A cultural renewal : native Americans in road movies

Abstract

In this thesis, contemporary Native American road films Powwow Highway (Wacks, 1989), Dead Man (Jarmusch, 1995), Smoke Signals (Eyre, 1998), and Dreamkeeper (Barron, 2003) are studied in terms of their relation to the formal and thematic conventions of the road movie genre. The movies are examined as social reproductions of postmodern mainstream American road picture. The films are analyzed as social texts working as cultural renewals of the texts representing American Indians in the mainstream American cinema as well as they are taken as major contributions to the road genre. In this sense, Native Americans’ use of the road picture’s generic patterns and contemporary tendencies in order to tell their own experiences of the road journey is investigated.