|
|
|
Book Review
| Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U. S. Popular Culture, 1850–1877. By Linda Frost. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. xix + 241 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $59.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.)
|
|
Linda Frost's Never One Nation represents an important contribution to the burgeoning literature on whiteness in American history and culture. Situating her study during critical years of national expansion, civil war, and reunion, she explores the relationship between race and "Americanness." Yet, rather than making a case for the creation of a singular national identity during these crucial decades, Frost quite astutely argues that meanings and productions of the nation differed from section to section. Echoing Toni Morrison, she insists that whiteness has been a metonym for "American," and she compares and contrasts variations in the deployment of this racialized discourse of the nation. |
1
|
|
Frost, a literary scholar, uses close reading techniques to scrutinize regional publications, such as Harper's Weekly (New York) in the Northeast, the West's Golden Era (San Francisco), and Southern Illustrated (Richmond, Virginia), as well as other "texts," like P. T. Barnum's American Museum spectacles in New York and traveling "freak" shows. She examines reportage on blacks and Irish immigrants in New York, Native Americans in the West, Chinese and women on the Pacific Coast, and northerners and slaves in the South. Each case pivots on a crisis: the 1862 Dakota uprising and executions in Minnesota, 1863 New York Draft Riots, the supposed threat of Chinese immigration in California, and the Civil War in the South. Frost's argument flows from the anxieties generated by these crises. In a period of profound fragmentation, discourses of whiteness and otherness underscore a desire to construct a bounded, stable, and imagined national community. |
2
|
|
Historians, especially, may find this an alternately enlightening and frustrating work. Drawing heavily on theorists of the nation, such as Homi Bhabha, Étienne Balibar, and Benedict Anderson, Frost reveals the inclusions and exclusions at the core of nationalism, and, most illuminatingly, she quite deftly illustrates regional variation in the production of "Americanness"/whiteness, richly contextualizing each of her cases. Yet, even while her comparison of sectional particularities is a much-needed contribution to scholarship on whiteness and nationalism, it seems strangely at odds with her most basic conclusion. Frost argues that "rather than biological, sociological, or even strictly historical fact, race as a category of otherness is a discursive formation; it is in the end an argument, a linguistic effect, even a language" (p. xiv). It has become commonplace to dismiss the biological basis of race, but the strength of Frost's evidence seems to demonstrate that race is constructed through historically specific and contingent processes. Her insistence on exploring race as a discursive formation flattens her assessment of whiteness, portraying it as a trans-historical phenomenon that appears at odds with her vivid regional locales and limits its usefulness as an analytic category. Nonetheless, Never One Nation constitutes an important step toward a more contextualized examination of the relationship between race and nation. |
3
|
| Derek Chang
|
| Cornell University |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
ISSN 1939-8603
|