During the 1930s the ‘empire film’ genre enjoyed considerable popularity. Between the American sound version of British novelist A. E. W. Mason's The Four Feathers (Paramount, 1929) and the British remake (distributor United Artists, 1939), US audiences saw many tales of European or white North American soldiers squaring off against non-white indigenous peoples in colonial Africa and Asia. Examples of the genre include The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Paramount, 1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (Warner Bros, 1936), Wee Willie Winkie (20th Century-Fox, 1937), Beau Geste (Paramount, 1939) and Gunga Din (RKO, 1939). The plots of these movies overlapped similarly structured ones of the Western. That Americans could embrace the narrative pleasures of imperial troops engaging (South Asian) Indians as easily as those of the US Cavalry engaging (Native American) ‘Indians’, despite the nation's origin in armed revolt against Britain, is a paradox of ‘settler colonialism’.

Settler cinemas, according to Peter Limbrick, refl ect the confl icted ideologies of ‘the white settlers who became dominant in these places, never displaced by decolonization movements, [and] have formed their identities in relation to each other, to land, and to indigenous presence, infl ected always and to differing degrees by the traces of a British imperial past’. Alan Lawson cites Homi Bhabha's concept of ‘double inscription’, in which the colonial subject always oscillates between the poles of ‘mother’ and ‘other’, to posit settler cultures as a ‘Second World’ whose narratives demonstrate that ‘the settler subject-position is both postimperial and postcolonial; it has colonized and has been colonized: it must speak of and against both its own oppressiveness and its own oppression’. For American culture, including the colonising culture of Hollywood, relations to the Other are especially vexed. Not only did European settlers dispossess and wage war upon the indigenous population but they, like several other cultures of the New World, imported and enslaved non-indigenous Africans to exploit for uncompensated labour. In addition, the United States eventually mimicked the imperial European powers after the Spanish–American War, alibied as an intervention on behalf of Cubans denied self-determination by Spain. It assumed colonial authority over former Spanish territories in Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam and, in a separate initiative, annexed the Hawaiian Islands.