“Don’t Leave out the Cowboys!”: Black Urban Cowboydom and Didactic Afrofuturist Countermemories in Ghetto Cowboy (2011) and Concrete Cowboy (2021)

“A Whole World of Black Cowboys”

Captivated by the lead story in a 2005 issue of Life magazine— with the tagline “an unlikely tale of a tough Philadelphia neighborhood and the young horsemen who live there”—Greg Neri sought to “look deeper into this unique world” (214), that is, the world of the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club. He did so in the form of a young adult novel titled Ghetto Cowboy (2011). The text’s revisionist intent foreshadowed the emergence of an ecology of activist and interventionist cultural production that has since become known as the Yeehaw Agenda.¹ Like other contributors to the agenda, Neri deploys the discourse of the archive to excavate Black cowboy life-worlds from historiographic erasure with a view to educating those who do not have the benefit of learning about the African American westering experience in higher education settings. Informed by the sensibilities of the Black Lives Matter era, the novel’s 2021 movie adaptation, Concrete Cowboy, is then an all-out call for Black people to claim public ownership of the uninterrupted presence of African Americans in the history, culture, and mythology of the American West.

Undergirded by a clearly marked didactic impetus, Ghetto Cowboy and Concrete Cowboy remediate and explicate academic scholarship on Black cowboydom for popular, more mainstream consumption. Both texts craft compelling and educational albeit fictional narratives that offer readers/viewers a “lens of alterity” (Giles 255). As such they can serve as productive additions to more traditional scholarship and modes of knowledge dissemination since they perform public education labor in the vein of a “culturally responsive pedagogy” (Webb-Johnson 34). The novel and its movie adaptation explicitly tackle the mainstream historiographic erasure of the Black cowboy(ing) experience in an effort to (1) expose the vulnerability of the heteronormative, white cowboy myth and, subsequently, (2) (re)assign the culturally privileged role of the cowboy to Black bodies. After all, African Americans have always co-owned the cultural heritage of the horse-mounted livestock laborer. The Black cowboy characters in both texts then deploy that heritage with a view to counteracting the effects of systemic racism; they lend a hand (and a hoof) to un-erase their historical and ongoing presence in settings where one would not expect to find them: urban environs. Consequently, these are stories about how Black urban equestrian associations have been key sites of Black resilience and resistance.

By hybridizing Black cowboys—who, if made visible at all, would be expected to populate rural, Western settings—with urban geographies, which are popularly equated with Black despair, decay, and dysfunction rather than agency, pride, and resilience, Ghetto Cowboy and Concrete Cowboy espouse speculative, indeed, almost science-fictional qualities. Readers/viewers are likely going to experience a sense of cognitive estrangement upon their first encounter with the texts.² More precisely, though, there are Afrofuturist sensibilities at work in both texts; while they do not employ Afrofuturist aesthetics, they deploy Afrofuturism as both criticism and method. Seeing “elements of Afro-futurism” and “a slice of an African-American utopia” in Black urban cowboydom, activist and public scholar Rachel Cargle has diagnosed “a sense of history braided with futuristic hope” in those communities (2020). According to Afrofuturist critic Kodwo Eshun, the social and epistemological labor of these communities amount to a “cultural project of recovery” that seeks to produce “countermemories” (287–88). Consequently, this article will leverage science-fictional poetics and Afrofuturist criticism in order to identify, map, and explicate the public education labor both texts perform.

Ol’ Proc’s Descendants: Black Urban Cowboy Lives and Popular Culture Matter

While there has been a modest albeit steady stream of scholarly work on the Black West since the mid-twentieth century,³ its impact has largely been confined to the privileged echelons of higher education. What is more, the existing body of scholarship on the Black West and Black cowboydom is not without shortcomings and blind spots in that it belies a latent American exceptionalism...