US National Identity Research Articles

Whitewashing American Exceptionalism: Racialized Subject-Positioning and US Foreign Policy

Abstracts American exceptionalism is enjoying a revival of scholarly interest amid new approaches to studying foreign policy narratives and unease regarding how US policymakers will manage a less unipolar international system. That revival coincides temporally, though not yet substantively, with growing attention to racialized dynamics and Eurocentrism within international relations. This article examines how core strands of American exceptionalism—the prevailing narrative framing of US foreign policy—reflect a whitewashed understanding of US foreign policy that can best be understood as the product of racialized subject-positioning that saturated its historical development. After conceptualizing American exceptionalism, it develops a theoretical framework to capture how racialized subject-positioning stratifies understandings of a nation’s role in the world. It proceeds to investigate how this process shaped the development of American exceptionalism in line with epistemologies of immanence, ignorance, and innocence, producing exceptionalist narratives that neglect non-white populations as meaningful others in the construction of US national identity and that negate US interactions with those groups as relevant evidence that might undercut its exceptionalism. These whitewashing effects remained embedded even as overtly racist discourse became delegitimized, posing enduring obstacles for US diplomacy today.

“Partialist” and “universalist”: American exceptionalism in antebellum writing on national identity

AbstractIn this article, I analyze six well‐known antebellum essays on US national identity from the perspective of their engagement with the contemporary exceptionalist discourse. My focus is on their representations of the particular and the universal, whose paradoxical relationship lies at the core of all national exceptionalisms. I approach antebellum exceptionalism as part of the history in which the authors of these texts (Emerson, Fuller, Simms, Douglass, and Delany) lived their lives and to which they responded in different ways. The analysis shows how the universal–particular duality at the core of US exceptionalism is conceived and operates in these essays' discourses of American identity. A tentative conclusion is that whenever the universal dimension of American exceptionalism is enlarged or challenged by other universal criteria, the nationalist ideology loosens its grip; conversely, its presence is stronger when particularization occurs. Furthermore, the representations of the universal and the particular in these texts are discussed in relationship with certain aspects of US exceptionalism as a cultural phenomenon of antebellum history, namely, Manifest Destiny, cultural nationalism, the concept of civilization, and the growing tensions of slavery and racial discrimination in the free states.

Composing a Nation in Crisis: Musical Americanism and US National Identity in Elie Siegmeister's Vietnam War Works

Composing a Nation in Crisis: Musical Americanism and US National Identity in Elie Siegmeister's Vietnam War Works

The limits of US national identity: interests and values in US military aid

According to policymakers, US national values shape US foreign aid policy. However, these national values clash with material interests when policymakers are faced with the decision of whether or not to grant US military aid to countries that do not adhere to US national values but do serve US security and economic interests. To what extent are US national values resilient to clashes with these material interests? This paper hypothesizes that national values are resilient to clashes with interests to the extent to which these values are a salient feature of US national identity. The findings indicate that more prominent values (democracy) are almost impervious to countervailing interests while more tangential values (enterprise and human rights) exhibit different effects on US military aid allocation depending on the security and economic importance of the recipient state.

Travelling the scenic landscape: Community, nationalism and precarity in Nomadland (2020)

The aim of this article is to interrogate the use of US rural landscape in the 2020 film Nomadland and its account of contemporary precarity and poverty in the United States. I argue that while the film is ostensibly invested in locating alternative modes of living in the face of neo-liberal marginalization, it ultimately reaffirms neo-liberalism’s core tenet, individualism, through its fascination with what Kenneth Olwig calls the ‘scenic’ landscape. This approach to landscape understands nature as an unchanging ‘stage’ on which a nation’s history is played out and thus ultimately naturalizes nationalism. Thereby, the film reaffirms the myth of the ‘wide open spaces’ of American landscape which has historically been instrumental in the displacement of people excluded from US national identity on the basis of class and race. This can be contrasted with a more interactive, more inclusive approach to landscape which understands landscape as the result of interaction between a community and its environment. Recent US films such as Leave No Trace (2018) identify precisely such an interactive understanding as a basis for potential resistance against the forces of neo-liberalism which perpetuate precarity.

Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity by John C. Havard

Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity by John C. Havard

The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature

What role did short fiction play in crafting stories of US nationhood? This lively question drives Lydia G. Fash's analysis of the sketch, the tale, and what she calls the beginnings of American literature. Fash's term “the culture of beginnings” describes the rewriting of puritan histories, revolutionary narratives, and other national origin stories for a white US reading public in the decades after the War of 1812. Fash argues that short fiction was an essential tool for fashioning US national identity, and her work demonstrates short fiction's influence on the mid-nineteenth century American novel.The term “short story” was not widely used until the late nineteenth century (6). Before then, short fiction circulated in a variety of interrelated genres, including the sketch and the tale. The tale, Fash shows, “evoke[s] temporal distance (a ‘once upon a time’),” focuses on plot, and is characteristically ambiguous (21). By contrast, the sketch “seeks to describe space more than time through the close examination of a single moment, landscape or idea” (21). Both genres make claims to authenticity, even as the tale sometimes includes seemingly supernatural elements. Together, these versatile forms helped construct narratives of American beginnings.Fash utilizes print history and textual analysis to structure her inquiry. Fash's first chapter, for example, contrasts the British and American publications of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book to solidify her argument about the distinctions between the sketch and the tale. Fash examines the relationship between Irving's “staid sketches predominantly about Britain” and his “lively American tales” (37). She argues that shifts in content and differences in the placement of sketches and tales across editions of The Sketch Book augmented its appeal for audiences on opposite sides of the Atlantic.This analysis of Irving hinges in part on the relationship between differing temporalities, juxtaposing the “calm pastness of the British sketches” with “dynamic” American tales devoted to rich plotting and serialization (49). Competing temporalities remain central throughout this study. In short fiction, the “negotiation between … temporal innovation and temporal linearity” demonstrates “calculated attempts to form readerly communities that could lay claim to national status” (10). In chapter two, for example, Fash argues that Sarah Josepha Hale's “Sketches of American Character” genders waiting as female and represents white feminized waiting as an integral act of national participation. Hale thus makes space for white women's patriotism by revaluing virtuous waiting.Fash's attention to another woman writer of short fiction, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, leads to one of her most intriguing material culture arguments, which focuses on the intimate registers of the holiday gift books that became popular in the 1820s. Holiday annuals were often given to female readers by fathers, uncles, husbands, and male lovers, implying tacit male approval for the narratives and ideologies they contained. These annuals were also designed to be personalized with the receiver's name and held close to the body, cradled in a hand or against one's chest. Sedgwick's popular gift book sketches “pulled female martyrs, old maids, and storytelling women into the patriotic mission of constituting the American people,” staging a cross-temporal community of women characters and embodied readers (112). Fash argues that these sketches imagined white women as part of the culture of beginnings through what she terms a “nonsynchronous synchronicity” that connects contemporary readers to historically disparate communities (86).As these chapters examine short fiction, they contribute to the scholarly revision of Benedict Anderson's argument that a shared sense of simultaneous time, facilitated by the novel and the newspaper, made the imagined community of the nation possible (9). Instead, the sketch and the tale show the ways readers negotiated local temporalities even as they invested in national narratives. Fash expands critical vocabularies for understanding national temporality to include Irving's double temporality, Hale's waiting and Sedgwick's nonsynchronous synchronicity. Her later chapters productively analyze the temporal innovations of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and William Wells Brown.Fash's archive consists almost entirely of white authors, who endeavor to produce a white fictive ethnicity for the United States (7). Brown's Clotel is the only work by a Black writer that gets significant treatment, as Fash explores the ways Brown “adopts the position of a sketch writer” to “expose the falsity of America as a white republic” (183, 186). This archive allows Fash to accomplish the goal of showing the ways prominent mid-nineteenth century American novels are indebted to short fiction and convincingly outlines the role of the sketch and the tale in producing narratives about white national origins. Still, I wonder how these texts interact with nineteenth-century short fiction that has different aims. A more robust conceptual examination of whiteness and genre would complement this volume's emphasis on print history and temporal structure while further clarifying the generic specificity of the sketch and the tale.

