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SEMINAR 01 - 73 Years of Tex: A Long Ride Across Popular Imagination and Canon

It took James Joyce eight years to write Ulysses; it took Roberto Raviola, aka Magnus, one of the greatest Italian comics artists, seven years to draw La valle del terrore, the Speciale Tex (aka “Texone”) written by Claudio Nizzi and published in 1996. The gestation of the graphic novel was so long because he was aware that (to put it in Giovanni Romanini's words) he was dealing with “un personaggio grandissimo e tuttora sulla breccia” [a great character which is still going strong], so that he “davanti a Tex si è fatto piccolo” [before Tex he made himself as small as possible].

Magnus' caution and – we might well say – awe are understandable. Tex was born in 1948, and is still in print: the series has ran regularly for seventy-two years, and it is surely the oldest still active among the Italian comics. Moreover, some important comics artists have drawn for it, such as Joe Kubert, Colin Wilson, José Ortiz, Magnus, Enrique Breccia, Claudio Villa, Carlos Ernesto Gómez.

Besides, Tex is one of the most popular and beloved comics series in Italy (and Brazil, plus other Spanish-speaking countries); it even managed to reach the UK and US comics markets, which have always been among the least easily accessible for Italian comics. And – last but not least – Tex is the main series published by Sergio Bonelli Editore (founded by one of the creators of the series, and named after him, the other being Aurelio Galleppini, aka Galep), a press which has played and still plays a vital role for the Italian comics, given the importance of the series it has launched (from Dylan Dog to Zagor, from Mister No to Nathan Never).

Tex is in all respects a cultural institution in Italy and abroad, and it is arguably one of the two fundamental Italian contribution to the spreading of the Western imagery (the other being the celebrated spaghetti Western made famous by Sergio Leone and resurrected by Quentin Tarantino). Hence the proponents believe that there must be a space specifically devoted to Bonelli and Galleppini's character and series in this conference, a seminar where comics scholars may discuss the long and complex history of this series from diverse points of view and research approaches, including the history of the American West, colonial and post-colonial studies, the history of post-W.W.II Italy, gender studies, ethnicity studies, the appropriation of US cultural artifacts, media studies, semiotics, comparative literature, and, last but not least, comics studies.

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SEMINAR 02 - Tradition and Beyond: Reconstructing and Deconstructing the American West in US Comics

Literature and cinema have traditionally constituted the most preponderant media vectors in the cultural history of the American West. Both media forms refer to wide constellations of tutelary deities including writers (such as James Oliver Curwood, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour), actors and directors (John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone). However, despite the formal hegemony intrinsic to their storytelling and visuality, from the first half of the 20^th century until the contemporary age, the potentiality of cultural representation and problematization of the American West has broadened through comics, both in the US and in the rest of the world – well represented by important publishers such as Timely Comics, DC Comics, and Dell Comics. In the US, the trajectory of Western comics shows interesting affinities with other graphic narrative genres: they experienced a “golden age” of serialized publications – located between the first phase of decline of superhero comics and the decline of Western cinema – including titles such as All-Star Western, Western Comics, or Gunsmoke. Between the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, following an aesthetic as well as ideological crisis of the Western genre in all its forms, US comics started to redefine their representation of the West and the frontier, a trend that brought to the production and consecration of hybridized visual reformulation of the West such as Joe R. Lansdale’s transposition of Dead in the West (1993), Garth Ennis’ Preacher (1995-2000), or Robin Furth and Peter David’s The Dark Tower – The Gunslinger Born (2007).

This panel encourages papers on US Western comics at large, prioritizing analysis devoted to contemporary graphic and conceptual reformulations of the tradition.

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SEMINAR 03 - The Latinx Side of Western America

The global production and distribution of Latinx graphic narratives, films, sitcom-format mainstream shows, digital visual products, and storytelling projects can be seen as a fairly new literary and narrative trend undergoing rapid evolution in the United States. Netflix shows like One Day at a Time or Gente-fied were produced during the same years as the graphic novels Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer. Undocumented Vignettes from a Pre-American Life (Ledesma, 2017) and Undocumented. A Worker’s Fight (Tonatiuh, 2018). Street murals, street signs, stickers, patches, comics, graphic novels, digital zines, illustrated short stories, webcomics, Instagram comics, and massive block-long illustration projects are constantly produced and distributed by multidisciplinary sources and independent visual artists around the major cities of the American West. The storytelling of these graphic products travels from El Paso borderline to Phoenix AZ, from Tijuana to San Diego to LA and Oakland, and passes through Portland all the way to Seattle. The Western side of the U.S. explores through these narratives’ diverse themes of anti-romantic realities inside the empire; this production can represent or misrepresent the force and contribution that undocumented communities bring to the American western society. Narratives displaying colonization, borders, national identity, first-generation American life experiences, bilingualism, the resistance of ancient tribes, the strong indigenous activism, and the childhood of undocumented kids explore problematic ideas about belonging, citizenship, and cultural identity that deserve in-depth analysis due to the current socio-political charged climate in the U.S. around equity and inclusion.

