Melancholic Attachments

Asian Melancholia

Sigmund Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” defines two psychic processes that contribute to subject formation, and distinguishes them from one another. Mourning, according to Freud, is the reaction to an identifiable loss, such as “a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”27 It is a finite process in which one recognizes the loss and, eventually, lets go and moves on. But if the lost object withdraws from consciousness, the grieving process turns inward, and the subject swallows the lost object, infinitely deferring mourning’s “end”: this is melancholia. Melancholia refers to unnamable, undefinable grief—it is the feeling of loss that emerges when one identifies with the lost object and incorporates it to the extent that the previously mournable thing is forever lost and unknown. In her powerful extension of Freud’s ideas, Anne Cheng argues that racialized subjects are both melancholic objects and melancholic subjects. For Cheng, Black and Brown bodies are the lost objects constituting the (American) white national ego-ideal, which disavows their labor and exploitation. As racialized subjects, they carry the grief that emanates from this exclusion. Yet racialized—or, for the purposes of this project, Asian diasporic—subjects are not uniform, and as melancholic subjects they are also constituted through other kinds of loss and erasure that are muddled and entangled with one another. Reflecting on the melancholia that hangs over Lee Isaac Chung’s 2020 film Minari, Cheng writes that the film’s “quiet fathoms . . . give us a patient and tender view into what it means to be sustained by a dream you can never fully occupy.”28 What Cheng leaves unanswered is the stakes of those dreams. What happens when we identify the melancholia of Asian diasporic subjects as related not just to their perpetual exclusion but also to their attachment to U.S. settler colonialism that generates and has been generated by violence? In posing such a question, I bring recent discussions of race and diaspora alongside settler-colonial and Indigenous studies to bear on Cheng’s framework of racial melancholia. To lay it out: diasporic attachments to settler colonialism register the lost possibility of assimilation into white settler culture. White settler colonialism is a lost object for diasporic subjects who are formed in relation to this lack, who desire incorporation into settler culture, and subsequently swallow, absorb, and incorporate settler coloniality—including its constitutive violence. As Cheng observes, riffing on Freud, “the melancholic eats the lost object—feeds on it, as it were.”29

Cowgirl and Wild West examine divergent relationships to the cowboy. Across both films settler-colonial loss/attachment is projected onto a fetish object: the cowboy, including the many objects associated with it and the American West (from now forward, I will use “cowboy” as shorthand for all of these objects). For Freud, the fetish was a substitute for the loss emerging from the realization that the mother lacked a phallus.30 He saw as perverse the inability to recognize that loss and to then direct one’s attention from the fetish toward a more normative object choice. It is worth noting that in theorizing the fetish, Freud was engaging with a concept coined by French philosopher Charles de Brosse, and further developed by thinkers such as Auguste Comte, Immanuel Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel, each of whom drew from colonial travel writings from across the world, particularly West Africa.31 For these writers, the fetish referred to improper objects of worship by Indigenous peoples, and the existence of fetish objects signified irrationality and savagery that was distinguished from the ostensible reason and civilization of Christian Europeans, one that Freud held onto in his own theorization, with “primitive” Indigenous societies serving as analogs for psychological under- or maldevelopment. At the same time (as Judith Butler has demonstrated) Freud’s theory of fetish is rife with contradictions: if the fetish is substitutable for the phallus, the fetish also undoes the primacy of the phallus as site of pleasure.32 Broken down this way, Freud’s theory of fetish thus also implicitly destabilizes the colonial discourse that it is constituted by.

Cowgirl and Wild West each examine such “perverse” fetishizations of the cowboy, in the Freudian sense. Yet, the consumption is incomplete, never entirely possible.33 Cowgirl makes sense of this impossibility eventually by letting go—the melancholic becomes mourned object. In Wild West there is a stubborn refusal to let go, and to remain perpetually ambivalent in relation to the cowboy. The cowboy as fetish object transforms from representative of settler-colonial culture into a thing unto itself. Wild West, Freud might say, is perverse in this respect. This perversion opens up a space of possibility for the cultivation of alternate worlds at the conclusion of Wild West, but it also elides Indigeneity as South Asian “Indians” fully fuse with the cowboy.

The Casualties of Asian Diasporic Attachments

Freud notes too that melancholia is narcissistic: the lost object feeds and forms the ego (in this case, the Asian diasporic subject). Loss perpetuates narcissism insofar as it creates the conditions for a singular focus on the wound, injury, or lack. For instance, as David Eng discusses in Racial Castration, the racial injury inflicted on some racialized communities through their feminization within popular cultures and media serves to shore up dominant white masculinities. Yet when racialized subjects aspire toward this dominant construction of masculinity, he observes, “the struggle to recompose the psychic and material body of the racialized masculine subject can often result in the ascribing of conservative norms to emancipatory political projects.”34 Readers grounded in Asian American studies will remember that in his works, the canonical writer Frank Chin, for example—along with his collaborators on the 1974 Aiiieeeee! anthology—attempted to repair Asian American racial injury by portraying Asian masculinity as more pure or virile than white masculinity, with the Chinese railroad worker standing in as the ultimate man.35 This is reflected in the main plot of Chin’s play The Chickencoop Chinaman, which is intercut by scenes in which the protagonist, Tom Lum, converses with the Lone Ranger; Lum believes that the Lone Ranger wore a mask because he was in fact Chinese.

