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This comprehensive study brings together leading international scholars in a variety of disciplines to both revisit the Spaghetti Western genre's cultural significance and consider its ongoing influence on international film industries. The book provides a range of innovative perspectives on this discrete and perennially popular topic. The book consists of four sections: Trans-Genre Roots; Ethnic Identities, Transnational Politics; Asian Crossovers; and Routes of Relocation, Transition, and Appropriation. Its rigorous historical, cultural, and political enquiry engages with current scholarly trends and balances specialized contextual knowledge with recognition of the instability of national/local identities. The book provides fresh interrogations of the myriad ways in which the Spaghetti Western has influenced contemporary filmmaking practice across national industries.

This chapter examines how Western movies (and their attendant themes and tropes) have functioned since the genre ceased to be a major part of mainstream American cinema, and how these changed generic conditions have affected the ways in which Westerns are produced and understood. It compares this situation with another historical moment in which the conventions of the Western genre found themselves transformed by a different set of surrounding contexts: the Italian adoption of the Western in the 1960s. It argues that the Italian Western makes the genre ‘strange’, and alienates the viewer from the world of the Wild West. It makes a compelling case for how the seemingly familiar codes of the Western have in fact been rendered alien in differing ways upon contact with various contexts, and thereby offers insights into the representational practices of twenty-first-century Westerns such as Appaloosa (Ed Harris, 2008), 3:10 to Yuma (James Mangold, 2007) and True Grit (Ethan and Joel Cohen, 2010).

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