This panel will focus on the representation, and misrepresentation of Latinx communities in visual works to find spaces of reconciliation between scholarship, mainstream outlets, and independent visual-cultural markets. In recent years, more scholars around the world have become interested in including the graphic and broader visual representation of immigrants’ struggles within conferences, departments, and syllabi. This panel is open to comics scholars, audiovisual communication scholars, independent Latinx artists, Latinx scholars, book creators, visual-cultural producers, art curators, and all of whom are interested in analyzing and discussing the storytelling that shines a light on narratives of conflict, displacement, resistance, and negotiation in the western side of the United States. We encourage participants to deliver intersectional approaches between genres, stories, and languages. This panel is meant to be a place to learn and discuss our honest ideas of the American experience on the Western side of the USA.

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SEMINAR 04 - Wild Weird West: Stranger Looks at the Frontier

In an essay on Eudora Welty’s The Robber Bridegroom, Lisa K. Miller traces the writer’s use of Gothic elements to the “dark side of the frontier heritage.” If the depiction of the American West has often followed F. J. Turner’s over-enthusiastic thesis, a strain of Western works has adopted a less apologetic view. Anti-Western graphic narratives explored the underbelly of the genre, but it is in the hybrid form of the Weird West that the dark side of the American unconscious comes into its own, embodied in grotesque deformations of typical (and stereotypical) Turnerian narratives. Weird Westerns blend classic Western imagery with elements of fantasy and science fiction, horror and Gothic, in a fascinating tension between epic and grim atmospheres. Crossing the genre border, the Weird West allows limitless possibilities to explore the speculative, the supernatural, and the alien that have always been haunting the background of the actual West. Alternatively, Western tropes sometimes appear in other genres as ironic or celebrative subtexts, showing how the Frontier epic is still a prolific mythic ground that different narratives confront in order to restate or deny their descendancy from American history’s hegemonic discourse. These hybrid forms are revealing ideological vessels: through the Weird Western or the weirdly Western, traditional views on nationalism, gender, race, religion, and colonialism are challenged or reinforced. The Weird enters the Western landscape as a destabilizing yet familiar presence epitomizing the genre’s ability to survive in vivid forms, still very much representative of the American popular culture and its contradictions.

The seminar aims at analyzing the cultural/aesthetic meaning of Weird West narratives. Interdisciplinary approaches encompassing comics, literature, cinema, and TV are encouraged. Topics may include:

●      The influence of the Western on other genres/the intrusion of the Western in other genres and vice-versa

●      Counter-narratives of the Frontier

●      Film/tv series adaptations of Weird West comics and graphic novels

●      Weird frontiers

●      Post-westerns, Weird westerns, and the questioning of the myth

●      The supernatural as a representation of a haunting past

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SEMINAR 05 - A Long View of the Landscape: Transnational Perspectives of the American West

The Italian cultural field has consistently represented the American West as a land of conquest, both in comics and cinema. This perspective historically has overshadowed visual depictions of the American West coming from other cultural areas. Despite Italy’s disproportionate influence, the international community has produced a rich, wide field of cultural productions portraying the American West. It includes characters that have joined a contemporary canon of Western comics, such as that of Belgian artists. They have created works such as Lucky Luke by Morris (published from 1946), and Blueberry, by Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean Giraud (published from 1963 to 2005). Interesting phenomena come from the United Kingdom, Spain, and Japan, where a mixture of Manga and Western narrative traditions have become a very successful creative form.

The transnational perspective has positively expanded the comics field and solidified the tradition of the Western, and it compels us to examine and reconsider the Western’s most traditional traits. In other words, Transnational Westerns can be intended as an occasion to observe the US myth of the West from a detached position and study those constitutive elements which an endogenous point of view might ignore. This sort of operation belongs to a wider framework elaborated by Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe in Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (2011). According to this argument, “the ‘transnational’ has exercised a monopoly of assimilative power that has enabled it to subsume and replace competing spatial and temporal orientations to the object of study – including multicultural American studies, borderlands critique, postcolonial American studies, and the more general turn to American cultural studies – within an encompassing geopolitics of knowledge.” This tendency is evident in the Italian case – where it is actually possible to see a representation of the American West following traits and components that had never been part of US Western comics; due to historical, cultural, and economic factors, the Italian case soon became connoted to be part of a “favorite” relation, a dominant position that penalized Western reformulations coming from other cultural landscapes.

