Mixing the High and the Low in Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down: the Use of the Western Genre as a Medium for Serious Content
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Ishmael Reed is an African American novelist whose creative works have promoted multi-cultural society and the interests of minority ethnic groups. Although Reed's second novel YBRBD was written in 1969, it still remains to be remarkable for its use of the Western genre (a narrative tradition not particularly known for its reliance on highbrow content) as a medium for questioning and subverting of social and religious oppression. YBRBD is innovative it its non-standard use of themes that are traditionally associated with the Western genre. The novel depicts how a wealthy white land owner attempts to subordinate the young, female, and Native American inhabitants of a city after which the novel is named. An African American cowboy emerges as the main protagonist of the novel and also as the person who is to thwart such actions supported by religious leaders of the town. In the end, the novel documents how the power of the Church and of the wealthy land owner wanes away and how the citizens are released from the bonds of oppression. The paper examines how Reed uses a supposedly low-brow genre as a medium for serious content. More specifically, it discusses Reed's revision of stock characters and situations which subvert some of the more repressive elements of white culture. In sum, the paper documents how YBRBD uses the supposedly low-brow Western genre as a tool for establishing a more dynamic and pluralistic society, which is not a common feat among Western novels. |