Hold It Real Still: Clint Eastwood, Race, and the Cinema of the American West by Lawrence P. Jackson (review).

Lawrence P. Jackson's book, "Hold It Real Still: Clint Eastwood, Race, and the Cinema of the American West," explores how Western films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries blurred the Black presence in order to reaffirm white paternalism and imperialism. Jackson argues that Clint Eastwood's film, "The Outlaw Josey Wales," played a significant role in this project by placing Black characters in the background and conflating the US defeat in Vietnam with the southern defeat during the Civil War. Jackson also examines other Civil War-era Westerns, such as "Ride with the Devil" and "Django Unchained," and how they perpetuated a color-blind logic that sentimentalized the Civil War as a southern white tragedy rather than a triumph of Black liberation. Overall, Jackson demonstrates how these films influenced culture and ideology, particularly in relation to their contemporary political climates. [Extracted from the article]