Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Published by De Gruyter

Volume 68 Issue 1 - Special Issue: Degeneration of Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Cinematic Depictions of the U.S. West / Guest Editors: M. Elise Marubbio, Marek Paryż, Matthew Carter

Issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Contents
Journal Overview

Publicly Available April 2, 2020

Frontmatter

Page range: i-iv

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Editorial

April 2, 2020

Degeneration of Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Cinematic Depictions of the U.S. West: Introduction

M. Elise Marubbio, Marek Paryż, Matthew Carter

Page range: 3-5

Abstract

The settler’s situation is underpinned by the fear of having been caught in a process of endless transition, hence the determination to define the parameters of collective sovereignty and to establish a satisfactory existential basis. The sense of uncertainty that underlies the settler’s situation accounts for the necessity of developing power structures that sustain the settler collective’s striving to complete its design, and this triggers a range of conflicts. Repeatedly addressing the eponymous region’s legacy of settler colonialism, film depictions of the American West re-inscribe oppression of racial minorities, sexual abuse, and class exploitation in order to validate the foundational settler-nation myth that consolidates hegemonic forms of racial, economic, cultural, and political power.

April 2, 2020

Uncertain Wests: Kelly Reichardt, Settler Sensibilities, and the Challenges of Feminist Filmmaking

Susan Kollin

Page range: 7-20

Abstract

Director Kelly Reichardt has been celebrated as an independent filmmaker who takes risks in developing complicated and often fraught storylines, especially for her female characters. In Meek’s Cutoff (2010), she uses the aesthetics of slow cinema to show details frequently overlooked in the Western. In doing so, the film lays bare the violence of the settler-colonial West, highlighting the underside of European-American dreams of progress and prosperity. Addressing settler women’s investments in nation-building projects, the film traces how their commitments to Whiteness helped underwrite expansionist history. Noting the limits as well as the forms of agency White women claimed in the West, Reichardt pushes the boundaries of the women’s Western in ways that foreground Indigenous lives and the possibilities of decolonization.

April 2, 2020

The Perpetuation of Myth: Ideology in Bone Tomahawk

Matthew Carter

Page range: 21-35

Abstract

The contemporary Western Bone Tomahawk is in the tradition of the settler-versus-Indian stories from the genre’s ‘classical’ period. Its story is informed by one of white America’s oldest and most paranoiac of racist-psychosexual myths: the captivity narrative. This article reads Bone Tomahawk ’s figuration of the racial anxieties that inhere within nineteenth-century settler-colonial culture in the context of post-9/11 America. It also considers that the film’s imbrication of Horror film conventions into its essential Western framework amplifies its allegorical representation of contemporary America’s cultural and political-ideological mindset. As well, the use of Horror conventions amplifies the racial anxieties generated by its use of a mythic binary construct of an adversarial relationship between whites and ‘Indians.’ To a lesser extent, the article suggests that the film also embodies certain uncontained ideological contradictions that, though undeveloped, could be said to contest its ideological coherence.

April 2, 2020

Portrayals of Degenerate Religious Leaders in Contemporary Film Westerns

Marek Paryż

Page range: 37-52

Abstract

This article discusses three contemporary film Westerns – Sweetwater (2013, dir. Logan Miller), The Duel (2016, dir. Kieran Darcy-Smith), and Brimstone (2016, dir. Martin Koolhoven) – with respect to their depiction of certain extreme forms of religiosity as a manifestation of the degeneration of the settler colonial social order. The plots of these three films revolve around the conflict between the hero/heroine and his/her antagonist who happens to be a charismatic, manipulating, and psychopathic religious leader. Sweetwater , The Duel , and Brimstone imply that, in settler colonial societies, religion becomes an expression of self-containment and hinders modernizing processes. It sustains the illusion of permanence and of the collective immunity to external influences. And when the order it protects comes under threat, religiously motivated violence proves to be the primary means of defense.

