Imagining the African American West

Imagining the African American West PDF Author: Blake Allmendinger
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803210671
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
The literature of the African American West is the last racial discourse of the region that remains unexplored. Blake Allmendinger addresses this void in literary and cultural studies with Imagining the African American West?the first comprehensive study of African American literature on the early frontier and in the modern urban American West. ø Allmendinger charts the terrain of African American literature in the West through his exploration of novels, histories, autobiographies, science fiction, mysteries, formula westerns, melodramas, experimental theater, and political essays, as well as rap music and film. He examines the histories of James P. Beckwourth and Oscar Micheaux; slavery, the Civil War, and the significance of the American frontier to blacks; and the Harlem Renaissance, the literature of urban unrest, rap music, black noir, and African American writers, including Toni Morrison and Walter Mosley. His study utilizes not only the works of well-known African American writers but also some obscure and neglected works, out-of-print books, and unpublished manuscripts in library archives. ø Much of the scholarly neglect of the ?Black West? can be blamed on how the American West has been imagined, constructed, and framed in scholarship to date. In his study, Allmendinger provides the appropriate theoretical, cultural, and historical contexts for understanding the literature and suggests new directions for the future of black western literature.

Imagining the African American West

Imagining the African American West PDF Author: Blake Allmendinger
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803210671
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Get Book

Book Description
The literature of the African American West is the last racial discourse of the region that remains unexplored. Blake Allmendinger addresses this void in literary and cultural studies with Imagining the African American West?the first comprehensive study of African American literature on the early frontier and in the modern urban American West. ø Allmendinger charts the terrain of African American literature in the West through his exploration of novels, histories, autobiographies, science fiction, mysteries, formula westerns, melodramas, experimental theater, and political essays, as well as rap music and film. He examines the histories of James P. Beckwourth and Oscar Micheaux; slavery, the Civil War, and the significance of the American frontier to blacks; and the Harlem Renaissance, the literature of urban unrest, rap music, black noir, and African American writers, including Toni Morrison and Walter Mosley. His study utilizes not only the works of well-known African American writers but also some obscure and neglected works, out-of-print books, and unpublished manuscripts in library archives. ø Much of the scholarly neglect of the ?Black West? can be blamed on how the American West has been imagined, constructed, and framed in scholarship to date. In his study, Allmendinger provides the appropriate theoretical, cultural, and historical contexts for understanding the literature and suggests new directions for the future of black western literature.

Re-imagining the Modern American West

Re-imagining the Modern American West PDF Author: Richard W. Etulain
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816516839
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Describes changes in how the West has been seen, from a male-dominated frontier, to a region with a powerful sense of place, to a modern center of both genders, ethnic groups, and environmental interests

Black Montana

Black Montana PDF Author: Anthony W. Wood
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496227719
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
2022 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize Finalist Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many African Americans moved westward as Greater Reconstruction came to a close. Though, along with Euro-Americans, Black settlers appropriated the land of Native Americans, sometimes even contributing to ongoing violence against Indigenous people, this migration often defied the goals of settler states in the American West. In Black Montana Anthony W. Wood explores the entanglements of race, settler colonialism, and the emergence of state and regional identity in the American West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By producing conditions of social, cultural, and economic precarity that undermined Black Montanans' networks of kinship, community, and financial security, the state of Montana, in its capacity as a settler colony, worked to exclude the Black community that began to form inside its borders after Reconstruction. Black Montana depicts the history of Montana's Black community from 1877 until the 1930s, a period in western American history that represents a significant moment and unique geography in the life of the U.S. settler-colonial project.

Freedom Dreams (TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)

Freedom Dreams (TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION) PDF Author: Robin D. G. Kelley
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807007854
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The 20th-anniversary edition of Kelley’s influential history of 20th-century Black radicalism, with new reflections on current movements and their impact on the author, and a foreword by poet Aja Monet First published in 2002, Freedom Dreams is a staple in the study of the Black radical tradition. Unearthing the thrilling history of grassroots movements and renegade intellectuals and artists, Kelley recovers the dreams of the future worlds Black radicals struggled to achieve. Focusing on the insights of activists, from the Revolutionary Action Movement to the insurgent poetics of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Kelley chronicles the quest for a homeland, the hope that communism offered, the politics of surrealism, the transformative potential of Black feminism, and the long dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. In this edition, Kelley includes a new introduction reflecting on how movements of the past 20 years have expanded his own vision of freedom to include mutual care, disability justice, abolition, and decolonization, and a new epilogue exploring the visionary organizing of today’s freedom dreamers. This classic history of the power of the Black radical imagination is as timely as when it was first published.

