“Holy Ghost Power!” in Robert Duvall’s The Apostle

The Whiteness of the White

This Article describes and theorizes the legal academy's denial of both class disadvantage and class migration, with particular attention to how those phenomena are manifest in relation to white faculty. The Article observes that a general disdain for poor and working-class whites evolves into the denial and distancing of class migrants, those who move into the professoriate from lower socioeconomic stations (SES). Further, the academy simultaneously discredits and disciplines these class migrants when they run afoul of narrow norms regarding credentials, scholarship, and culture. The author employs storytelling as methodology, drawing on her own experiences as a white class migrant to illustrate some of these phenomena. This Article, one in a series that takes up poor whites and the white working class as critical race projects, makes several theoretical contributions. First, it theorizes why white poverty, the white working class, and thus the phenomenon of white class migration, are so taboo among legal scholars. Closely related to this taboo are the reasons white class migrants are not viewed and valued as representing the diversity held so dear by the professoriate. Among other things, the Article begins the work of thinking about the phenomenon of white class migration as one that is as much about race as about class. It does so, however, in ways that go beyond Critical Race Theory's (CRT) typical engagement with whiteness as monolithic abstraction. The Article suggests that the persistent race-vs.-class debate--regarding whether race or class is a bigger culprit in relation to various social problems and injustices--has proved an attractive distraction that has deterred robust scholarly engagement with many potent intersections of race with class, including that between white-skin privilege and socioeconomic disadvantage. Indeed, the academy is deterred from taking up just this intersection of whiteness with socioeconomic disadvantage for fear that doing so will detract from the very grave problems of racial disadvantage and racial discrimination experienced by nonwhites. Yet when we ignore class-based disadvantage--as when we ignore race-based disadvantage--we avoid an uncomfortable but critical conversation about authentic meritocracy. Ignoring the intersection of class disadvantage with white privilege also permits us to avoid confronting long-standing, intra-racial elite biases against poor and working-class whites. The second theoretical contribution of the Article--written for a collection about the persistence of gender discrimination in the academy--regards the ways in which gender mediates the white class migration experience in the context of legal academia. In particular, the author discusses three junctures when the intersection of gender and class have particular implications for academic careers. These are mentoring, physical appearance, and life partnerships. Finally, the author identifies several reasons why the legal academy needs the distinctive perspectives of class migrants. First, class migrants have become rarer among the professoriate in recent years because of heightened elitism in law faculty hiring during an era when low-income students are in shorter supply than ever in the prestigious colleges, universities, and law schools that bestow the requisite credentials. Second, the wider trend of diminishing upward mobility not only weighs on our national psyche, it has serious implications for our nation's economic well-being due to this failure to optimize raw human capital of all colors. This situation renders the perspectives and insights of all class migrants more valuable than ever because they have first-hand experience with the upward mobility journey that we should be fostering, and which we support in principle. Furthermore, class migrants can serve as role models and mentors for students in the midst of that process. Third, the author argues that poor and working-class whites are both key stakeholders and key informants in our quest for racial progress, although their perspectives are seldom heard in the academy. …

