Description
Book SynopsisHow did the American western feature film genre rebrand itself in the late seventies and respond to the fury of global and domestic political affairs?In Hold It Real Still, Lawrence Jackson examines Clint Eastwood's influence on the western film while also exploring how that genre continues to operate into the twenty-first century as an ideological channel for ideas about race and imperialism. Jackson argues that the western genre pivoted from an initial doctrine of racial liberalism, albeit a clumsy one, during the John Wayne years to a motile agenda of substitution, exclusion, and false equivalency during the Clint Eastwood period. The book traces how Eastwood, an actor first associated with the avant-garde, anti-colonialist discourse of spaghetti western cinema, reversed himself in the second half of the 1970s with The Outlaw Josey Walesa film that had at its heart the fantasy of Black erasure from American life. Jackson situates Eastwood's work as a response to massive social and p
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter One. Black Representations in the Western
Chapter Two. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Critique of the Colonial Aftermath
Chapter Three. "That Damn War": The Outlaw Josey Wales and Reframing the Civil War
Chapter Four. "Hold It Real Still": Black Containment and Structures of Inequality in The Outlaw Josey Wales
Chapter Five. "Their Slaves, If Any They Have, Are Hereby Declared Free Men": Ride with the Devil and the Contraband as Decorative Adjunct
Chapter Six. "I Am That One in Ten Thousand": Django Unchained and the Black Exceptional State
Chapter Seven. "Why Don't They Kill Us?" Django Unchained and the Politics of Deadly Force
Conclusion. The Return of the Native
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
