The Girl-Child,the Outlaw,and the Land/Woman

Abstract

Through three separate-yet-connected instances of spectatorial re-appropriation of the Western cinematic iconicity, I explore how the genre framed an understanding of a war that is not only geographically but also historically and politically far away from the Western’s American home culture. The war in question is one that broke the country of Yugoslavia apart at the end of the 20th century (a century that is, incidentally, also known as the century of cinema). From prominent Yugoslav artists re-writing iconic Western imagery to refuse troubling divisions haunting their home country, to my own personal experiences with surviving the war—fused with my childhood love of the Western film genre—I explore how the Western mythology was re-appropriated to symbolize something entirely different from what it might have meant in its home context. While this re-appropriation might potentially erase or reconfigure some of the Western’s domestic complexities, it creates many new ones, offering an opportunity to explore the question of how trans-cultural “fantasy echoes” offer sites of creative possibility and of insightful re-readings rather than of reductive limitations.