Reviewed by: Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature by Jolene Hubbs David A. Davis Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature, by Jolene Hubbs. Cambridge University Press, 2022. 191 + xi pages. $110 cloth, eBook. Poverty leaves an indelible mark in the form of a self-consciousness that never completely fades. Growing up poor white in rural Georgia, I learned the difference between my family, who lived in a trailer, and the families of other kids, who lived in houses. I heard the jokes told about poor whites, developed the sense of shame that comes with poverty, and felt the resentment that comes with marginalization. As a literary critic, I am inclined to notice how poor white characters are portrayed, and I realize that they tend to be depicted as either depraved or pathetic, and I also notice that literary critics tend to be reluctant to address issues of class in southern literature. Jolene Hubbs’s book Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature explores how middle-class southern writers have depicted poor whites to define their own social superiority and how recent poor white writers resist their marginalization. She notes that white poverty tends to be distinctively associated with the US South, and she argues that “poor white southerners appear throughout US literature as embodiments of whatever wealthier white people are most eager to distance themselves from” (8). She uses literary case studies from four periods—the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, and the 1990s—to illustrate how poor whites have been depicted as foils for class status, ignorance, racism, and obesity. In her study, she explains that middle-class writers project deviance onto poor whites in a pattern that illustrates America’s evolving social anxiety. Hubbs focuses her analysis on five writers as illustrations of middle-class anxiety projected onto poor white southerners in southern literature. The book is much more representative than exhaustive, and each chapter functions as a case study for representations of poor whites in specific time periods and in relation to specific social contexts. While poor whites have an extensive and formative role in both the US South specifically and the United States generally, the book extrapolates from particular examples. In each chapter, Hubbs establishes a prevailing [End Page 225] tendency for depictions of poor whites in a time period, such as the Gilded Age of the 1890s, in the works of several writers and then contrasts the prevailing depiction with the somewhat different representation of poor whites in the work of a specific writer. This dialogue reveals tension between how poor whites are depicted in mass media, magazines, and print culture and in the work of authors who have offered more sophisticated impressions of poor whites. Most of the book, with the exception of the final chapter, explores southern middle-class authors’ depictions of poor whites, which diminish the ability of poor whites to influence how they are perceived, leaving a distorted perception of them. She contends that poor white authors have not been able to represent themselves effectively until the late twentieth century. Therefore, the first three chapters focus on middle-class writers and the concluding chapter focuses on two contemporary writers with poor white roots, and the book reveals, unsurprisingly, that poor whites offer a much more complex depiction of social class than middle class writers who project deviance onto white poverty. The depiction of poor white southerners as deviant, lazy, and problematic extends at least as far back as the early colonial period with William Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line (1728), which characterized southern poor whites as indolent lubbers. Since then, poor whites have been portrayed as alternately problematic or praiseworthy depending upon the political or rhetorical agenda of the author. Thomas Jefferson, for example, described them as the foundation of civil society, whereas old southwestern humorists caricatured them as ignorant and depraved. In the first chapter of the book, Hubbs begins her analysis after Reconstruction, when the regions were reunified but sectional differences continued to linger. She describes how poor whites were portrayed in The Atlantic Monthly after the Civil War, at a time when “white poverty came to be treated as a social and personal pathology,” and...

(1999). Theorizing friendship: Interracial friendships in the American South. Women: A Cultural Review: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 139-150.

