Mobilizing Culture, Cultural Mobility

Abstract

Abstract This review of Linda Frost's Never One Nation and Mark Simpson's Trafficking Subjects argues that these works contribute to the exploration of the multivalent identificatory practices of the nineteenth-century United States and that, when taken together, the two books also offer opposed but complementary methodologies for analysing the fragmentary material and cultural history of the nineteenth-century United States. Frost's work focuses primarily on the varying, mutually reinforcing, and often conflicting ways in which American popular culture of the period constructed race, focusing primarily on popular periodical texts, while Simpson instead focuses on the cultural deployment of the concept of mobility within the United States and the ways in which that concept can both reinforce and undermine the status quo.