Cowboys, Aliens, and Astrapreneurs: Reading Blackness in Frontier Imaginaries

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel examines how Black subjects navigate and transform frontier spaces—from the nineteenth-century American Midwest to contemporary outer space. Drawing together insights from geography, visual culture, and literary studies, these papers trace how Black communities have encountered and reimagined frontier spaces while confronting the racial logics of American empire. The frontier, as both material reality and powerful imaginary, has long served as a key site for articulating American nationalism and racial capitalist expansion. Yet as these papers demonstrate, Black encounters with frontier spaces have also generated alternative geographies that challenge dominant narratives of progress. Together, these papers reveal the centrality of Black experience to understanding how frontier spaces—whether terrestrial or celestial—are imagined, contested, and transformed.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Frontier Subjectivity: Black Aliens and the Legal Geographies of Citizenship in Nineteenth Century Midwest - Jane Henderson, Dartmouth College

• West of Freedom: The Visual Archive of the Black Cowboy - Lucas T Williams, University of Texas at Austin

• The Future & Other Fictions: Close-Reading Race and Outer Space in the 21st Century - Adriana Green, Princeton University

Chair

• Jovan S. Lewis, University of California, Berkeley

Biographical Information

Jane Henderson is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Dartmouth. As a historical geographer, her research addresses the relationship between black placemaking and settler colonialism across North America and the Caribbean. Her current book project focuses specifically on how frontier imaginaries shape black geographies of Minnesota. Jane is also co-PI on the Antipode Foundation funded project “Beyond Esri: Moving Toward Abolition in Geography” which analyzes the role of geography education and geospatial tools in contemporary policing and surveillance.

Luke Williams is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, organizer and critic of twentieth and twenty-first-century Black diasporic performance and visual cultures. His in-progress manuscript titled In the Black: Figures of Racial Capitalism examines the practices of four Black emerging artists as they navigate the pressures of racial capitalism in the art market. The project charts how these artists adopted performative and aesthetic strategies of refusal to reorient frameworks of value when Black figuration sold for a market premium. Through this project and others, Williams queries narratives of freedom and the radical imagination. He is the editor of Blood, Sweat, and Time: Emerging Perspectives on Mildred Howard and Adrian Burrell, published by SmingSming Books and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. A collaborative maker himself, Williams is often on stage or in the gallery. His performance practice excavates site-specific histories to devise community-based responses in the present. Williams holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University, where he was a Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence (DARE) fellow. He received his B.A. in Political & Social Thought as a Jefferson Scholar at the University of Virginia. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin.

Adriana Green is a cross-genre writer from southern Virginia with a love of all things otherworldly. Currently she is a doctoral candidate in UC Berkeley’s African American & African Diaspora Studies Department where she combines archival research, literary critique, and historical analysis to meditate on the dispersal of Black people not only across space but across time in the making of global capitalism.