home > TRiO and USP Programs > McNair > symposium > 2007 presentations > Margarita Wickham

Margarita Wickham
Ethnic Studies

David Vazquez, Mentor

Buffalo Bill and the White West:
A Theoretical Analysis of White Supremacist Ideology in American Popular Culture

As one of the largest historical contributors to the Western myth, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West provides a way to analyze the social formation of a culture of “Whiteness.” Few historians or philosophers have sought holistic explanations of how and why the Wild West has become such a dominant, influential theme in the American cultural imagination. The main goal of my research is to construct a critical model to analyze the performances of Buffalo Bill as recorded in advertising posters, newspaper stories and historical accounts to form a deeper understanding of the intersecting categories of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in the Western myth. In the second phase of research, the critical model will be used to analyze two contemporary Western films, Dances with Wolves (1990) and Open Range (2003). Several descriptive concepts—Marxism, racial and sexual contract social theory, the politics of identity, theatricality and performativity, cultural nationalism, and historical theories of imperialism—are key elements of a more effective ideological critique of the Wild West. .