Download or read book Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature written by Michael Kyle Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American writings often express a hunger for a mythologized frontier at the edge of known civilization, where one's identity, choices, and decisions are not limited by convention. Since the nineteenth century, writers have used this frontier space both to probe and to define the meanings of masculinity. In Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature, Michael K. Johnson examines the writings of black authors whose works use the mythologized frontier to explore black masculinity and identity formed in an environment free of racism and race-based restrictions. Black writers have reworked the mythology of the American West to address black male experiences more authentically, Johnson argues, grappling with such concerns as racial assimilation and the notion of "regenerative violence" as a method of masculine initiation. White-authored stories of frontier conquest often pit a white hunter against a hunted man of another race. In this ritual of the hunt, defeating the racial other renews white manhood. Black writers who invoke this ritual address the contradictions inherent in adapting a dominant culture form that routinely positions the black man as the hunted object rather than as the hunter. Following his discussion of the frontier in the American West, Johnson explores how writers invent new frontiers by mythologizing or reimagining various locations, such as Paris in the 1960s or the African continent. Johnson also addresses efforts by black authors to develop a frontier identity that transcends the gaps between the cultures of Africa and the mainstream culture of the United States.

Download or read book Outside America written by Dan Moos and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2005 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new study of those excluded from the national narrative of the West. Dan Moos challenges both traditional and revisionist perspectives in his exploration of the role of the mythology of the American West in the creation of a national identity. While Moos concurs with contemporary scholars who note that the myths of the American West depended in part upon the exclusion of certain groups - African Americans, Native Americans, and Mormons - he notes that many scholars, in their eagerness to identify and validate such excluded positions, have given short shrift to the cultural power of the myths they seek to debunk. That cultural power was such, Moos notes, that these disenfranchised groups themselves sought to harness it to their own ends through the active appropriation of the terms of those myths in advocating for their own inclusion in the national narrative. that, because the construction of American culture was never designed to accommodate these outsiders, their writings display a division between their imagined place in the narrative of the nation and their effacement within the real West marked by intolerance and inequality.

Download or read book Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature written by Jeffrey B. Leak and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The portrayal of black men in our national literature is controversial, complex, and often contradictory."In Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature, Jeffrey B. Leak identifies some of the long-held myths and stereotypes that persist in the work of black writers from the nineteenth century to the present--intellectual inferiority, criminality, sexual prowess, homosexual emasculation, and cultural deprivation. Utilizing Robert B. Stepto's call-and-response theory, Leak studies four pairs of novels within the context of certain myths, identifying the literary tandems between them and seeking to discover the source of our culture's psychological preoccupation with black men. Calling upon interdisciplinary fields of study--literary theory, psychoanalysis, gender studies, legal theory, and queer theory--Leak offers ground breaking analysis of both canonical texts (representing the "call" of the call-and-response dyad) and texts by emerging writers (representing the "response"), including Frederick Douglass and Charles Johnson: Ralph Ellison and Brent Wade; Richard Wright and Ernest J. Gaines; and Toni Morrison and David Bradley. Though Leak does not claim that the "response" tests are superior to the "call' texts, he does argue that, in some cases, the newer work--such as charles Johnson's "Oxherding Tale--can address a theme or offer a narrative innovation not found in preceding texts, such as "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas. In these instances, argues Leak, the newer texts constitute not only a response to the call text, but a substantial revision. Leak offers the first in-depth criticism of black masculinity in a range of literary texts. In a final chapter, he expands his discussion to the emerging field of black masculinity studies, pointing to future directions for study, including memoir, film, drama, and others. Poised on the brink of exciting new trends in scholarship, "Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature is flagship work, enhancing the understanding of literary constructions of black masculinity and the larger cultural imperatives to which these writers are reacting.

