DescriptionThe scope and topic of my thesis project is to investigate the figure of the black western hero, primarily in films from the 1970s. I analyze Sydney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher (1972), Martin Goldman’s The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972), and Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974). My argument rests in the consideration of filmmakers who use western tropes and cultural cues to provide an alternate understanding of American social and racial realities by incorporating blackness into this tradition. On a grander scale my thesis topic forces re-evaluations of the usual questions of mimesis, genre reproduction, and authorship that plague film study. To ground my study in theories of visual representation, I use Laura Mulvey’s concept of visual pleasure and gazing in film and Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicry. My thesis project argues that studying the black western protagonist brings forth questions of American artistic, economic, and socio-political realities. I also look at a recent manifestation of this phenomenon, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), to grasp what about these realities has changed and what has remained constant.