Greg Dickinson

Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum

Few places tell the myth of the American frontier more vigorously than the Buffalo Bill Museum does in Cody, Wyoming. Traveling to the museum through the ‘Western’ landscape of Wyoming into the foothills of the Rockies prepares visitors for the tale of Western settlement. This narrative, which works to secure a particular vision of the West, draws upon the material artifacts of Cody’s childhood and his exploits as scout, Pony Express rider and showman. The museum retells the story that Cody first told to millions at the turn of the twentieth century in his Wild West arena show. In this paper, we argue that the museum privileges images of masculinity and Whiteness, while using the props, films, and posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to carnivalize the violent conflicts between Anglo Americans and Native Americans.

Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2002 convention of the Western States Communication Association.

Museums, memorials, and other historic places are key sites in the construction of collective memory and national identity. The Plains Indian Museum in Cody, Wyoming is one such space of memory where the (pre)history of “America” and its native peoples is told. Based on the view of texts as experiential landscapes, it is argued that this museum works to absolve Anglo-visitors of the social guilt regarding Western conquest through a rhetoric of reverence. This rhetorical mode invites visitors to adopt a respectful, but distanced observational gaze. A concluding section assesses the social and political consequences of memorializing in this mode.

Joe's rhetoric: Finding authenticity at starbucks

Abstract In this essay, I explore the materiality of rhetoric through a close analysis of one Starbucks coffee shop. Starbucks’ rhetoric works to suture individual bodies and subjectivities into a seemingly natural world through the practices of production and consumption of coffee and through the use of “natural”; colors, shapes and materials. This turn to nature is augmented by a claim to authenticity made by the coffee itself and is further reinforced by the rituals surrounding the buying and drinking of coffee. These rituals provide sanctifying performances that strive to cover the sins of postmodern consumer culture.

Enunciating Locality in the Postmodern Suburb: FlatIron Crossing and the Colorado Lifestyle

The shopping center is a major part of consumer space built in the U.S., and the shifts in shopping center design are part of the changing landscape of American consumer culture. In this essay we examine FlatIron Crossing, a mall and lifestyle center recently built in Colorado, to explore the development of the hybrid space as a response to postmodern suburbanization. We argue that FlatIron Crossing is a place making technology that offers invocations of locality as a response to the abstractions and placelessness of postmodern suburbanization. Locality, we argue, is different from “local” in that locality offers images of place rooted in time and geography but drawn from globalized images. Even as recent shopping centers and lifestyle centers offer images of place they do so to cover, without directly addressing, the difficult relation between the global and the local.

The Pleasantville Effect: Nostalgia and the Visual Framing of (White) Suburbia

Suburban films of the last fifteen years offer audiences spatial visions of nostalgically tinged suburbs, place individuals into the bosom of imperfect but loving and white families, and remake home and away, self and Other, on foundations of security and comfort. Functioning as “ethical” rhetoric, the films create suburban dwelling places that map the particular contours of suburbia. Representing and rejecting “impossible” sexualities and spaces, the films not only mark the boundaries of suburban space but also create the contours of “suburban subjectivities.”

Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum

Boasting over 6000 objects, including replicas of a western hardware store, a frontier stage stop, and a late nineteenth-century industrial factory, the Cody Firearms Museum, located at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, is “the largest and most important collection of American firearms in the world.” 1 The museum, which creates a decidedly visual space through its near-exclusive engagement with looking, employs an aesthetic of domestication and sterility to frame firearms for museumgoers. Even as it transforms guns into inert objects of visual pleasure, the museum cannot fully erase the history of violence and colonial conquering in which guns played a starring role. The museums rhetorical effectivity/affectivity, then, turns upon the unique play of presence and absence.

Selling democracy: Consumer culture and citizenship in the wake of September 11

Contemporary public discourse often defines citizenship with language of consumer capitalism. In the wake of September 11, 2001 corporations moved swiftly to assert the relation between consumption and citizenship. Drawing on a close reading of advertisements addressing the attack published in the New York Times, I argue that within the first month after September 11, corporate advertisers created identification between corporations and America such that the health of corporations was part of the health of the nation. Advertisers utilized this identification to argue that enacting consumption was a central mode of practicing patriotic citizenship. The advertisements, then, served to create consumer citizens through the civic duty of shopping.

Fallen: O.J. Simpson, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the re‐centering of white patriarchy

The authors examine two Time magazine cover images: O.J. Simpson, after his arrest for the murder of Nicole Brown, and Hillary Clinton during the Whitewater controversy, arguing that the Time covers function as a visual rhetoric, invoking myths central to Western culture. The photos naturalize deep, cultural myths which assert that black men and women of all colors are evil, thereby re‐centering white masculinity.

Beyond authenticity: A visual-material analysis of locality in the global redesign of Starbucks stores

In this article, the authors examine the global store design strategy launched by Starbucks in 2009 in the wake of the economic crisis, increasing brand dilution, and growing competition. They offer a visual-material analysis of the corporation’s efforts to create a global aesthetic grounded in locality, with an in-depth focus on meaning potentials of materiality and community found across the four store redesigns that were unveiled in Seattle, the coffee company’s hometown, and which functioned as prototypes for store design across the United States, Europe and Asia. They then critically engage Starbucks’ rhetoric/discourse of locality in relation to the more widespread notion of authenticity and argue that, while authenticity is rooted in textual and symbolic arrangements, locality operates in the realm of emplaced and embodied claims of difference. Shifting from authenticity to locality in design and branding practices alters critical engagements and everyday relationships with global consumer capitalism, insofar as this may be increasingly entrenched with vernacular expressions of cosmopolitanism.

Neoliberal Capitalism, Globalization, and Lines of Flight Vectors and Velocities at the 16th Street Mall

In this essay we resist claims that neoliberal capitalism is all-encompassing and inescapably flat by attending the materiality of a specific site of globalization: Denver’s 16th Street Mall. Taking vector and velocity as critical terms that demand attention to materiality and temporality, we suggest that globalization is rough rather than flat. Using vector and velocity, our critical engagement with The Mall demonstrates complex interplays of global and local, systemic and transgressive, and highlights an intriguing range of tactical, embodied negotiations that suggest potential lines of flight. We argue that careful attention to spatial rhetorics provides intellectuals with powerful critical tools for interrupting and intervening in the spatial politics of the 21st century.