Black Masculinity And The Frontier Myth In American Literature

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.

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.

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.