Such recuperative strategies are not unique to Asian American scholarship or cultural production; Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree) likewise critiques Native studies’ installation of the “Red Power-like warrior” as the ultimate revolutionary subject, one which relegates Indigenous feminist and queer inquiry to the margins.36 In States of Injury, feminist political theorist Wendy Brown correspondingly warns of the pitfalls of speaking as a wounded subject, cautioning that centering attention on experience and injury risks reinstalling (and thus essentializing) identity at the expense of interrogating how that identity comes to be produced in the first place.37 Under the narcissistic conditions of melancholia, what happens to relationality? In the context of the AIDS epidemic, art historian Douglas Crimp has argued that the inability to mourn deaths by AIDS produced melancholic gay conservative responses to the crisis that understood sexual pleasure and promiscuity as “infantile” and advocated for monogamous respectability.38 In other words, in its turn inward and toward assimilation, the melancholic reaction in this case killed relationality. Stretching Crimp’s formulation, I read the pattern of Indigenous absence in Asian diasporic westerns also as an effect of the Asian diasporic melancholic reaction: Indigeneity does not figure into the grief over Asian exclusion, over the uneven and imperfect incorporation of Asian subjects into white national cultures. It does not compute; it does not register. However, unlike gay conservatives who explicitly disavow relationality, there is not necessarily a parallel disavowal of Indigeneity. Instead, the narcissism of melancholia generates the erasure and absence of Indigeneity, such that the erasure appears incidental. Occluded in this schema are both historical intimacies—such as the queer cross-racial encounters between Asian and Native men described by the historian Nayan Shah in the homosocial context of the American West, or “queer frontier,” as literary critic Blake Allmendinger calls it—as well as potential future ones.39 To elucidate: settler colonialism is constituted through structural erasure and the infinite deferral and displacement of Indigenous presence; through the disavowal of Indigenous bodies, relations, and knowledge. If settler-colonial culture is the lost object of Asian diasporic subjectivity, then Indigeneity endures a double erasure, first through settler-colonial violence and subsequently through Asian diasporic absorption of settler colonialism that is unable to adequately register Indigeneity. Whereas Asian diasporic subject formation happens in reaction to the primary loss of settler colonialism, then fractured Asian-Indigenous relations are absorbed into that loss. Cowgirl, Wild West, and the work of Kenneth Tam and others painfully enunciate this argument: Asian-Indigenous relationality is the cost of diasporic attachments to settler colonialism.

This opens up onto another question: what happens to relationality when we are preoccupied with tending to the wounds of racism, exploitation, militarism, and colonization? The distinct responses that Cowgirl and Wild West propose to problems of diasporic exclusion and identity have in common a consistent pattern of Indigenous erasure. As examples of Asian diasporic westerns, these films amplify diasporic reactions to white settler society’s exclusions. Yet all diasporic cultural production is narcissistic to the extent that it is, understandably, focused on the self (Asian diasporic subjectivity). To repeat, Asian-Indigenous relationality is the casualty in the struggle to address the harms diasporic subjects experience under white settler colonialism.

Amid this erasure, I see in the afterlives of both films possibilities that are never entirely foreclosed. While neither Cowgirl nor Wild West engage directly with Indigeneity, their mournful and melancholic affects create a sense of openness at the films’ respective ends. Here, I wonder what might happen if we take and stretch Freud’s theory of mourning and melancholia. What if, as a critical viewing practice, we mourn the Asian-Indigenous relations that have been lost—the missed connections, the missed love and care, the missed repair and reparation: the protests we failed to show up for, the solidarity we did not express, the friendships that did not happen, the collaborations that never materialized. What if we recognize the loss that has come from attending to the wounds of diasporic pain? Viewing these films as archives of Indigenous erasure emanating from melancholic reactions to white settler colonialism—rather than solely as archives of Asian diasporic struggles with identity and inclusion, for example—opens up the latent potential that the films’ narratives already present. My discussion of the films considers both these registers: the explicit intention to archive struggles with identity and exclusion, against the unwitting archival of Indigenous erasure.

Cowgirl: Consumption and Desire

Sunny Lee’s Cowgirl situates Asian diasporic belonging in the context of the intimate entanglements of settler colonialism, militarism, sex, and desire.40 It reveals, in other words, some of the “obscured connections”—to cite Lisa Lowe—of racial capitalism and empire.41 However, to make these important connections, it ironically depends on the implicit substitution of South Koreans (and Korean or Asian Americans more broadly) for Native Americans, both framed as undifferentiated victims of colonization.

Sandra Oh plays Sara Huang in Cowgirl, a young Korean American woman in Los Angeles who is obsessed with all things western: she dresses in gingham and paisley, regularly dons cowboy boots and hats; and she loves country music, rodeos, westerns, and “cowboy food” like baked beans. Western paraphernalia signals the limits and impossibility of Asian diasporic belonging and assimilation; Sara’s obsession is over-the-top and excessive, both within the world of the film, and as Lee presents it to viewers. At the same time, Lee takes Sara’s obsession seriously, taking care to situate and understand it. If Sara aspires to white settler assimilation, the film embeds that aspiration and desire within an entangled U.S.-Pacific history of colonialism, imperialism, and militarism through its citations of histories of food and popular culture. At the same time, presenting the cowboy and Wild West as metaphors and objects of consumption wrests them from their historical associations and significance for ongoing settler colonization. By framing these objects as primarily accessible vis-à-vis globalized culture, Lee implicitly situates settler-colonial meanings of the cowboy in a nineteenth-century past, effectively substituting the past violence of settler colonialism with the racism, displacement, and xenophobia of the globalized present. There is thus a tension in the film: it creates space for understanding desires for belonging and assimilation as fraught and enmeshed within entangled histories, but that space making ironically relies on the displacement of Indigeneity.

