Delivered at GRACLS Conference, 8th and 9th November 2025, University of Texas at Austin.

For all that Lonesome Dove‘s Augustus McCrae might have famously proclaimed that “It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living” (McMurtry 1985, 359), these two states are neither separate nor mutually exclusive. Given the role burial has historically played in nation building and erasing indigenous histories, as well as encoding the national self, it may in fact matter far more “where you die [than] where you live” (McMurtry 1985, 359). The reality that the personal does not stop being political after death is a subject the American Western has covertly explored since the 1950s.

As part of my wider research project tracing the evolution of death in the silver screen Western from its golden age to the present day, this paper will use Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics (2019) to read burial plots in The Searchers (1956), Lonesome Dove (1989) and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005). Although its settings and social conditions vastly change between iterations, Western cinema still plays an important role in reflecting and encoding anxieties surrounding “national identity, masculinity, race relations [and] power” (Campbell 2013, 11).

By exploring how political movements and historical events have shifted both the visual depictions of burials and the implicit meanings attached to them, my paper will explore anxieties surrounding the treatment of historically “othered” communities by the justice system of the United States in the aftermath of both domestic social movements and conflicts surrounding borders in the aftermath of global and domestic conflicts. From the the annexation of Hawaii to ongoing conflicts along the US-Mexico border, necropolitics determine the status of selves and others in both the American West and the wider US psyche the genre continues to reflect and inform.