Redefining colonial identities in contemporary transnational westerns: Tracker (2010) and Black ’47 (2018)

In this article, I discuss two contemporary films that exemplify the use of the western genre for historical reassessments in varied national contexts: Tracker (2010, dir. Ian Sharp, New Zealand/UK) and Black ’47 (2018, dir. Lance Daly, Ireland). The two films employ similar plot structures, based on the motif of pursuit. In Tracker, set in the aftermath of the Boer wars, a former Boer fighter, now in New Zealand, searches for an assimilated Māori sailor who has been accused of killing a British soldier. In Black ’47, set in Ireland at the time of the Great Famine, an Irishman who served in the British colonial army in the Middle East strives to take revenge on the landowner responsible for the death of his relatives. A mission is organized to prevent him, led by an alienated veteran of the colonial wars. Tracker and Black ’47 show that as a result of colonization various directions of mobility emerged that triggered reinventions of predefined identities within the colonizer/colonized binary. In the two films under discussion, the use of the western helps to address the problem of identity construction by exploring the experience of liminality as a factor behind the dissolution of colonial cultural hierarchies. The protagonists of Tracker and Black ’47 embody the kind of mobility that signifies lasting displacement, seen as a larger syndrome of the era of colonial empires.