Download or read book African American Literature in Transition 1900 1910 Volume 7 written by Shirley Moody-Turner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 653 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910 offers a wide ranging, multi-disciplinary approach to early twentieth century African American literature and culture. It showcases the literary and cultural productions that took shape in the critical years after Reconstruction, but before the Harlem Renaissance, the period known as the nadir of African American history. It undercovers the dynamic work being done by Black authors, painters, photographers, poets, editors, boxers, and entertainers to shape 'New Negro' identities and to chart a new path for a new century. The book is structured into four key areas: Black publishing and print culture; innovations in genre and form; the race, class and gender politics of literary and cultural production; and new geographies of Black literary history. These overarching themes, along with the introduction of established figures and movement, alongside lesser known texts and original research, offer a radical re-conceptualization of this critical, but understudied period in African American literary history.

Download or read book Failed Frontiersmen written by James J. Donahue and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2015-02-04 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Failed Frontiersmen, James Donahue writes that one of the founding and most persistent mythologies of the United States is that of the American frontier. Looking at a selection of twentieth-century American male fiction writers—E. L. Doctorow, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Gerald Vizenor, and Cormac McCarthy—he shows how they reevaluated the historical romance of frontier mythology in response to the social and political movements of the 1960s (particularly regarding the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the treatment of Native Americans). Although these writers focus on different moments in American history and different geographic locations, the author reveals their commonly held belief that the frontier mythology failed to deliver on its promises of cultural stability and political advancement, especially in the face of the multicultural crucible of the 1960s. Cultural Frames, Framing Culture American Literatures Initiative

Download or read book Black on Earth written by Kimberly N. Ruffin and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American environmental literature has relied heavily on the perspectives of European Americans, often ignoring other groups. In Black on Earth, Kimberly Ruffin expands the reach of ecocriticism by analyzing the ecological experiences, conceptions, and desires seen in African American writing. Ruffin identifies a theory of “ecological burden and beauty” in which African American authors underscore the ecological burdens of living within human hierarchies in the social order just as they explore the ecological beauty of being a part of the natural order. Blacks were ecological agents before the emergence of American nature writing, argues Ruffin, and their perspectives are critical to understanding the full scope of ecological thought. Ruffin examines African American ecological insights from the antebellum era to the twenty-first century, considering WPA slave narratives, neo–slave poetry, novels, essays, and documentary films, by such artists as Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Henry Dumas, Percival Everett, Spike Lee, and Jayne Cortez. Identifying themes of work, slavery, religion, mythology, music, and citizenship, Black on Earth highlights the ways in which African American writers are visionary ecological artists.

Download or read book Masculinity and Place in American Literature since 1950 written by Vidya Ravi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American literature has long celebrated the figure of the self-made man and the idea of establishing selfhood, particularly male selfhood, in nature. However, during the crisis of masculinity that swept across America in the middle of the twentieth century, a generation of writers started exploring a different kind of a man. This was a figure who was concerned not so much with the loss of the West or the desire to recover a wilderness, but with how to live in an ordinary, domesticated continent. Masculinity and Place in American Literature since 1950 explores the role of place in negotiating, reinforcing, and subverting articulations of hegemonic masculinity in the work of four American writers from the latter part of the 20th century—John Cheever, John Updike, Raymond Carver, and Richard Ford. The book argues that American fiction by white male writers between the 1950s and the present day is compelled by the troubled and troubling relationship between masculinity and place. This relationship is deeply embedded in how ideals of masculinity are predicated upon the experience of the physical world, and how the symbolic logic of masculinity is continually subverted by alternative conceptions of dwelling and ecological consciousness.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Literature of the American West written by Steven Frye and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.

