Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film ed. by Hervé Mayer and David Roche (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film ed. by Hervé Mayer and David Roche
• Daniel R. Adler

Hervé Mayer and David Roche, eds., Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2022. 318 pp. Hardcover, $90; paper, $40; e-book, $39.99.

This collection of articles casts a transnational lens on the Western film and its mythos, from its origins in the work of John Ford to its modern global representations in Japan, South Africa, Australia, and other nations. Through transnationalism and imperialism, the authors that Mayer and Roche have collected contend that the Western genre retains its vibrancy through its incorporation of Otherness, rather than the settler-colonial ideology with which it is often associated.

The collection is divided into thirds, and the first covers the North American Western in its subversions of Hollywood—describing the different intertitles used in the US version of The Iron Horse (1924) and its exported British version; how Fort Apache (1948) incorporates Irish songs and other depictions of Irishness; and how Vera Cruz (1954), filmed in Mexico and politically aligned with the rebel Juaristas, can be seen as a decolonial text. These elements are often overlooked, the authors argue, and can be interpreted in a regenerative capacity within the genre for their hybridity and subtle criticisms of the US imperialist project. The final essay in the first part treats the subject of the frontera in Tejano (2018), which complicates the stereotypes and traditional simplifications of "border" states.

The collection's second part begins in Europe, with an article on the successful Yugoslav film Kapetan Leši (1960), which plays with the Western trope of the Indian as Other and repackages the US form with local ideology to depict the resistance of Kosovar Albanians in the face of a Yugoslav state-building strategy. The next article reads Lawrence of Arabia (1962) as an empire film and connects that genre to the Western as an example of transatlantic shared values. The [End Page 71] author highlights T. E. Lawrence as similar to Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956) in being a man caught between two cultures, which complicates a purely imperialist reading of both films. Next is an example of the savior film, The Dark Valley (2014), which doubles as a Heimat film, an Austrian anti-urban subgenre with origins in the late nineteenth century. Its director and writer, Andreas Prochaska, is cast as a Nestbeschmutzer and the film reads as a critique of repressed Austrians. Adieu Gary (2009) and Les Cowboys (2015) treat French transnationalism in the post-Western's metaphorical capacity to reflect contemporary national issues such as miscegenation, "the deterioration of the social republic and the integration of Muslim minorities in France" (159).

This collection helpfully reveals neglected areas of Western film study, from silent Italian Westerns inspired by Buffalo Bill to the Brazilian Nordestern to the "Eastern," or Asian Western. Throughout the third part of the book, which treats the Western in a postcolonial or post-empire context, the authors describe the generic hybridizations that manifest as deterritorializations of the genre, from Antônio das Mortes (1969) to Jauja (2015) and "bad films" such as Sukiyaki Western Django (2007). South African and Australian Westerns are viewed as revising colonial legacies, and Roche makes a compelling argument that The Tracker (2002) and Sweet Country (2017) decolonize white legacies through a universalizing force of Otherness. Such representations stand side by side in an interrogation of "the meaning of cultural history and … the participation of others in [the Western's] construction and deconstruction" (299). In this collection "transnational" connotes hybrid, local, and creative critiques of imperial ideology, which raises questions about the future of an adaptive genre.

Throughout these articles the authors recast the Western as striving to incorporate an Other, rather than being built solely on violence, panoramic vistas, and well-worn genre tropes. This logic qualifies why there are so many attempts to stultify or demarcate later Westerns—and helps explain their continued popularity. It is also a testament to how well Mayer and Roche have compiled these articles thematically to document the Western's lasting and evolving legacy. [End Page 72]

Daniel R...