Reviewed by:

• Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary by Tom Lynch
• Alex Trimble Young

The importation of Australian settler colonial theory into the US academy has occasioned a surge of scholarly exchange between the United States and Australia during the last two decades. This exchange has not, however—with a few happy exceptions—been accompanied by the widespread adaptation of the transnational comparative method that produced that theory. This state of affairs makes Tom Lynch's Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary an especially welcome addition to transnational research on the literature of the US West, environmental humanities, and settler colonial studies. In this thoroughly researched comparative study of settler environmental writing in the two storied and arid regions named in his title, Lynch engages settler colonial studies not as a source of theoretical dogma but as a method for his challenging and original comparative close readings.

Lynch's central argument hinges on the claim that settler literary representations of the ecologies of the Outback and the West are both inflected by the settler colonial imaginary, a fantasy forged in the violence of conquest that shapes even the most seemingly benign forms of settler environmental writing. Identifying this transnational connection, Lynch argues, destabilizes not only the nationalist allegories that imagine the Outback and the West as synecdoches for the exceptional status of the nation-states of which they are a part but also countercultural claims of so much environmental [End Page 402] writing, which, he convincingly argues, can be settler colonial even when they are explicitly antinationalist.

Outback and Out West makes this nuanced argument by engaging the formal traditions of ecocriticism and bioregionalism, even as Lynch's settler colonial critique unsettles some of the key assumptions of those fields. Outback and Out West calls to mind the work of ecocritics like Scott Slovic in its organization, alternating between "field notes," brief travelogues narrating Lynch's personal experiences exploring the two regions he analyzes, and thematically organized chapters of comparative literary criticism.

While arguably undercutting the too-often imperious authority of disinterested cultural criticism, the field notes sections also tentatively unsettle their own implicit claim on authority. Much of the prose in these personal narratives reads like the work of the white naturalists of the last century, enthusiastically documenting the local geology, flora, and fauna Lynch encounters as he traverses the storied landscapes of the Outback and the US West. At the same time Lynch writes with a keen if awkward awareness of how his standpoint inflects his experience of these landscapes. At one point he pauses in a description of an Outback landscape to consider the Indigenous perspective on the place, noting that "there is another landscape, invisible to the likes of me, that lives within and animates this more obvious one. I can intuit aspects of it, but its details are out of my range of vision, and really none of my business" (89). The "field notes" sections thus highlight contradictions latent in the relation between the author's ecological enthusiasms and his political commitments without attempting to resolve them, leaving readers to judge for themselves.

The real strength of Outback and Out West is found in its comparative close readings. At their best Lynch's careful readings identify not only structural similarities between literary representations of the environment in both places but particular phrases that reoccur with startling frequency in both regional literatures, repeated like mantras that attempt to establish settler sovereignty and ownership as facts of nature. His first chapter explores one such phrase, "this very spot," that appears repeatedly in memoirs and travelogues that seek to retrace the steps of the first settler explorers in a region, a literary preoccupation of writers in both the West and the [End Page 403] Outback. By attempting to embody the perspective of these explorers, Lynch argues, contemporary writers in both locales reinforce a peculiarly and perniciously settler colonial relation to place. Another standout analysis in this regard comes in Lynch's fourth chapter (developed out of an article...

审阅者：

• 内陆和西部地区：汤姆·林奇的殖民者环境想象
• 亚历克斯·特林布尔·杨

过去二十年来，澳大利亚定居者殖民理论被引入美国学术界，引发了美国和澳大利亚之间学术交流的激增。然而，除了一些令人高兴的例外之外，这种交流并没有伴随着产生该理论的跨国比较方法的广泛采用。这种状况使得汤姆·林奇的《内陆与西部：定居者殖民环境想象》成为美国西部文学、环境人文和定居者殖民研究的跨国研究特别受欢迎的补充。在这篇对标题中提到的两个故事和干旱地区的定居者环境写作进行彻底研究的比较研究中，林奇将定居者殖民研究不是作为理论教条的来源，而是作为他具有挑战性和原创性的比较仔细阅读的一种方法。

林奇的中心论点取决于这样一种主张，即对内陆和西部生态的定居者文学表现都受到定居者殖民想象的影响，这种幻想是在征服的暴力中形成的，甚至塑造了看似最良性的定居者环境写作形式。林奇认为，确定这种跨国联系不仅会破坏民族主义寓言的稳定，这些寓言将内陆和西部想象为民族国家的特殊地位的提喻，而且还破坏了如此多的环境问题的反文化主张[结束第402页] ]写作，他令人信服地认为，即使定居者明确反对民族主义，这种写作也可能是殖民者的。

《内陆地区》和《外西部地区》通过结合生态批评和生物区域主义的正式传统，提出了这一微妙的论点，尽管林奇的殖民者殖民批评动摇了这些领域的一些关键假设。《内陆地区》和《外西部地区》让人想起像斯科特·斯洛维奇这样的生态批评家在组织上的工作，交替使用“田野笔记”、叙述林奇探索他所分析的两个地区的个人经历的简短游记，以及按主题组织的比较文学批评章节。

虽然可以说削弱了无私的文化批评常常具有的专横权威，但该领域指出，各部分也尝试性地动摇了他们自己对权威的隐含主张。这些个人叙述中的大部分散文读起来就像上个世纪白人博物学家的作品，热情地记录了林奇在穿越内陆和美国西部的传奇景观时所遇到的当地地质、动植物。与此同时，林奇在写作时敏锐而尴尬地意识到他的立场如何影响他对这些风景的体验。有一次，他在描述内陆景观时停下来考虑土著人对这个地方的看法，并指出“还有另一种景观，对我这样的人来说是看不见的，它生活在这个更明显的景观中，并赋予它活力。我可以凭直觉了解各个方面但它的细节超出了我的视野，而且真的不关我的事”（89）。因此，“田野笔记”部分强调了作者的生态热情与其政治承诺之间潜在的矛盾，但没有试图解决它们，让读者自己判断。

内陆地区和西部地区的真正优势在于其相对仔细的阅读。林奇的仔细阅读不仅发现了两个地方的环境文学表现之间的结构相似性，而且还发现了在两个地区文学中以惊人的频率重复出现的特定短语，这些短语像咒语一样重复，试图将定居者的主权和所有权确立为自然事实。他的第一章探讨了这样一个短语，“这个地方”，这个短语反复出现在回忆录和游记中，试图追溯某个地区第一批定居者探险家的足迹，这是西方和欧洲作家的文学关注点。 403]内陆地区。林奇认为，通过试图体现这些探险家的视角，这两个地区的当代作家强化了定居者与地方的特殊而有害的殖民关系。在这方面的另一个出色的分析来自林奇的第四章（源自一篇文章......