Black Frontiers: Race, Region, and Myth in African American Westerns, 1854-1954
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Up until the 1960s the African American West remained largely unexamined in scholarship and, when examined, was marked for its historical absence or, as Eric Gardner notes, “limited to brief biographical asides focusing on the most romantic figures” (Gardner, Jennie Carter, xii). The challenge faced by recent scholarship in Western studies has not only been to recover the works of authors who have remained understudied or unpublished, but also to develop interpretive frameworks that consciously push beyond Anglo-centric visions of the West. One such method is New Regionalism. Espoused by Gardner, New Regionalism emphasizes the role of place and location in the production of a creative text. This approach interrogates the Western genre outside of previous canonical constructions that limit Black presence in literary and cultural history to certain geographic locations (i.e. the South and the Mid-Atlantic) and genres (i.e. the slave narrative). Examining Black textual communities in the West allows scholarship to move beyond acknowledging historical presence, to analyzing how African Americans represent themselves through the Western genre and, perhaps more pointedly, in relation to how they “cite/site under acknowledged Black geographies” (Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 111). \n Each of the texts that I analyze involves migration to a frontier space on the edge of white society, a place where African American authors and cultural producers adapt to race-based restrictions and limitations, sometimes by challenging these restrictions and other times by assimilating into the white society. By revising a narrative structure that is associated with white American culture, they also claim a place in a society that refuses to acknowledge African American participation in and contribution to frontier history and mythology. The body of works examined in this dissertation analyzes a diverse set of stories to show the ways African American authors and producers of Western texts have participated in the revision of the Western genre in a full range of imaginative forms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".