Moros in America

This chapter talks about Moros and Americans negotiating an increasingly globalized world beyond colony and metropole. It mentions a vernacular dime novel about the St. Louis World's Fair published in 1904 titled Uncle Bob and Aunt Becky's Strange Adventures at the World's Great Exposition. It also describes how overseas colonies appeared to a skeptical metropolitan public and how cultural producers appropriately portrayed the America's foreign subjects. The chapter mentions the U.S. newspapers that followed the Moros closely as they met with presidents, performed for midwestern crowds, took in the Manhattan skyline, and embraced collegiate life. It cites the Moros' appearance in assorted fictions, such as comic operas, children's adventure stories, radio serials, and motion pictures that manufactured Muslim colonial subjects and presented them in varied ways to a curious public.

A Black Sherlock Holmes (1918): A Case Study in Racebending

With hundreds of Sherlock Holmes screen adaptations, the silent all-Black-cast A Black Sherlock Holmes (1918) remains an under-researched anomaly. The essay provides an overview of colourblind and colour conscious casting practices, ultimately advocating for adopting fan studies approaches to ‘racebending’. Racebending involves alternately ‘racing’ canonical characters from white to Black Minority Ethnic. After briefly reviewing representations of African Americans in blackface minstrelsy and early twentieth-century race films, the essay argues that A Black Sherlock Holmes highlights the ways in which race filmmakers were trying to reimagine new ways for African Americans to become part of dominant literary culture. In reimagining Sherlock Holmes as an African American, the film (re)inscribes Black people into prominent literary and cultural history. Because Knick Garter is doubly descended from two notable fictional detectives, America’s Nick Carter of dime novel fame as well as Britain’s legendary Sherlock Holmes, his very existence posits a new world where famous Black characters are as much a part of the American literary landscape as canonical characters from Hawthorne, Poe, and Twain. Viewing A Black Sherlock Holmes in light of the possibilities the film offers, rather than its limitations, allows viewers today to see the ways literary history, film, and race coalesced to highlight the possibilities of radical racial change in the post-Reconstruction era at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Das Lesen der Schundkämpfer

In contrast to former research, this paper argues that moral crusaders strategically focused on the plot level of (historical) popular literature. This article asserts that text and reception need to be combined when analysing moral panicking about textual popular culture. This approach is presented by contextualising the public denigration of two distinct narrative elements of the imported dime novel series Nick Carter in Imperial Germany, namely its urban setting and its hands-on detective hero, with changes in the perception of city life and in criminological epistemology. Departing from this example, this contribution reflects on the general benefits of such an approach for reception-oriented criticism.

Introduction: the warp, woof, and weave of American gun violence

This introductory chapter lays down the theoretical framework for the forgoing analyses, taking many cues from legal studies, U.S. Supreme Court cases and Foucauldian theory. In the world of the Western, the procedural focus of American law gets in the way of justice. The genre embraces justice by gun violence rather than by trial, and has therefore often been read as ‘anti-law’. From the early dime novel fascination with such outlaws and renegades as Billy the Kid and Jesse James, through depictions of lynching in Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian, and the film The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), to the guns-blazing heroics of films such as Rio Bravo (1959), High Noon (1952), and Shane (1953), through the darker critiques of The Gunfighter (1950), The Wild Bunch (1969), and Unforgiven (1992), to the postmodern pastiche of Django Unchained (2012), the Western has nourished a vision of social organisation and a means for delivering justice that operates outside the official parameters of American law, relying on a gunslinging hero to uphold order. This chapter argues, in fact, that this opposition is progressively undone in the genre’s formulaic shootouts. The cherished antipathy between ‘the law’ and the Western’s ‘law of the gun’ is, in short, unfounded.