Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western by Mia Mask (review)

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• Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western by Mia Mask
• Abby M. Gibson

Mia Mask, Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2023. 275 pp. Hardcover, $110; paper, $24.95; e-book, $14.95.

You might have noticed the recent rise of Black Western images on the silver screen in the three years since the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. From the outlaw drama of Jeymes Samuel's Netflix release The Harder They Fall (2021) to the Western flair of Jordan Peele's intergalactic Nope (2022), the African American West is currently cutting a sharp and powerful shape in American cinema. Samuel and Peele are not the first to deploy politically salient Black Western images onscreen; instead, they are stepping into a cinematic tradition that stretches back to the earliest days of filmmaking. Despite this long history, Black Western films have all but been erased from the history of the Western genre and American cinema writ large, writes professor and Mary Riepma Ross's 1932 endowed chair of film at Vassar College Mia Mask in her latest book, Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western. Calling for "cinematic reparations" (xv), Mask offers in this important book the first ever survey of Black Western films, centering her analysis on films made during the era of civil rights and Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mask argues that Black Western films during this period drew from the politics and ideology of Black nationalism to offer a restorative, [End Page 183] if sometimes itself mythic, history of African Americans and the frontier experience that explicitly addressed themes of racial injustice, white supremacy, and Black empowerment. In doing so these films pushed the boundaries of the Western genre, created a new and oftentimes problematic image of Black masculinity onscreen, and highlighted, long before historians, the African American presence in the American West. Deftly interweaving the concepts of historical and cinematic reparations, Mask effectively emphasizes the value of film as a force of historical documentation in the face of historiographic silence. For example, in the final chapter of the book on "neo-Black westerns" (165) in the 1990s and 2000s, Mask offers a close reading of John Singleton's Rosewood (1993), a film about the often-forgotten 1923 race massacre in the all-Black town of Rosewood, Florida. She argues that the film functions as a form of cinematic reparations in that it "corrects the historical record of the 1920s and resonates with the culture wars of the 1990s" (182). In the absence of widespread historical documentation and knowledge concerning the Rosewood massacre, Singleton's film stepped in to fill the void while simultaneously offering commentary on the political moment in which it was released in the early 1990s.

This dual temporality of Rosewood—that it has one foot in 1923 and the other in 1993—is a common characteristic among the films Mask covers throughout Black Rodeo. Black Westerns made in the civil rights era and beyond have consistently concerned themselves as much with their own time as with the history they purport to represent. Sidney Poitier's directorial debut, Buck and the Preacher (1972), centered its attention on imperialism in the US West that affected, albeit in differing ways, both African Americans and Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century in an effort to "imagine a strategic political community between African Americans and Native Americans" in the 1970s (85). Meanwhile, Mask argues that certain plot points in The N––––Charley trilogy deliberately function as metaphors for real-life events related to the Black Power movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly Fred Hampton's assassination and Bobby Seale's defeat in his campaign for Oakland mayor.

Mask's discussion of these and other films made in the 1960s and 1970s is strongest in clarifying the relationship between Black Western films and the sociopolitical scene in which they were created, an [End Page 184] express purpose of this book. Given the lack of scholarship pertaining to these films, Mask's survey is important in laying the foundation for future work on the African American Western. However, because Black Rodeo...