Romance and Power in the Hollywood Eastern / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

"This book is a timely intervention that explores how generic conventions from the Western and notions of romance have been used in canonical Euro-American cinema to shore up a Eurocentric view of the non-Western world. Films from Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to Indochine (1992) are unpacked to reveal the politics of gender, race, geography, and romance at play in mainstream images built on colonial legacies."

--Michael W. Thomas, co-editor of Cine-Ethiopia: The History and Politics of Film in the Horn of Africa (2018), SOAS University of London, UK

This book asserts the existence of the "Eastern" as an analytically significant genre of film. Positioned in counterpoint to the Western, the famed cowboy genre of the American frontier, the "Eastern" encompasses films that depict the eastern and southern frontiers of Euro-American expansion. Examining six films in particular-Gunga Din (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Heat and Dust (1983), A Passage to India (1984), Indochine (1992), and The English Patient (1996)-the author explores the duality of the "Eastern" as both assertive and seductive, depicting conquest and romance at the same time. In juxtaposing these two elements, the book seeks to reveal the double process by which the "Eastern" both diminishes the "East" and Global South and reinforces ignorance about these regions' histories and complexity, thereby setting the stage for ever-escalating political aggression.

Nalini Natarajan is Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. She is the author of six books, including The Atlantic Gandhi: The Mahatma Overseas (2012) and The Unsafe Sex: The Female Binary and Public Violence against Women (2016).