CFP reminder: When the Western meets the Southern, UVSQ, April 19-20 2013

From: Claire Dutriaux <[email protected]>

APPEL A COMMUNICATIONS / CALL FOR PAPERS
QUAND LE WEST/ERN RENCONTRE LE SOUTH/ERN
WHEN THE WEST/ERN MEETS THE SOUTH/ERN
COLLOQUE INTERNATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE


Lieu / location: Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Laboratoire Suds d’Amériques, Espaces Atlantiques (SUDS : http://www.sudam.uvsq.fr/)

Dates: les 19 et 20 avril, 2013.


Langues / languages: français & anglais / French & English


Les propositions (250 mots) sont à envoyer à / Please send a 250-word 
proposal to Claire Dutriaux, Université Paris-Sorbonne [email protected] et à Taïna 
Tuhkunen, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines 
[email protected] avant le 31 décembre, 2012 / by December 31st, 
2012.    


    Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery is often presented as the very first western in cinema history due to 
the way it sets up many of the western types and motifs found in later 
movies on the American West. Bearing in mind the interest raised by The Great Train Robbery, one might wonder why another film, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, also made in 1903, which introduces the spectator to an ostensibly Southern 
atmosphere has drawn far less attention – to the point of being easily 
“forgotten” from Porter’s filmography. However, this first film 
adaptation based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel (1852) already 
presents us with a number of fundamental motifs, tropes and narrative 
schemes highlighted by the “southern” genre, term proposed by Larry 
Langman and David Ebner in Hollywood’s Images of the South: A Century of Southern Films (2001).
    Are the reasons for this lack of recognition to be sought among the 
difficulties of the American South, marked by its “peculiar 
institutions”, of providing illustrious enough material for fiction 
(illustrious in the etymological sense of the word – illustris : 
“lighted, bright, brilliant” ; figuratively “distinguished, famous”)? Perhaps, but there seem to be plenty of other reasons for the preeminence of the 
westerns which tend to resonate with the rhetorics of discovery and 
conquest, as well as with the taming of various “wildernesses”, while 
the southern, a “bad genre”, more often focalizes on the lost and the 
obscure and browses through some of the most somber pages of American 
History.
    While it would be 
difficult to evoke the westerns and the southerns without exposing the 
question of their historical rootings and generic perimeters, one cannot overlook the way these film genres interact with American icons and 
master narratives. Similarly to the American West, the referential space named “South” has been recreated multiple times on screen with its 
symptomatic aesthetics and typologies. In 1915, with the technically and aesthetically dazzling, yet ideologically intolerable The Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith, the Southern film proved its potential as an “action movie” which was definitely on a par with westerns. A 
quarter of a century later, Gone with the Wind (1939), another crucial movie driven by its own glorifications and historical 
and cultural obliterations, confirmed the power of melodrama over 
Southern films during the reconstructions of a world “gone with the 
wind”, yet oddly enough still (as the French put it, “in the wind”) 
trendy.
    At the outset, the 
differences between the filmic West and the cinematographic South, two 
equally real and fantastic spaces, seem unquestionable. “Action films” 
on the one hand, embodied by masculine heroes, “scenarios of stagnation” on the other, centered upon plantations with their Southern Beaux and 
Belles ; vast plains to be conquered and populated in the West incompatible with the cotton fields, deleterious swamplands and the confined or ruined 
mansions in the South. Without disregarding, of course, the postures of 
the white pioneer seen in the midst of a panoramic landscape, defending 
his family against the “red-skins”, whereas another white man is ruling 
his white house as the unconditional master of black slaves.
    Beyond these clichéd images which instantly summon up a series of typical 
scenes, it is, however, possible to perceive signs of mingling 
concerning pre-established schemes.
    Luckily for the contemporary spectator, westerns and southerns tend to escape 
less and less frequently the hybridization and “bastardization” of 
genres by inviting us to reconsider the North-American West and South 
without systematically relying on neither geographical nor cultural 
polarities, multiplied and propagated, as we know, by popular culture and mainly by the cinema.
    The Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines conference will provide an 
opportunity to examine the various dynamics, often less recent than one 
might think, between the Far West and the (Deep/) South, projected for 
more than a century on the big screen. Whichever the chosen approach or 
viewpoint, every speaker will deal with the two topoi in question. For 
although a number of studies already exist on the North-South as well as on the East-West, there is still a lot to explore within the West-South (or, if one prefers, South-West) relations in the cinema. – The thus 
framed cross-over approach of our conference whose title highlights the 
word “encounter” (“meets”) will allow, we hope, an improved 
understanding of the stakes involved in southern movies, while shedding 
light on the western genre, a field so thoroughly researched that one 
might be inclined to argue that everything has already been said and written on the subject. The 
cinematographic South which has never shared with the West a line of 
demarcation similar to the Mason-Dixon Line, may greatly benefit from 
this momentary distance or detachment from the Yankees. As for the 
westerns, the deliberately oblique or off-centered approach may, we 
believe, enhance reflections on some of its own “legitimacies” and 
“counter-legitimacies” within the westerns’ cinematographic 
constructions of America.

