Introduction

In The Rhizomatic West, one of the most important recent books on the representations of the eponymous region in film and other visual arts and media, Neil Campbell describes the West as a “geographical, cultural and economic crossroads defined by complex connectivity, multidimensionality, and imagination, even if these have often been elided in favor of a more inward looking and emotive vision” (3). The Deleuzian metaphor of the rhizome serves to illustrate the diversity and interdependence of spaces in which the imaginings about the West have been shaped as well as the variety of cultural discourses that have informed these imaginings. While subscribing to Campbell’s postulate that artistic representations of the West should be analyzed in a broad transnational context, the essays collected in the present volume aim to balance two concerns: the theme and the form, as their continuing reinventions account for the contemporary currency of a fundamental American genre that the Western is. The year 2000 does not really constitute a caesura in the history of the film Western, but it does mark a caesura-even if merely symbolic-in the development of global cultures. If the West is a rhizomatic, deterritorialized space, then the Western is a rhizomatic genre; or perhaps it has always been one, but the technologies of film production and distribution the acceleration of which we have witnessed in the new millennium have made this aspect of the genre more visible than it ever was before.