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the works of well-known African American writers but also some obscure and neglected works, out-of-print books, and unpublished manuscripts in library archives.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.

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

This groundbreaking collection of essays shows how the American Western has been reimagined in different national contexts, producing fictions that interrogate, reframe, and remix the genre in unexpectedly critical ways.

Manifesting the Primal Imagination explores a little known, but important, aspect of Black American Christianity—the primal spirituality of the Black Pentecostal and spiritual church. Set against the backdrop of a Christianity believed by many to be synonymous with White Western culture, Manifesting the Primal Imagination demonstrates how this image of Christianity came to be, and how it is false, through a historical and scriptural examination of Christianity itself. At a time in which the nature of Christian faith is hotly contested, with many rejecting Christianity on the basis of its historical association with White supremacist claims, Settles advocates for a rereading of the history of Black American faith in a way that recognizes the importance of the primal imagination to Christianity itself.

Challenges common views of how Africans and African Americans approach race, Western civilization, and their influences

A Choice 2015 Outstanding Academic Title Throughout history, Muslim men have been depicted as monsters. The portrayal of humans as monsters helps a society delineate who belongs and who, or what, is excluded. Even when symbolic, as in post-9/11 zombie films, Muslim monsters still function to define Muslims as non-human entities. These are not depictions of Muslim men as malevolent human characters, but rather as creatures that occupy the imagination -- non-humans that exhibit their wickedness outwardly on the skin. They populate medieval tales, Renaissance paintings, Shakespearean dramas, Gothic horror novels, and Hollywood films. Through an exhaustive survey of medieval, early modern, and contemporary literature, art, and cinema, Muslims in the Western Imagination examines the dehumanizing ways in which Muslim men have been constructed and represented as monsters, and the impact such representations have on perceptions of Muslims today. The study is the first to present a genealogy of these creatures, from the demons and giants of the Middle Ages to the hunchbacks with filed teeth that are featured in the 2007 film 300, arguing that constructions of Muslim monsters constitute a recurring theme, first formulated in medieval Christian thought. Sophia Rose Arjana shows how Muslim monsters are often related to Jewish monsters, and more broadly to Christian anti-Semitism and anxieties surrounding African and other foreign bodies, which involves both religious bigotry and fears surrounding bodily difference. Arjana argues persuasively that these dehumanizing constructions are deeply embedded in Western consciousness, existing today as internalized beliefs and practices that contribute to the culture of violence--both rhetorical and physical--against Muslims.

Identifying the antebellum era in the United States as a transitional setting, Imagining Southern Spaces ́investigates spatialization processes about the South during a time when intensifying debates over the abolition of slavery led to a heightened period of (re)spatialization in the region. Taking the question of abolition as a major factor that shaped how different actors responded to these processes, this book studies spatial imaginations in a selection of abolitionist and proslavery literature of the era. Through this diversity of imaginations, the book points to a multitude of Souths in various economic, political, and cultural entanglements in the American Hemisphere and the Circumatlantic. Thus, it challenges monolithic and provincial representations of the South as a provincial region distinct from the rest of the country.

Plutarch, the famed Greek biographer, wrote The Lives of the Roman Emperors early in his career. Simone Drake could have called her book The Lives of Black Men. She contrasts the portrayal of black men in mainstream media with the way she insists black men must imagine their lives, ambitions, and desires in both the civic arena and the domestic arena. The narrow popular representation of black men as being in perennial crisis is one she rejects, opting instead to see them as active agents of their own destinies. Her book uncovers the ways in which black men in history, literature, film, political arenas, and popular culture have either challenged or been challenged by pathological constructions of black masculinity. Imagining Grace refers to Toni Morrison s Beloved, a black feminist framework Drake uses to see power in vulnerability and emotivenessfrom Tom Joyner s radio show to Richard Pryor s comedy to some of President Obama s social policy. Drake is synthesizing black feminist and black masculinity studies. Her black lives feature the African American cowboy, Nat Love, also Drake s own grandfather, who imagined grace through military service in the first colored military unit to fight in World War II (what emerges is a narrative of black pride and shame), and thence to movies, where Drake explores the theme of black fathers and daughters (framed by a court case involving The Cosby Show as intellectual property). The chapter that follows, on twisted criminalities, contrasts the valorization of black criminals (thugs) as heroes with the denigration of gay black men, where we encounter the limits of grace in American Gangster, Cornelius Edy s poetry, and the viral video of Antoine Dodson (discussing the attempted rape of his sister). In concluding with Berry Gordy and hi-hop (Jay-Z), Drake meditates on black entrepreneurship as a nationalist site of redemption. We are given in this book a way of seeing and knowing black malenesssophisticated in concept but bracingly vivid in the telling. "

This collection of essays from eminent scholar F. Abiola Irele provides a comprehensive formulation of what he calls an "African imagination" manifested in the oral traditions and modern literature of Africa and the Black Diaspora. The African Imagination includes Irele's probing critical readings of the works of Chinua Achebe, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Amadou Hampaté Bâ, and Ahmadou Kourouma, among others, as well as examinations of the growing presence of African writing in the global literary marketplace and the relationship between African intellectuals and the West. Taken as a whole, this volume makes a superb introduction to African literature and to the work of one of its leading interpreters.

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