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This chapter traces the changing iconography of guns within an array of literary texts from the nineteenth century and cinematic texts of the twentieth century. This chapter outlines the shifting emphases within the Western; for though the gun has always been important to the Western, the genre’s representations of gun violence have varied through its history. This chapter argues that the Western's changing iconographic emphases, from aim to speed, codes violence morally upright and justifiable at different moments within the genre’s long history.

This concluding chapter examines the relationship between the increasing codification of aggressive “Stand Your Ground” laws since 2005 and the continued relevance of the Western as a popular genre. This final chapter presents a reading of two contemporary Westerns, the television series Justified (2010-15) and Quentin Tarrantino's film, Django Unchained (2012), arguing that the film epitomizes the challenge of gun possession and self-defense within a neoliberal state.

This chapter presents a reading of Unforgiven (1992), situating this film within a paradigmatic shift in the extension of due process protections for minorities, and the transformation of American self-defense doctrine brought about through a focus on battered women.

Paul Seydor’s essay highlights how Peckinpah drew upon classic forms of cinematic representation while at the same time reconceiving them. By also concentrating on the innovative editing of The Wild Bunch, Seydor helps us appreciate how the film exemplifies both tradition and Peckinpah’s unique talent.

In television and film westerns of the 1960s and into the 1970s, two particular African American performers, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Woody Strode, are repeatedly cast as the representatives of the African American West—in popular televisions shows such as The Rifleman and Rawhide, in classic western films such as Sergeant Rutledge and Once Upon a Time in the West. Through Davis and Strode, this chapter examines the dual strategies developed for representing the African American westerner on screen during the civil rights era: the erasure of race, resulting in the character type of the “raceless (black) westerner”; the exact opposite, narratives that explicitly draw attention to race, resulting in the character type of the civil rights westerner. This chapter traces the evolution of those types in later westerns such as Fred Williamson’s blaxploitation film westerns and the television series Hell on Wheels and The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr.

This chapter examines the Japanese film genre known as “middle-class film” (shoshimin eiga), a formative genre in the classical Japanese cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. It first considers genre criticism as a strategy for national cinema studies, as well as an elaboration of genre’s specific historical construction in Japanese cinema. It then explores how the middle-class film genre established connections with an audience of the urban middle class and how idiosyncratically the Japanese film industry employed genres apart from Hollywood in the cinematic modes of that period. It also discusses the politics of genre in Japan’s national cinema and the creation of a modern national subject in two films by Ozu Yasujiro: Tokyo Chorus (Tokyo no gassho, 1931) and I Was Born, But… Finally, the chapter explains how notions of Japanese genre have been molded in cross-cultural misunderstandings within Western film scholarship, along with the culturally specific use of genre appropriation in Japan.

In the first of two chapters that treat promises of an imperial golden age in Aeneid Book 6 in relation to American expansionism as portrayed in the Western film genre, Kirsten Day compares the production contexts of Vergil’s epic, during the “golden age of Latin literature” in the wake of epochal civil wars, to the Westerns produced after World War II during the “golden age” of Hollywood. So too the dramatic settings of the Aeneid, after the Trojan War, and of Westerns, after the American Civil War, enshrine these trailblazing pioneers in the pantheon of founding heroes whose struggles (re)built the nation of the narrative’s audience. Through a wide-ranging survey of many of the genre’s most famous films, such as Red River and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Day examines several key themes, including nation-building as divinely driven labor; the laconic characterization of the Western male hero and his troubling resemblance to the villain; and the sacrificial role assigned to female characters. Day concludes that these ancient and modern texts also share an undercurrent of anxiety about the moral ambiguities of these projects, which belies their superficial optimism.

This chapter re-reads the work of Alain Badiou as a probing of the problem of negativity. Tracing the history of Badiou’s political involvement in the radical Maoist formations of the 1970s suggests how he tries to articulate a politics of destruction and subtraction. Turning to Badiou’s more recent work on formalising the logic of negation the chapter traces inconsistency in the attempt to subordinate negation to affirmation. Probing Badiou’s dismissal of certain radical forms of politics as forms of nihilism the chapter closes with a consideration, prompted by Badiou, of the Western as an aesthetic form able to convey a sense of political courage. Against his explicit intentions, Badiou’s work gives a sense of what it might mean to depart from the ‘affirmationist consensus’, and the possibilities of an alternative form of political negativity.