Revisionist Western Research Articles

‘What did we prove?’: William Wyler’s The Big Country (1958) and the revisionism of Westerns

The Western is widely seen as a cinematic means of embodying the American culture in which it was produced. The canonical dividing line between ‘classic’ and ‘revisionist’ Westerns coincides with the end of the Hays Code, when the Western genre, and American culture as a whole, underwent their most significant tonal shift. This article is primarily an analysis of a 1958 allegorical, classic and pacifist Western, The Big Country. This film promotes a revised attitude towards previously accepted moral conventions of violence within the genre and should thereby be understood as a revisionist work. Furthermore, The Big Country’s pacifistic revisionism creates a stark contrast with canonical revisionist Westerns and thereby calls into question the criteria for classifying films as ‘classic’ or ‘revisionist’. Ultimately, I argue that the drastic shift in tone and theme in New Hollywood Westerns has obscured the revisionism inherent to the genre and perpetuated a reductive view of the variations, shifts and nuances of the thematic arguments of Westerns from Classical Hollywood.

Town Savior or Scourge? Asian Identity in the Western and Generic Reversal in 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964)

ABSTRACT The often-racist portrayals of Asians in Hollywood productions of the 1950s and 1960s and earlier decades constitutes one facet of a double-bind within which Asian Americans have historically found themselves. Bearing in mind wider cultural, economic, and political discourses surrounding Asian American communities in the postwar period, it is important to closely consider specific cinematic representations of Asians during this period. This article argues that 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964) operates as a strange and conflicted film informed by progressive science fiction literature and many of the sentiments that would come to define revisionist westerns. Charles Beaumont's screenplay adaptation of Charles G. Finney's novel The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) infuses the film with clever and engaging dialogue and mirrors the concepts of reversal often present in Beaumont's work. Furthermore, Beaumont's screenplay offers insightful takes on racial and generic dynamics in a film that might otherwise be dismissed as an egregious example of harmful yellowface practices. Thus, viewing 7 Faces of Dr. Lao as a prototypical revisionist western draws attention to its engagement with concepts of reversal and critique of stereotypes.

코맥 매카시의 『핏빛 자오선』: 웨스턴 장르 비판과 폭력의 의미 고찰

The classical Western depicts the confrontations between two contending forces―the East and the West, white settlers and native Americans, and civilization and wilderness―in the backdrop of the Wild West. Conversely, the revisionist Western of the 1960s and the 1970s highlights the unknown histories of the victims of violent suppression and genocide during the era of nineteenth-century American imperial wars. Blood Meridian reveals the limits of both the classical and the revisionist Western regarding the characters, setting, and theme. Set in the frontier, as the backdrop of the American myth of the West and Manifest Destiny, the novel severely criticizes American capitalism and imperialism, describing the Glanton gang’s merciless murders. Furthermore, it blurs the boundaries between civilization and barbarism through its central character, Judge Holden, who incarnates universal evil and mindless violence. Insinuating the intricate relations between violence and art, McCarthy demonstrates that art, including writing, creates life, thus enabling redemption and regeneration.

Riding East—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in Hidalgo (2004)

<i>Riding East</i>—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in <i>Hidalgo</i> (2004)

Cormac McCarthy in Context

Cormac McCarthy in Context

Emile Durkheim Rides Again: The Death of the Western Hero and the Rise of the Moral Individualist

