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.

 

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the works of well-known African American writers but also some obscure and neglected works, out-of-print books, and unpublished manuscripts in library archives.

 

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.

Blake Allmendinger is a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the coeditor of Over the Edge: Remapping the American West and the author of Ten Most Wanted: The New Western Literature.

"The most fascinating feature of this volume is the author’s emphasis on twentieth-century cultural production about the West. Rather than solely focusing on a first-person western narratives or the western as a literary genre, Allmendinger illustrates the multiple ways that the concept of the West had symbolic significance among African American artists. . . . The author greatly expands and contemporizes our static notion of the West, illustrating the emblematic value of this mythic region for African Americans."—Gerald R. Butters Jr., Journal of American History

“Although [Allmendinger] emphasizes that this is a study of African American literature, the strength of the book comes from placing that literary study in the context of the multifarious expressive forms through which African Americans have imagined and represented black experience in the American West.”—Michael K. Johnson, Western American Literature

“Illuminating and creative in structure, content and argument. . . . Allmendinger endeavors to ameliorate the scholarly 'neglect' that the 'Black West' has endured, as a result of the problematic ways in which it has been imagined, constructed, and framed, by offering illuminating theoretical, cultural, and historical contexts for comprehending this literature. He is successful in his efforts, and the body of literature of African American history and life in the American West is much better for it.”—Matthew C. Whitaker, Journal of Arizona History

“Allmendinger’s use of research material can frequently let us look through the miasma produced by the smoke of popularity history to find new realities and new perspectives. Allmendinger offers historians of the West a highly rewarding read in Imagining the African American West.”—Jere W. Roberson, Great Plains Quarterly

"Blake Allmendinger looks at how literature, film and music have examined the black experience in the American West. Such appreciations of history connect the present to important aspects of our past."—Omaha World-Herald

"Well-written and accessible to the general reader Imagining the African American West is both an important reference work and an interesting read."—Roundup Magazine