Book contents
- African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910
- African American Literature in Transition
- African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology, 1900–1910
- Introduction
- Part I Transitions in African American Authorship, Publishing, and the Visual Arts
- Part II New Negro Aesthetics and Transitions in Genre and Form
- Part III Modernist Masculinities and Transitions in Black Leadership
- Part IV Remapping the Turn of the Twentieth Century
- Chapter 10 Can the Black Subaltern Speak?
- Chapter 11 Race and Manhood in African American Representations of the Frontier
- Chapter 12 Narratives of Black and Chinese Citizenship after Plessy v. Ferguson
- Chapter 13 Black Transpacific Culture and the Migratory Imagination
- Index
Chapter 11 - Race and Manhood in African American Representations of the Frontier
from Part IV - Remapping the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2021
- African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910
- African American Literature in Transition
- African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology, 1900–1910
- Introduction
- Part I Transitions in African American Authorship, Publishing, and the Visual Arts
- Part II New Negro Aesthetics and Transitions in Genre and Form
- Part III Modernist Masculinities and Transitions in Black Leadership
- Part IV Remapping the Turn of the Twentieth Century
- Chapter 10 Can the Black Subaltern Speak?
- Chapter 11 Race and Manhood in African American Representations of the Frontier
- Chapter 12 Narratives of Black and Chinese Citizenship after Plessy v. Ferguson
- Chapter 13 Black Transpacific Culture and the Migratory Imagination
- Index
Summary
The twentieth century dawned on a regional, southern-based African American community on the verge of diasporic national change. Decades before the Great Urban Migration, Black individuals had migrated west as homesteaders, cowboys, soldiers, and town-builders, participating in the project of Manifest Destiny. But by the early 1900s, the “frontier” was receding into the realms of myth and memory, and white writers such as Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister wondered what would become of American manhood once the “Wild West” disappeared in the new, industrializing order. Black male writers, who had themselves sought to establish masculine credentials by joining frontier conquest, wondered too. Nat Love, a former slave turned ranch hand, and Oscar Micheaux, a farmer turned filmmaker, recorded their experiences, respectively, in their memoirs The Life and Adventures of Nat Love and The Conquest. In their writings can be seen the literary tension between the “Wild West” of violence and savagery and the “agrarian West” being settled by farmers and ethnic groups from across the world.
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- African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910 , pp. 273 - 298Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021