De-Westernising the Western: Remapping Genre and Nation in World Cinema

This project aims to remap genre theory in order to make it newly relevant and freshly indicative of transnational film studies and the rapidly evolving reality of World Cinema. This thesis will re-orient and re calibrate western conceptions of genre studies with their elitist colonialist values by demonstrating the need for a radical dewesternisation of the system that maintains all other cinemas beyond Hollywood as other in a world thought subject to its colonialist rules but actually infinitely more vibrant unique and independent. Based on the precept that if one can dewesternise the Western film genre then one can dewesternise any genre this thesis analyses worldwide iterations of the iconography narratives stylistic tropes and violent tendencies of the Western genre in order to remap both the retrograde concept of the Western as exclusive heritage of American filmmakers and the progressive in surrectionism of World Cinema in the twenty first century.

In order to avoid the stagnation of traditional genre studies and to integrate the project within World Cinema theory this thesis will follow Shohat and Stam in their call for unthinking Eurocentrism 1994. Instead of devising an opposition between the West and the rest it will look at the West from the perspective of the rest and will propose a new outline of the Western where films will be approached in relation to their local regional or national discourses but also as manifestations of globalisation and interconnectedness. The Western will then be devised as a locus for World Cinema contestation that as a case study can be extrapolated into other genres and cinemas.

The proposed thesis builds on my successfully passed MA by Research dissertation A Gun of Ones Own Gender Representation in Contemporary Westerns, which studied the changes undergone by the Western within the current feminist and identity struggles in features such as Meeks Cutoff Django Unchained Godless and Westworld. I have also explored these issues in a chapter in the volume TV Series as Literature: From the Ordinary to the Unthinkable and my forthcoming chapter in the volume Quantum Quixote Myth and Multiplicity. These outputs show my preparedness experience and commitment to undertake this research.