Emile Durkheim Rides Again: The Death of the Western Hero and the Rise of the Moral Individualist Scott Pearce Corrigendum: (updated 10.05.20) Page 79: The last paragraph of text has been updated to read: "At the beginning of the film, Munny is living a law-abiding life as a farmer while raising two children, but it is only an illusion of social integration. At the end of the film, after his rampage, Munny has demonstrated the magnitude of the threat he poses to society. When the epilogue then notes that Munny “prospered in dry goods," signaling his return to an illusion of integration (magnified, in fact, by prosperity), the film holds the myth of a nation’s moral identity in a final contempt." This article examines the function, transition, and ultimate removal of the hero from the Western film genre in the late 1960s. Most examinations of the genre, especially of its mid-twentieth-century heyday, have assumed that the Western requires a “hero.” Even “antihero” Westerns of the late 1960s depend on this assumption, for although the hero is often absent from antihero narratives, the hero and antihero exist on the same spectrum. The result has been a remarkably binary approach to the genre, with heroic figures played by the likes of Errol Flynn, Randolph Scott, Alan Ladd, and John Wayne used as lenses for understanding large-scale cultural movements.1 This article argues instead that revisionist Westerns, which arose as early as The Ox-Bow Incident (Wellman 1943) but flourished in the 1970s onwards, present neither hero nor antihero but, rather, the “moral individualist”—a complex and problematic figure best understood through the work of sociologist Emile Durkheim. Origins of the Western The Western film genre has its roots in “Manifest Destiny,” the nineteenth-century form of exceptionalism in America that conflated westward expansion with Christian hegemony. The concept sprang, in part, from European settlers, who themselves could trace exceptionalism not just to nation-state expansions and retreats over the previous thousand years but to religious crusades and to key theological constructs that required both [End Page 67] domination and sacrifice. But the United States adapted and consolidated that exceptionalism into a new sense of personal and political destiny. Spreading the American republic over the vast North American continent required a relatively modern vision of conquest, in which the land would be dominated not by hierarchy or caste but by the egalitarianism and individualism—even if these values required deception, dispossession, and extermination to effectuate. It was the creed of the exceptional individual, the hero, taken from classical myth but deployed not in service to any single collective but in service to the assorted masses of individuals. The killer was simultaneously the personal liberator. There were clear and deliberate attempts to establish the legitimacy of this national myth towards the end of the nineteenth century. Stephen McVeigh names the four-volume collection The Winning of the West (1889–1896) by Theodore Roosevelt, along with Roosevelt’s presidency itself (1901–1909), as vital to the promotion of the mythology of the West. For McVeigh, at the core of Roosevelt’s work are two directives: the “negation of the Native-American” and “the formation of the American character,” the latter defined by self-reliance, and “the priority of the individual” (21). Roosevelt’s position early on as both a former frontiersman in South Dakota and a former member of the lower house of the New York State Legislature bridged the gap between the east and the west, between the cultivated and the wild. Roosevelt embodied both forms of life in America, winning him broad acceptance among the populace. His presidency, along with his expeditions to Africa and South America, only fortified his position as an authoritative voice on how and why America had flourished. He offered in his own life an example of the exceptional American individual. Roosevelt, however, was supported by other like-minded people, most familiar of whom was Frederick Jackson Turner, whose essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” presented in 1893 at a meeting of the American Historical Association, formulated for academics a new direction and perspective on the foundations of...

European Auteurs Revisit the Western: Thomas Bidegain’s Les Cowboys and Valeska Grisebach’s Western

Abstract The classical film western enacts the myth of American manifest destiny, codifying and promulgating stories of the conquest of the West. Subsequent so-called revisionist westerns, of which John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) is the preeminent example, call this triumphal master narrative into question and probe the darker sides of American expansionism. Recent returns to the western by European auteurs both revisit the classic western and revise its revisionist extensions, foregrounding experiences of sociopolitical crisis, displacement, and disintegration of values such as community and home in an age of transnationalism and globalism. Focusing on two productions that self-consciously redeploy the western’s legacy, Thomas Bidegain’s Les Cowboys (2015) and Valeska Grisebach’s Western (2017), as well as some related examples, this article scrutinizes the myths of the genre and their enduring contemporary relevance.

West/Border/Road: Nation and Genre in Contemporary Canadian Narrative by Katherine Ann Roberts

