The African American West: A Century of Short Stories ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud, Laurie Champion (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 3 2 7 the gamut from interview to fiction to textual and historical analysis. Undergirding the entire collection is Wall’s personal story: a young Irish man immigrating to America, furthering his education, finding gainful employ­ ment, and establishing, with his wife Dru, family and a new home. In travel­ ing to the American West, Wall recapitulates myth, but with attitude: his own poetry (seen most recently in Iron Mountain Road) speaks to the development of a “hybrid imagination” (107). It is this hybridity that Wall finds most com­ pelling in New Irish writing. As fiction writer Helena Mulkerns explains in an interview, “We don’t want to forsake what we came from, and we can’t leave our homeland forever like previous immigrants. We have a great, lively cul­ ture, and I think that we’ve come over here aware of that and being able to draw on it, as opposed to trying to forget our origins, or romanticize them” (60). This fluidity, enhanced by air travel, fax machines, and the Internet, has irrevocably changed the conditions of exile and complicated assimilation. The movement from East Coast to the Black Hills complements Wall’s role as cultural witness. Whether imaginatively traveling New York’s bor­ oughs, returning to his native Ireland, or westering in the family car, Wall sur­ veys the “healthy clash between present and past” that finds voice in the New Irish artistic community (11). Along the way, he illuminates the “intense con­ tact with America” that has shaped New Irish literary achievement (122). His trenchant, memorable essays through complex terrain provide us with graced passage. The African American W est: A Century of Short Stories. Edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Laurie Champion. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000. 420 pages, $29.95. Review ed by D an M oos State University of New York at Buffalo In The African American West, Glasrud and Champion have compiled a lengthy and comprehensive collection of short stories by and about African Americans in the American West. The book is divided into six roughly chronological sections beginning with stories written near the turn of the twentieth century. Glasrud and Champion identify three distinct criteria for a story’s inclusion in this collection. First, the story must be set, or at least refer­ ence, the American West—with the West defined loosely as a geographic region “one [state] removed westward from the Mississippi River” and as “a state of mind, a sense of place, a community, and a dream and spirit” (x). Second, the text included must have been a distinct narrative, not a fragment of a larger story or novel. Last, the main character or point of view in the story must be African American, though the actual race of the author remained unimportant (x). Many of the authors collected here are well known: W. E. B. Dubois, Pauline Hopkins, Eldridge Cleaver, Ntozake Shange, Chester Himes, 3 2 8 WAL 3 5 . 3 FALL 2 0 0 0 and Langston Hughes. But the majority of these stories comes from lesserknown writers, whose skills in this particular genre often eclipse those of the more celebrated authors. This collection does not attempt to define the American West in any pos­ itive terms (that is, what the West in particular offers to African Americans), but rather it explores this region as a contrast and possible retreat from the racial injustices of the South and also as an alternative to the increasingly hos­ tile northern urban environs. What we discover in many of these stories is that the African Americans who left the South for the West after a few generations of freedom found themselves alienated in a strange land where they yet had no history (even in contrast to the short history of white settlers in the area). In many ways, the term “the West” becomes highly mutable in this collection. Rarely is the West an ideological locale—except as it is defined as the notSouth or the not-North. Even within this shifting ideal called “the West,” the majority of stories takes place in Texas or California, both peculiar social and even protonationalist regions in the West. These are...