete disavowal of the author and the man—an end to the conversation, as it were—or is there space for the #MeToo movement within Wallace Studies?