Reviewed by: West/Border/Road: Nation and Genre in Contemporary Canadian Narrative by Katherine Ann Roberts Johannes Fehrle Katherine Ann Roberts, West/Border/Road: Nation and Genre in Contemporary Canadian Narrative. Montreal and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's UP, 2018. 404 pp. Cloth, $95 CAD; e-book, $44.95 CAD. Katherine Ann Roberts attended several WLA conferences while working on a manuscript now published as West/Border/Road. Her [End Page 325] monograph examines the presence of three tropes Roberts considers as both centrally US-American and present in the Canadian imagination as "imported but not foreign" (14). Their presence results from an asymmetrical relation between the two North American nations in which Canada is always looking to the US, which often does not look back. Canada is therefore immersed in US pop culture, while the US remains largely oblivious of its northern neighbor. Roberts's discussion of the West includes Aritha van Herk's writings and Guy Vanderhaeghe's western trilogy—The Englishman's Boy (1996), The Last Crossing (2002), and A Good Man (2011)—as well as a chapter discussing Jim Lynch's Border Songs (2009), the independent film Frozen River (dir. Courtney Hunt, 2008), and Richard Ford's Canada (2012) under the aspect of their representation of the Canada-US borderlands. Other sections examine the CBC crime series Intelligence (2006–2007) and The Border (2008–2010), the Québécois road films Route 132 and À l'origine du cri/Crying Out (both 2010), and the English-Canadian road movies One Week (2008) and Passenger Side (2009). Roberts approaches these works from a perspective of unapologetic Canadianness, a "critical nation theory" (23) that questions certain aspects of how national narratives are constructed, but does not reject nation-building per se, taking for granted instead a "need to take pleasure in forms of national belonging that are inclusive and non-hegemonic" (337). Bringing this decidedly Canadian critical perspective into contact with genre and Western studies approaches from Steve Neale to Neil Campbell, Roberts in the first chapter discusses Guy Vanderhaeghe's western trilogy as a "heterogeneous, unorthodox, decentered version" (83) of the Western that not only expands its traditional playing field to include the Canadian "Whoop-Up Country" in the 1870s, but manages to present a non-ironic counter-narrative to both the traditional and the revisionist Western. The latter is identified by Roberts (who presumably thinks primarily of Cormac McCarthy and Clint Eastwood) with "nihilism" and "endless cycles of male violence, corruption, and greed" (83), a description that seems too one-sided given the breadth and creativity of many less canonical US revisionist Westerns. Nevertheless, Roberts [End Page 326] convincingly argues for an engagement with the West in Canadian literature that is more nuanced than that undertaken by scholars like Arnold Davidson, who contrasts an ironic Canadian with a conservative US West. As Roberts argues, Vanderhaeghe's trilogy instead advocates an unironic, subtle heroism and masculinity that does not rely on violence and the domination of women. Chapter 2 examines Aritha van Herk's writing on the West, particularly her novel Restlessness (1998) and the short pieces "A Fondness for the Bay" (1998), "Washtub Western" (2004), "Shooting a Saskatoon (What Happened to the Marlboro Man?)" (2005), and "Leading the Parade" (2005). Collectively these texts put forth a Canadian experience focusing on female subjectivity and "the difficulties women writers face in writing themselves into the West" (85), a difficulty that leads not to resignation, however, but to a subversive engagement with a mythic West whose presence is taken for granted. Chapter 4 presents Roberts's engagement with US takes on the Canadian-US border, probing an overall lack of engagement with Canada in US texts. Even the works discussed do not really engage Canada, Roberts claims: Lynch's Border Songs uses Canada primarily by invoking the conventions of Mexico-US border fiction in which drugs, illegal immigrants, and violence enter the country from outside; Hunt imagines Canada merely as a Northern frozen desert; Ford uses it as "a metaphor for loss." In this fashion, these works for Roberts "illustrate the power of genre to inadvertently exacerbate the invisibility of Canada within the Canadian-American dynamic" (230). The remaining chapters...

Introduction

Introduction Kalenda Eaton (bio), Michael Johnson (bio), and Jeannette Eileen Jones (bio) Buck: Which way are you ridin', Preacher? The Preacher: Well, that's not exactly settled in my mind yet. Buck: Well, you got three possibilities. The Preacher: Oh? Buck: North, south or east. The Preacher: What happened to west? Buck: We're going west.1 The 1972 film Buck and the Preacher tells the story of black migrants leaving the south in search of economic opportunity, self-determination, safety, and black power in the American West. Buck's (Sidney Poitier) declaration to the Preacher (Harry Belafonte) that he and his travel companions were "going west" (and implying that the Preacher should not accompany them) reads as a declaration and a provocation. As the film reveals, formerly enslaved Blacks imagined the West as a place where they could cut ties with the Old South and their former owners, and with the aid of Native Americans, establish all-black towns where they could thrive and escape Jim Crow. Blacks would go west and challenge anyone who attempted to thwart them. As a "black power" western in the revisionist tradition, Buck and the Preacher tapped into an over 100-year tradition of black performances and representations of the Black West as a site of resistance and becoming. Black communities and individuals occupied, defined, imagined, and deployed the Black West to their own ends, ever mindful that their presence in the West provided counter-narratives to the mythic Wild West [End Page 5] replete with white cowboys, pioneers, gunslingers, homesteaders, sex workers, and marauding "savage" Indians. In doing so, they not only demanded that their presence be acknowledged in Western narratives, but also critiqued the dominant white framing of the West as a utopian space for rugged individuals and frontier democracy. The cultural work performed by Buck and the Preacher and other black westerns echoed that of novels, museums, plays, paintings, photographs, nonfiction texts, and other mediums dedicated to preserving histories and articulating visions of the Black West. In the academy, the study of the Black West has primarily included historians, many of whom are concerned with correcting narratives of Western settlement featuring cowboys, Indians, and intrepid "pioneers." Interest in black cowboys, "black Indians," black homesteaders, and the famed Buffalo Soldiers fueled historical scholarship beginning in the 1970s. Kenneth Wiggins Porter's The Negro on the American Frontier and William Loren Katz's The Black West: A Documentary and Pictorial History both appeared in 1971. A year earlier, the University of Nebraska's PBS station NET had released a four-part documentary series "The Black Frontier" that sought to place Blacks firmly in the histories of the West. Nell Irvin Painter's Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976) and Robert Athearn's In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879-80 (1978) offered more critical analyses of black migration westward. Historians were not alone in paying attention to the black presence in the West in the 1970s, as the aforementioned Buck and the Preacher (a clear narrative break from John Ford's 1960 revisionist western Sergeant Rutledge) and several blaxploitation westerns—Soul Soldier (1970), The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972), and Boss Nigger (1974), to name a few—sought to place Blacks (primarily men) at the center of cinematic Westerns. Documentaries like Black Rodeo (1972), narrated by Woody Strode the star of Sergeant Rutledge, drew on black cowboy histories to explain the significance of the New York rodeo invitational. The 1990s became the most significant decade for literary production, particularly by Black women, in the genre of western historical fiction. Writers produced reinterpretations of historical spaces, geographic migrations, and the realities of social relationships in the "new" frontier. Examples include Pearl Cleage, Toni Morrison, Jewell Parker Rhodes and others who turned their attentions westward in an attempt to reconstruct prosperous and thriving communities destroyed by white capitalism, racism, and terror. Other authors like Octavia Butler frequently positioned the west as a platform for Afrofuturism and reimagined black power.2 During this same period scholars produced multiple critical histories of blacks in the West—that is, histories that did not focus solely on including Blacks in Western historiography, but rather...

