Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West by Blake Allmendinger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West by Blake Allmendinger Christine Bold Blake Allmendinger, Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 215 pp. Hardcover, $55; e-book, $55. The more stories of settlers going west to transform their identities emerge, the clearer the link between acts of “personal reinvention” (10) and the systemic dispossession of Indigenous lands becomes. This is not exactly the thesis of Blake Allmendinger’s Geographic Personas, but it is, to my mind, the volume’s most consequential implication. [End Page 430] Allmendinger brings together nine stories of self-transforming performance from the mid-nineteenth- to the early twentieth-century US West. Among the transnational array of figures some are familiar (Willa Cather, German author Karl May, mixed-race actor Sylvester Long / Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, French-Canadian cowboy artist and writer Will James / Joseph Dufault), some less so (con man James Addison Reavis, Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, Polish actor Helena Modjeska), and some surprising to find in this company (geologist and nature writer Clarence King, dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan). What this diverse group has in common is their reworkings of identity in western lands and social spaces. Allmendinger closely reads their stories for traces of performance, in his subjects’ maps, archival documents, autobiographies, fiction, visual art, theatrical style, and social relationships. Some stories bear directly on the land. Clarence King led the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, mapping boundary lines onto western lands that dispossessed and erased Indigenous peoples; back east he secretly straddled the color line, living as a member of an exclusive New York white men’s club and as a light-skinned Black man residing with his African American family in a segregated area of the city. James Addison Reavis invented an aristocratic Spanish lineage for himself, undergirded by forged archives and masqueraded relationships, in order to claim one of the “floating” land grants issued by Spanish colonizers (12), in this case 18,6000 square miles in New Mexico and Arizona Territories. When Joseph Ernest Nephtali Dufault of Montreal, Quebec, made himself over into Will James, cowboy, artist, writer, and Hollywood stuntman, the transformation depended both on his fictional autobiography and his larger rewriting of “the West into a fictional space bearing little resemblance to the settled territory” (51). Other stories carry different relationships to power, and the stakes in their impersonations seem quite different. Sylvester Long carried a complex lineage of Indigenous, Black, white, and Kainai (Blood) adoption; his self-identification as Buffalo Child Long Lance (naming himself first Cherokee then Blackfoot) and the fictions he performed on and off camera can be read as strategies [End Page 431] of survival, as he navigated the lines and fantasies laid down by dominant forces. Yone Noguchi arrived in California as “an educated member of the Japanese middle class” (97), but in pursuit of a career as poet and writer found himself navigating very different social structures. Employed first as hotel dishwasher, then as poet Joaquin Miller’s houseboy, he worked his way into patron-ship by members of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, for whom he performed identities crossing classes, sexualities, and Orientalist fantasies, including authoring The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902). After his return to Japan, Noguchi reflected on his identity performance: “two people, the Oriental and the Occidental, on one pair of shoulders are too painful to carry about” (106). In 1876 actor Helena Modjeska fled her own multiple and fractured identities, as well as the oppression of Poland under partition, to found an agricultural commune in California. When the experiment failed, she went on the American stage as a “self-styled Polish countess” (112), a layering of identities novelized in Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy (1926) and Susan Sontag’s In America (1999). Allmendinger starts in a familiar place, with Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis, rereading it as a parade of westward-moving actors changing costume as they encounter different landscapes. It’s a nice conceit and can work well—for example, when he parses the movement work of Isadora Duncan, the California-born “creator of modern American...