Reviewed by: Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri Leigh Merritt Tim Lockley Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South. By Keri Leigh Merritt. Cambridge Studies on the American South. ( New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 361. Paper, $32.99, ISBN 978-1-316-63543-8; cloth, $59.99, ISBN 978-1-107-18424-4.) Keri Leigh Merritt's important new book depicts an antebellum South where life for poor whites was incredibly harsh. Lacking access to capital and unable to sell their labor for a decent price, poor whites were suffocated by a system clearly designed to entrench the power of the slaveholding elite. The themes that run throughout Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South show the wealthy elite consciously controlling and suppressing the white poor in the antebellum South for their own gain and the white poor, who were well aware of this state of affairs, usually unsuccessfully resisting it as best they could. While nailing down exactly who fell into the category "poor whites" has troubled many scholars, Merritt estimates that by 1860 at least one-third of the [End Page 456] white population in the antebellum South were poor, lacking land or any meaningful property. These people could never aspire to reach the status of slaveholders and were "truly, cyclically poor" (p. 16). Merritt's strongest and perhaps most provocative argument is that the elite actively strove to perpetuate this situation. She does not see a herrenvolk democracy operating here. The elite failed to provide an adequate educational system that might have provided the poorest with the skills to improve their lot, and they used the power of the law to harass, corral, and bully the poor. Those without obvious means of support could be arrested for vagrancy and then bound out in a form of unfree labor. Those suspected of property crimes, drunkenness, interracial fraternization, or a whole host of other offenses could be jailed, publicly beaten, and exiled. Propertied whites controlled the machinery of justice, and those caught in the system could do little to escape it. Poor whites were not simple victims in this process. Many did exactly what the courts said they did—including lying, cheating, and stealing—in their efforts to do whatever they could to survive. In this sense, poor whites and the enslaved similarly resisted planter oppression. This was perhaps most noticeable during the Civil War, when those trying to avoid the Confederate draft melted into the swamps, forests, and mountains of the South just as enslaved people had for a long time. My caveats are relatively minor and are more about added nuance than anything else. Sometimes Merritt treats the South as monolithic, seeing the same hierarchies and oppressions almost everywhere. Any person bold enough to look at the entire South will always leave themselves open to this criticism, but it is worth reiterating the sheer variety and complexity of southern environments. For one thing, southern towns and cities clearly operated under slightly different social conventions since poorer whites tended to congregate there and gained some social and political power as a result. For instance, shopkeepers could turn a blind eye to illegal trading between poor whites and the enslaved. Moreover, Merritt downplays what I think were genuine efforts by at least some elite southerners to create a network of private and public benevolence, including a functioning system of public education. While there is an argument that charity is a form of social control, it is hard to always see it in this light and thus overlook those who tried to help poorer whites, particularly the sick, disabled, and orphaned. Provisions for public education were admittedly patchy, indeed some states did very little, but in North Carolina and Alabama most white children had access to at least some public education by the 1850s and enrollment rates matched those of some New England states. Furthermore, those working to create effective public school systems promoted in print the racially cohesive effect of providing education only to whites. Evidently not all members of the slaveholding elite wanted to suppress the poorest whites. None of...

Representations of southern poor whites have long shifted between romanticization and demonization. At worst, poor southern whites are aligned with racism, bigotry, and right-wing extremism, and at best, regarded as the passive victims of wider, socio-economic policies. Poverty Politics: Poor Whites in Contemporary Southern Writing pushes beyond these stereotypes and explores the impact of neoliberalism and welfare reform on depictions of poverty. The book examines representations of southern poor whites across various types of literature, including travel-writing, photo-narratives, life-writing, and eco-literature, and reveals a common interest in communitarianism that crosses the boundaries of the US South and regionalism, moving past ideas about the culture of poverty to examine the economics of poverty. Included are critical examinations of the writings of southern writers such as Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, Barbara Kingsolver, Tim McLaurin, Toni Morrison, and Ann Pancake. Poverty Politics: Poor Whites in Contemporary Southern Writing includes critical engagement with identity politics as well as reflecting on issues including Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, and mountaintop removal. It interrogates the presumed opposition between the Global North and the Global South and engages with micro-regions through case studies on Appalachian photo-narratives and eco-literature. Importantly, it focuses not merely on representations of southern poor whites, but also on writing that calls for alternative ways of re-conceptualizing not just the poor, but societal measures of time, value, and worth.