    Here are a few tracks, among many others, one might wish to consider – from 
the West to the South, or vice versa (the route chosen by Captain 
America in Easy Rider) – in 
order to examine the numerous kinds of interaction, overlapping and 
porosity that seem to take form between the two genres:
• The genre 
indicators in the westerns & the
southerns ;
Thematic constants, typologies, recurrent spaces and character traits, 
narrative schemes and strategies, aesthetic codes ; Is the “southern” an
autonomous genre or a mere “sub-genre”, is it “illegitimate” compared 
to the western? The southern as the “reverse side” or the “flip” / “flop
side” of the western?
• (Founding and regenerating) myths and 
legends in westerns & southerns : polarities or crossings ? The 
pastoral myth ; the myth of the lost paradise ; the de/composition of 
the agrarian myth (Thomas Jefferson) ; Eldorado & Dixieland ; 
Typically American values (democracy, freedom of opinion, liberty to 
undertake, individualism, etc.) revisited through these two genres.
•
Genealogy and evolution of the two genres, also through the interaction
with other art forms and medias (dime novels, plantation novels, 
minstrel shows, Tom shows, etc.) ; The role of subtexts / intertexts 
(ex. The Bible); filmic
intertextuality and transtextuality.
• Westerns and southerns as 
cultural mirrors intimately associated with the imaginary and History of
the American nation. Connections between History and memory? For what 
kind of representations of the “New World”? Is the shadow of the 
“peculiar institution” restricted to the (official) slave society? The 
representation of other institutions (family, school, church,
etc.); Links with the law and the outlaws ; the judicial system ; law establishment/-ing (enforced by the West / the North).
•
Violence and trauma in the westerns & in the southerns : origins, 
manifestations and scope ? The violence of the “savage West” and the 
“civilized South” ; primitive violence and the struggle for survival ; 
violence as recreation in the West vs. disturbing, distressing violence 
in the South?
• The creation of westerns & southern spaces; 
permeability of frontiers and borders; the wilderness
: a benign or a malignant, revengeful nature ? The relationships with 
the land and the concept of territorial integrity; the notion of the 
“frontier” and of liminal territories that invite us to reconsider 
West/South relations (such as Texas in Giant or Lone Star).
• Heroes 
and heroines (frontiersmen, conquerors, cowboys, ranchers, sheriffs, 
lawmen, bounty hunters, saloon girls, school marms, etc. ; planters, 
Belles, rednecks, hillbillies, poor white trash, etc.). Crossings 
between characters from both ends of the western/southern spectrum; the 
specific case of the former Confederate turned outlaw, sometimes lost in
a western universe (The Searchers, Shane, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Dances with Wolves).
•
Relation to time ; retrospective vs. prospective approaches (is the 
western
immune to the nostalgia of “grand old times”?) ; Existence, in the 
symbolic system of the westerns, of similar splits as those of “the Old 
South” and “the New South” / ante- and postbellum Souths? Presence of 
these time-related questions in the narrative strategies of films?
• 
The question of gender; Dixie chicks & frontier girls ; Calamity 
Jane & Scarlett O’Hara : convergences or distinct forms / types of 
femininity ? ; Reinvestments and transvestism; Female freaks in the West
& in the South: the old ancestral fear or new territorial 
variations ? Southern women in western settings (ex. Belle Starr, True 
Women, Thelma & Louise).
• Ethnic alterity and racial questions ;
representation of ethnic minorities (ex. characters of color in 
westerns ; Native Americans in southerns ?) ; men and women from abroad 
(Europe, Asia, South America) ; Mixed couples, miscegenation, etc.
• Problems of class in the westerns, less
visible than in the southerns? ; Social hierarchies in the era of American classics and today?
•
Parodies and pastiches of classic westerns & southerns in the 
service of the renewal of the western & southern genres (spaghetti 
westerns, western comics ; Hillbilly movies, multi-character movies, 
etc.)
• Music of the West & the South in the cinema ; Do westerns
& southerns have a musical identity of their own ? (ex. “Yankee 
Doodle” vs. “I Wish I Was In Dixie”).
• Film directors who have used 
both genres (ex. John Ford, John Huston, Don Siegel, Joel and Ethan 
Coen, King Vidor) : intersections between the West & the South or 
cinematographic territories and experiences not to be mixed up ?
• 
Commercial exploitation of the West & the South in the cinema ? 
Phases and periods ; in/compatibilities concerning the successes of 
western & southern movies in the box-office? Turning points, 
successes and flops in
the evolution of the two genres.
• Postmodernist blendings ; 
renewals of archetypes ; recirculation of western & southern effects
(ex. next film by Tarantino, Django Unchained, expected release in 2013) ; What does cinema gain with these 
inter-spatial and interfilmic games between the West & the South, by frustrating and playing with the spectators’ expectations, and by 
weaving links between the “lost” and other, more “illustrious causes”?

Looking forward to your proposals.
Best regards,
Claire Dutriaux and Taïna Tuhkunen