Leslie Dorrough Smith, Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity

Reviewed by: Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity by Leslie Dorrough Smith Elaine Schnabel Leslie Dorrough Smith, Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) Leslie Dorrough Smith’s second book, Compromising Positions, examines the role of US Christianity in creating the conditions that allow some politicians and not others to survive a sex scandal. Smith argues that sex scandals are not about sex. Sex scandals are about the construction and embodiment of national identity, a complex theater in which racialized and gendered tropes determine the political fate of the men who wield them. In other words, Americans will condemn some politicians and excuse others for perceived sexual immorality based on the extent to which a politician can mobilize and embody a form of white masculinity associated with “American Values.” To make this argument, Smith draws on a familiar cast of characters, both an interdisciplinary gamut of theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Lauren Berlant, Bruce Lincoln, and Benedict Anderson, and political figures whose sexual relationships for a time captured the American imagination like Anthony Weiner, Roy Moore, and (of course) Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump. In tackling issues of gender and sexuality, politics, and morality, Smith’s work is a timely explication of the seeming contradictions inherent in American evangelical support of the 45th president. [End Page 145] In each chapter, Smith examines both the “winners” and “losers” of various sex scandals, using the case studies to explore the religious conditions that lead to those results. Chapters one and two focus on scandal and religion respectively, while three through five focus on sex, nation, and media. In her first chapter, Smith proposes a new model for understanding sex scandals as crises of national identity, using Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy as her case study. In chapter two, Smith shifts to the role of religion in that model, following Bruce Lincoln to argue for religion’s inherently political nature. For Smith, religious discourse is “the means by which various groups within a culture preserve their power structures and norms” (62). Supernatural or extraordinary elements lend credence to these groups seeking to legitimate these regimes of normativity. She compares and contrasts the cases of Mark Foley and Roy Moore to explicate how sex scandals can decimate some careers and leave others relatively untainted. Anita Hill and Paula Jones are featured in chapter three where Smith draws connections between evangelical marriage and sexuality literature and the ways women are characterized (“feminists” and “whores”) during these scandals. Chapters four and five fill out her argument by incorporating conceptions of nationhood and the role of the media. Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and Arnold Schwarzenegger provide the empirical data for her argument that certain men are able to mobilize a kind of virile or toxic masculinity. Because of its capacity to protect US citizens, this aggressive masculinity makes some men’s promiscuity not just acceptable but natural. Others—such as John Edwards and Anthony Weiner—fail to mobilize that ideology in their favor because they apologize or admit their weaknesses. In her final chapter, Smith compares and contrasts the recent Brett Kavanaugh/Christine Blasey Ford hearings with the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings to explore the strength and malleability of white masculinity. Despite Blasey Ford’s portrayal of the ideal (white, rational) victim of sexual assault, the credibility of Kavanaugh’s white masculine aggression and rage made him a righteous and innocent victim of the Democrats’ sinister machinations. Compromising Positions comfortably sits in a body of work that identifies US Evangelicalism’s political role in establishing white, patriarchal heteronormativity on a national scale. For the most part, Smith argues that White Evangelicalism is simply one of the most politically powerful carriers of racialized and gendered tropes that shape US national identity. While Smith proves this with aplomb, some of her chapters evince a disconnect between the case studies about sex scandals and her preceding theoretical argument. For instance, in chapter four, Smith draws on Lauren Berlant and others who show the strong correlation between the conviction that the US is a “Christian” nation and the people who voted for Trump. Smith persuasively builds on the work of...