The Wandering Character in the Coen Brothers’ Films: When the Southern Gothic Meets the Western

The wandering character is a regular feature in the Coen Brothers’ films. Roaming the American South and West, two regions those directors have explored on various occasions, Coenian wanderers are mysterious, ominous characters, often grotesque, most of them undoubtedly having Gothic roots. If the image of the lonesome cowboy traditionally haunts classical Westerns, the bounty hunter chasing outlaws remains a key character of the spaghetti Western, and revisionist Westerns in general. Those archetypes can be found in their contemporary versions in Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987) or No Country for Old Men (2007) – movies in which the iconography of the Western is pregnant – and to some extent in Fargo (1996) which provides a re-reading of the frontier myth. Characters roaming the American territory in search of money or adventure are also part of the Southern literary tradition. The Coens admitted they had Flannery O’Connor’s works in mind when they created some of the characters in The Ladykillers (2004), or O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), both taking place in Mississippi. Dishonest preachers, traveling salesmen or runaway prisoners have replaced cowboys and bounty hunters in the Coens’ Southern films, but their whereabouts are always used as a pretext to discover American regionalisms. Finally, what seems to be a specificity of the Coens’ films is the phenomenon of hybridization between Southern and Western cultures which became very clear in Barton Fink (1991) and resurfaced in No Country for Old Men and True Grit (2010), laying stress on the influence of Gothic and Southern grotesque subtexts in which the wanderer plays a prominent part. Focusing on an analysis of the Coen brothers’ Western/Southern films through the critical tool of the wandering character, this article will seek to emphasize the possible parallels that can be drawn between Southern and Western cultures, in literature and cinema, arguing that the Gothic roots of the wandering character were transferred from European literature to American Western and Southern literatures and popular culture, thus becoming essential to the generic hybridization pervading the Coens’ filmography.

Myth in Black: Revisionismo ed epica in Django Unchained

This article aims to investigate the role of the German mythology in Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist western Django Unchained (2012). According to the following analysis, the director uses the western formula and aesthetics to characterize Django as a black cowboy in the antebellum south. However, while portraying the protagonist as a renovated champion of a displaced West, Tarantino resorts to the German epic in order to make Django an iconic hero like Siegfried, German emblem of morality and masculinity. As in the German legend – where the knight goes on a quest to rescue his beloved and prove his heroic skills –, Django overcomes several challenges to be finally recognized as an uncontested hero, emblem of manliness, strength, and moral.

In Memoriam: Susan Hawkins (1946–2016)

We mourn the loss of Susan Hawkins, respected member of the Cormac McCarthy Society and participant in many Society-sponsored conferences and activities. Professor Hawkins earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Portland State University and in 1981 received her PhD from the University of Oregon with a dissertation, “The Poetics of the Postmodern American Prose Poem.” She was a poet herself, and her love of the power of language guided her reading, research, and teaching interests. She held teaching positions at the University of Kansas and Lewis and Clark University before settling for most of her career at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. There she taught modern and contemporary fiction and poetry to undergraduates and Master's candidates and served as English Department Chair in her last five years before retiring in 2012.Professor Hawkins won various awards and grants, among which was a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship in Bulgaria, but she was proudest of receiving the Oakland University Teaching Excellence Award in 2008. The university's most distinguished teaching award, it is given to one faculty member per year chosen from across the university's disciplines.Those who attend conferences and panels on Cormac McCarthy will remember Susan's work on Cold War themes, American imperialism, and end-times in McCarthy's later works. Her “Cold War Cowboys and the Culture of Nostalgia” (Cormac McCarthy International Conference, University of Reims, France, 2002), was selected for inclusion in Christine Chollier's Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories. Other presentations include “Renegotiating the Border(s): Cormac McCarthy's Revisionist Western Romance” (Great Lakes American Studies Association Annual Conference, 1997); “‘Tryin to Minimize the Pain’: The End of Things in Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain” (Cormac McCarthy Annual Conference, Austin, 2000); “Out of the Preterite World: Crossing into the Cold War” (American Literature Association, Boston, 2005); and “Historical Endings, Vestigial Times: Cormac McCarthy's The Road” (American Literature Association Symposium on American Fiction, San Diego, 2006). In the final years of her career, Professor Hawkins undertook an extended research project entitled “Chronicles of the Late World: Cormac McCarthy's The Road,” and she delivered a series of related papers from this project at the American Literature Association in Boston, 2007; the Cormac McCarthy Society International Conference in Warwick, England, 2009; and the American Literature Association Fiction Symposium, Savannah, 2011.Society members will miss Professor Hawkins' wit and humor, her feistiness, her capacity for friendship, and her support for the work of her colleagues and students.

