Michael K. Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617039287
- eISBN:
- 9781626740013
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617039287.003.0009
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The hybrid genre of the Science Fiction-Western has opened a new space for imagining and performing an African American West. Using settings that are futuristic and/or post-apocalyptic, they free the ...
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The hybrid genre of the Science Fiction-Western has opened a new space for imagining and performing an African American West. Using settings that are futuristic and/or post-apocalyptic, they free the genre from the (already highly fictionalized) historical setting of the American West. By so doing, film and television westerns with science fiction elements such as Joss Whedon’s Firefly and the Hughes brothers’ post-apocalyptic western film The Book of Eli are able to move beyond the racial mythologies that have long operated within the western. Freed as well from longstanding expectations about African American roles (comic relief, sidekick) in westerns, these narratives experiment with different strategies for performing the role of the black westerner and creatively incorporate elements of African American cultural tradition—slave narratives, trickster tales—into their science fiction frontier adventures. If not quite “after race,” these narratives imagine ways to move beyond earlier ways of conceptualizing African American identity.Less
The hybrid genre of the Science Fiction-Western has opened a new space for imagining and performing an African American West. Using settings that are futuristic and/or post-apocalyptic, they free the genre from the (already highly fictionalized) historical setting of the American West. By so doing, film and television westerns with science fiction elements such as Joss Whedon’s Firefly and the Hughes brothers’ post-apocalyptic western film The Book of Eli are able to move beyond the racial mythologies that have long operated within the western. Freed as well from longstanding expectations about African American roles (comic relief, sidekick) in westerns, these narratives experiment with different strategies for performing the role of the black westerner and creatively incorporate elements of African American cultural tradition—slave narratives, trickster tales—into their science fiction frontier adventures. If not quite “after race,” these narratives imagine ways to move beyond earlier ways of conceptualizing African American identity.
