South by Southwest: Westerns and Postcolonial Resistance

Abstract

South by Southwest examines the interplay between tropes from the Hollywood Western film genre and postcolonial masculinities and identity formation, with chapters situated in South Africa, Ireland, the Caribbean, and India. Each chapter pairs literary work and film to pursue this line of inquiry, as the study attempts to critically analyze works that reflect on the cultural and political complexities of pre- and post-imperial statehood, allowing it to engage with themes of identity, power, and representation that resonate within both American and postcolonial contexts. The texts considered explore the possibilities and paradoxes involved in transnational refraction when Hollywood genres are exported to the postcolonial world. Ultimately, the dissertation finds that radicality emerges from the Western when it is filtered through considerations of linguistic imperialism and state power, and that its latent conservatism survives when these factors are set aside in an avowal of ideological formations of heroes and villains under colonial logics.