Reviewed by: Poverty Politics: Poor Whites in Contemporary Southern Writing by Sarah Robertson Martyn Bone Sarah Robertson. Poverty Politics: Poor Whites in Contemporary Southern Writing. UP of Mississippi, 2019. vii + 188 pp. Despite two decades of the New Southern Studies, with its transnational turns and critiques of southern exceptionalism, southern literary studies still retains some regionalist assumptions about its object of study and who is doing the studying. Even the ostensibly polemical “Blast South” manifestos published in 2015 by the Emerging Scholars Organization (an affiliate of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature) include nativist pronouns (we southerners, our South); indeed, nine of the ten emerging scholars featured are from the region, and eight teach at southern institutions. It is striking, then, that this second book by Sarah Robertson—an American literature specialist trained and based in England—is “less concerned with . . . the US South than . . . the region’s place within global financial markets” (xii-xiii). Poverty Politics not only “embraces the aim of new southern studies” (xiii) but also pitches the struggles and representation of poor southern whites as a “case study” (xxii) for “the exploitation of workers under neoliberalism . . . across the globe” (xii). While “the writers in this study might not always be those the reader expects” (xiii)—Harry Crews, Chris Offutt, and Tom Franklin appear only fleetingly—Robertson’s five chapters encompass an eclectic range of authors and genres. This ensures that even experts on so-called Grit Lit or Rough South writing (terms Robertson repudiates as reductive) will likely encounter new texts and fresh analyses. The opening chapter attends to poor whites in contemporary travel narratives, beginning with British authors but concentrating mostly on Douglas Kennedy’s In God’s Country (1989), which Robertson scores for scapegoating poor whites as the wellspring of southern racism. If travel narratives by V. S. Naipaul and others reproduce similarly hoary ideas of poor white southerners as “authentic” (11), Robertson is more interested in how, when seeking to excavate a “real” South “untouched by neoliberalism,” these authors “displace class and economic issues.” Chapter 2 turns to photo-narratives and considers whether or not they “offer counternarratives, or countervisualities” (28) to well-worn images of white southern poverty (often established by Farm Security Administration photographers during the Depression). Robertson is sympathetic to the Appalshop projects of the 1970s and 1980s but charges Sally Mann, Tim Barnwell, and Susan Lipper with romanticizing the rural South while eliding “the actualities of poverty” (48). Perhaps inevitably, Shelby Adams, a controversial figure [End Page 590] for three decades, receives the most sustained attention; Robertson notes that Adams’s recent projects seem to respond to criticism leveled at earlier works such as Appalachian Portraits (1993). Chapter 3 considers “poor white life-writing” (Robertson prefers this more expansive nomenclature to David A. Davis’s designation, “white trash autobiographies” [63]). The chapter includes a compelling critique of J. D. Vance’s notorious Hillbilly Elegy (2016), a memoir that adheres to neoliberalism’s rhetoric of “choice and economic freedom” without “any consideration of socioeconomic policies” (84–85) that compound working-class suffering, such as access to healthcare. Poverty Politics also draws lightly here (as it does elsewhere) on postcolonial theory, arguing that Rick Bragg and Janisse Ray write back against dominant stereotypes about hicks, hillbillies, and trash; Robertson qualifies, however, that Bragg and Ray register their ancestors’ role in Native removal. Furthermore, for all that Ray occasionally appears like a “wistful neo-agrarian” and Bragg sometimes indulges in what Robertson deliciously skewers as “foodways frivolity,” neither author “sugarcoat[s] the ecological destruction wrought by settlers and their descendants” (72–73). Rather less convincing is Robertson’s attempt to locate Bragg and Ray within her larger project of linking the poor southern white experience to a “national and sometimes global community” (70) defined by class solidarity rather than racial division. Too much here hangs on Bragg’s brief gesture to the “global economy” (86), while Robertson herself observes that Ray “focuses at the micro level, on an uber-local notion of community . . . political action at the granular level” (88). Ray’s “localism” may evade ossified “categories of southern, regional writing,” but I wanted more evidence of how exactly she...

The popular and scholarly imagination considers Americans—especially those from the US South—to be averse to working-class politics. The South, in particular, is regarded as having especially low levels of class consciousness, hopelessly mired in racist or racialized ideologies which effectively eliminate the possibility of working-class solidarity. This article problematizes these conclusions by presenting the results of a series of studies conducted in New Orleans, Louisiana. Interviews with activists and community leaders, as well as two representative surveys of the city find that New Orleanians are remarkably class conscious, and almost universally regard the workplace as the central social system for determining their overall well-being. These findings are contextualized in Louisiana’s oft-ignored labor history, and contrasted with the currently en vogue “white working class” literature.

Situating itself in the crosshairs of critical whiteness studies, queer studies, and Black studies, this essay considers the literary production of the (poor) white trash subject in the intersection of two moments of racial upheaval—the civil rights era of the US South and the “focus on the family” during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s—in which whiteness was under siege. Taking its cue from Toni Morrison's articulation of the white imaginary and W. E. B. Du Bois's history of the (Black) and white working class, this article looks at representations of queerness in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina to (1) understand the ways in which poor whiteness solidifies through queer moments of “bad” sex; and (2) reveal the ways in which “bad sex” retards white subjectivity/progressivity.