The film opens with Sara’s voice talking over a romantic scene from a black-and-white western that she watches intently while eating a can of Spam with red chopsticks (Figure 4). The camera slowly pans from the small television set to various processed food items—Wonder Bread, a can of Ranch Style Beans, Ritz Crackers, a can of apple juice, a cheese plate—then moves up from her red cowboy boots, to her paisley-print western-style shirt, to her ten-gallon hat. The unexpected clustering of these objects with an Asian woman’s body, in combination with the character’s excessive desire in what seems a private, intimate moment—generates a comedic effect. As Lee recalls, there was often a lot of “chuckling” at screenings, though it “was not a ‘LOL’ film.”42 The scene’s humor comes from its unsettling of expectations; in the process, it also clarifies what the expectations are: that the cowboy is not an object of consumption for Asian women—and that, perhaps, Asian women are not meant to be desiring subjects—that cowboys are men, and that they are primarily white men. As the historian Philip Deloria (Dakota) has argued in the context of representations of Indigeneity, “Expectations and anomalies are mutually constitutive.”43 Marking the Asian cowgirl as an anomaly simultaneously marks dominant cultural expectations for the gendered racialization of the cowboy.

This rich scene also establishes the film’s seeing framework, inviting viewers to take in a number of intimate connections. Routing Sara’s desire through processed foods, and specifically Spam—the ubiquitous, highly processed, canned pork-and-ham amalgam that the U.S. government distributed to army bases across the Pacific—and visually linking Spam to chopsticks, a salient signifier of East Asian cultures, Lee immediately situates Sara’s obsession in relation to the U.S. military intimacies that have led to Spam’s incorporation into Asian and Pacific Islander food cultures.44 The cluster of signifiers in this scene implicitly gestures to the transformation of military outposts into settler spaces, which Jodi Kim refers to as the “settler garrison.” As she writes, “The United States, in particular its military, can exercise certain jurisdictional and sovereign powers in specific locales or spatial exceptions across Asia and the Pacific that it has transformed into . . . the settler garrison. Thus, although Seoul . . . is a global megacity . . . it is the capital city of what is effectively a militarized U.S. neocolony.”45 By visually linking the cowboy to U.S. militarism, Cowgirl also invites the audience to see the cowboy as a transnational figure whose violent expansion of the American West symbolically and materially frames the U.S. empire. As Richard Slotkin explains, the “frontier myth” that many classic westerns promulgate has foundationally impacted American culture and politics, as evident in everything from the “cowboy presidencies” (Nixon, Reagan, G. W. Bush), to the frontier language that military and government officials and media pundits have used to code and describe America’s wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.46

The mobilization of the cowboy and frontier mythology in the service or war and empire is not just an evocation of the distant past: as Kevin Bruyneel notes, this is an instantiation of “settler memory” that actively upholds ongoing settler-colonial violence.47 Although Bruyneel theorizes settler memory primarily in terms of state memory, that memory is also absorbed and incorporated by the state’s subjects. Is settler memory at work in Cowgirl, or does it in fact call attention to settler memory’s machinations? This is open to interpretation. Though Cowgirl invites us to make connections between the cowboy and U.S. militarism, I wonder about the cowboy’s counterpart: the Indian. It is the “Indian” of “cowboys and Indians” who makes the cowboy legible as a figure of manifest destiny, vigilantism, and lawlessness. With Cowgirl, I am left wondering whether the Indigenous peoples whose bodies and ancestors have been violated by the cowboy have not been substituted, ironically, by other kinds of colonial subjects: in this case, South Koreans, particularly those in the U.S. diaspora.

The film again underscores settler and military entanglements in a scene where elders invite Sara to take the karaoke stage at an intergenerational Korean barbecue. Sara requests John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” which she sings with her childhood friend Steve. There are dense nodes of meaning knotted into this moment: “Country Roads” is a song about West Virginia, a celebration of white settler, rural Appalachian life and its attendant geographies.48 But, as Karen Tongson notes, it is also a song that became popular across the U.S. Pacific (including the Philippines, Vietnam, and South Korea) through military radio, and is a frequent karaoke selection.49 She states that “karaoke functioned as a vehicle of nostalgia for those in the diaspora who longed to connect with memories of ‘home’ through certain musical repertoires, even if some of those repertoires were actually already comprised of American pop hits folks grew to love when they were still ‘back home’ (e.g., songs by the Carpenters, or any of the Johns—Elton, Olivia Newton, Denver).”50 Thus, while audiences outside these diasporic communities may hear it as nostalgia for a fantasy of American settler life, for those in-the-know, it more aptly signifies a nostalgia for “back home” in Asia. Sara’s enthusiasm for “Country Roads” thus carries double meanings: as a wish to become indigenized in the United States, but also as a longing for an Asian “back home,” if not in South Korea, then in the familiar diasporic spaces where she presumably grew up singing karaoke renditions of the song. In this way, Cowgirl depicts Asian diasporic dislocations of the song’s significations that enact unintentional cross-colonial solidarities, as they shift the song’s meaning from a nostalgia for settler landscapes to a nostalgia for a familiar, homey experience of karaoke. At the same time, the original meaning of the song remains, held fast by Sara’s assimilatory desires. The film thus registers the dissimilar experiences of colonialism that U.S. settler empire generates across differentiated sites, particularly as the double meanings of the song sit in fraught tension with one another.

