Full Description
Perhaps the most sophisticated and complex of shows in HBO's recent history, Deadwood has surprisingly little coverage in our current scholarship. Grounding contemporary anxieties about race and class, domesticity and American exceptionalism in its nineteenth-century setting, Deadwood revises our understanding of a formative period for the American nation through a re-examination of one of the main genres through which this national story has been transmitted: the Western. With contributions from scholars in American studies, literature, and film and television studies, The Last Western situates Deadwood in the context of both its nineteenth-century setting and its twenty-first-century audience. Together, these essays argue for the series as a provocative meditation on both the state and historical formation of U.S. empire, examining its treatment of sovereign power and political legitimacy, capital accumulation and dispossession, racial and gender identities, and social and family structures, while attending to the series' peculiar and evocative aesthetic forms. What emerges from this collection is the impressive range of Deadwood's often contradictory engagement with both nineteenth and twenty-first century America.
Contents
Introduction: Deadwood and the Forms of Empire --Jennifer Greiman and Paul Stasi
Part I - No Law at all in Deadwood: Statelessness, Violence, and Sovereignty
Chapter 1: A Terrible Beauty? Deadwood, Frontier Rhetoric, and U.S. Hegemony in the Post-9/11 Era --Erik Altenbernd and Alex Young
Chapter 2: Listen to the Thunder:' Deadwood and the Extraordinary Depiction of Ordinary Violence --Justin A. Joyce
Chapter 3: Vile Task: Founding and Democracy in Deadwood's Imperial Imagination --Ronald Schmidt
Part II -Taking people's money: Agency, Identity and Political Economy
Chapter 4: It's all f***ing amalgamation and capital, ain't it?: Deadwood, the Pinkertons, and the Closing of the Frontier -- Jeffrey Scraba and John David Miles
Chapter 5: The Gothic Frontier of Modernity: The 'Invisible Hand' of State-Formation in Deadwood --Julia M. Wright
Chapter 6: Securing the Color: The Racial Economy of Deadwood -- Daniel Worden
Part III - A Sovereign F***ing Community: Sexuality and the Frontiers of the Social
Chapter 7: The Return of the Father: Deadwood and the Contemporary Gender Politics of Complexity -- David Greven
Chapter 8: The World is Less Than Perfect: Nontraditional Family Structures in Deadwood -- Paul Zinder
Chapter 9: Messages from Invisible Sources: Surveillance and the Public Sphere in Deadwood -- Mark Berrettini
