Ghost Towns and Ghost-ed Riders: Nature as a Radical Archive in the African American Experience

Fig 1.

Dearfield, Colorado. Photo taken by the author.

The myth of the American West is the myth of exploration, freedom, land ownership, and wildness, and the ideologies surrounding this space have defined the concept of America in imaginations around the world. By extension, the larger-than-life figures we have called pioneers—figures characterized as daring, entrepreneurial, rugged individualists—have embodied the idea of what it means to be an American. This association of the collection of legends, ideologies, and myths called "the West" with the very concept of America makes it especially problematic that representations of this mythic space have been whitened to exclude people of color, except when their bodies represent obstacles to white progress in the forms of savages, bandits, or outlaws. The exclusion of people of color from the idea of the West is problematic not only because it is historically inaccurate but also because representation influences perceptions of belonging (both individual and collective).¹

In recent scholarship about the American West there has been a call to examine the experiences, imaginative productions, and histories of the people of color who played an enormous role in the development of this real and imagined space and whose dreams, aspirations, and personal sense of belonging were also influenced by this space's emergence. As this scholarly conversation continues to develop, there are many stories that have yet to attain the historical primacy they deserve and a slew of theoretical questions to be raised and explored. This is especially true when we turn our attention to the African American West, which is perhaps the most neglected history in the narrative of the American West and in American history more generally.

Investigating the African American West raises crucial theoretical questions that move beyond the project of recovery (which is also important). Studying the African American West presents opportunities to shift the paradigm for the study of race in America. Whereas most of the scholarship generated by and about other regions focuses on the history of oppression, the West presents the opportunity to focus more heavily on African American agency. The figures that populated this landscape—black cowboys, homesteaders, and leisure seekers—aggressively pursued freedom of movement and identity formation. At the same time, studying the African American West also shifts the paradigm for ecocriticism and the study of the American environment. The study of the West is always entwined with the study of human beings' interaction with spaces that we have problematically defined as "wilderness." Yet the dominant perception of wilderness since the Romantic era has been as a pleasurable site for recreation and transcendence. This perception reinforces a Cartesian ideology that ultimately promotes anthropocentricism, because nature figures as a site for human pleasure and transcendence, not as a space of centrality or primacy with its own inherent needs and value outside what it can do for humans.² At the same time, experiences of recreation and transcendence in the presence of nature have been so insistently coded as white that we often miss the ways in which African Americans have participated in this kind of engagement with the natural world. More often, however, African American engagement is overlooked or ignored because much of this community's interaction with the land comes in the form of practices that exceed pleasure, such as labor; activism; and, in the case of the Great and Dismal Swamp and the Underground Railroad, literal escape rather than escapism. An example of this concurrent paradigm shift is evident in this very introduction; I, like many scholars, tend to celebrate examples of agency in historically oppressed populations. However, when it comes to environmental criticism, human agency is problematic, because it is often coupled with anthropocentrism and environmental destruction. In this very example, then, considering nature shifts the conversation around race, just as our consideration of race has the power to shift the conversation about nature.

I am not the first to engage with these concurrent paradigm shifts and their potential to influence conversations about...