Through Other Continents

Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

This book is a call to think outside the limits of American literary study (and study of other literatures as well). Dimock calls for interpreting American culture as an extreme holism incorporating human experiences reaching back into "deep time" and across the globe, a paradigm she sees as best illustrated by the spread of religion and languages. (She also uses Deleuze/Guattari's rhizome idea to illustrate this.)

Articulating an understanding of humans as fundamentally connected through the experience of embodiment, she then goes on to destabilize any number of other supposed "connections" which create the categories by which we define our academic studies. "Eras," she argues, should be seen as more plastic; even death should not curtail our inclusion or exclusion of particular people in categories of inquiry (this is a post-human moment). Dimock argues that the nineteenth century, with its expanding scientific knowledge, created opportunities for some people to see themselves as part of a "species" instead of as nations.

An example of a person in the nineteenth century American scene whose thought must be seen as transcending these boundaries is Thoreau, whose interest in the Bhagavad Gita Dimock sees as a "translation" across time. (John Brown, she argues, is also translated "across death" by his actions and by Thoreau's writings.) The acts of reading, writing, and translation are all radical acts, she argues, which challenge the primacy of time and allow us to hear the dead and reaffirm connections between ourselves and those who live far from us. Ezra Pound and fascism; Henry James in Italy; Robert Lowell and Vietnam all show up in different chapters. Her final chapter, on Gary Snyder and Native American and Japanese thought about tricksters (liminal animal/human figures), animals and ecology, reaffirms her conclusion that embodiment points the way to connection and empathy.

Dimock is in the English and American Studies departments at Yale. She recently co-edited a book on transnationalism and literary studies, Shades of the Planet, with Lawrence Buell; has written a book on Melville and individualism; and co-edited, with Priscilla Wald, a special issue of American Literature which I should read: Literature and Science: Cultural Forms, Conceptual Exchanges (Duke UP, 2002).

The Circus Age

Title: The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

Author: Our own Janet Davis!

Argument: "This book argues that the turn of the century railroad circus was a powerful cultural icon of a new, modern nation-state" (10) - that the circus took shape in the way it did, where it did, because of the particular society in which it flourished. The circus represented the diversity and pleasure of the spectacle of a multitudinous America, but often in a way which reiterated cultural norms.

Chapter-by-chapter:

Circus Day: Rich descriptions of the public spectacle that was a circus coming into town in "railroad circus" days, followed by a basic overview of the historical currents which fed into the phenomenon (immigration, "the search for order", racism, empire, expanding overseas markets, incorporation - see Alan Trachtenberg). Davis then describes the three largest railroad circuses upon which the book will focus (Barnum & Bailey, the Ringling Bros, and Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers), making a case for them as the three largest, most widely-traveled, and most influential of the circuses, and differentiating them from Wild West Shows (the circus was less historically minded, more eclectic in subject matter, and employed the definitive "big top" canvas covering).

This photo of Barnum & Bailey camels on a main street parade was found on a website called camelphotos.com. Cue the "I love the Internet" theme song.

The Circus as Historical and Cultural Process: This chapter dips back in time to the 1790s, describing the evolution of the circus during the 1800s as "a metonym for national expansion and infrastructural development" (12). (In other words, the railroad, Western expansion, and the circus were intimately linked.) This chapter also discusses, using cultural theory of Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Judith Butler, how the different groups involved in the production of the circus came together to produce its "ideological content" (25). NB: On p 35, Davis discusses children's circus culture, including a circus toy set which modeled itself after TR's African safari of 1909.

These men were supposed to be "pearl divers from the Sandwich Islands" - an instance of American imperialism's absorption into circus-world.

Spectacular Labor: This chapter "illuminates the thick, physical framework in which the circus produced its ideological content" (39) - in other words, how did it all get done, and how does this "how" help us understand what workers, supervisors, and spectators expected? Spectators who watched the circus were not only intrigued with the parts of the show specifically designated as performance. They also congregated to watch the set-up and strike of the tent, and were fascinated/repelled by the lives of circus performers. Davis argues that these performers created a social world apart from "regular life", and also that the tightly wound methods and processes of the circus (they had to be tight, to fit onto the railroad schedule) brought the industrial order of organization to small towns far away from factories.