Cowgirl draws attention not just to the everyday food and sonic cultures generated by U.S. militarism but also—perhaps most significantly—to the desire economies that it has cultivated. Such economies have cast Asian women alternatively as passive or lascivious sexual objects of an Orientalist, heteropatriarchal gaze. The film disrupts these economies by presenting Sara as an actively desiring subject, with food—and specifically white, “bland” dairy foods—as a symbol for Sara’s excessive desires.51 In one scene, she messily eats a vanilla soft-serve cone on the beach in her ten-gallon hat, red cowboy boots, and gingham bikini when she spots her object of desire, rodeo rider Dave. When he notices her, she self-consciously stops eating her cone. When they later share a meal at a nearby diner, she sips on a glass of milk through a straw, nearly spurting it out in excited laughter in the course of their fairly mundane conversation (Figure 5).

Contrasting Dave—an improper object choice—is friend Steve, a car mechanic, who is the understanding voice of reason in the film. Steve calls Sara on her obsession but accepts it; during a scene at the barbecue, aunties knowingly nudge and wink at them and encourage Steve to “protect” Sara. Sara’s obsession with Dave, and with the figure of the cowboy, unravels after she sees him with another (white) woman. She and Steve are at a diner together after the barbecue, and she eats voraciously, the implication being that she has saved her appetite for whiter foods. When she spots Dave and the woman in the parking lot, she scrambles to her car to follow them, but a group of white rednecks accost her from a neighboring car, mocking her cowgirl outfit and shouting Asian slurs. Sara responds by throwing leftover barbecue food at them. Food again serves as metaphor for her emotions, but this time it is Korean food that expresses antiracist rage. In the final scene, Sara is back at the beach. She carries back two soft-serve vanilla cones, but leaves her hat at the ice cream stand. She stands in the sand, looking out somewhere into the distance; as she does, we hear her singing “Country Roads” again, and the end credits roll. The “home” of “Country Roads” more firmly signifies now as Sara’s return to her “roots” and to Steve, the ostensibly more proper object-choice. By abandoning her fetish (symbolized through the cowboy hat), Sara lets go of the lost object, and disassociates it from her sexual desires (symbolized through the ice cream). Her relationship to white settler culture transforms, no longer melancholic. The lingering “Country Roads”—in Sara’s voice, not John Denver’s—suggests more of a permanent incorporation and absorption; she has been forever changed.

One might read Cowgirl’s politics as conservative given that it appears to pit female desire against racial affiliation: she abandons her pursuit of Dave and her cowboy fetish, perhaps to settle with Steve. One might argue too that the “taming” of Sara’s excess corresponds to diasporic cultural politics that seek to preserve culture with recourse to heteropatriarchal norms. But in contrast to Hollywood’s overwhelming representation of Asian–white interracial romance in terms of anxieties around “yellow peril”—wherein, as Gina Marchetti has convincingly demonstrated, representations of relationships between Asian women and white men have served to “create a mythic image of Asia that empowers the West and rationalizes Euroamerican authority over the Asian other”—the film presents an alternate configuration of race and desire that upends assumptions about exotic Asian femininity.52 Moreover, the film’s focus on the inner world of Sara as a cowgirl rather than on Sara’s objects of desire (Dave or Steve) complicates an interpretation of the film as conservative. Rather, Sara’s cosplay, which also increases her proximity to whiteness, is indicative of the entanglements of racialization, gender, and desire insofar as Sara believes her access to whiteness vis-à-vis heteropatriarchy—as symbolized by the western romance she watches in the opening scene—is conditional both on her own assimilation into whiteness and her attachment to the white cowboy, Dave. If, as Yvonne Tasker argues, “the Western is a genre in which white men and women achieve a freedom in class terms that is simply unimaginable in other genres,” Sara’s insertion into the genre as a cowgirl is also about her access to self-actualization and freedom.53 In other words, her access to the privileges of white settler America hinges both on her own transformation to a specific kind of white femininity and her connection to Dave. The film thus invites us not just to think about the cowboy as a representation of idealized American masculinity but also to reflect on the politics of sex, gender, and desire as a means of negotiating racial injury. However, in contrast to Frank Chin’s recuperation of Asian masculinity as more pure or virile than white masculinity, Sara wrests her Asian American femininity from the position of the already-excessively feminine by choosing to play cowgirl and not domestic goddess (or geisha, or “lotus blossom”).54 She thus mimics a form of white femininity that is transgressive of gender norms, even if not radically so.

I want to close out this section by thinking through the stakes of Lee’s deployment of the cowboy and Wild West as metaphors for American culture that is out of reach. Two things are notable here. First, the film positions Asian diasporas as tenuously and ambivalently positioned with respect to the United States, including U.S. settler culture. Lee makes painfully clear that the cowboy is not equally consumable by everyone. In other words, despite the transnational proliferation of westerns and western paraphernalia, these objects remain cathected to white bodies, and to mythologies of Euro-American settler expansion. Thus, recognition as a cowboy—or, recognition in terms of everything signified by this figure—is conditioned through race. This inability to recognize the nonwhite cowboy recalls Fanon’s classic discussion of Black identity in Black Skin, White Masks, where the Black male subject continually finds his subjectivity overdetermined by race, unrecognized by the dominant gaze.55 Cowgirl gestures toward the failure of recognition discussed by Fanon by continually pointing to the inevitability and impossibility of an Asian woman playing cowboy. This is a relationship of failure and negotiated belonging.

