Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads

Austin Fisher is Associate Professor of Popular Culture at Bournemouth University. He is the author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western, editor of Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads and Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond, and founding co-editor of the ‘Global Exploitation Cinemas’ book series. His main area of expertise concerns popular Italian cinema’s relationship with political movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

• List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1: The Quiet Man Gets Noisy: Sergio Leone, the Italian Western and Ireland, Christopher Frayling; Section I: Trans-Genre Roots; 2: Pietro Germi, Hybridity and the Roots of the Italo-Western, Pasquale Iannone ; 3: Malaysian Pirates, American Cowboys, and the Marginalised Outlaw: Constructing Other-ed Adventurers in Italian Film, Aliza S. Wong; Section II: Ethnic Identities, Transnational Politics; 4: Spectacles of Insurgency: Witnessing the Revolution as Incoherent Text, David Hyman and Patrick Wynne; 5: Emancipation all’Italiana: Giuseppe Colizzi and the Representation of African Americans in Italian Westerns, Lee Broughton; 6: Corbucci Unchained: Miike, Tarantino and the Postmodern Discursivity of Exploitation Cinema, Mikel J. Koven; Section III: Asian Crossovers; 7: Bounty Hunters, Yakuzas and Rōnins: Intercultural Transformations between the Italian Western and the Japanese Swordfight Film in the 1960s, Thomas Klein; 8: Spaghetti Westerns and Asian Cinema: Perspectives on Global Cultural Flows, Ivo Ritzer; 9: Cowboys and Indians: Transnational Borrowings in the Indian Masala Western, Iain Robert Smith; Section IV: Routes of Relocation, Transition and Appropriation; 10: For a Few Comic Strips More: Reinterpreting the Spaghetti Western through the Comic Book, William Grady; 11: Transit to East Germany: the Distribution and Reception of Once Upon a Time in the West in the German Democratic Republic, Rosemary Stott; 12: Spaghetti Westerns and the ‘Afterlife’ of a Hollywood Genre, Pete Falconer; Filmography

This collection of essays moves over territory and across borders previously uncharted and undocumented in existing accounts of the Western. In taking paths and routes less travelled, Fisher and his contributors show how rich and diverse the genre is in its many international, national and local guises. This is scholarship of high merit.