Respectable Female Nudity: Women were becoming more and more visible in the public sphere (see the "New Woman"), and the people who ran these circuses faced an interesting gender conundrum: what to do about their very visible female performers? In general, they tried to "reconfigure strong Euroamerican circus women into dainty, domestic ladies, and women of color into educational artifacts" (12). They did so with an eye to a subtle titillation of the viewer, playing with transgression, referring to sex obliquely, through "emphasis on female performers' lives, loves, and body-hugging tights" (85). Here is also a discussion of presentation of "untouched" tribes or "savages" in the circus context.

From the King of Beasts to Clowns in Drag: Masculinity in the circus and its contrasting meanings is the subject of this chapter, which holds that "performances...were sites of gender play that could provide audiences with liberating alternatives to disciplined lives of manly capital accumulation" (12). Although circus men were seen as exemplars of the athletic, "strenuous" ideal, they were also sometimes androgynous or dressed in drag - or, they were actually animals, dressed up as men. Here are examples of the animals' roles in particular tableaux, as well as the integration of evolutionary theory (chimpanzees used as examples of "Man, Previous to His Degeneration" [153]) and the emphasis placed on "ideal" or "alpha" specimens of megafauna (just like Carl Akeley and his Giant of Karisimbi). Men of color, even African-Americans, were often used as examples of apes or savages (182). Do hippos really have teeth that look like that?

Instruct the Minds of All Classes: Through the circus (and the Wild West show), American involvement in foreign countries was processed, naturalized, and contained. Episodes of foreign entanglement were re-broadcast in circus format, reenacted or dramatized. The overriding philosophy behind these representations was that circuses were "moral cheerleaders of expansionism" (194). Meanwhile, on a material level, animals and labor from overseas were used in performance, dramatizing the advantages of selective American extraction of talent and labor from foreign countries - however, Davis points out, the freakiness of these performers may have served to subtly uphold an anti-imperialist racial logic of exclusion (see Eric Love).

Looks like kind of a scary dream for a kid to have.

Legacies: From Las Vegas to the Bridges of Madison County: Contemporary analogues of circus culture, and some speculation as to what forms of culture may have taken its place.

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, Don Wilmeth lauded the book for being "clearly written, persuasively argued, exhaustively documented", and wrote that it did an admirable job of completing its project of connecting the circus to the cultural history of the time. The book was also well-reviewed in non-scholarly pubs, including the NYT and the Times Literary Supplement.

Books to follow up on: Primary: Peter Harkness, Andy the Acrobat; or, Out with the Greatest Show on Earth (1907); William Hornaday, The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals (1922); Harvey Root, Tommy with the Big Tents (1924).

Secondary: Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (1986); Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (1997); RJ Hoage and William A Deiss, New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (1996); Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (1999); Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Engima of Efficiency (1997); Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990); Patricia Vertinsky, The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century (1990).

Indians in Unexpected Places

"New Horse Power in 1913" - Collage by Arthur Amiotte. Oglala Lakota Artist (1994)

Title: Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004)

Author: Philip J. DeLoria, professor of history and director of the Am. Cult. program at Michigan. Author, also, of Playing Indian (1998) and coeditor of the Blackwell Companion to American Indian History (2002). Describes his areas of interest as "Issues of culture and representation, particularly concerning American Indian people; Environmental and Western American history." His family heritage - as Dakota Sioux - is key to his approach to this book. His father, Vine Deloria Jr, is an activist and historian (see reference to his activity in Krech's Ecological Indian); his grandfather, Vine Deloria Sr, who was a minister and an accomplished college athlete, forms the keystone of Unexpected Places' chapter on athletics.