Second, as much as Cowgirl is a film about the inner worlds of its subjects, there are absences and silences that constitute its reflections. It is not that Cowgirl obliterates these other meanings tied to the cowboy/Wild West, but that there is an excision of the Indigenous histories, stories, and experiences that make the film’s worlds possible. Whereas settler colonialism consigns Indigeneity to death and obliteration, Cowgirl’s appropriations of settler-colonial culture—as symbolized through the cowboy—unwittingly repeat the presumed inevitability of Indigenous death. This is the double erasure I referred to earlier in the chapter, or, in Hutcheon’s terms, a form of complicitous critique. In registering the loss that Sara comes to terms with, the film both enacts settler colonialism’s original erasures and, through Sara’s performance of mimicry, repeats them. Within the structural frame of the film, which centers on the grief caused by settler colonialism’s exclusions, Indigeneity—the absence and displacement of which constitutes settler colonialism—does not register. I thus watch this film not just with the hopeful sense that the protagonist has comes to terms with her identity and sense of belonging in white settler America, but also with the grief over the losses that remain unnameable within this frame, of Asian–Indigenous histories and relations.

Wild West: The Impossibility of Resignification

In Cowgirl, Sara consumes and attempts to absorb the cowboy and Wild West, the ultimate objects of white settler culture. In Wild West, the protagonists not only consume but attempt to resignify these objects—and consistently fail, maintaining an “unhealthy” obsession with the cowboy (Figure 6). The film is set in Southall, a predominantly working-class South Asian suburb of West London with a history of tensions between police and South Asian youth. In 1976, the death of a young Sikh man, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, sparked the formation of the Southall Youth Movement to protest racism and police brutality.56 Though no one pressed charges, many believed that Chaggar was killed at the hands of white supremacist youth.57 The movement was further galvanized in 1979 by the police murder of New Zealand schoolteacher Blair Peach, at a rally to protest the growth of organized racism in East London.58 Wild West’s narrative of youth rebellion and British South Asian working-class communities unfolds in this context of race and racism in Southall specifically, and Britain more generally.

The film’s setting and context are significant insofar as they portray a more distant and transnational relationship to U.S. settler cultures and politics: in Wild West, the cowboy is a figure of possibility for non-Americans desiring recognition within a system of transnational whiteness. Whereas the cowboy for Sara in Cowgirl symbolizes white America, in Wild West the cowboy signifies differently as a marker of excessive difference and rebelliousness that contrasts against other kinds of music-based youth subcultures in the United Kingdom, such as those formed around rock, punk, reggae, or hip hop.59 In the film, the cowboy and British South Asians share the status of being foreign and postcolonial in relation to the United Kingdom, odd cousins of the erstwhile British empire. It is worth noting here too that South Asian migration patterns to the United States and United Kingdom differ significantly. In the United States, South Asians have immigrated primarily as highly skilled workers.60 This has contributed to their perception as model minorities, and their participation in that myth. Vijay Prashad, among others, has argued that the model minority myth contributes to anti-Black racism, as South Asian success is attributed to the result of biological or cultural traits, wherein the myth obfuscates the systemic production of “success” and “failure” while denying the salience of race.61 By contrast, in the United Kingdom, citizens from across Commonwealth countries gained entry into the state through Commonwealth rules following World War II.62 Unlike their U.S. counterparts, British South Asians are predominantly working class.63 Moreover, because of the structural similarities between South Asian and Afro-Caribbean migrants, there has been a longer history of alliance between the two, as race politics in the United Kingdom have been framed through discourses of national belonging, enabling increased possibilities for multiracial alliance formation.64

This working-class South Asian diasporic context frames the film. The slippage between Asian “Indians” playing cowboy and the cowboy’s substitutability for “Indian”—where “Indian” stands in for the colonized, and where cowboys are conflated with Americans, who are former colonial subjects of Britain—sets up Wild West’s running punch line. The film mines the characteristic vigilantism and lawlessness of the cowboy to present the protagonists as an even more radical counterpart to other youth subcultural formations.65 Though this might seem ironic, it speaks to the transnational appeal of the western. While the film theorist Andre Bazin—perplexed by the western’s reach—attributes this to “a secret that somehow identifies [the western] with the essence of cinema,” I would suggest that its appeal may lie in its paradoxically colonial anticoloniality.66 As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz astutely notes, while popular histories may mark 1898 as the beginnings of U.S. imperialism, “‘American’ supremacy and populist imperialism are inseparable from the content of the U.S. origin story and the definition of patriotism in the United States today. . . . The founding of the United States marked a split in the British Empire, not an anticolonial liberation movement.”67 Although there is little disagreement that the western depicts conquest and colonization, it is conquest and colonization that doubles as anticolonial fantasy. Unlike aristocratic European colonization, popular conceptions of American colonization frame it as rough, uncouth, and lawless. The national mythology of the United States imagines Americans as simultaneously European and Indigenous, yoking together the historical prowess of Europe with the authentic “savagery” of Indigeneity. According to Deloria, this paradox of American national identity emerged in relation to a desire to formulate a distinctly American sense of self that was distinguishable from a British or European one. He writes:

Whereas Euro-Americans had imprisoned themselves in the logical mind and the social order, Indians represented instinct and freedom. They spoke for the “spirit of the continent.” Whites desperately desired that spirit, yet they invariably failed to become aboriginal and thus “finished.” Savage Indians served Americans as oppositional figures against whom one might imagine a civilized national Self. Coded as freedom, however, wild Indianness proved equally attractive, setting up a “have-the-cake-and-eat-it-too” dialectic of simultaneous desire and repulsion.68

If the crown and royal family symbolize British empire, the cowboy symbolizes American empire. America paradoxically spreads civilization through vigilante forms of justice that themselves lack civility. Absorbing and appropriating Indigeneity, American national imaginaries (as articulated through venues such as popular culture and political discourse) frame themselves as successfully postcolonial in relation to Britain.