Demythologizing American Frontier Myth through the Fusion of 3D Technology: Focus on Avatar(2009)

This paper aims to find the 21st revisionist Western and demythologizing frontier myth through James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). The revisionist western reveals the myth of America or the frontier myth should be written through a new alternative narrative. Avatar carefully portrays a newly worked-out revisionist western by using 3D technology and new types of cinematic language such as emotion capture and new characters like Na’vi. In addition, Avatar leaves such a peculiar feeling of nostalgia toward the viewers which makes them wish to remain at Pandora with Na ‘vi tribe. By demythologizing frontier myth, Avatar writes back American frontier myth not by writing it as an extension of White supremacy but as a story on universal respect for life and the environment and toward the Other as Na ‘vi keeps saying, I see you.

Orange is the warmest color: mood and chromatic temperature in Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller

This article examines the aesthetic, affective, and character-based significance of the color orange in Altman’s revisionist western. Drawing on the concept of Stimmung (“mood” or “attunement”), it focuses on the film’s interplay between cool and warm tones, wherein different shades of orange contend with blues and grays. The essay considers the ways in which this chromatic scheme describes the inner lives of the two central characters; it also shows how this use of color opens onto a politicized critique of the mortal violence, greed, and inequality that put an end to their partnership.

Still in the Saddle: The Hollywood Western, 1969–1980 by Andrew Patrick Nelson

Reviewed by: Still in the Saddle: The Hollywood Western, 1969–1980 by Andrew Patrick Nelson Kevin L. Stoehr Andrew Patrick Nelson, Still in the Saddle: The Hollywood Western, 1969–1980. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2015. 249pp. Paper, $19.95. Still in the Saddle is a welcome addition to the body of film scholarship dealing with the movie “oater.” It focuses on the production of the Western during a decade (or so) of American cinema in which the conventions of Hollywood’s “Classical Golden Age” were amplified as well as subverted. The phase of the Western under discussion was bookended on one side by The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and, on the other, by Heaven’s Gate and The Long Riders. Nelson’s overall thesis is a convincing one, especially given the evidence he presents: the role of the revisionist Western has been overemphasized to such a degree that the full diversity of the Western in this period has been overlooked, especially when we consider the movie Western’s overall history. Above all, Nelson rejects the view that a genre (and especially the Western) follows some fixed pattern of evolution, self-critique, and then decline. He points quite rightly to the fact that the movie Western has almost always followed a cyclical course of regeneration in which the genre [End Page 115] tends to reinforce as well as reinvigorate its defining conventions. The view that the period in question is chiefly defined by its collective tendency toward revisionism is an overgeneralization resulting from an overemphasis (by some film scholars) on certain critically acclaimed Westerns that are revisionist in large part: Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, and Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, to name but three. Some of this oversimplification can be blamed on the auteurist tendency to focus on a very small group of respected filmmakers at the forefront of the “New Hollywood” renaissance. As Nelson indicates, this period witnessed added instances of genre revivalism, including more than several movies featuring that iconic star of the classical Western, John Wayne. Furthermore, by examining the highest-earning Westerns, Nelson demonstrates that while certain anticonventional Westerns (including quasi-Westerns) did indeed top box office charts during this time—Blazing Saddles, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jeremiah Johnson, and Little Big Man being the top four moneymakers, in that order—audiences were drawn as well to the more traditional Westerns starring Wayne. True Grit, Rooster Cogburn, Big Jake, and The Cowboys also appeared among the dozen highest earners. Nelson points out as well that Wayne’s later Westerns are not always as purely traditional as some might think. While viewing the revisionist Western as typically involved in either “allegorizing contemporary politics” (the Vietnam-Watergate era) or “deconstructing the myth of the frontier hero,” Nelson sees many of Wayne’s final Westerns as testaments to the need to transmit the values of the frontier hero to a new generation (145). In sum, the kind of “updating” and “reworking” of the genre’s conventions that help define the revisionist Western are also present to some degree in these less-subversivefilms. And furthermore, the “cyclical play of repetition and variation” exemplified in the many Westerns of this period is “less the product of individual filmmakers than a key characteristic of the genre” (137). One minor qualm concerns the book’s structure. What distinguishes the chapter on Wayne from several others is how it is unified around a particular artist and follows a chronology of filmmaking. I wish Nelson had included a few more of these artist-unifying chapters, [End Page 116] which might have expanded on the treatment of certain films, especially the 1970s Westerns directed by Altman, Penn, and Eastwood. He addresses both of Altman’s Westerns in an overly cursory section. In the case of Eastwood, for example, The Outlaw Josey Wales shows us, especially in connection with his earlier High Plains Drifter, how he helped recharge and reinvigorate the Western after having been influenced by two very different directors of the genre: Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. These films point forward in their distinct ways to...

