Cowboy contradictions: Westerns in the postcolonial Pacific

Abstract

ABSTRACTIndigenous scholars have recently focused on the Hollywood western and the figure of the cinematic cowboy as particularly potent sites of identification in twentieth century Oceania. Curiously, neither the genre nor the icon figures prominently in current film scholarship about the Pacific. One of the reasons is that westerns have been considered particularly paradigmatic of cinema's imperial legacy. The genre's tendency to reaffirm the dominance of white masculinity at the expense of Indigenous people, suggests that westerns ought to have attracted utter contempt in colonial settings such as Samoa and New Zealand. The fact that the opposite seems to have been true, that westerns and cowboys were not only admired in Oceania but even imitated, cannot be simply dismissed as yet another example of ‘spectators […] unwittingly sutured into a colonialist perspective’ (Shohat and Stam 1994: 12). Instead, the cowboy constitutes a complex site around which political critique, corporeal desire and modern spectacle coalesce. This article interrogates why the western appears to have been overlooked, how the cowboy can be seen as a significant cultural influence in the Pacific, and how he might shed light on historical spectatorial practices and preferences in the region.