African American literature : recasting region through race
- Submitting institution
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The University of Lancaster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 237270187
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
-
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- Book title
- A history of Western American literature
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN
- 9781107083851
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- February
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This contribution to a volume that challenges dominant understandings of the American West in US literature—and, by extension, associated mediations of the frontier in the arts—focusses on African American writing. Its argument about the need to decolonize paradigmatic notions of the American frontier, of where it is and who inhabits it, is grounded in the collation of formerly dispersed and overlooked primary materials by black American writers. It expands on the fledgling attention given to African American western literature, as to date there are only two substantial works on this area: Allmendinger’s Imagining the African American West [2005] and Johnson’s Hoo-Doo Cowboys [2014]). Analysis of this newly assembled corpus of black American western texts by writers representing a diversity of genders and sexualities, reveals new ways the frontier, and therefore the nation, has been conceived and experienced as a space of possibility and movement for non-white American ‘others’. As such, the research develops new scholarly thought in the field of US frontier studies in the arts, adopting concepts integral to African American studies, gender studies and postcolonial theory to rectify how the traditional focus on the frontier myth in West scholarship and research has marginalised or excluded African Americans.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -