Aboriginal Australian Cowboys and the Art of Appropriation
IN AMERICA, THE IMAGE OF THE COWBOY configures the ideals of courage, freedom, equality, and individualism.1 As close readers of the genre of the Western have argued, the cowboy fulfills a mythical role in American popular culture, as he stands between the so-called settlement of the country and its wilderness, between an idea of civilization and the depiction of savage Indians. The Western vaulted the cowboy to iconic status, as stage shows, novels, and films encoded his virtues in narratives set on the North American frontier of the nineteenth century. He became a figure of the popular national imagination just after this frontier had been conquered.2 From the beginning, the fictional cowboy was a character who played upon the nation’s idea of itself and its history. He came to assume the status of national myth and informed America’s economic, political, and social landscape over the course of the twentieth century.3 Yet this is only one nation’s history of the cowboy. As America became one of the largest exporters of culture on the planet, it exported its Western imagery, genre films, and novels. These cowboys were transformed in the hands of other cultural producers in other countries. From East German Indianerfilme to Italian spaghetti Westerns and Mexican films about caudillos (military leaders), the
BROWN COWBOYS ON FILM: RACE, HETERONORMATIVITY AND SETTLER COLONIALISM
This dissertation analyzes minority-produced westerns as examples of settler cinemas. Though they are produced by subjects at the margins of settler society, I argue that settler colonialism is, nonetheless, a significant cultural context shaping these films. The dissertation intervenes into existing film studies scholarship, which has tended to frame settler colonialism as the historical context structuring the racial oppression of Native Americans, rather than as a constitutive feature of all forms of racial subjugation. As a result, the connections and investments of other racialized subjects within the dynamics of settler colonialism have received limited attention. Drawing on queer, race and Native American/Indigenous studies, the dissertation develops and deploys an intersectional framework for examining film that illuminates the fraught relationship between racialized minorities, Indigenous peoples and settler colonialism. To make its argument, the dissertation examines three sets of films: black westerns, South Asian diaspora films, and Jackie Chan’s martial arts westerns. In each chapter, I consider how existing film scholarship has read these respective films before offering an alternative interpretation that draws attention to their settler colonial contexts. For example, black westerns have been interpreted in terms of anti-racist historical revisionism; South Asian diasporic films have been analyzed in terms of their liminal position between Hollywood and Bollywood film industries; and Jackie Chan’s western parodies have been interpreted in terms of postmodern mimicry. My own analysis suggests that settler colonialism is exercised through cultural fantasies – which I term heterocolonialities – such as those of property ownership, heterosexual romance, family and “settling down”. I demonstrate that representations of the racialized cowboy in the minority-produced western play an ambiguous function in relation to ongoing colonialism. On the one hand, these representations normalize colonial violence when the heteronormative fantasies underpinning the western genre are left intact. On the other hand, representations of the racialized cowboy pose challenges to colonial violence by drawing attention to the discourses of race and whiteness informing the western genre. This ambiguity highlights the complex ways in which racialized minorities negotiate their position in settler societies, simultaneously challenging and supporting the logics of colonial power.
"The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative
Critics of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements—gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony— or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some way examines the main theme of the text, the appropriation of power and authority, little of it accomplishes both the textual and contextual analysis that Castle Rackrent deserves. Exploring Thady’s “plain round tale” as a slave narrative in content and form sheds new light on the work both textually and contextually; in Thady Quirk, Edgeworth has created a typical slave narrator who recounts a history of oppression which is ultimately mediated by an outside editor. As John Cronin writes of Castle Rackrent, “What Maria Edgeworth has given us . . . is a magnificently realised slave, a terrifying vision of the results of colonial misrule. There must have been a moment of clearly deliberate artistic decision in which she realised that what needed to be said must be said through one of the submerged people.”1 The three main textual elements of the narrative indicate its likeness to typical slave narratives: its presentation of a conflicted slave narrator, its use of the framing device of the outside editor, and its narrative structure of episodic anecdotes that utilizes memory, description, and didacticism.