Wild West’s protagonists mime and mine the cowboy’s “postcoloniality.” The film’s plot centers on the struggles of an aspiring country music band composed of young South Asian men in the United Kingdom: Zaf Ayub (Naveen Andrews), along with his bandmates in the Honky Tonk Cowboys, dreams of making it big and moving to Nashville, Tennessee. He faces many obstacles along the way: his mother, who frequently admonishes Zaf and his brothers for bringing shame to their family; his disgruntled employers (he can’t seem to hold a steady job); the vengeful Tappers (a local group of rocker/punk Brown men), who believe Zaf’s brother Ali—a used car mechanic and salesman—has cheated them; and English society in generally, where systemic racism limits Zaf’s potential for fame. Zaf’s brief romance with Rifat (Sarita Chowdhury), a young woman in an abusive relationship, opens up a space of possibility for the Honky Tonks. Her singing talents and “exotic” looks help the band land a meeting with (fictional) Wild West Records. However, the record label producer ultimately decides that they want to produce Rifat as a solo act, because the Honky Tonks are otherwise not “marketable.” In the end, Zaf and the band take off to Nashville to realize their dreams. Echoing a trend in British South Asian film and writing more generally, the Honky Tonks perceive the “postcolonial” United States, in contrast to the United Kingdom, as a space of possibility and freedom.69 Though the film troubles the perception of the United States as multicultural utopia, it does not necessarily upend the notion of a postcolonial United States. When the Wild West producer, for example, explains why the band would be untenable in the United States, he points to the slippages of U.S. multiculturalism through an overemphasis on visual registers of recognition, rather than historically distinct processes of racialization:

Back in the US, they see a picture of you, they say, “Oh boy. Red Indians trying to play country.” Maybe down in Texas . . . in Texas they say, “These hombros [sic] are Mexican! Trying to play our music.” Then they get fucking historical. [They] say, “Remember the Alamo.”

The film points out the representational limits of the cowboy, but in the process performs a slippage of its own: it implies that the stakes for South Asian “Indians” playing cowboy are the same as the stakes for Indigenous “Red Indians” playing cowboy. “Indians” are conflated with a generalized colonial or racially marginalized status that is equally, if variably, vulnerable to misrecognition.

Like Cowgirl’s Sara, Wild West’s protagonist, Zaf, is obsessed with all things western. And like Cowgirl, Wild West is also a reflection on how the figure of the cowboy circulates through global capitalism and is negotiated locally in complex and sometimes contradictory ways, drawing attention to its production and consumption within popular cultures. By re-presenting the cowboy as Brown, Wild West undercuts some of the racial and colonial coding of the western, and its 1990s Southhall setting spatially and temporally dislocates the western from the nineteenth-century American West. Through its mise-en-scène, Wild West—again, like Cowgirl—is attentive to the historical material processes through which these objects circulate transnationally even as they are part of the everyday world of Zaf and the Honky Tonks: early in the film, for instance, the camera focuses on a billboard for “Cowboy brand Blackeye Beans”; western paraphernalia covers Zaf’s bedroom, including posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, the Lone Ranger, and a Confederate flag; and the family home doubles as brother Ali’s western-themed car shop, complete with a cactus advertising sign, saloon doors, and a wagon wheel (Figure 7). The unexpected clustering of these objects, particularly the Confederate flag, around Brown men’s bodies undercuts the seriousness of the young men’s aspirations, serving as a reminder that the United States is not the space of freedom that they believe it to be.

The Honky Tonks’ version of cowboy, however, is distinctive from the U.S. one, a mimicry that is intentionally “not quite.”70 During their performances for example, the Honky Tonks’ cowboy outfits are brightly colored, fringed, and sparkling. If Zaf’s style seems excessive, it mirrors his mother’s. The family living room is a mishmash of colors, patterns, and objects: the room is covered in patterned wallpaper, the red sofa is draped with a heavy gold throw blanket, on the floor is a Pakistani rug, while a large image of General Zia-ul-Haq adorned with sparkly garlands hangs next to an Islamic calendar.71 Just as John Denver’s “Country Roads” had a double, insider meaning in Cowgirl, the careful arrangement of mise-en-scène in Wild West suggests that Zaf’s ostentation is not just overcompensation for his inability to fit in, but an extension of his familial identity. Here, the film draws lines of affiliation between the figure of the cowboy and South Asian “Indians” through an indigenization of the cowboy as British South Asian. We learn in the film that much of Zaf’s obsession with the Wild West and country music centers on the question of identity and belonging. The Honky Tonks perform Steve Earle’s “Number 29,” for example, the lyrics for which begin with “I was born and raised here, this town, my town.” And, in his conversation with Rifat, Zaf tells her that he doesn’t wear cowboy gear for the “shock value.” “It’s for myself, it’s like the way I see things,” he explains. Simultaneously, Wild West draws our attention to the uneven access to this settler culture, because their racial difference positions the Honky Tonks as perpetually outside of the significations of cowboy, itself an insider-outsider role. Early in the film, Zaf’s mother cries in exasperation, “There are no Pakistani cowboys!”; at an Asian Talent Contest performance, the audience boos the Honky Tonks, yelling “bring back the bhangra” (referring to the previous band); and, during one of their first conversations, Rifat says to Zaf, “You don’t see too many Asians wearing cowboy hats.”72 Following their rejection at Wild West Records, Zaf proclaims, “I always thought we could duck the punches, but these people got no sense of imagination. Just like the rest of this damn, deadbeat country. We’re just Brown faces to them.”

