Chapter 10 - African American Literature of the West and the Landscape of Opportunity

Summary

In “African American Literature of the West and the Landscape of Opportunity,” Janet Neary considers the ways in which Black writers of the American West presented California as a brief loophole of economic opportunity for Black citizens in the expanding and consolidating nation – a way of defining place with fascinating parallels to Marrs’s work on memory. Although early Black newspapers in California linked economic mobility with legal enfranchisement, Neary suggests that California’s idiosyncratic response to Reconstruction paradoxically shut down certain avenues of opportunity for Black citizens, centering wealth production with white property owners. Focusing on James Williams’s 1873 Life and Adventures of James Williams and Thomas Detter’s 1871 Nellie Brown, or the Jealous Wife, Neary argues that African American Western writers articulated economic possibility and upward mobility with social justice and racial equality, while simultaneously highlighting the mercenary and racially biased nature of the law both before and after Reconstruction.