White trash . The phrase conjures up images of dirty rural folk who are poor, ignorant, violent, and incestuous. But where did this stigmatizing phrase come from? And why do these stereotypes persist? Matt Wray answers these and other questions by delving into the long history behind this term of abuse and others like it. Ranging from the early 1700s to the early 1900s, Not Quite White documents the origins and transformations of the multiple meanings projected onto poor rural whites in the United States. Wray draws on a wide variety of primary sources—literary texts, folklore, diaries and journals, medical and scientific articles, social scientific analyses—to construct a dense archive of changing collective representations of poor whites. Of crucial importance are the ideas about poor whites that circulated through early-twentieth-century public health campaigns, such as hookworm eradication and eugenic reforms. In these crusades, impoverished whites, particularly but not exclusively in the American South, were targeted for interventions by sanitarians who viewed them as “filthy, lazy crackers” in need of racial uplift and by eugenicists who viewed them as a “feebleminded menace” to the white race, threats that needed to be confined and involuntarily sterilized. Part historical inquiry and part sociological investigation, Not Quite White demonstrates the power of social categories and boundaries to shape social relationships and institutions, to invent groups where none exist, and to influence policies and legislation that end up harming the very people they aim to help. It illuminates not only the cultural significance and consequences of poor white stereotypes but also how dominant whites exploited and expanded these stereotypes to bolster and defend their own fragile claims to whiteness.

The paper highlights the contribution of the American playwright Tennessee Williams to the development of American drama, theater and film. It underlines the originality of Williams's work that brought the revival of the American post-war drama, expanded the boundaries of theatricality and revived American film of the fifties. Williams’s poetic language liberated American drama from the constraints of realism; "plastic theatre" replaced the “exhausted theatre of realistic conventions”, established standards of the genre and norms of the structural and thematic correctness. Williams’s unique style, shocking and universal themes, a wide range of characters from the margins of society, the dual attitude towards the American South and the ability to re-consider American myths brought about Williams’s unprecedented popularity among the audience. Of particular interest to American culture of the fifties was the unbreakable bond of Tennessee Williams and film. The paper describes the impact of film on Williams’s creativity, the use of film techniques in Williams' plays and Williams’s contribution to the development of American film. The enormous popularity of Tennessee Williams in Hollywood is attributed not only to William-son mastery but to the special historical circumstances, i.e. the willingness of the Hollywood industry to adapt Williams's work at a given historical moment.