Argument: During modernity, Native Americans, having been supposedly "defeated" at Wounded Knee in 1890, were facing some of the most adverse material (and spiritual) conditions in the history of white occupation. White Americans chose to see Native Americans as stuck in the past, defeated, contained, and/or passive. Deloria's mission is to use selected Native life histories to illustrate how, contrary to "popular" belief, Native Americans during this time were actively seeking out ways to shape and use the processes of modernity (including technology, mass media, film, etc). Through the use of these examples, Deloria asks us to consider the implications of our automatic relegation of American Indians to the realm of the "primitive" through stereotypical imagery, and to challenge the quotidian nature of this "directional" ideology.

Chapter-by-chapter:
Introduction: Expectation and Anomaly: This introduction situates the historical area to be explored in the early twentieth century, when, unexpectedly, "a significant cohort of Native people engaged the same forces of modernization that were making non-Indians reevaluate their own expectations of themselves and their society" (6). Deloria outlines the difference he sees between "ideology" and "discourse", preferring these terms to the more flat "stereotype." He also distinguishes between "the anomalous, which reinforces expectations" and "the unexpected, which resists categorization and, thereby, questions expectation itself" (11). As a broader project, he posits that looking at "secret histories of unexpectedness" such as this one has the power to "change our sense of the past and lead us quietly, but directly, to the present moment" (14).


Red Cloud Woman in Beauty Shop, Denver, 1941. Deloria uses this picture to illustrate how the gap between expectation and possibility for Indian roles both creates humor and reinforces structures of power.

Violence: The Killings at Lightning Creek: One of the first "expected" categories of "Indianness" in the early twentieth century was that of violence. Deloria shows how the massacre at Wounded Knee led to an understanding of the Indian as "contained," and that acts of Indian resistance on reservations were understood from then forward as "breaking out" or "breakouts" (such acts could include hunting illegally or moving from reservation to reservation, as seen in the chapter on cars and technology). These outbreaks, Deloria argues were not feared so much because of their promise of violence, but for "the eruption of resistant forms" of Indian culture. Furthermore, "these stories...helped establish critical contexts for the twentieth-century imagemaking even then beginning to take shape" (49). The fiction of containment meant that white society was apt to "forget" that the twentieth-century Indian was capable of acts such as the 1973 takeover of Wounded Knee (51).

Representation: Indian Wars, the Movie: Here, Deloria discusses the lives of Indians who took part in movie culture, either by acting or producing, and makes a case for their active agency in the new industry (as also articulated by LG Moses in his book about Wild West Shows). Buffalo Bill's "Indian Wars" movie (1914), the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and various pictures including DW Griffith's "Call of the Wild" (1908) are examined. Deloria takes special care to point to Native critiques of pictures which took advantage of Indian stereotypes, and includes an analysis of the pictures by Indian producer James Young Deer. What matters most, according to Deloria, is that "a significant group of early-twentieth-century Indian people...came rapidly to understand the power of representation and cultural production" (105).


The actor Luther Standing Bear.

Athletics: "I Am of the Body": My Grandfather, Culture, and Sports: This chapter opens with a very personal interlude introducing the life of Vine Deloria, Sr., who was a committed college athlete, and who, as Deloria says, at the end of his life, focused on this aspect of his past even beyond the other work he had done as a minister for, and elder of, the Lakota Sioux: "For my grandfather, race, religion, culture, and family were inextricably tangled with his feats on the playing field" (112). This revelation spurs Deloria to reconsider narratives of Indian athletes which could see them as having been exploited or denigrated by the teams and leagues they played for. Here he discusses the story of Charles Albert "Chief" Bender, a player for the Philly Athletics in the 1910s, the runner and Olympic medalist Louis Tewanima, and the many athletic teams fielded by the Carlisle School. In these situations, he says, "Indian mimicry of Indianness back at white audiences made it clear that there was both a shared sense of expectation and a critical Indian intelligence at work" (130). However, after the reservation system calcified in the post-WWI era, and the athletic system of the greater US rearranged along institutional lines, "the entire cultural, social, and economic system that had supported Indian athletes in the early twentieth century had been transformed in ways that almost completely shut them out" (133).