Counter-Counterstorytelling: Rereading Critical Race Theory in Percival Everett’s Assumption

Counter-CounterstorytellingRereading Critical Race Theory in Percival Everett’s Assumption Matthew Mullins (bio) Percival Everett’s story “Warm and Nicely Buried” was first published in Idaho Review in 2001 before appearing at the heart of his 2004 collection, Damned If I Do. The narrative follows deputies Lem Becker and Warren Fragua as they investigate the mysterious death of a young man named José Marotta and the subsequent disappearance of José’s body from the morgue of their small New Mexico town. Warren, the only Native on the sheriff’s department payroll, reappears unchanged in Everett’s 2011 novel Assumption, but Lem is reimagined as Ogden Walker, the reserved and oftentimes out-of-place black deputy, whose heroism and integrity position him squarely in the tradition of classic lawmen of the American West. In Assumption, the José Marotta case is just one in a series of cases that culminates with the murder of Terry Lowell, a local Fish and Game officer. From the outset of this final episode everyone but those who know Ogden best suspect him of Terry’s murder. As the story reaches its climax, Ogden has exhausted every possible lead that might vindicate him, but as it turns out his battle for exoneration has been fueled by guilt not innocence. In a startling twist, Warren confronts Ogden at the scene of the crime in the middle of the night: “Warren couldn’t see his friend’s face, not that he would have recognized him if he could. ‘I think you killed this man right here. Somehow Terry Lowell found you with the body and you shot him, too.’” To which Ogden responds: “That’s pretty much it” (Everett, Assumption 224). With these four words, spoken in a shockingly matter-of-fact tone, the novel capitalizes on its title, eclipsing assumptions about its hero, the themes of guilt and innocence, and the Western genre all in a single revelatory flash. Assumption is not Everett’s first rodeo. Amongst his previous novels at least five have received critical attention for their ties to the Western, including Walk Me to the Distance (1985), God’s Country (1994), Watershed (1996), Wounded (2005), and Grand Canyon, Inc. (2001). As Ogden Walker’s literary genealogy suggests, Everett has also taken up the Western genre in his short fiction. All three of his earlier collections, The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair (1987), Big Picture (1996), and Damned If I Do (2004), trace the contours of at least a few Western towns and characters, as does 2015’s Half an Inch of Water. Literary critics have almost unanimously treated Everett’s Western fiction as revisionist history committed to rewriting the Western with an eye toward the narratives of oppression and marginalization that often go unrecognized or unowned in the genre. Yves Bonnemère and Leland Krauth offer insightful readings of Everett’s characters, who often appear or even claim to be traditional Western character types, but in satirical and ironic ways turn out to be something else. Curt Marder, for instance, the white, would-be hero of God’s Country, “claims to be a real cowboy, a tough fellow, but from the very beginning what he says [End Page 457] points in the other direction” (Bonnemère 149–50). Among other problems, the should-be good-hearted cowboy is plagued by an unshakable racism. “Confronted with black men as well as Indians,” Krauth says of Marder, “he is full of prejudice; he considers all racial ‘others’ not just inferior but even sub-human, savages beneath the law, with no claims to justice” (319). William R. Handley and Michael K. Johnson have examined Everett’s Western writing as a broader body of work, and note two distinct rewriting approaches, the one almost slapstick and the other more subtle. Handley maintains that “if Everett’s other westerns, God’s Country and Grand Canyon, Inc., are mischievous re-workings of generic conventions that call to mind Mark Twain, then Watershed is a non-formulaic but equally revisionist western” (305). Johnson also sees Watershed as a turning point in Everett’s Western fiction, noting that the “more recent stories are often developmental narratives that trace the evolution of...

