Beschreibung:
<jats:p xml:lang="en">This essay argues that the black-audience musical westerns of the late 1930s attempted to reconfigure African American national identity in their casting but also by strategically using anachronism and geographical juxtaposition. These westerns created a dual present by using the trope of contemporary Harlem alongside the nineteenth-century setting, thereby ironically echoing the western expansionist movement in a cinematic African American West.</jats:p>