If in Cowgirl, Sara ultimately finds resolution and “moves on” from her obsession with the cowboy, in Wild West, Zaf and the band never let go. They stubbornly remain obsessed with their fetish, even in the face of a precarious future: they have no record deal and are only able to afford their airfare to the United States after having sold their family home in London. This lack of resolution in Wild West places pressure on utopian renderings of diaspora and migration.73 Zaf and the band’s “perverse” attachment to the cowboy in Wild West detaches it from its primary significations. The fetish ceases to be a substitute for an original lack and becomes a desirable object in and of itself. Rather than representing aspirations toward inclusion or historical revision, the cowboy in the film’s U.K. context is a permanent form of difference—difference that the protagonists fully embrace. For the Honky Tonks, the cowboy is fully extractable from U.S. history as a standalone figure of freedom. In the penultimate scene, the Honky Tonks are decked out in summer shirts embroidered with palm trees and cowgirls, getting ready to board the plane for Nashville (Figure 8). The parting shot of the film is of the plane taking off, suggesting that they have finally realized their impossible dream of getting to Nashville. Their pioneering ambition and willingness to risk it all bears echoes of Euro-Americans venturing out to the frontier. The Honky Tonks too “go West” in search of fame and riches. Like Cowgirl, Wild West suggests the cowboy as a product of globalized culture, with its settler-colonial meanings functioning as metaphors for the impossibility of belonging and inclusion.74 But given that the film takes place in the United Kingdom and not the United States, the originary lack here was never white settler culture, as it is in Cowgirl, but white British culture (which, of course, emerges from the colonial empire that gives birth to U.S. white settler culture). As metaphor, the cowboy in Wild West signals not so much Americana per se, but lawlessness and rebellion.

As a figure of freedom, the cowboy writ large is rife with contradictions: excessively masculine, faithful to but uninterested in heteropatriarchy. Indeed, if the cowboy is an object of desire for the Honky Tonks, it is also entangled with sex and desire. The protagonists’ veneration of the cowboy and commitment to their craft is intelligible through sex and gender relations. Whereas in Cowgirl, Dave stands in for the cowboy/U.S. West and impossible assimilation in whiteness, in Wild West, Rifat stands in for the impossibility of heteronormativity. Hetero-romance appears initially as the film’s promise: Zaf and the band are a safe haven for Rifat after she flees her white British husband, and in this sense Zaf fulfills patriarchal duty as a protector restoring racial equilibrium. But he is ultimately more faithful to his cowboy fetish than he is to Rifat, who is unable to help the Honky Tonks realize their Nashville dream. A producer at Wild West Records declares them not marketable while favoring Rifat. As Jigna Desai points out in her astute reading of the film:

Gendered Orientalism marks Rifat as commodifiable and desirable by a multicultural capitalist market and marginalizes Zaf and the other members of the band. . . . This film is conscious of the configuration of nonthreatening and commodifiable diasporic production—the band is acceptable only if they play bhangra, and Rifat is marketable because women can be exoticized.75

The film includes a comical scene that assures the audience that Zaf’s perversion of desire—away from Rifat, the ostensibly proper object choice, and toward his cowboy/country music obsession—is quirky rather than queer. This rendering of the cowboy corresponds to genre conventions. As Roderick McGillis notes:

Cowboys function as preservers, even nurturers, of community, and at the same time they remain outside community, uninterested in economic gain and political power. Often they interact with children, and when they do they are clearly role models for these children. Yet they do not marry, they do not hold jobs, they appear not to work. They exist on horseback, forever riding from one endangered community to another to set things right.76

In the scene, Zaf’s mother stumbles across Rifat’s undergarments in his bedroom, and assumes that Zaf is transgender. Her shock and despair centers on the repercussions this may have on his prospects for a heteronormative future: “You would not be happy as a girl. We could never find you a husband!” she exclaims in panic. “First you become a cowboy, and now this!” The mother, in this utterance, links two kinds of transgressions, first of racial-national identification, the second of gender. This moment in the film underscores what Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore argue is the relational construction of “trans-,” which they suggest can never be understood as an isolated identity formation.77 Here, Zaf’s mother likens his failure as a diasporic subject to fully embody the American cowboy, to the failure of gender contained in the presumption of his transgender-ness. The problem of gender nonconformity thus emphasizes for the audience the problem that Zaf’s desire to be a cowboy poses, with transgender problematically functioning as metaphor for problem. Zaf eventually reveals that the clothing belongs to Rifat, who has fled her abusive husband and is staying with Zaf. While his mother is not pleased, she accepts this transgression much more readily than the presumed transgression of gender. The confirmation of hetero- and cis-identification positions Zaf’s otherwise nonnormative status closer to the conventions of genre: presumably heterosexual but uninterested in settling down.78 It is worth noting here that the cowboy’s masculinity is legible in relation to Indigenous masculinities that are perceived as hypermasculine, improperly so.79 In popular discourse, the cowboy mirrors—or matches—the perceived wildness and strength of Indigenous masculinity, but whereas Indigenous masculinities are equated with savagery, the cowboy is deemed a servant of civilization. Yet, as Lisa Tatonetti points out, “popular culture’s hypermasculine warrior ethos is a socially engineered and inadequate understanding of the myriad ways in which Indigenous peoples live and deploy gender”; historically, the expansiveness of Indigenous gender traditions proved threatening to English, French, and Spanish invaders.80 When the film depicts a repudiation of transgender identity, then, it simultaneously depicts a repudiation of expansive Indigenous traditions of gender.