In an effort to recontextualize hegemonic relationships like this between Italy and the United States, this panel aims to investigate Western narratives and representations, namely those that were published outside of the cultural context to which the Western is commonly associated. More specifically, we encourage the submission of papers that wish to focus on symbols and narrative repertoires that are typical of the US Western tradition and to observe how they have been recuperated, reconceptualized, and renegotiated in different contexts from the most paradigmatic trajectories.

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SEMINAR 06 - More than Madams: Gender Perspectives on Western Narrative

Predominantly configured as a manly narrative scenario, the American West also represents an interstitial territory where gender considerations can arise. Historical figures such as Calamity Jane or Annie Oakley achieved a position in the American Western pantheon alongside historically noted male protagonists. Early U.S. television shows like Gunsmoke portrayed strong women characters such as Miss Kitty Russell, but often these women were juxtaposed against a strong leading male character like Sheriff Matt Dillon. Recent literary, cinematic, television and graphic narratives are questioning and subverting the traditional Western patriarchal and masculine narrative. Cinema has played an important part in redefining gender and gender roles in Western narratives (for example, Gavin O’Connor’s Jane Got a Gun, released in 2016, or Sharon Stone’s gunslinging character “The Lady” in Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead, 1995). However, cinema has not been the only medium to do so. James Otis Smith’s newly released graphic novel, Black Heroes of the Wild West (2020), challenges the long-standing stereotype that all Western notables were not only male, but also white. His collection brings to audience’s attention historical figures like Mary Fields, otherwise known as Stagecoach Mary.

This panel welcomes submissions that bring to light visual and graphic narratives that similarly confront the traditional masculine stereotype long associated with the American West.

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SEMINAR 07 - Representations of the American Frontier in Japanese Manga, Anime and Movies: The Textual Politics of Cultural Dialogue between the "East" and the "West"

The image of the American West in Japan was created under the influence of Western films. One of the most popular genres in Hollywood, Western also gained popularity in Japan in the 1940s, resulting in a phenomenon called “the gun boom” emerging around 1960. Around the same time, TV series such as Rawhide and Laramie Ranch were enthusiastically received, and Italo-Westerns, known as "macaroni Westerns", had great local success.

Actually, there is a common thread that profoundly links Japanese narrative tradition and American and Italian Western cinema. The cinematographic techniques of John Ford's Western movies had a decisive influence in the work of Akira Kurosawa, tutelary deity of Japanese cinema. The Western aesthetic is recognizable in many of Kurosawa's samurai Jidaigeki films which, in turn, played a fundamental role in the birth and development of the sub-genre which, with a term probably coined by the Spanish journalist Alfonso Sánchez, would become famous as “spaghetti Western”, featuring samurai-style gunslingers. The bond between the two characters was strong enough to lead to the production of Western films like Red Sun, by Terence Young, in which cowboys and samurai share the same scene. The success of the genre in Japan, of course, led not only to the local production of Westerns like Sandanju no otoko [The Man with a Shotgun] (1961), by Seijun Suzuki, and spaghetti Westerns like Koya no toseinin [The Drifting Avenger] (1968), by Junya Satō, but also of manga and anime like Koya no shōnen Isamu [Boy of the Wilderness Isamu] (manga: 1971, anime: 1973), renown in Italy as Sam il ragazzo del West [Sam the boy from the West], and Gun Frontier (manga: 1972, anime: 2002), by Leiji Matsumoto. The genre is still appreciated in Japan and the production of Western works continues to this day.

This seminar examines how the American West was imagined in Japanese manga, anime and movies, produced as a result of a cultural dialogue between the "East" and the "West".

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SEMINAR 08 - The American West on Screen and Its “Posthumous” Reconfiguration: From Stagecoach to Post-Westerns

