When the South/ern meets the West/ern

As shown by Quentin Tarantino’s latest film,Django Unchained (2012), compared to westerns, motion pictures on the American South are often presented as films of a “bad genre”. However, like the movie scenarios on the Far West, the great narratives and quintessential representations of the Deep South have also profoundly affected the vision we have of American history and culture. Why, then, did we have to wait until the release of Tarantino’s parodic and provocative western-soaked southern (or vice versa) to realize to what extent the codes, myths, motifs and typologies of the western genre can interact and overlap with the generic traits of the southern? This and related questions will be debated by American, British and French specialists of American cinema at the April 2013 international symposium “When the West/ern meets the South/ern” at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Transatlantic and transdisciplinary, the encounter between film and literary studies, history and politics will constitute a major step towards the creation of an international network to enhance further explorations of this fascinating interdisciplinary object of study marked by the idea of “splitting”, as well as by notions of “crossing” and “hybridization”