April 2, 2020

True Grit: Dirt, Subjectivity and the Female Body in Contemporary Westerns

Jordan Savage

Page range: 53-66

Abstract

This article considers the significance of dirt to three Western texts: Lonesome Land , Mudbound , and Brokeback Mountain . The overall argument is that the more complicated and ambiguous dirt is permitted to be, the more imaginative and critical potential it has for the iconography of the contemporary Western. Taking B.M. Bower’s 1912 Western Romance as a model, it is argued that the dirt aesthetic is crucial to how Westerns construct the myth of the American character. This is further complicated by intersections between representations of the White rural poor, women (as for both Lonesome Land and Mudbound , there are connotations of sexual impurity in the dirty White female body), and representations of queerness. In the two versions of Brokeback Mountain , Annie Proulx’s short story and Ang Lee’s film, we see the ambiguity of dirt: it can be read as an essential part of the American land, or as polluting waste matter. The critical framework draws on feminist history and criticism via Kathleen Healey and Phyllis Palmer; sociological theories of imagining poverty in North America via Kate Cairns and Winfried Fluck; and queer theory via Christopher Schmidt.

April 2, 2020

Settler Colonial Disease and Dis-Ease in August: Osage County

M. Elise Marubbio

Page range: 67-78

Abstract

Tracy Letts’s screenplay, August: Osage County (2013), and John Wells’s film adaptation (2013) offer a compelling critique of American racism towards Native Americans which demands that viewers consider their own inculcation into ongoing settler-nation colonialism. The film layers the history of place (Oklahoma) with the Cheyenne character Johnna, whose Indigenous heritage is negotiated throughout by liberal academics, conservative rural matriarchs, and Johnna herself. The role is small but essential to the film’s allegorical analysis of settler-colonialism and racism. The Weston family’s secrets, addictions, and dysfunction starkly contrast with Johnna’s health and stability. Through Johnna, the film questions the toll colonialism takes on the mental and physical health of the American people. This paper analyzes the metanarrative association of the Weston family’s dysfunction and racism with ongoing colonialism that results in disease of the settler-colonial space as it emerges in the screenplay and film.

April 2, 2020

Appropriating the Comanche: Hell or High Water and the New Southwest

Douglas E. Green

Page range: 79-92

Abstract

Hell or High Water (2016) takes the elegiac mode – the wistful lament for the myth of the Old West – and recasts it as a raucous country song on the dismantling of that myth by twenty-first-century capitalism. In the wake of the Great Recession, director David Mackenzie and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan pair off two iconic sets of Western characters: a couple of down-and-out bank-robbing brothers shadowed by an old, White Texas Ranger and his American-Indian/Mexican-American deputy. The values of the lawmen and the outlaw brothers are not mutually exclusive – each pair shares more with the other than with the new materialistic order around them. The overarching metaphor for men who repeatedly confront the socioeconomic forces pitted against their values is the Comanche, to which several characters lay claim. Hell or High Water gives us both a lament for the myth of the Old West and a tart critique of the film Western and of the real-world exploitation of the region, its people, and the American dream they cling to.

Book Reviews

April 2, 2020

“A Feast that Lasts a Year or Two”: Writing, Reading, and Editing Serials in the ‘Quality Monthlies.’

Philipp Loeffler

Page range: 93-95

April 2, 2020

Shakespearean Celebrity in the Digital Age: Fan Cultures and Remediation

Heidi Liedke

Page range: 96-99

April 2, 2020

Books Received

Page range: 101-101

About this journal

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (ZAA) is a peer-reviewed journal that traditionally reflects the entire spectrum of English and American language, literature and culture. Particular attention will also be paid to the new literatures in English, the development of linguistic varieties outside Britain and North America, the culture of ethnic minorities and the relationship between anglophone and neighbouring cultural areas. The journal also welcomes contributions which examine theoretical and interdisciplinary issues in literary, linguistic and socio-cultural research. Thus, ZAA invites contributions concerning a wide range of research on current issues, survey articles featuring recent developments in the fields of culture, literature and language, research reports as well as proposals concerning new directions within the discipline. For two of the journal’s four annual issues articles may be submitted in the field of literary and cultural studies; the remaining two issues will be reserved for special topics, one in literature and culture, the other in linguistics.