As Franco Moretti and Stefano Rosso pointed out (2018), the history of Western cinema includes periods of unequivocal consecration, particularly between 1945 and 1970 (including John Ford’s Stagecoach, released in 1939, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, 1952, or Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968), alternating with phases of evident decline in which the Western did not survive its own endogenous transformations. The 1960s already marked the rise of a new genre, referred to with less-than-precise definitions such as Leslie Fiedler’s “New Western” (in his 1968 book The Return of the Vanishing American) or John G. Cawelti’s “Post-Western” (in his 1970 The Six-Gun Mystique). The need to deconstruct the rigid tropes of a genre that transfigures the violence of the frontier experience into a foundational myth meaningfully coincides with a loss of “innocence” in American politics and culture that follows the Kennedy assassination and the subsequent years of foreign wars and political frictions. Paradoxically, in the fields of cinema and television, after the 1960s the overcoming of the Western was not determined by its apparent failures (ex.: the box office bombing of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate in 1980), as much as by the subsequent successes and revivals, which marked the near-impossibility of resuming the genre without revisiting it through a revisionist lens. Post-Westerns are often anti-epic and hybridized with other genres. They encompass parodic or deconstructive narratives that stage the return of the repressed – the foundational myth’s abjections – or adhere to points of view that were traditionally marginalized in the frontier epic (especially those of women and Native Americans), for example Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), or Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995).

Traditional or “post,” Western cinema has continued to provide occasions for its own reconceptualization and re-examination. Other modifications of cinematic representation that have occurred arise from the interaction of the genre with cartoons, for example An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991), Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002), and Home on the Range (2004). More than attesting to an apparently predictable conclusion of the Western’s trajectory, its intersection with new forms of representation and different historical contingencies has provided an occasion to re-observe the Western from a de-centered standpoint. On this note, recent quotations and homages to the classics certainly contain a significant nostalgic tension (for example, Marty McFly says his name is Clint Eastwood, in Back to the Future III, 1990; Chon Wang is baptized as John Wayne, in Shanghai Moon, 2000; or Django meeting his spaghetti-western homonym, Franco Nero, in Django Unchained, 2012), but they also help to recompose the tradition.

Because of the crucial significance of cinema in understanding Western in its several declensions and transformations – both formal and historical – the present panel encourages the submission of abstracts dealing with the audiovisual and cinematic depiction of the Western universe, especially reflecting the ups and downs of its trajectory, genre hybridization in the Post-Western in cinema and television (e.g. Western and noir, Western and science-fiction, etc…); tropes of the genre transplanted into a contemporary setting (e.g. Paris, Texas by Wim Wenders); post-colonial, feminist and queer revisitations of the genre; transnational Post-Westerns (non-American Westerns); Post-Western and abjection; the Post-Western and hauntology (how the genre reflects on the nostalgia for a lost future); the Post-Western and post-modernism.

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SEMINAR 09 - Writers of the Purple Sage: across the Literary Tradition of the American West

Before the considerable impact of cinema and comics, literature was the first medium to represent the American West and give voice to its protagonists. It could not have been otherwise, considering that the first few pieces of literature about the conquest of the West circulated during the second half of the 19^th century – well into the epoch that media studies define as the age of Gutenberg, far from the potential that book circulation would articulate during the 20^th century. Yet, the literary work provides the first few occasions for reflecting over an imaginary and a symbology of the American West, and, especially, a repertoire of fundamental forms and traits that would eventually define later reformulations of the genre. For example, the conclusion of Frank Norris’ McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899) already stages a canovaccio that foreshadows elements later emerged in canonical Western narratives, visible for example in the landscape construction and in the structural dynamics that characterize the epilogue of the novel. 

Thoroughout its development, Western literature has been positioned between a “restricted field of production” and a “field of large scale production”, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms. However, during the first half of the 20^th century, the Western progressively acquired the traits of a narrative of genre and, by circulating through channels that were typical of large scale production, such a genre was legitimized as a form of popular literature. In the beginning of the Western trajectory, some of the first few significant authors were James Oliver Curwood, Zane Grey, and, partially, Jack London. During the first few decades of the 20^th century, the Western literature paved the way for a literary tradition of the genre, first established by Louis L’Amour. It was then consecrated by later writers such as Elmore Leonard, although this occurred within the landscape of popular fiction. Similar to Western cinema, Western literature alternated phases of great success and moments of crisis (Moretti and Rosso 2018), but traces of its tradition appear in the literature of the second half of the 20^th century, as well as in the literature of the last twenty years, a scenario which problematizes the supposedly declining trajectory of the Western, especially when related to the several recent contaminations that the genre has undergone. The most relevant author among those who have recently narrated the American West is Cormac McCarthy, who wrote Blood Meridian (1985), and the Border Trilogy, composed of All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998). McCarthy is not an isolated case: elements of the same tradition from where he draws can be identified in the works by Joe R. Lansdale and Philipp Meyer, although in different measure.

Although its visual impact is certainly more limited in literature as opposed to other forms, the literary depiction of the American West is a fundamental perspective for the understanding of the genre – at least as the first form able to produce a popular imagination of the conquest. Considering these premises, this panel will privilege papers that wish to focus on and analyze literary representations of the American West and the role of such a literary trend in the construction of a Western tradition and imagination.