Settlers are weird: Daryl Celeste Meador, Melancholic Texas: Cinema and the Settler Colonial Uncanny, PhD dissertation, New York University, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Settlers are weird: Daryl Celeste Meador, Melancholic Texas: Cinema and the Settler Colonial Uncanny, PhD dissertation, New York University, 2024

05Nov24

Abstract: This dissertation traces a melancholic archive of Texan culture, arguing that the fraught psyches it contains are formed by the radical imaginative foreclosures imposed by the state’s settler colonial history. Texas’ history of discursive and forceful claims to Anglo sovereignty parallels that of the United States at large, but in a condensed space and time, placing it within the problematics of settler colonial theory in ways that have yet to be fully understood. Building upon theories of psychoanalysis, settler colonial studies, and Indigenous critical theory, this dissertation considers cultural mediations of Texas for their continued imaginative work of repression and disavowal, work that is necessitated by the central violences and constitutive fraudulences of the state. I look to cinema and literature as realms of shared fantasy that reflect the psychopathological conditions of settler colonial subjectivity. Texas often forms a conflicted site in the national imaginary, one of both desire and disavowal, a screen through which realities of broad and structural historical violences can be effaced, quarantined, or assuaged. I write colonial histories into and alongside these cultural texts, arguing that the violence necessitated by forcing settler fictions into reality offers crucial context to the oftentimes inexplicable or misattributed psycho-affective confusion of Texas cultural characters. The literature of Larry McMurtry, and filmic adaptations of his work, serve as a central locus through which to explore the melancholic psyche of Texan settler masculinity and the trauma of colonial Oedipal demands in Texas. I argue that the centrality of loss that permeates the cultural archive of Texas is best understood as a settler neurosis, a symptom of subjectivities that remain haunted by what they necessarily disavow but are unable to mourn. This dissertation ultimately proposes a radical abandonment of attachments to Texas, motivated by understanding the violent and irreconcilable logics structured within it, in hopes of building more sustainable shared futures.

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