Colonial Discourses, Collective Memories and the Exhibition of Native American Cultures and Histories in the Contemporary United States


Book Description

First published in 1998, this monograph is a collection of essays and recollections that covers such topics of the Battle of Little Bighorn, Native American museum exhibitions at the Smithsonian, Chief Illiniwek and the exhibition of Comanche.




Unsettling America


Book Description

Unsettling America explores the cultural politics of Indianness in the 21st century. It concerns itself with representations of Native Americans in popular culture, the news media, and political debate and the ways in which American Indians have interpreted, challenged, and reworked key ideas about them. It examines the means and meanings of competing uses and understandings of Indianness, unraveling their significance for broader understandings of race and racism, sovereignty and self-determination, and the possibilities of decolonization. To this end, it takes up four themes: -false claims about or on Indianness, that is, distortions, or ongoing stereotyping; -claiming Indianness to advance the culture wars, or how indigenous peoples have figured in post-9/11 political debates; -making claims through metaphors and juxtaposition, or the use of analogy to advance political movements or enhance social visibility; and -reclamations, or exertion of cultural sovereignty.




Postcolonial America


Book Description

Scholars from a wide array of disciplines describe and debate postcolonialism as it applies to America in this authoritative and timely collection. Investigating topics such as law and public policy, immigration and tourism, narratives and discourses, race relations, and virtual communities, Postcolonial America clarifies and challenges prevailing conceptualizations of postcolonialism and accepted understandings of American culture. Advancing multiple, even conflicted visions of postcolonial America, this important volume interrogates postcolonial theory and traces the emergence and significance of postcolonial practices and precepts in the United States. Contributors discuss how the unique status of the United States as the colony that became a superpower has shaped its sense of itself. They assess the global networks of inequality that have displaced neocolonial systems of conquest, exploitation, and occupation. They also examine how individuals and groups use music, the Internet, and other media to reconfigure, reinvent, and resist postcoloniality in American culture. Candidly facing the inherent contradictions of "the American experience," this collection demonstrates the patterns, connections, and histories characteristic of postcoloniality in America and initiates important discussions about how these conditions might be changed.




The San Diego World's Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880-1940


Book Description

In the American Southwest, no two events shaped modern Spanish heritage more profoundly than the San Diego Expositions of 1915-16 and 1935-36. Both San Diego fairs displayed a portrait of the Southwest and its peoples for the American public. The Panama-California Exposition of 1915-16 celebrated Southwestern pluralism and gave rise to future promotional events including the Long Beach Pacific Southwest Exposition of 1928, the Santa Fe Fiesta of the 1920s, and John Steven McGroarty's The Mission Play. The California-Pacific International Exposition of 1935-36 promoted the Pacific Slope and the consumer-oriented society in the making during the 1930s. These San Diego fairs distributed national images of southern California and the Southwest unsurpassed in the early twentieth century. By examining architecture and landscape, American Indian shows, civic pageants, tourist imagery, and the production of history for celebration and exhibition at each fair, Matthew Bokovoy peels back the rhetoric of romance and reveals the legacies of the San Diego World's Fairs to reimagine the Indian and Hispanic Southwest. In tracing how the two fairs reflected civic conflict over an invented San Diego culture, Bokovoy explains the emergence of a myth in which the city embraced and incorporated native peoples, Hispanics, and Anglo settlers to benefit its modern development.




Indian Spectacle


Book Description

Amid controversies surrounding the team mascot and brand of the Washington Redskins in the National Football League and the use of mascots by K–12 schools, Americans demonstrate an expanding sensitivity to the pejorative use of references to Native Americans by sports organizations at all levels. In Indian Spectacle, Jennifer Guiliano exposes the anxiety of American middle-class masculinity in relation to the growing commercialization of collegiate sports and the indiscriminate use of Indian identity as mascots. Indian Spectacle explores the ways in which white, middle-class Americans have consumed narratives of masculinity, race, and collegiate athletics through the lens of Indian-themed athletic identities, mascots, and music. Drawing on a cross-section of American institutions of higher education, Guiliano investigates the role of sports mascots in the big business of twentieth-century American college football in order to connect mascotry to expressions of community identity, individual belonging, stereotyped imagery, and cultural hegemony. Against a backdrop of the current level of the commercialization of collegiate sports—where the collective revenue of the fifteen highest grossing teams in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has well surpassed one billion dollars—Guiliano recounts the history of the creation and spread of mascots and university identities as something bound up in the spectacle of halftime performance, the growth of collegiate competition, the influence of mass media, and how athletes, coaches, band members, spectators, university alumni, faculty, and administrators, artists, writers, and members of local communities all have contributed to the dissemination of ideas of Indianness that is rarely rooted in native people’s actual lives.




