Indecipherable Lostness

This chapter explores the play with genre in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010), a film which troubles the relationship between many familiar signifiers of the western genre—including its mute characters—and their customary significations. The film does not simply rearrange meanings; binary Manichaeism is not replaced by an alternative ethical system, female characters do not become active narrative drivers, and the Native American character does not become heroic. Instead, meaning is complicated, as inarticulate silence disrupts the settlers’ sense of identity and the Native American becomes an inscrutable signifier for both salvation and destruction. This chapter argues that genre is used as a critical (rather than textual) apparatus for marshalling films into pre-arranged significance that relies on the seamless operation of genre signifiers. Meek’s Cutoff makes visible the complications at work in all westerns, invites a reappraisal of these eccentric films, and critiques genre as an ideological knowledge system.

Performance, Paradigms of Visual Culture and The Matrices of Representation: Anna Deavere Smith’s on The Road

This paper attempts to put radically in to question the hegemonic choices of representation in western visual culture by examining Anna Deavere Smith’s performance series On the Road: A Search for American Character. What is brought to the sharp focus of this study is the logic of perpetuating the conventional categories of race, ethnicity, gender and age in performance – a logic that prevails in the mainstream media; more specifically in theatre – and the unmasking of these categories in representation. Then with a shout we rushed upon him and locked our arms about him; but the ancient god had not forgotten his craft and cunning. He became in turn a bearded lion, a snake, a panther, a monstrous boar; then running water, then a towering and leafy tree, but we kept our hold, unflinching and undismayed, and in the end this master of dreaded secrets began to tire. So he broke into speech ... . The Odyssey IV, 384 ff.

Toward an American Greek Orthodoxy

This chapter charts the Greek Orthodox Church's efforts to accelerate and deepen its American character. It talks about the Americanized second- and third-generation Greek Orthodox Americans that had been instilled with a strong sense of Greek Orthodox identity. It discusses the pan-Orthodox conference held at the Antiochian Church's retreat in Ligonier, Pennsylvania that acquired a degree of notoriety because of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople's rejection of its outcome. The chapter discusses Charles Moskos, a Greek immigrant who became an authority on the sociology of the US military. It analyzes Moskos's belief that Greek immigrants need to reorder their lives on arrival and conform to the socioeconomic realities of the New World and to its cultural norms.

True Grit: Dirt, Subjectivity and the Female Body in Contemporary Westerns

This article considers the significance of dirt to three Western texts: Lonesome Land, Mudbound, and Brokeback Mountain. The overall argument is that the more complicated and ambiguous dirt is permitted to be, the more imaginative and critical potential it has for the iconography of the contemporary Western. Taking B.M. Bower’s 1912 Western Romance as a model, it is argued that the dirt aesthetic is crucial to how Westerns construct the myth of the American character. This is further complicated by intersections between representations of the White rural poor, women (as for both Lonesome Land and Mudbound, there are connotations of sexual impurity in the dirty White female body), and representations of queerness. In the two versions of Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx’s short story and Ang Lee’s film, we see the ambiguity of dirt: it can be read as an essential part of the American land, or as polluting waste matter. The critical framework draws on feminist history and criticism via Kathleen Healey and Phyllis Palmer; sociological theories of imagining poverty in North America via Kate Cairns and Winfried Fluck; and queer theory via Christopher Schmidt.

Whose Citizenship? Social Conflict over Property in the United States

Land ownership and the rights in property are central to the American character, having originated as part of the colonial dialogue that led to the American revolution. Yet there has also been substantial social conflict over who has claims to property, and in whose interest. This article presents an interpretive history of citizenship claims to land and property from the colonial period to the present. It argues that a theme in this history is an ever expanding realm of citizenship claims against the individual owner, most markedly since the beginning of the twentieth century. The emergence of the modern environmental movement and a counter so-called private property rights movement in the 1970s forward has accentuated this social conflict. The future likely holds increased conflict in an era of social and political polarisation. The outcome is uncertain, and will depend on democratic dialogue among those with strongly opposing perspectives.

‘I Am Also Having Mother Once, and She Is Loving Me’: Reading Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation in a Post-Network Era

This article examines Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, with a special focus on the final scene, in which a counsellor is assigned to help the protagonist deal with the trauma of having been a child soldier. While the casting of a black African actor as the counsellor in Fukunaga’s film may appear to detract from the novel’s interrogation of the uneven power relations between Africa and America, an interpretation oscillating between novel and film reveals that there may be some benefits to erasing the white saviour figure from the scene. The erasure of a white American character not only redirects the focus to relations among Africans but also comments indirectly on the circulation of transnational films via streaming services such as Netflix. Reading in between adapted text and adaptation also yields some important insights about Beasts’ critical engagement with the politics of circulation, reception, and consumption of child-soldier narratives at a time when such narratives have become popular among transnational audiences.