The national divide: A social representations approach to US political identity

AbstractExtending research on US ideological identity as a social identity, this study employs a social representations approach to capture identity meaning as a form of national attachment. Across two studies (n = 723), we demonstrate that two novel organizing principles of US ideological identity—national reverence (veneration of the nation in the abstract, its symbols, sacred texts, and founding fathers) and individual support (a focus on the progress of individuals and the change required to bring about equality)—significantly predicted ideological self‐categorization, 2016 presidential voting, and affective political polarization over and above right‐wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. The results suggest an integration of national and conservative identities that places US national identity in opposition to liberal identity and to progress and equality, pointing to the divisive employment of national identity in the current political environment.

The discursive hegemony of Trump’s Jacksonian populism: Race, class, and gender in constructions and contestations of US national identity, 2016–2018

Contributing to burgeoning studies of populism, this article conceptualises and contextualises Trump’s language as ‘Jacksonian populism’. We explore how this style of populist discourse influenced political debates before and after Trump’s election. Ours is the first article to analyse opposition and media responses to Trump’s construction of ‘real America’ as that of a Jacksonian, White, and male working class. To do so, the article analyses 1165 texts, from the government, opposition, newspapers, television coverage, and social media. In addition to locating Trump’s reification of a mythologised White working class within a broader Jacksonian tradition, we find that the Democratic opposition and mainstream media initially reproduced this construction, furthering Trump’s cause. Even where discursive challenges were subsequently developed, they often served to reproduce a distinct – and hitherto unspoken for – White (male) working-class America. In short, early resistance actively reinforced Trump’s discursive hegemony, which centred on reclaiming the primacy of working, White America in the national identity.

Commodifying People, Commodifying Narratives: Toward a Critical Race Media Literacy

In this article the authors make an argument for a critical race media literacy that is attuned to the ways in which popular media are used to adhere media consumers to a taken for granted US national identity. Using the concept of “black narrative commodities”, the article suggests that black pain and/or black visibility become filters through which black lives are brought into a nationalist framing. The article uses three popular media commodities to illustrate how how pain and visibility mask a nationalist agenda, including: (1) the videotaped killing of Eric Garner, (2) the book The New Jim Crow and the film 13th: An Original Netflix Documentary, and (3) the movie Black Panther. The authors suggest that critical media literacy absent a cogent and principled interrogation of the interplay between race, class, and the nation-State is incomplete.

Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity by John C Havard

Reviewed by: Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity by John C Havard Maria A. Windell HAVARD, JOHN C. Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2018. 224 pp. $44.95 cloth; $44.95 e-book. The president of the United States is an avowed nationalist who constructs his position as such most consistently through xenophobic screeds against (im)migrants from Latin America. In such a political moment it is vital that we both produce and attend to scholarship that explores the US’s relationship to the Americas. John C. Havard’s Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity undertakes this task by tracking how the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century US defined itself through and against depictions of Spain’s imperial presence in the Americas. Havard posits the Hispanicism of his title as a counterpart to Edward W. Said’s and Toni Morrison’s more familiar formulations of Orientalism and Africanism. His use of Hispanicism builds on Ed White’s earlier coining of the term as a hemispheric parallel to the exoticism of Orientalism, and his argument more generally builds on developments in transamerican studies that highlight the necessity of nuancing nationalist and transatlantic framings of US literary traditions. In particular, he emphasizes Hispanicism’s “political dimension,” arguing that it “had a special role” in developing “the idea that Anglo-Americans were racially fitted for liberal-democratic self-government,” an idea that he insists goes beyond Africanism’s “constructi[on of] whiteness as a prerequisite for freedom and agency” (15). He thus asserts, “It is no coincidence that US representations of Hispanic difference focus on what is construed as the metaphysical aversion to liberty of the Spanish and their New World descendants in a period in which US expansionists turned their eyes toward Spanish Louisiana, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America” (18). Hispanicism and Early US Literature covers the aftermath of the American Revolution through the late nineteenth century, working to explain how the nation arrived at 1898 and the Spanish-American War, so often seen as a turning point in the development of US imperialism, with a discourse fully prepared to promote US intervention in Spanish America. In tracing Hispanicism across the long nineteenth century, Havard engages an array of canonical and noncanonical authors and texts—at times crossing these categories by, for instance, working with lesser-known novels by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper. The study includes poetry, novels, novellas, and essays, thereby demonstrating Hispanicism’s breadth, depth, and duration. Havard’s argument balances its formal, temporal, and geographic range with a focus on literature’s relation to US political discourses, particularly liberalism. Each chapter of Hispanicism and Early US Literature close reads its central text(s) while questioning how Hispanicism related to developments within liberalism. Havard notes that Hispanicism and liberalism were not, as we might presume today, opposed in the nineteenth century: “For many early national and antebellum whites, it seemed obvious that the capacity to establish liberal institutions was a specifically Anglo-American faculty. Liberalism and racialism were not at odds for these US Americans” (17). By locating Hispanicism within liberal political discourse, Havard illustrates not only the literary but also the cultural, social, commercial, and governmental impact of US tendencies to paint the Spanish (Americas) with a broad brush. The book is organized into an introduction, conclusion, and five chapters divided in two parts. The introduction offers an historical and critical framework [End Page 320] for Hispanicism. Part I of the book examines “The Black Legend, Hispanicism, and the Emergence of National Identity in the Early United States.” The three chapters that compose this section cover ways US authors positioned the nation in relation to ideas, perceptions, and images of Spain, Mexico, and Spanish(-American)ness from the 1780s through the years preceding the US Civil War. The first chapter reads Joel Barlow’s epic poems The Vision of Columbus (1787) and The Columbiad (1807) as establishing an Hispanicist ideology by juxtaposing a rising, cosmopolitan, commercial US against a greed-driven...

Missives and Other Un-Notes

Beginning his series of disorienting and theatrical vignettes with an extended introduction, Gamboa describes his childhood and young adulthood coming of age in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s. It is through these stories of prejudice in elementary school and of mass action against police brutality and the national government’s neglect of communities of color, Gamboa implies, that readers should approach his text. Missives and other Un-notes skewers myths of US national identity, masculinity, and whiteness, placing readers in a dystopic world of violence, surveillance, and the constant threat of annihilation.

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

The Dangerous Real: Queer Solo Performance in/as Active Disruption

Like all radical community endeavours, queer performance in the United States has been shaped through resistance to restrictive ideologies. National insecurity over ‘indecent’ (read: queer) artistic expression in the US has been aimed at artists working in a variety of genres, and here I focus specifically on queer solo performance artists. This essay explores the dangerous realities that queer artists present to an imagined unified US national identity. I argue that queer solo performers operate as artistic activists, challenging homogenous fantasies about US culture through the queering of experience. Aesthetically disparate, their work is connected by common threads of vulnerability and precarity. The article asks how their work disrupts U.S. insecurities concerning intersections of sexuality, gender identity, race and religion.

Outing the Pakistani queer: Pride, paranoia and politics in US visual culture

This article draws on the 26 June 2011 US embassy-sponsored Gay Pride parade in Islamabad, Pakistan alongside popular US visual cultural moments (2008–2012). I use visual culture to reread US intrigue in Pakistani queer subjects through specific images of terrorist/feminized masculinities – images that elucidate the conspicuous shifts in the technologies of power and sexuality in the context of contemporary Pakistani LGBT visibility. I move through popular US representations of Pakistan, Muslim masculinity and US LGBT visibility – all of which attempt to capture homoerotic desire (and dread) in the transnational landscape of sexuality-racial-gender politics and all of which, I argue, are embroiled in US national identity (and ‘security’). My analysis is two-pronged. First, I look closely and critically at the narrative and visual character of the knowledge the US has created around defining Pakistan and Pakistani (sexual) subjects. Second, I demonstrate that in Pakistan queer resistance is often produced and animated from below the state and articulated against US hegemonic practices of visibility and representation.