First Nations, Museums, Narrations


Book Description

When the Franklin Motor Expedition set out across the Canadian Prairies to collect First Nations artifacts, brutal assimilation policies threatened to decimate these cultures and extensive programs of ethnographic salvage were in place. Despite having only three members, the expedition amassed the largest single collection of Prairie heritage items currently housed in a British museum. Through the voices of descendants of the collectors and members of the affected First Nations, this book looks at the relationships between indigenous peoples and the museums that display their cultural artifacts, raising timely and essential questions about the role of collections in the twenty-first century.




History's Shadow


Book Description

Who were the Native Americans? Where did they come from and how long ago? Did they have a history, and would they have a future? Questions such as these dominated intellectual life in the United States during the nineteenth century. And for many Americans, such questions about the original inhabitants of their homeland inspired a flurry of historical investigation, scientific inquiry, and heated political debate. History's Shadow traces the struggle of Americans trying to understand the people who originally occupied the continent claimed as their own. Steven Conn considers how the question of the Indian compelled Americans to abandon older explanatory frameworks for sovereignty like the Bible and classical literature and instead develop new ones. Through their engagement with Native American language and culture, American intellectuals helped shape and define the emerging fields of archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, and art. But more important, the questions posed by the presence of the Indian in the United States forced Americans to confront the meaning of history itself, both that of Native Americans and their own: how it should be studied, what drove its processes, and where it might ultimately lead. The encounter with Native Americans, Conn argues, helped give rise to a distinctly American historical consciousness. A work of enormous scope and intellect, History's Shadow will speak to anyone interested in Native Americans and their profound influence on our cultural imagination. “History’s Shadow is an intelligent and comprehensive look at the place of Native Americans in Euro-American’s intellectual history. . . . Examining literature, painting, photography, ethnology, and anthropology, Conn mines the written record to discover how non-Native Americans thought about Indians.” —Joy S. Kasson, Los Angeles Times




The Native American Mascot Controversy


Book Description

Sports mascots have been a tradition for decades. Along with the usual lions and tigers, many schools are represented by Native American images. Once considered a benign practice, numerous studies have proved just the opposite: that the use of Native American mascots in educational institutions has perpetuated a shameful history of racial insensitivity. The Native American Mascot Controversy provides an overview of the issues that have been associated with this topic for the past 40 years. The book provides a comprehensive and critical account of the issues surrounding the controversy, explicating the importance of anti-Indian racism in education and how it might be challenged. A collection of important primary documents and an extensive list of resources for further study are also included. Expounding the dangers and damages associated with their continued use, The Native American Mascot Controversy is a useful guide for anyone with an interest in race relations.




Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race


Book Description

Kassanoff shows how Wharton participated in debates on race, class and democratic pluralism at the turn of the twentieth century.




Media, Minorities, and Meaning


Book Description

Foundations. Introduction -- Constructing categories of difference -- Minorities, meaning, and mass media -- Articulations of difference -- The articulation of difference. Country music and redneck woman -- The construction of Arabs as enemies -- Perpetuation of the hot Latina stereotype in Desperate housewives -- Commodified racism : brand images of Native Americans -- The pornographic gaze in mainstream American magazine and fashion advertising -- Women, lipstick, and self-presentation -- Sun also rises : Stereotypes of the Asian/American woman on Lost -- Coon songs : the Black male stereotype in popular American sheet music (1850-1920) -- Homosexuality and horror : the lesbian vampire film -- Television news coverage of "Day without an immigrant.