At the same time, though Zaf is an outcast cowboy figure who does not fit in, unlike the cowboy of classic westerns, he neither symbolically nor literally enables the settlement of others. Zaf’s desire to be a cowboy, and what his mother assumes is a desire to be feminine, signal a betrayal of patrifilial attachments to the nation that are expressed through respect for the Father (or, for the Patriarchy). In his essay “Are You a Man or a Mouse?,” Homi Bhabha emphasizes the continuities between the figures of father and son, and love for the nation, drawing attention to the relationship between patrilineality and nationhood.81 Bhabha suggests that the fatherly desire for the son to embody an empowered masculinity—encapsulated in the question “Are you a man or a mouse?”—is ironically possible only through the son’s respect for the father; a relationship of subservience. Zaf’s cowboy ethos navigates this uneven terrain of masculinity. As he struggles to keep a steady job, his father’s death due to years of overwork at the Southhall Meat Company haunt him. Zaf’s honest but failed attempt to hold down a job at a halal butcher shop (despite being a vegetarian) echoes his simultaneous desire and inability to perform respect and subservience. Bhabha suggests that one likewise fulfills patriarchal obligations to the nation only through service to, and respect for, the nation. In Wild West, Zaf’s mother chastises him for failing to live up to his obligations as a Pakistani son. Yet Zaf’s sense of service to masculinist ideals is tempered by raced and classed limits to national belonging, as evoked by the conditions of his father’s death. His failure to live up to masculine duties extends to his brief but unrequited romance with Rifat, as Rifat snags a solo deal, while the Honky Tonks head to Nashville with no guarantee of success. If Zaf is a “failed” or incoherent postcolonial subject, he is fully coherent as a cowboy.

The protagonists’ perverse attachment to the cowboy beyond the film’s conclusion, on the one hand, disturbs the sanctity of the cowboy and firmly positions it as a free-floating object of consumption, rather than as a marker of belonging in the United States. The cowboy is simultaneously an impossibility, out of reach for the film’s protagonists, and in this way the film nudges viewers to remember the colonial histories that structure representation and aesthetics. The cowboy is thus an unattainable site of desire. But I am left with some questions about the cowboy itself, and what it stands for: What is the unattainable thing that is framed as desirable? The film emphasizes the rebelliousness, freedom, and independence associated with the cowboy, with the protagonists finding in the cowboy a source of anticolonial solidarity. Although the decoupling of the cowboy from its specific role in U.S. history seems to extract it from its colonial associations, the cowboy as anticolonial figure is itself embedded in its longstanding status as a symbol of U.S. nationhood and ethos, one that is made possible in relation to Indigeneity—not just through the coupling of “cowboys and Indians” but also the perceived “instinct and freedom” that Indigenous communities were associated with.82 If the U.S./cowboy is rebellious and free in contrast to the constrained civility of Britain, it is rebellious and free by virtue of its proximity to Indigeneity. The film’s latent critique of colonial histories and the unattainability of the cowboy for the Honky Tonks is thus tempered by a loss, too. The extraction of the cowboy from its histories also swallows and absorbs Indigenous referents that make the cowboy legible as a figure of rebellion. As with Cowgirl, I am again left with grief and unease around what remains unregistered here: Asian-Indigenous relations, and the possibilities for transnational solidarity across empire(s). The open-ended nature of the film, however, leaves the possibility that anything could happen; the Honky Tonks will likely realize that Nashville is not the fantasy land they have imagined. In the United States, the Honky Tonks are unlikely to be read as going against the grain, and more likely to be perceived as attempting to project a normative image—one which, because of race, may alternately be subject to ridicule or approval. They may also cause cultural confusion, as the Wild West Records producer informed them. Such speculative interpretations are possible because loss remains melancholic and infinitely deferred in Wild West. However, given that the pleasure of the film comes from the Honky Tonks’ stubborn refusal to let go of their obsession, it is simultaneously impossible to imagine that there is ever a future in which the Honky Tonks are not playing cowboy. Their dogged desire is precisely the film’s point.

In both Cowgirl and Wild West, the cowboy is a means to navigate problems of diasporic exclusion. Each film evinces the range of distinct meanings, intentions, and pleasures associated with “playing cowboy.” For the young men in Wild West, there is the thrill and excitement of identifying with the cowboy’s rebellious nature and vigilantism, which they see as oppositional to British and Pakistani cultural norms, but aligned with their hybrid identities as South Asian diasporic subjects. For Cowgirl’s Sara, the cowgirl/cowboy embodies the promise of acceptance, recognition, and inclusion as an Asian American woman. Like many other diasporic films released during the 1990s, Wild West and Cowgirl draw on postmodern aesthetics and strategies of representation in order to advance critiques of whiteness, xenophobia, and national identity. Because they draw attention to the impossibility of Asian diasporic belonging, they are unable to process another kind of loss, that of Asian-Indigenous relationality. The loss is structurally generated.

This prompts the questions that lead to the next chapter: Does knowing more or knowing better generate different kinds of representational and aesthetic strategies? What happens when artists more attuned to the politics of Indigenous sovereignty address issues of racism and exclusion?