“Kesarjanaan Revisionis” dalam Studi Al-Qur’an (Upaya Merekonstruksi Sumber Awal Kemunculan Teks al-Qur’an)

The challenge on the Qur’anic studies will never be end. For many centuries, The Qur’an always attracted many people attention all over the world, to treat or to examine the truth; whether the Qur’an as the word of God or the word of Muhammad ?. This is therefore, starting from that point, This paper particularly will attempt to explores a new trend of Qur’anic studies by the emerging of Revisionist Western scholarship theories of Islamic origins. In their analysis shown that the documentary sources or the beginnings of historical writing in the Islamic tradition must be considered in controversies. One might argues that the Qur’an contains several different kinds of material, hypothesizes that different parts of the Qur’an originated in different communities, some or all of which, were located not in Arabia, but in Iraq or Syria. Moreover, the analysis come to the conclusion that the Qur’anic text as we now know coalesced only slowly and does not assume final form until the late second/eighth century or even later. Taking the notion that the traditions about Islamic origins are the products of long and partly oral evolution. The aim of this paper then will describe the fact on how the revisionist western scholarship try to reconfigurate the reliable information about Islamic origin.[Tantangan studi al-Qur’an tidak akan pernah berakhir. Selama berabad-abad lamanya, al-Qur’an selalu menjadi perhatian banyak orang di seluruh penjuru dunia. Guna menguji kebenaran, yakni apakah ia benar-benar firman Tuhan atau kah perkataan Muhammad ? oleh karena itu, berangkat dari point ini, tulisan ini secara spesifik akan mengeksplorasi tren terkini tentang studi al-Qur’an dengan memunculkan teori kemunculan Islam oleh kesarjanaan Barat Revisionis. Dalam analisis mereka menunjukkan bahwa sumber documenter atau sejarah awal penulisan al-Qur’an mengalami kontroversi. Ada yang beranggapan bahwa al- Qur’an berisi beberapa macam perbedaan materi atau redaksi, sebagian dari itu berasal dari perbedaan komunitas. Sebagian lainnya berargumen bahwa al-Qur’an turun bukan di jazirah Arab, melainkan di Iraq dan Syria. analisis sampai pada kesimpulan bahwa teks Al-Qur’an seperti yang kita tahu sekarang perlahan-lahan mengalami bentuk fibalnya kecuali pada akhir abad kedua/kedelapan atau bahkan kemudian. Atas dasar itu, kemunculan Islam (al-Qur’an) adalah produk evolusi yang berasal dari manusia jauh belakangan. Singkatnya, Tulisan ini akan mendeskripsikan realitas tentang bagaimana kesarjanaan Revisionis mencoba menata ulang data yang tersedia tentang kemunculan Islsam (al-Qur’an).]

The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend GlennFrankel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend Glenn Frankel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.The collaborations of John Ford and John Wayne, beginning with 1939's Stagecoach, have come to define the Western genre for many. This relationship would culminate in the 1956 masterpiece, The Searchers. Often cited as the emergence of the revisionist Western, The Searchers continues to receive critical attention and accolades: it has been ranked the seventh-greatest film of all time by the 2012 Sight and Sound poll and the best Western and twelfth-best film of all time by the American Film Institute. In Glenn Frankel's most recent book, he traces the origin of the acclaimed film to the myths surrounding the 1836 abduction of Cynthia Ann Parker by a band of Comanche.The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend is organized around the four key elements of the myth's development-Cynthia Ann Parker, her mixed-blood son Quanah Parker who would become the last great Comanche chief, the novelist Alan LeMay who penned The Searchers in 1954, and John Ford's production of the film in 1956. While the legend exists in various manifestations, the primary tenets are Parker's abduction in 1836, James Parker's obsessive search, Cynthia Ann Parker's marriage to a Comanche chief, her eventual rescue at the Pease River Massacre in 1860, and her unwillingness to reintegrate herself or her daughter, Prairie Flower, back into white society. In the absence of a personal narrative written by either Cynthia Ann or Quanah Parker, Frankel draws upon primary sources ranging from military reports and family histories to Comanche oral tradition in creating a working history of the Cynthia Ann Parker legend. Throughout the sections devoted to Cynthia Ann and Quanah, Frankel achieves a lyric narration that continues to instill the mythic and legendary into his construction of their tale.Shifting focus to Parker's oldest child, Frankel explicates the means through which Quanah attained cultural prominence as the heir to and essential element of his mother's legend. Frankel further explains Quanah Parker's rise to the position of chief and his often controversial tribal politics that emphasized integration and coexistence with white America.The sections devoted to LeMay's novel and Ford's film draw on biographic information and first hand accounts of each artist's process. Discussing LeMay's craft, Frankel emphasizes the breadth and depth of his research into captivity narratives, which evinces the connection between The Searchers and Cynthia Ann Parker. …