Nearer, My God, to Thee

Black Radicalism, Marxism, and Collective Memory: An Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley Jordan T. Camp (bio) This interview was occasioned by the twentieth anniversary of Robin D. G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), an anniversary that fell amid the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Conducted in Los Angeles during 2011, it has been since edited and revised. It aims to clarify the historical lessons of the black freedom and radical labor struggles in the 1930s for confronting the current crisis. Jordan T. Camp 2010 marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Hammer and Hoe. It began as your dissertation in the history department at UCLA, which you completed in 1987. Can you talk about how the conjuncture shaped your study? Robin D. G. Kelley The timing is really important. The project was conceived in the early 1980s. My interest was in southern Africa, specifically the South African Left. At the same time, the Jesse Jackson campaign and the Rainbow Coalition was taking off, as was the idea of multiracial and multiethnic organizing actually led by people of color. I was involved in campaigns at UCLA and was simultaneously trying to write about an original rainbow coalition. My dissertation began as a comparative study of radicalism in South Africa and the US South. I ended up dropping the South Africa piece because I was denied access to the country. Yet with a South African framing of what became a US story I was forced to think hard about things like intraracial class tensions and conflicts. I had to look at Alabama differently. I couldn’t look at the black working class as a kind of solid whole, nor could I look at the white working class in the same way. Part of what Hammer and Hoe tried to do was look at Alabama society as whole, not just black workers. [End Page 215] Camp How have you felt about its reception over the past two decades? Kelley It’s been interesting. I am really happy with that book. Looking over it again, I am not sure what I would do differently because I said what I needed to say. The reviews over all have been great, but more importantly the way a number of activists and organizers on the Left have talked about that book has been very heartening. For many readers, the book does three things. First, it demonstrates that substantial, effective organizing can occur under the worst of circumstances; that immense poverty, depression, and violence weren’t successful deterrents to movement building. Second, that even the most ardent racists are not fixed in their ideology. People can be transformed in the struggle. Racism is definitely a fetter to multiracial organizing, but Hammer and Hoe shows how people built a movement across the color line in the most racist place of all. Anyone watching footage of Bull Connor in Ingram Park in 1963 could not believe that thirty years before that there had been an interracial group of five thousand people in Birmingham standing on the street demanding relief, jobs, and an end to police brutality. Third, that class politics are alive and well. But any class politics that pretend that race and also gender get in the way of class organizing miss the point altogether. You can actually build white support for antiracism, male support for antisexism, and black support for white working-class justice. People can and do cross the boundaries that historians and scholars impose on people. The levels of empathy that many of the people in Hammer and Hoe showed—the fact that people were willing to be beaten or die for others—is an extremely important lesson. We spend so much time theorizing race, class, and gender and wondering whether or not you can get people of a particular identity to move, but we don’t even ask the question “Can you get Steve to risk his life for Hosea Hudson?” It is not that Steve is supporting Hosea Hudson because he is black and male; Steve is supporting Hosea Hudson because he is part of a...

STUDENTS OF SOUTHERN HISTORY ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE TERMS PLANTER, plain folk, and poor white. Most will acknowledge an understanding of who enjoyed status as a planter and who was a poor white, but the characteristics of plain folk are neither as clearly defined nor as well understood. This article examines the ambiguity surrounding the term plain folk, considers the reasons that its precise definition has remained elusive, and analyzes the historiographical usage that has perpetuated the imprecision. Then, after demonstrating the persistence of ambiguity and imprecision, the article employs statistical data derived from the 1850 census to suggest a precise definition of plain folk, a definition designed to advance the research on social groupings in the antebellum South. Many historians resist the idea that class is a useful category of analysis for the history of the United States and the American South. For the in particular, race is often assumed to trump class as a marker of group identity. Scores of southern historians, inspired by such studies as Edmund S. Morgan's groundbreaking American Slavery, American Freedom, identify events like Nathaniel Bacon's 1676 rebellion in Virginia as critical determinants in the departure from old-world class identity to new-world racial divisions. While Morgan's perspective on the dominance of race among social characteristics remains open to debate, few would dispute that class differences among antebellum white southerners were muted by the presence of African slaves. (1) Racism was the flux that melded rich and poor whites together into a classless blend defined by their common whiteness. More than sixty years ago W. J. Cash labeled this racial affinity the bond. As Cash interpreted it, proto-Dorian pride provided the white elite with reliable allies in the effort to subjugate and exploit blacks, while, in turn, the common man became an extension of the ruling class simply because his skin was white. According to Cash, grand outcome was the almost complete disappearance of economic and social focus on the part of the masses. (2) Such conditions, augmented by the non-elite white's blindness to his real interests, his lack of class feeling and of social and economic focus, led, in Cash's view, to a South where farmer and white-trash were welded into an extraordinary and positive unity of passion and purpose with the planter.... (3) These observations help to explain not only the forces motivating the average Confederate soldier but also the resistance to social change common in much of the twentieth-century South. However, these assertions of a solid obfuscate the social and economic complexities present in the antebellum South. Racially inspired unity did not contribute to the emergence of a homogeneous identity among antebellum white southerners. But emphasis on white racial unity has ensured that social distinctions among white southerners were only a secondary focus of scholarship. This study neither seeks to qualify the power of racial solidarity as a social determinant nor claims that something other than race-based polemics forged the southern political character. Instead, it focuses on identity among antebellum white southerners, suggesting that, even if class divisions were muted, social and economic distinctions were real and are now imprecisely defined for a variety of reasons. The difficulties of social identitification--whether in reference to class, culture, or political condition--focus on the middling group of southerners. So, who were the plain folk? asked a member of the audience during a session on southern plain folk at a recent meeting of the Southern Historical Association. The question clearly challenged those assembled; the blunt query virtually silenced the panelists and aroused only a few speculations from the large audience. This meager response demonstrated the lack of consensus with regard to the characteristics of the common folk of the Old South. …

