Postwestern Horizons Series

During the post-World War II period, the Western, like America’s other great film genres, appeared to collapse as a result of revisionism and the emergence of new forms. Perhaps, however, as theorists like Gilles Deleuze suggest, it remains, simply “maintaining its empty frame.” Yet this frame is far from empty, as Post-Westerns shows us: rather than collapse, the Western instead found a new form through which to scrutinize and question the very assumptions on which the genre was based. Employing the ideas of critics such as Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Rancière, Neil Campbell examines the haunted inheritance of the Western in contemporary U.S. culture. His book reveals how close examination of certain postwar films—including Bad Day at Black Rock, The Misfits, Lone Star, Easy Rider, Gas Food Lodging, Down in the Valley, and No Country for Old Men—reconfigures our notions of region and nation, the Western, and indeed the West itself.

Campbell suggests that post-Westerns are in fact “ghost-Westerns,” haunted by the earlier form’s devices and styles in ways that at once acknowledge and call into question the West, both as such and in its persistent ideological framing of the national identity and values.

The Rhizomatic West

by Neil Campbell

Published 1 January 2008

Is the American West in Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns" the same American West we find in Douglas Coupland's Generation X? In Jim Jarmusch's movies? In Calexico's music? Or is the American West, as this book tells us, a constantly moving, mutating idea within a complex global culture? And what, precisely (or better yet, imprecisely) does it mean? Using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of the rhizome, Neil Campbell shows how the West (or west-ness) continually breaks away from a mainstream notion of American "rootedness" and renews and transforms itself in various cultural forms.A region long traversed by various transient peoples (from tribes and conquerors to immigrants, traders, and trappers), the West reflects a mythic quest for settlement, permanence, and synthesis - even notions of a national or global identity - at odds with its rootless history, culture, and nature.
Crossing the concept of "roots" with "routes," this book shows how notions of the West - in representations ranging from literature and film to photography, music, and architectural theory - give expression to ideas about identity, nationhood, and belonging in a world increasingly defined by movement across time and borders. "The Rhizomatic West" offers a new vision of the American West as a hybrid, performative space, a staging place for myriad intersecting and constantly changing identities.