Susan Kollin, Captivating Westerns: The Middle East in the American West  Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. 294; ISBN 978 0 8032 2699 9. Alessandra Magrin Susan Kollin’s ambitious monograph on the exchanges between the American West and the Middle East in popular culture opens with a fundamental observation: that the Western was “never merely national, but always transnational and global” (35). By overcoming the impasse of a field bound to national narratives for too long, ..

Magrin, Alessandra

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Susan Kollin, Captivating Westerns: The Middle East in
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Alessandra Magrin
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Susan Kollin, Captivating Westerns:
The Middle East in the American West
Alessandra Magrin
1 Susan Kollin, Captivating Westerns: The Middle East in the American West 
2 Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. 294; ISBN 978 0 8032 2699 9.
3 Alessandra Magrin
4 Susan Kollin’s ambitious monograph on the exchanges between the American West and
the Middle East  in popular culture opens with a fundamental  observation:  that  the
Western was “never  merely  national,  but  always  transnational  and global”  (35).  By
overcoming  the  impasse  of  a  field  bound  to  national  narratives  for  too  long,  this
concept  truly  unlocks  the  potential  for  countless  new  perspectives  on  Western
scholarship. In this respect, Kollin’s book represents an admirable effort in leading the
way forward.  In Captivating Westerns,  Kollin sees the Western genre as transcending
national  boundaries  from  the  very  beginning.  Drawing  theoretically  from  Richard
Francaviglia,  Neil  Campbell  and  Christine  Bold—among  the  most  important  ones—
Kollin  traces  the  origins  of  the  Western  back  to  captivity  narratives,  which  she
reconnects  with  its  transnational  origins  from  the  East.  The  book  then  carefully
assesses  Middle  Eastern  sources  and  references  in  19th century  Western  literature.
Spanning the works of Mark Twain, Owen Wister, Frank Whittaker, Teddy Roosevelt,
Frederick Remington, and delving into the influence of Moorish-Spanish horse culture
(which arrived in the US via Mexico), Kollin unearths a network of shaping connections
between the Orient and the ‘Western creational myths’ engineered by the architects of
the ‘Frontier Club’—to use Christine Bold’s fitting expression.
5 In the second chapter, Kollin shifts this discourse to the 20th century through a close
reading  of  Willa  Cather’s  works,  situating  the  celebrated  Western  author  in  the
“tradition  of  American  Orientalism  that  emerged  out  of  a  popular  wave  of
Egyptomania” (74). The American Southwest equated to an Orient to Cather, Kollins
argues, “the desert spaces and cultural ruins of the region were often viewed as New
World analogs of ruins in the ancient Middle East…. The Southwest in turn became a
landscape of exotic otherness and intrigue…” (75).  In Death Comes for the Archbishop,
Susan Kollin, Captivating Westerns: The Middle East in the American West
European journal of American studies , Reviews 2019-3
1
Kollin notes how such Orientalizing ideas about otherness—of landscapes, religions and
Indigenous peoples—helped to foster an American strain of the orientalist discourse
culminating in the trope of the “Arab-as-Indian.” At the same time, Kollin intercepts
traces  of  another  Western-Middle  Eastern  contamination:  the  construction  of  the
“cowboy-as-Arab.”  Such  Oriental  elements,  Kollin  maintains,  played  a  determining
influence in American culture,  problematizing the “quintessential  Americanness” of
Western icons such as the cowboy. In this chapter, Kollin’s evocative and compelling
analysis  offers  strong  proof  that  the  narratives  of  American  Exceptionalism,
particularly in its Western declinations, rest on inherently shaky foundations. 
6 In  the  third  chapter,  the  trope  of  the  “cowboy-as-Arab”  re-appears  in  Kollin’s
exploration of the connections between Hollywood Westerns and the Middle East. The
films Hidalgo (2004) and Annie Get your Gun (1950) are brought into conversation with
discourses of  civilization,  savagery,  and national  identity belonging to the tradition
initiated by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Of all the chapters, this is perhaps the one in which
the cogency of Kollin’s writing dims. A sounder engagement with the rich scholarship
on World Fairs, Wild West shows, and ideas of nation and ethnicity, would have helped
to better situate the place the Orient occupied in the national imagination. Equally, a
deeper historical contextualization would have been beneficial to disprove some factual
inaccuracies (i.e. the Arab performer George Hamid claiming Annie Oakley had taught
him English,  when,  in  reality,  she  had left  Buffalo  Bill’s  show several  years  before
Hamid even joined the company), which Kollin takes for granted as evidence for her
thesis.  In  the  chapter  analyzing  the  musical  Oklahoma! (1943)  Kollin’s  argument
sometimes becomes engulfed in lengthy commentary and storyline digressions, which
can prove distracting from the core reasoning. Yet,  the focus picks up again in the
latter part of the chapter, when she examines the figures of the Syrian and Persian
peddlers. Here, Kollin illuminates on the contested notions of whiteness at play within
American  society,  exposing  the  ambivalent  and  shifting  racial  status  of  these
immigrant groups, which is ultimately reflected in the representation of the Middle
Eastern character in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical. “In reaching across regional,
national, and global terrain for its settings, characters and conflicts,” Kollin cleverly
concludes, “the Western…has also relied on various Easts in its development, resolving
certain racial conflicts only to repress and elide the existence of others” (143). The last
two chapters concentrate on Westerns in the aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent U.S.
occupation of Middle Eastern regions. Kollin recognizes a revisionist narrative in 21st
century Westerns,  which, she argues,  is apt at questioning the dialectic of “cowboy
diplomacy” which justifies America’s aggressive foreign policy. She explains that “in
recent Westerns savagery…becomes located within the rescuers themselves...” (149),
and invokes in her discussion Paul Haggis’s  In  the Valley of  Elah (2007) and Kathryn
Bigelow’s  The Hurt  Locker (2008)  as  examples of  critical  interpretations of  American
missions in the Middle East. These movies, Kollin argues, follow a conventional Western
dynamic which is based on the conflict between savagery and civilization. At the same
time, she maintains,  they challenge and undermine this same narrative.  Ultimately,
Kollin  looks  at  the  way the  Western has  also  become a  vehicle  for  Middle  Eastern
audiences to convey criticism of American foreign policy. Often, Westerns reach these
global audiences in a mediated form, most commonly through the Spaghetti Westerns,
which through the inversion of  the moral  codes of  the classic  Westerns carried an
intrinsic  critique  of  America.  Under  the  light  of  this  extensive  and  well-argued
evidence,  Kollin’s  overarching  thesis  that  the  Western  is  fluid,  ubiquitous,  and  no
Susan Kollin, Captivating Westerns: The Middle East in the American West
European journal of American studies , Reviews 2019-3
2
longer  understood  as  a  quintessentially  American  genre  speaks  most  powerfully.
Overall, the book is a goldmine of Middle Eastern references in Westerns, offering at
the same time a useful interpretive key to access the Western outside canonical texts
and contexts. Despite suffering from an occasionally unbalanced analysis and a limited
historical grounding, the cogency of its thesis and the sound engagement with literary
and  cultural  theory  renders  Captivating  Westerns  a  valuable  addition  to  literary
scholarship, cultural studies, and American studies.
AUTHOR
ALESSANDRA MAGRIN
Alessandra Magrin, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
Susan Kollin, Captivating Westerns: The Middle East in the American West
European journal of American studies , Reviews 2019-3
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