Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West by Michael K. Johnson (review)

Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos is a stunning analysis of the African American West through close and critical analysis of a range of literary and media texts. Michael Johnson contributes not only to the historiography of the Black cowboy but also to the history of African Americans in the West long marginalized, infantilized, and relegated as side characters in the drama of manifest destiny. His work is a critical contribution to this emerging field of study and, more importantly, to a literary history of African American westerners, one that encompasses their writings, how they were written about, and the narration of their authentic voices speaking to lived experiences. Hence, in many ways, Johnson’s project is both critical analysis of particular texts and ethnographic in nature. By helping to illuminate the cultural lives of African American westerners into a cogent narrative sutured through the tangled strands of their representation and misrepresentation, their stolen legacies and resiliency of spirit, he resituates the dignity of their being and articulates the significant role they played in making manifest the destiny of the United States—both in the physical, social, and political economy of this country and in its literary imagination.

Johnson proceeds to “reconsider a restricted notion of the literary text and be more open to the discovery of the full richness of the ways the African American West has been experienced, imagined, written, represented, and performed” (5) through his critical analyses of “writings by Rose Gordon, who wrote for local western publications rather than for a national audience; . . . memoirs and letters of musicians, performers and singers . . . who lived or wrote about touring the American West . . . ; and black-audience films” (14–15). Johnson’s examination expands the spirit of the literary—from restrictive genres or canons to the literary as a lyricism of human expression, the narration and depiction of cultural lives meant not only to invoke particular emotional effect but to engage in the critical efforts of cultural studies as memory and memorialization, broadening the focus of Black cultural expression and performance solely from publication.

Johnson writes, “The backbone for my exploration of these disparate texts involves not only an interest in the trickster archetype but also two key conceptual ideas, erasure . . . and twoness. The exploration of what W. E. B. Du Bois calls ‘double consciousness’ has long been considered a central element of African American writing, and it is thus not surprising to discover twoness in representations of the African American West” (13). What Johnson does is use these complicated constructions as an abiding analytical trope throughout the chapters—looking at how African American westerners and writers were torn between “the opportunities available in the predominately white society in the West and the sense of belonging to African American community back east” (14).

Johnson is critical and articulate in his analysis, far-reaching in his interdisciplinary approach to the project, and scathingly articulate in his deep reading of texts, highlighting the hidden legacy of the African American West. Years ago I shared my penchant for old Westerns with my father who would force me to watch any Western film that featured a Black cowboy. We both would gaze upon these films, eager to acknowledge an actual African American westerner outside the Hollywood depiction. My father would have been pleased to see this book. It would have served him as a pedagogical tool, as I believe Johnson intends it to be, a critical annotation to all those movies we watched looking for the Black cowboys and more than just traces of a real African American presence and contribution in the West.