Download or read book The Frontier Club written by Christine Bold and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Hollywood films to novels by Louis L'Amour and television series like Gunsmoke and Deadwood, the Wild West has exerted a powerful hold on the cultural imagination of the United States. Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt's founding of the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887, Christine Bold traces the origins and evolution of the western genre, revealing how a group of prominent eastern aristocrats-a cadre she terms "the frontier club" -created and propagated the myth of the Wild West to advance their own self-interest as well as larger systems of privilege and exclusion. Mining institutional archives, personal papers, novels, and films, The Frontier Club excavates the hidden social, political, and financial interests behind the making of the modern western. It re-reads frontier-club fiction, most notably Owen Wister's bestseller The Virginian, in relation to federal policies and cultural spaces (from exclusive gentlemen's clubs to national parks to zoos); it casts new light on key clubmen, both the famous and the forgotten-figures such as Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, Silas Weir Mitchell, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Frederic Remington-while recovering the women on whom these men depended and without whom this version of the popular West would not exist; and it considers the costs of the frontier-club formula, in terms of its impact on Indigenous peoples and its marginalization of other popular voices, including western writings by African Americans, women, and working-class white men. An engaging cultural history that covers print culture, big-game hunting, politics, immigration, Jim Crow segregation, and environmental conservation at the turn of the twentieth century, The Frontier Club provides a welcome new perspective on the enduring American myth of the Wild West.

Download or read book Jennie Carter written by Jennie Carter and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In June 1867, the San Francisco Elevator -one of the nation\'s premier black weekly newspapers during Reconstruction-began publishing articles by a Californian calling herself \Ann J. Trask\ and later \Semper Fidelis.\ Her name was Jennie Carter (1830-1881), and the Elevator would print her essays, columns, and poems for seven years. Carter probably spent her early life in New Orleans, New York, and Wisconsin, but by the time she wrote her \Always Faithful\ columns for the newspaper, she was in Nevada County, California. Her work considers California and national politics, race and racism, women\'s rights and suffrage, temperance, morality, education, and a host of other issues, all from the point of view of an unabashedly strong-minded African American woman. Recovering Carter\'s work from obscurity, this volume re-presents one of the most exciting bodies of extant work by an African American journalist before the twentieth century. Editor Eric Gardner provides an introduction that documents as much of Carter\'s life in California as can be known and places her work in historical and lite-rary context. Eric Gardner is chair and professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University. He is the editor of Major Voices: The Drama of Slavery, and his work has appeared in African American Review, the African American National Biography, and Legacy .

Download or read book Imagining the African American West written by Blake Allmendinger and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Black Masculinity and the U S South written by Riche Richardson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pathbreaking study of region, race, and gender reveals how we underestimate the South's influence on the formation of black masculinity at the national level. Many negative stereotypes of black men--often contradictory ones--have emerged from the ongoing historical traumas initiated by slavery. Are black men emasculated and submissive or hypersexed and violent? Nostalgic representations of black men have arisen as well: think of the philosophical, hardworking sharecropper or the abiding, upright preacher. To complicate matters, says Riché Richardson, blacks themselves appropriate these images for purposes never intended by their (mostly) white progenitors. Starting with such well-known caricatures as the Uncle Tom and the black rapist, Richardson investigates a range of pathologies of black masculinity that derive ideological force from their associations with the South. Military policy, black-liberation discourse, and contemporary rap, she argues, are just some of the instruments by which egregious pathologies of black masculinity in southern history have been sustained. Richardson's sources are eclectic and provocative, including Ralph Ellison's fiction, Charles Fuller's plays, Spike Lee's films, Huey Newton's and Malcolm X's political rhetoric, the O. J. Simpson discourse, and the music production of Master P, the Cash Money Millionaires, and other Dirty South rappers. Filled with new insights into the region's role in producing hierarchies of race and gender in and beyond their African American contexts, this new study points the way toward more epistemological frameworks for southern literature, southern studies, and gender studies.

