Daniel Worden in The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of American Empire

Daniel Worden's essay "'Securing the Color': The Racial Economy of Deadwood" has just been published in The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of American Empire, edited by Jennifer Greiman and Paul Stasi (Continuum, 2012).

With contributions from scholars in American studies, literature, and film and television studies, The Last Western situates Deadwood in the context of both its nineteenth-century setting and its twenty-first-century audience. Together, these essays argue for the series as a provocative meditation on both the state and historical formation of U.S. empire, examining its treatment of sovereign power and political legitimacy, capital accumulation and dispossession, racial and gender identities, and social and family structures, while attending to the series' peculiar and evocative aesthetic forms. What emerges from this collection is the impressive range of Deadwood's often contradictory engagement with both nineteenth and twenty-first century America.