Reviewed by: Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era by Dominique Brégent-Heald Camilla Fojas Dominique Brégent-Heald, Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2015. 448pp. Cloth, $60. In Borderland Films Dominique Brégent-Heald explores the idea of “borderlands” to draw together the visual cultures of the borderlands of the United States with Canada and Mexico. Few scholars attend to the role of the US-Canadian border in the cultural dynamics of North America—with such exceptions as Kornel Chang, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, and Claire Fox. Moreover, Brégent-Heald contextualizes her study in the Progressive Era, a time when political transformations in the North American hemisphere brought these three nations into intimate contact. The films of this period reflect and subsequently influence the geopolitics of the borderland regions by shaping policy and public opinion about the relationship of the United States to its neighbors. The north and south borderlands are places where ideas about the formation of national, gender, sexual, and racial identities are enacted and take shape. Like other film critics—notably Chon Noriega, Arthur Pettit, and Charles Ramírez Berg—Brégent-Heald argues that early images of the border emanate from narratives that predate the inception of cinema. And she notes thematic continuities regarding the meaning of borders and frontiers while observing the contrast between the Mexican and Canadian borders involving issues and ideas about US national security. This contrast, in which Mexico poses a security threat while Canada is perceived as nonthreatening, emanates from the Progressive Era and the symbolic [End Page 361] representations and storylines of cinematic features, persisting still into current political ideology. Yet both borders are central to ideas about US expansion; moreover, the concept of the frontier as a place to be conquered and colonized abides across the Northwest and Southwest of the United States and in the North in relation to the Klondike, often considered the “last frontier”—though others might argue that US expansion into the Pacific designates another final frontier. Brégent-Heald explores how visual culture and fictions embodying border mythology engaged the Progressive Era’s diverse publics, readerships, and audiences. Indeed, she shows that the border has often been deployed as a convenient shorthand for capturing the ideals of the Progressive Era, standing in for splits between moral values, opposing forces, and other spheres of difference and division, particularly with regard to race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Although many of the films in this study are no longer in circulation or even extant, Brégent-Heald turns to their “paper trail,” borrowing Thomas Cripps’s term, to contextualize them, relying on their description in written texts—periodicals, biographies, literature, newspapers, and government documents—to provide a more complete cinematic portrait of the era. In each chapter she compares Mexico and Canada with the United States as a point of reference but not the defining center of her analysis. She teases out differences between the interrelated ideas of the “frontier” and the “borderlands” across various American colonial spaces in early Hollywood, noting how they contribute to the formation of US national identity. She notes parallels between representations of the “Southland,” or the southern US border spaces, and the “Northland,” or land abutting Canada and the Klondike, discerning the various symbolic meanings attached to these borderlands, particularly as imagined spaces of interracial intimacies and contact where normative gender and sexual identities might be redefined and challenged, particularly in relation to the production of racial boundaries. Borders, north and south, become zones where people encounter difference. Overall, Borderland Films is a clearly written and well-argued exploration of the impact of cinema on North American international relations. This sprawling and ambitious archive of hundreds of borderland [End Page 362] films is a much-needed corrective to border studies in the American hemisphere and a model of global and comparative border studies. It will no doubt become a key text of the field. Camilla Fojas University of Virginia Copyright © 2016 Western Literature Association