Go East, Young Man

Go East, Young Man PDF Author: Richard Francaviglia
Publisher: Utah State University Press
ISBN: 9781607329282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Transference of orientalist images and identities to the American landscape and its inhabitants, especially in the West—in other words, portrayal of the West as the “Orient”—has been a common aspect of American cultural history. Place names, such as the Jordan River or Pyramid Lake, offer notable examples, but the imagery and its varied meanings are more widespread and significant. Understanding that range and significance, especially to the western part of the continent, means coming to terms with the complicated, nuanced ideas of the Orient and of the North American continent that European Americans brought to the West. Such complexity is what historical geographer Richard Francaviglia unravels in this book. Since the publication of Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, the term has come to signify something one-dimensionally negative. In essence, the orientalist vision was an ethnocentric characterization of the peoples of Asia (and Africa and the “Near East”) as exotic, primitive “others” subject to conquest by the nations of Europe. That now well-established point, which expresses a postcolonial perspective, is critical, but Francaviglia suggest that it overlooks much variation and complexity in the views of historical actors and writers, many of whom thought of western places in terms of an idealized and romanticized Orient. It likewise neglects positive images and interpretations to focus on those of a decadent and ostensibly inferior East. We cannot understand well or fully what the pervasive orientalism found in western cultural history meant, says Francaviglia, if we focus only on its role as an intellectual engine for European imperialism. It did play that role as well in the American West. One only need think about characterizations of American Indians as Bedouins of the Plains destined for displacement by a settled frontier. Other roles for orientalism, though, from romantic to commercial ones, were also widely in play. In Go East, Young Man, Francaviglia explores a broad range of orientalist images deployed in the context of European settlement of the American West, and he unfolds their multiple significances.

Darkening Mirrors

Darkening Mirrors PDF Author: Stephanie Leigh Batiste
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082234923X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
In an important contribution to African American film and performance history, Stephanie Batiste looks back at African American stage and screen productions of the 1930s.

Imagining Africa

Imagining Africa PDF Author: Clive Gabay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108473601
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
While challenging traditional postcolonial accounts, Gabay places racial anxiety at the heart of imaginaries of Africa and international order.

Making the White Man's West

Making the White Man's West PDF Author: Jason E. Pierce
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607323966
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The West, especially the Intermountain states, ranks among the whitest places in America, but this fact obscures the more complicated history of racial diversity in the region. In Making the White Man’s West, author Jason E. Pierce argues that since the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the American West has been a racially contested space. Using a nuanced theory of historical “whiteness,” he examines why and how Anglo-Americans dominated the region for a 120-year period. In the early nineteenth century, critics like Zebulon Pike and Washington Irving viewed the West as a “dumping ground” for free blacks and Native Americans, a place where they could be segregated from the white communities east of the Mississippi River. But as immigrant populations and industrialization took hold in the East, white Americans began to view the West as a “refuge for real whites.” The West had the most diverse population in the nation with substantial numbers of American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians, but Anglo-Americans could control these mostly disenfranchised peoples and enjoy the privileges of power while celebrating their presence as providing a unique regional character. From this came the belief in a White Man’s West, a place ideally suited for “real” Americans in the face of changing world. The first comprehensive study to examine the construction of white racial identity in the West, Making the White Man’s West shows how these two visions of the West—as a racially diverse holding cell and a white refuge—shaped the history of the region and influenced a variety of contemporary social issues in the West today.

Imagining the Nation

Imagining the Nation PDF Author: David Leiwei Li
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804741309
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This book identifies the forces behind the explosive growth in Asian American literature. It charts its emergence and explores both the unique place of Asian Americans in American culture and what that place says about the way Americanness is defined.

The Struggle in Black and Brown

The Struggle in Black and Brown PDF Author: Brian D Behnken
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803262744
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
It might seem that African Americans and Mexican Americans would have common cause in matters of civil rights. This volume, which considers relations between blacks and browns during the civil rights era, carefully examines the complex and multifaceted realities that complicate such assumptions—and that revise our view of both the civil rights struggle and black-brown relations in recent history. Unique in its focus, innovative in its methods, and broad in its approach to various locales and time periods, the book provides key perspectives to understanding the development of America’s ethnic and sociopolitical landscape. These essays focus chiefly on the Southwest, where Mexican Americans and African Americans have had a long history of civil rights activism. Among the cases the authors take up are the unification of black and Chicano civil rights and labor groups in California; divisions between Mexican Americans and African Americans generated by the War on Poverty; and cultural connections established by black and Chicano musicians during the period. Together these cases present the first truly nuanced picture of the conflict and cooperation, goodwill and animosity, unity and disunity that played a critical role in the history of both black-brown relations and the battle for civil rights. Their insights are especially timely, as black-brown relations occupy an increasingly important role in the nation’s public life.