Body and Nation: The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century, edited by Emily S. Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick

Body and Nation: The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century, edited by Emily S. Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick. Durham, Duke University Press, 2014. viii, 331 pp. $94.95 US (cloth), $26.95 US (paper). The essays collected in Body and Nation approach twentieth-century depictions of bodies within the United States through a transnational lens. The relationship of the human body to the body politic has emerged in recent decades as a prominent node of historical and interdisciplinary analyses of national identity, and this volume provides a necessary but often-overlooked global context for US discourses of the body. Exploring the ways in which US body politics have been translated and refracted through political, military, and media engagements abroad, as well as the ways in which US national identity has been defined over and against the bodies of alien others, the essays illustrate the transnational vectors along which twentieth-century representations of bodies have moved. Along with an introduction and epilogue by the editors, Body and Nation contains twelve essays, ten of which have not been previously published. The essays are arranged simply in chronological order, although they focus broadly on three themes articulated in the introduction: the challenges of defining a national body in an age of imperialism and global migration; the relationship of the body to discourses of national security; and the depiction of the modern, national body in transnational mass media. Most if not all of the essays take up more than one of these themes. For example, the first essay in the collection, Paul A. Kramer's study of US military and domestic understandings of prostitution during the Philippine-American War, addresses the perceived dangers that the prostitute body presented to the US empire, to American military forces, and to the domestic nation and its citizens. The presence of regulated prostitution in the US-occupied Philippines only came to the attention of the American public through the efforts of journalists in the anti-colonialist, social purity, and suffragist presses, who saw in the practice a risk of miscegenation and immigration that would pollute the US population, disease that would weaken the US military, and sexual license that would soil US morality, among other concerns. Kramer's essay deftly establishes the myriad ways in which discourses of disease penetrating the body are intermingled with those of foreign customs and institutions invading the nation and empire, a focus thoughtfully mirrored in the final essay of the collection, Kristina Shull's history of the Mariel Boatlift from Cuba to Key West in 1980, following which fears regarding security, disease, and sexual deviance helped to give rise to the modern US immigration detention system. …

“My Trespass Vision”: Disability, Sexuality, and Nationality in Hart Crane’s Versions of “The Idiot”

American modernist Hart Crane’s poem “The Idiot” details the poet’s real-life encounters with a young man with a cognitive disability. Beginning in 1926, Crane worked on the poem through different versions through letters, manuscripts, and magazine publications until about 1932. Crane shuttled the geographic setting of the poem back and forth across the border between Florida and Cuba. With a focus on the material instantiation of these versions, this essay highlights the complex relationship between Crane’s queer speaker and the intellectually disabled man as it moves across national borders. This identification between two people with differently marginalized—and inherently sexualized—identities shifts within and outside the border of the United States, and, in this, Crane explores the nature of social marginalization as it relates to US national identity.

Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era by Dominique Brégent-Heald

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

If Anyone Hears This: Confronting Discourses of Immigration in South Mississippi

AbstractLatino immigrants are subject to circulating discourses that produce processes of inclusion and exclusion, and inform expectations of future encounters with local native populations. However, they rarely have an opportunity to answer back. This paper draws on two projects in which immigrants were invited to use photography and writing to document the messages they would like to send to native‐born Mississippians to examine how they mobilize discourses of inclusion and exclusion as they deal with “stranger fetishism” (Ahmed 2000), the notion that immigrants are recognized, but are cast as individuals who do not belong. Immigrant messages show that they at once contest and draw on hegemonic discourses of race and US national identity in their efforts to lay claim to legitimate spaces of belonging. [immigration, discourse, stranger fetishism, representation, Mississippi]