Download or read book West of Harlem written by Emily Lutenski and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2023-04-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance—Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, and Arna Bontemps, among others—are associated with, well . . . Harlem. But the story of these New York writers unexpectedly extends to the American West. Hughes, for instance, grew up in Kansas, Thurman in Utah, and Bontemps in Los Angeles. Toomer traveled often to New Mexico. Indeed, as West of Harlem reveals, the West played a significant role in the lives and work of many of the artists who created the signal urban African American cultural movement of the twentieth century. Uncovering the forgotten histories of these major American literary figures, the book gives us a deeper appreciation of that movement, and of the cultures it reflected and inspired. These recovered experiences and literatures paint a new picture of the American West, one that better accounts for the disparate African American populations that dotted its landscape and shaped the multiethnic literatures and cultures of the borderlands. Tapping literary, biographical, historical, and visual sources, Emily Lutenski tells the New Negro movement's western story. Hughes's move to Mexico opens a window on African American transnational experiences. Thurman's engagement with Salt Lake City offers an unexpected perspective on African American sexual politics. Arna Bontemps's Los Angeles, constructed in conjunction with Louisiana, provides a new vision of the Spanish borderlands. Lesser-known writer Anita Scott Coleman imagines black Western autonomy through domesticity. The experience of others—like Toomer, invited to socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan's circle of artists in Taos—present a more pluralistic view of the West. It was this place, with its transnational and multiracial mix of Native Americans, Latina/os, Anglos, and African Americans, which buttressed Toomer's idea of a "new American race." Turning the lens elsewhere, Lutenski also explores how Latina/o, Asian American, and Native American western writers understood and represented African Americans in the early twentieth-century borderlands. The result is a new, unusually nuanced and unexpectedly complex view of key figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the borderlands cultures that influenced their art in surprising and important ways.

Download or read book Before the West Was West written by Amy T. Hamilton and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the West Was West examines the extent to which scholars have engaged in-depth with pre-1800 “western” texts and asks what we mean by “western” American literature in the first place and when that designation originated. Calling into question the implicit temporal boundaries of the “American West” in literature, a literature often viewed as having commenced only at the beginning of the 1800s, Before the West Was West explores the concrete, meaningful connections between different texts as well as the development of national ideologies and mythologies. Examining pre-nineteenth-century writings that do not fit conceptions of the Wild West or of cowboys, cattle ranching, and the Pony Express, these thirteen essays demonstrate that no single, unified idea or geography defines the American West. Contributors investigate texts ranging from the Norse Vinland Sagas and Mary Rowlandson’s famous captivity narrative to early Spanish and French exploration narratives, an eighteenth-century English novel, and a play by Aphra Behn. Through its examination of the disparate and multifaceted body of literature that arises from a broad array of cultural backgrounds and influences, Before the West Was West apprehends the literary West in temporal as well as spatial and cultural terms and poses new questions about “westernness” and its literary representation.

Download or read book Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African American Literature written by Stephen Knadler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a reading of periodicals, memoirs, speeches, and fiction from the antebellum period to the Harlem Renaissance, this study re-examines various myths about a U.S. progressive history and about an African American counter history in terms of race, democracy, and citizenship. Reframing 19th century and early 20th-century African-American cultural history from the borderlands of the U.S. empire where many African Americans lived, worked and sought refuge, Knadler argues that these writers developed a complicated and layered transnational and creolized political consciousness that challenged dominant ideas of the nation and citizenship. Writing from multicultural contact zones, these writers forged a "new black politics"—one that anticipated the current debate about national identity and citizenship in a twenty-first century global society. As Knadler argues, they defined, created, and deployed an alternative political language to re-imagine U.S. citizenship and its related ideas of national belonging, patriotism, natural rights, and democratic agency.

Download or read book A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West written by Nicolas S. Witschi and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West presents a series of essays that explore the historic and contemporary cultural expressions rooted in America's western states. Offers a comprehensive approach to the wide range of cultural expressions originating in the west Focuses on the intersections, complexities, and challenges found within and between the different historical and cultural groups that define the west's various distinctive regions Addresses traditionally familiar icons and ideas about the west (such as cowboys, wide-open spaces, and violence) and their intersections with urbanization and other regional complexities Features essays written by many of the leading scholars in western American cultural studies

Download or read book Masculine Style written by D. Worden and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues for the importance of 'cowboy masculinity,' from late nineteenth-century dime novels, to the writings of Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, and Owen Wister, and analyzes the democratic politics of masculinity in American literature and positions the American West as central to modernism.