Early Twentieth-century North Research Articles

CASUAL SEX

This essay explores the homosocial world of hobos, tramps, ‘casual labourers’ and other itinerant workers in early twentieth-century North America. In addition to providing evidence suggesting that same-sex sexual behaviour was a common aspect of everyday life in this milieu, the essay also suggests that any serious consideration of it raises certain conceptual problems for the study of the history of sexuality. Among other things, the essay argues that the existing historiography on gay male life in the United States may over-privilege the enabling effects of urban space, and in so doing tilt a potentially geographically expansive prehistory of gay life in what theorist Judith Halberstam would call a ‘metronormative’ direction.

"A half caste" and other writings

What did it mean to be a 'half caste' in early twentieth-century North America? Winnifred Eaton lived that experience and, as Onoto Watanna, she wrote about it. This collection of her short works--some newly discovered, others long awaited by scholars--ranges from breathless magazine romance to story melodrama and provides a riveting introduction to a unique literary personality. -- Diana Birchall, author of Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton Onoto Watanna (1875-1954) was born Winnifred Eaton, the daughter of a British father and a Chinese mother. The first novelist of Chinese descent to be published in the United States, she became Japanese to escape Americans' scorn of the Chinese and to capitalize on their fascination with things Japanese. The earliest essay here, Half Caste, appeared in 1898, a year before Miss Nume: A Japanese-American Romance, the first of her best-selling novels. The last story, Elspeth, appeared in 1923. Of Watanna's numerous shorter works, this volume includes nineteen--thirteen stories and six essays -- intended to show the scope and versatility of her writing. While some of Watanna's fictional characters will remind today's readers of the delicate but tragic Madame Butterfly, others foreshadow such types as the trickster in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey (a novel in which Onoto Watanna makes a cameo appearance). Watanna's characters are always capable, clever, and inventive--molded in the author's own image.

Toward the ‘Moral Conquest’ of Morocco: Hispano–Arabic Education in Early Twentieth-Century North Africa

The Spanish colonial enterprise in early twentieth-century North Africa was coloured by ambiguous perceptions of cultural purpose and identity. Because Spaniards have tended to view their primary focus of recent imperialist activity, Morocco, as more of a historical frontier — or even as an extension of the metropole — than as home to a fully oppositional Other, they have not been able to place as much emphasis on cultural, historical, and racial distinctions between themselves and the colonized as have many other Westerners. On a practical level, the contradictions that underlay Spain’s ‘civilizing mission’ in the Maghrib left a clear imprint on the military-administered Hispano–Arabic schools, which eschewed any attempts to evangelize and instead sought to impart the teachings of the Koran and what it perceived to be true Muslim values to Moroccan children. The programmes of the Spanish schools for Moroccan children also illuminate the strong contrast between Spanish colonialist ideologies in North Africa and those of the French in Morocco and Algeria.