‘Maysville? That’s a white town’: “The Harder They Fall” and Blackness in the Western Landscape
This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies The popularity of the Western as a genre solidified the frontier mythology as one of the building myths of the American nation and its cultural iconography. However, the Western carries sinister implications in its ‘good guys vs bad guys’ code. The danger of keeping the Western alive without revision lies in the frontier myth’s binary, civilization/savagery, that excused the violence towards cultural Others in the name of expansion and progress of the (white) United States and white exceptionalism. This binary is mirrored in the earliest forms of Western literature as well as the first cinematographic Westerns, in which the villains are often Native Americans, who are considered ‘savage’, barely human, to justify their demise at the hands of the white heroes.[i] Through their Otherness, the frontier myth defined Native Americans as part of the territory, […]