"Chief" Bender, of the Philadelphia Athletics.

Technology: "I Want to Ride in Geronimo's Cadillac": Here Deloria examines expectations that Indians would not be participating in the technological revolutions of the early twentieth century, with the most obvious exemplar being automobility. He looks at photography and advertising of the time period that portrayed Indianness as an *inspiration for* automobility (signifying freedom, fleetness, etc) without making a place for Indians themselves in the picture (hence, the photograph of Geronimo in the Caddy, which Deloria sees as a sight-gag set up by a white photographer, but then proceeds to use as a way to interrogate Geronimo's investment in being so portrayed). Indians who bought cars, using money gained from the sale of reservation land or oil, were seen as spendthrifty, while whites who mortgaged houses while keeping cars (see Middletown) were not. Meanwhile, in the lives of Indians, automobility "allowed Native people to imagine an even broader vision of Indian country, one that transcended individual tribes and places and helped create new expressions of the pan-Indian and the intertribal" (153).


Geronimo in the Cadillac.

Music: The Hills Are Alive...with the Sound of Indian: White fascination with the "primitive" in the early twentieth century led to white musicologists and composers visiting Indian reservations to try to "salvage" their music. Here, Deloria outlines the creation of an "Indian sound", which signifies, per Deloria, all of the expectations of what-is-Indian: "primitivism and social evolution, violent conflict, indigenous nationalism, Indian disappearance, the romance of the forbidden exotic, the haunted American landscape..." (184) However, he writes, there were also Indian performers in the realm of musical "high culture", most significantly, Tsianina Redfeather, a Creek Indian who performed in pieces which encapsulated Indianness (especially "Shanewis", an opera). Deloria examines how Redfeather was prized for her authenticity, but how her talent was sometimes written off as a result of a "natural" Indian gift, stripping her of agency for her accomplishments. As happened in the athletic realm, Indian musical performers lost the public's attention by midcentury.


"Princess" Tsianina Redfeather.

Conclusion: The Secret History of Indian Modernity: Deloria reiterates his idea that "expectations exist in relation to concrete actions" (225) and explains that this is why "stereotypes" such as the ones that manifest themselves in the Tomahawk Chop or the P. Diddy/Nelly song "Shake Ya Tailfeather", matter to Indian realities. Deloria writes, summing up, "These expectations have concerned, among other things, Native technological incapacity, natural proclivities toward violence and warfare, a lack of social development, distance from both popular and aesthetic culture, and an inability to engage a modern capitalist economy" (230). He then diverges into a brief discussion of how African-American culture overtook Indian culture as the touchstone of modernism, pointing to the urbanization of African-Americans as a significant factor (238).

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, Gretchen Bataille wrote that Deloria's book succeeded at its project, but did not offer very much more in the way of in-depth criticism. Meanwhile, in Reviews in American History, Leonard Sadosky lauded Deloria for managing to find a mode of examination that eschewed the traditional tragic story of Indian victimization by governmental forces, and calls the book "cultural history at its best".

Stories: The Pawnee word for "car", when cars first came out, was kiriir aawis tarusta, which means "smoking anus" or "smoke from the anus dragging" (154). In 1940, "the Cherokee actor Victor Daniels apparently applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for federal recognition for a new tribe - what one reporter called the 'Demille Indians' of Hollywood" (80).

Leads to follow up on: The broadside for the 1912 movie "Custer's Last Fight" pitched the movie as "educational - every school boy and girl should see it!" (82) The Redpath Chatauqua Collection, which is at U. Iowa.

New words: "sodality" ("association or confederation with others; brotherhood, companionship, fellowship").

Books to follow up on: Primary: John Joseph Matthews, Sundown (1934); Luther Standing Bear, My People, The Sioux (1928).

Secondary: Christopher Castiglia, Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (1996); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (p-back, 2002); Ivan Karp and Steven Levine, eds, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (p-back, 1991); Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (2000); Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (1999); Stephen Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity (p-back, 1998); Andrew Brodie Smith, Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood (2004).