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Full Description
2021 Top Ten Finalist for the Locus Awards in Nonfiction
Joshua Smith's chapter "Uncle Tom's Cabin Showdown" won the 2021 Don D. Walker Prize from the Western Literature Association
Weird Westerns is an exploration of the hybrid western genre—an increasingly popular and visible form that mixes western themes, iconography, settings, and conventions with elements drawn from other genres, such as science fiction, horror, and fantasy. Despite frequent declarations of the western's death, the genre is now defined in part by its zombie-like ability to survive in American popular culture in weird, reanimated, and reassembled forms.
The essays in Weird Westerns analyze a wide range of texts, including those by Native American authors Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet) and William Sanders (Cherokee); the cult television series Firefly and The Walking Dead; the mainstream feature films Suicide Squad and Django Unchained; the avant-garde and bizarre fiction of Joe R. Lansdale; the tabletop roleplaying game Deadlands: The Weird West; and the comic book series Wynonna Earp.
The essays explore how these weird westerns challenge conventional representations by destabilizing or subverting the centrality of the heterosexual, white, male hero but also often surprisingly reinforce existing paradigms in their inability to imagine an existence outside of colonial frameworks.
Contents
Introduction: Westworld(s): Race, Gender, Genre in the Weird Western
Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, and Sara L. Spurgeon
Part 1. The Weird West, Past and Present
1. Attack of the Monstrous Vegetable: Bret Harte's Pioneer Nightmare and "Miscegenation" Dream
Tara Penry
2. Strange Country: Sexuality and the Feminine in Robert Coover's Ghost Town
Eric Meljac and Alex Hunt
3. A Selective History: Identity and Identification in Deadlands
Nicholas William Moll
Part 2. Native Reclamations and Representations
4. Mongrel Transmotion: The Werewolf and the Were/Wear/Where-West in Stephen Graham Jones's Mongrels
Joshua T. Anderson
5. Indianizing the Western: Semiotic Tricksterism in William Sanders's Journey to Fusang 000
Sara L. Spurgeon
6. Magnificence and Metas in Professional Westerns
Domino Renee Perez
Part 3. Surrogate indians and Other Indigenous Metaphors
7. Defamiliarizing the Western on the Extraterrestrial Frontier: Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape
Johannes Fehrle
8. Shining the Light of Civilization: The Savage Other of the Frontier in Firefly and Serenity 000
Meredith Harvey
9. Racial Metaphors and Vanishing indians in Wynonna Earp, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Emma Bull's Territory
Rebecca M. Lush
Part 4. The African American Presence in the Weird Western
10. The Mad Black Woman in Stephen King's The Dark Tower
Jacob Burg
11. Uncle Tom's Cabin Showdown: Stowe, Tarantino, and the Minstrelsy of the Weird West 000
Joshua D. Smith
12. Race and Gender in the Time Travel Western
Michael K. Johnson
Part 5. The Undead in the Weird Western
13. Go West, Old Man: Or, Buffalo Bill and the "Yellow Peril" in Zeppelins West
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
14. amc's The Walking Dead and the Restructuring of Gender and Race on the Neofrontier000 Scott Pearce
15. Afterword: This Is (Not) the End
Stephen Graham Jones
Contributors
Index
