The demise of 'international relations': America's Western Palimpsest

Geopolitics

Volumn 10, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 222-243

  Shapiro, Michael J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS; POLITICAL HISTORY;

NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES; WESTERN HEMISPHERE; WORLD;

EID: 19744369894     PISSN: 14650045     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14650040590946566     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. It is in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan that the quoted phrase exists. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University Press 1991) p.88.
2. See Michel Foucault 'Society Must Be Defended': Lectures at the College De France 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador 2003).
3. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (New York: Atheneum 1992).
4. Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1997), p.48.
5. See for example Cheryl Walker's Indian Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1997), where she notes (p.4) that not only was 'America' an encounter of alternative nationhoods (for Native Americans had not understood nations as the Euros had come to define them'), but also that America emerged as a political entity as a result of significant Native American participation in discussions of national identity.
6. For a treatment of this shift, see John Bomeman, 'American Anthropology as Foreign Policy', American Anthropologist 97/4 (December 1995) pp.659-668.
7. Ibid. p.665.
8. John C. Cremony, Life Among the Apaches (New York: Indian Head Books 1991) pp.13-14.
9. I am using the term ethnogenesis in the sense in which it is used in William Boelhower, 'Stories of Foundation, Scenes of Origin', American Literary History 5/3 (Fall 1993) p.392.
10. See Pierre L. Van Den Berghe, 'The Modern Nation State: Nation-Builder or Nation-Killer', International Journal of Group Tensions 22/3 (Fall 1992), pp.191-208;
11. Walker Connor, 'Nation-Building or Nation-Destroying? World Politics 24/1 (January 1972), pp.319-55.
12. The quotations are from Barry Langford, 'You Cannot Look at This: Thresholds of Unrepresentability in Holocaust Film', Journal of Holocaust Education 8/3 (Winter 1999), p.29.
13. The concepts (of frontier and region) and quotations are from William Cronon, George Miles and Jay Gitlin, 'Becoming West', in Cronon et al. (eds), Under and Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (New York: W.W. Norton 1992) pp.18-23.
14. See John Agnew, Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge 2003).
15. Michael J. Shapiro, Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (New York: Routledge 2004) p.142.
16. This part of the plot follows that of the novel by Friedrich Durrenmatt (which treats the murder of a young girl in one of Switzerland's eastern cantons), the prototype for the film script; Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Pledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1959).
17. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone 1992) p.65.
18. Ibid. p.121.
19. The 'American Indian population of Nevada, which was almost half of the 16,000-plus total in the early 1860s (see) is now, in the Reno area, which is representative, slightly over 1 per cent (see ).
20. The 'perception-image' is another of Gilles Deleuze's categories in Cinema 1 (note 16) pp.66-8.
21. The so-called 'civilized tribes' from the East, who were removed to Oklahoma, brought black slaves and black relatives with them ('thousands of Negroes were neighbors or slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes'), and many became cowboys. See Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones, The Negro Cowboys (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1965) pp.18-19. As for the all-black towns, novelist Toni Morrison discovered their history in Oklahoma towns while researching her novel Paradise. As she notes, 'I was looking at the book of photographs Ghost Towns of Oklahoma ', and noticed that 'it scarcely mentions any of the black ones' (quoted in 'Morrison's West', Vanity Fair 450 (February 1998) p144.
22. In his biography of Ford, Scott Eyman states that from his earliest films, Ford was already 'making the landscape a character'; see his Print the Legend, (New York: Simon Schuster, 1999) p.73.
23. Deleuze (note 16) p.146.
24. Ibid., p.148.
25. For an analysis of the Cooper-Wister contrast and its influence on westerns, see John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press 1999) p.66.
26. See Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1889).
27. Lewis H. Morgan, Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines, ed. Pau Bohannan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1965 [1881]) p.xxiv.
28. Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1995) p.195.
29. Tag Gallagher, 'Angels Gambol Where They Will: John Ford's Indians', in Jim Kitses and Greg Rickman (eds) The Western Reader, (New York: Limelight, 1998) p.273.
30. Virginia Wright Wexman, 'The Family on the Land: Race and Nationhood in Silent Westerns', in Daniel Bernardi (ed.), The Birth of Whiteness (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1996) p.129.
31. On the anti-diegetic aspects of experimental cinema, see Andre Gardies, Le Cinema de Robbe-Grillet: Essai semiocritique (Paris: Albatross 1983).
32. The phrase belongs to Peter Handke in A Writer's Afternoon trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Methuen, 1991) p.3.
33. Certainly Sam Shepard, who wrote the screenplay, is known for his psychological, Freudian-oriented plots. But at the same time his stories and vignettes explore historical landscapes. See, for example, his western musings in The Motel Chronicles (San Francisco, CA: City Lights 1982), which contains imagery that anticipates aspects of his screenplay for Paris, Texas.
34. For a treatment that offers a psychoanalytic reading of the film, see Donald L. Carveth, 'The Borderland Dilemma in Paris Texas: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Sam Shepard', Psyart: A Hyperlink Journal for Psychological Study of Arts, at: .
35. Conversation with Alain Bergala in Wim Wenders, Written in the West (Munich: Shirmer 1987) p.11.
36. I b i d.
37. Ibid., p.9.
38. Ibid. p.13.
39. Ibid. p.16.
40. The 'location scouting' stills can be seen in Chris Sievernich (ed.), Wim Wenders - Sam Shepard: Paris Texas (Nordlinger: Greno 1984) pp.98-9.
41. Peter Handke, The Long Way Around, one of three novelettes in Slow Homecoming (New York: Farrar/Straus/Giroux 1985) p.76. Both authors of the screenplay of Paris Texas, Wenders and Shepard, are familiar with Handke's novels. Wenders worked with Handke on a screen play for one of Handke's earlier novels (The Anxiety of the Goaltender During the Penalty Kick), and Shepard reviewed Slow Homecoming in the New York Times Book Review.
42. This expression and its implications are well developed in Jacques Derrida's 'Violence and Metaphysics', in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1978).
43. Joy M. Lynch, '"A Distinct Place in America Where all Mestizos Reside": Landscape and Identity in Ana Castillo's Sapogonia and Diana Chang's The Frontiers of Love', Melus 26/3 (Fall 200 1), p.120.
44. This is the interpretive resort of Phillip Kolker and Peter Beicken in their excellent reading of the film, 'Paris, Texas: Between the Winds', in P. Kolker and P. Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire (New York: Cambridge University Press 1993) p.125.
45. Handke, Slow Homecoming (note 39) p.114.
46. This apt expression is in Kolker and Beicken (note 42) p.120.
47. Quotations from Slotkin (note 3) p.212.
48. Joseph Conrad, 'Geography and Some Explorers', in Joseph Conrad, Last Essays (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1926) pp.1-21.
49. Cecilia Tichi, Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Places (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2001) p.2.
50. See Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1998).
51. Ibid. p.27.
52. The quotations are from B. D'Arcus's excellent analysis of the spatial strategies of the Wounded Knee insurgency: 'Contested boundaries: Native Sovereignty and State Power at Wounded Knee, 1973', Political Geography 22/4 (May 2003) p.416.
53. Ibid., p.421.
54. Pascal Bonitzer, 'Hitchcockian Suspense', in Slavoj Zizek (ed.), Everything You Always Wanted to know About Lacan ... But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (New York: Verso 1992) p.23.