A terrible beauty: settler sovereignty and the state of exception in Home Box Office's Deadwood

Abstract

The Western has long been understood as a mythic genre that utilizes historical representation in service of presentist allegories that address the sovereignty of the settler nation-state. While many have lauded the Home Box Office program Deadwood for presenting a more realistic – and thus less generic – vision of US territorial expansion, this article argues that Deadwood rather effectively embraces the Western genre?s tendency to refract frontier history into a usable past. We contend that Deadwood amplifies the anxieties expressed in Cold War Westerns about the relationship between extralegal violence and the liberal nation-state by representing the sovereign order of the Deadwood isopolity as authoritarian rather than democratic. In a reading that addresses both Deadwood's revisionist visual aesthetics and its narrative representations of settler violence, we argue that the series, like many Westerns before it, neglects the representation of the violence of settler colonial invasion in favor of representing violence within the settler isopolity in order to allegorize the extralegal modes of violence utilized by the USA during the early phases of the War on Terror. By interpolating frontier violence within the familiar tradition of the Western genre, Deadwood bridges the gap between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century ideologies of American imperialism by reproducing the trope of ‘the vanishing Indian’ and dramatizing the violence that structures the mythology of settler independence and nationhood in the American West.