Ride, boldly ride: the evolution of the American Western

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction 1. Diverse Perspectives in Silent Westerns: Landscape, Morality, and the Native American 2. Not at Home on the Range: Women against the Frontier in The Wind 3. He Went That-Away: The Comic Western and Ruggles of Red Gap 4. Landscape and Standard-Setting in the 1930s Western: The Big Trail and Stagecoach 5. Indian- Fighting, Nation-Building, and Homesteading in the A-Western: Northwest Passage and The Westerner 6. Howard Hawks and John Wayne: Red River and El Dorado 7. The Postwar Psychological Western (1946-- 1956): My Darling Clementine to Jubal 8. John Ford's Later Masterpieces: The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 9. The Existential and Revisionist Western: Comanche Station to The Wild Bunch and Beyond 10. Eastwood and the American Western: High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Unforgiven 11. Coda: From Lonesome Dove (1989) to Cowboys and Aliens (2011) Notes Bibliography Index

Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film

Reviewed by: Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film Chris Stone M. Elise Marubbio Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film University of Kentucky Press, 2006; $30 Scholars have tended to encode the cinematic Indian as male, relegating Native women to the periphery. In challenging this literature, M. Elise Marubbio refrains from engaging the entire range of screen representations of Native women. Instead, she focuses on the “Celluloid Maiden,” an alluring, exotic young woman who engenders her own demise by entering into a relationship with the white hero. As she stresses, the Celluloid Maiden, is neither a static nor a monolithic figure. Variations exist; filmmakers decide which elements to incorporate; their choices, in turn, speak to the broader cultural and political milieu in which they operate. Despite these variations, Marubbio contends that the Celluloid Maiden, as the romantic, doomed avatar of a vanishing people, has sabotaged attempts to depict Native Americans with greater sensitivity and empathy. Marubbio traces the Celluloid Maiden back to the silent era, foregrounding two subtypes: the Celluloid Princess and the Sexualized Maiden. As the female counterpart of the ignoble savage, the Sexualized Maiden, as mandated by her “savage” blood, is a promiscuous, sexually aggressive femme fatale of mixed parentage who threatens to castrate white males. If this figure endangers white masculinity, violates sexual mores, and stokes fears of moral and racial degradation, filmmakers manage these threats to the social order by killing her off. In contrast, the Celluloid Princess “symbolizes the ‘best’ of Native America” (6). She is unspoiled, innocent, exotic, beautiful, and open to engagement with white culture. In “helper” films, the Celluloid Princess, in gratitude for a past kindness, sacrifices her life to warn whites of an impending Indian attack. In “lover” films, the Celluloid Princess marries and procreates with a transplanted Easterner seeking sanctuary in the West. With time, a crisis imperils their interracial union. Either she discovers that her husband loves another (white) woman, or she realizes [End Page 44] she cannot forsake her people and accompany him on his return to the East, or she becomes inconsolable after her husband enrolls their child in an eastern school. Whatever the crisis, the resolution is the same: she commits suicide, thereby releasing her husband from his obligations, facilitating his return to “civilization,” and ensuring the benefits of civilization for their progeny. The Sexualized Maiden and Celluloid Princess each receded from screens in the 1930s (for reasons Marubbio never adequately foregrounds). A lustier, deadlier, more wanton Sexualized Maiden did reemerge, however, in the 1940s. As in the silent era, these films encoded female assertiveness as deviant, racialized promiscuity, conjoined miscegenation with degeneracy, and cast interracial romance and female sexuality as threats in need of containment. If Sexualized Maidens continued to appear through the 1960s, Marubbio argues that filmmakers fused the Sexualized Maiden and Celluloid Princess into a hybrid figure in the early 1970s. The catalyst for this merger was the ascendancy of the revisionist western, which recast westward expansion as a tragic tale of murder and dispossession rather than an inspiring story of progress and nation-building. The Celluloid Maiden in these films, while as sexually assertive as the Sexualized Maiden of yesteryear, earned admiration, not scorn. Filmmakers cast the Celluloid Maiden as a harbinger of the sexual revolution and used her to inveigh against a “civilization” they deemed repressive. On the other hand, while these maidens resembled Celluloid Princesses in that they were full-bloodied Indians of social standing who entered into romantic relationships with whites, hybrid maidens practiced a markedly different brand of assimilation. Rather than seeking acceptance among whites, they detached their white lovers from “civilization.” Yet, for all of their good intentions and countercultural leanings, revisionist westerns, according to Marubbio, were less progressive than advertised. The Celluloid Maiden still died, an outcome that not only perpetuated the image of Native Americans as noble, exotic creatures destined for extinction, but also undercut the revisionist film’s bid to posit Indian culture as a viable alternative to the status quo. As revisionist films attest, the historically and ideologically laden baggage of genre can subtly undermine the liberal intentions of filmmakers. If Marubbio demonstrates nothing...