Myths of the West
•
Frontier experience; racial clashes with Native
Americans; progress and extermination
Myths of the South: segregated
archetypes: cavaliers, belles,
mammies and bucks
African Americans and
Nat Love, aka Deadwood Dick
Mexican Americans in the
and below, Mexican vaqueros at
West: Revising the Cowboy
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
• Of the estimated 35,000 cowboys
who worked the ranches during the
19th century, 5-9,000 were black
• At the end of the 19th century, 1 in
3 cowboys was a vaquero
Annie Oakley (1860-1926) and Ellen Watson
(Cattle Kate, 1861-1889)
Women Behind the Lines: Hidden Histories of
the War
Spies:
• When Belle Boyd was 17, she shot and killed a
drunken Union soldier who was trying to raise
the US flag over her house in West Virginia
• The next year she worked as a spy for General
Jackson
• Arrested in twice in 1863
Government workers:
Thousands of southern women worked for the
Confederate government--Known as
“department girls.” They received higher
wages than men in the army
Hospital superintendents:
A CSA report in 1862 noted that hospitals
managed by men had mortality rate of 10%
while those managed by women had only 5%
death rates
Shared Histories of Expulsion,
Extermination and Slavery
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Treatment of Native Americans
Expulsion from lands (Cherokee
Nation v. Georgia, 1831; Trail of
Tears, 1831-8)
Resistance by religious leaders
like Tecumseh (sides w/ British in
1812; Sitting Bull and Red Cloud,
1876)
Massacres by settlers and US
Army (Sand Creek, 1864;
Wounded Knee, 1890)
Reservations
Question of citizenship
Loss of historical voice
Savage, demonised image in
popular culture
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Development of Slavery in
South
Sale and enforced separation of
families
Resistance through slave revolts
(1831, Nat Turner, lay preacher)
Lynchings by the ‘invisible army’:
aka, the KKK
Segregation and Jim Crow laws
Voting rights denied in South
Slave narratives as correctives to
national history (Harriet Jacobs,
1861)
Image of unbridled male sexuality
and female passivity in popular
culture
Gender and Race in American
South
• Racial theories justified as a means of protecting white
women from aggressive black male sexuality (KKK)
• Black women subjected to rape by white men for
centuries; mulatto population largely result of white male
sexuality and fantasies of power
• Both white and black women and black men subject to
discrimination and disenfranchisement; white southern
Grimke sisters were most prominent abolitionists and
advocates for sexual equality from 1830s-1850s
• Image of mulatta popular theme in 19th-century literature:
Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Clotel (1853),
the story of Thomas Jefferson’s daughter with Sally
Hemmings: virtuous mulatta used to defy racial
stereotypes
Multiracial Exclusion in the West (different from
South’s black-white racial binary)
• In California, mestizos, Indians, and Chinese were not
allowed to vote or testify in court. Many Californios (of
Spanish-Mexican-Indian descent) were divested of their
lands due to their alleged Indian blood
• Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882, forbids future importation of
Chinese labourers (made permanent in 1902)
• Statements against Japanese men in California and other
western states use language of miscegenation and fears
of unions with white women to stir up racial hatred
(borrowed from South). Ban on Japanese immigration in
1924
• Were westerners really against slavery? CA, NV, OR all
pass anti-miscegenation laws in 1870s (not repealed in
CA until 1948 and 1959 in NV). Oregon’s law forbidding
settlement of free blacks not repealed until 1926
Gender and Race in the American
West
• Pioneer women share same frontier experience as men; active
wage earners and farmers; women buy land through
Homestead Act, 1862
• Native American women form unions with trappers, miners,
soldiers
• Captivity narratives: white women cultural border-crossers;
integration within native culture; white male fear of race
contamination
• Native women (Pocahontas) and mixed-race heroines
(Ramona, 1884) popular symbols which problematize racial
stereotypes
• Ramona, a novel, raises awareness of Native American
situation which Jackson’s history, A Century of Dishonor (1881)
cannot
• Fears of Chinese and Japanese immigration focus on potential
unions with white women—nativist fears borrowed from South
Mixed-Race Americans: Mulattoes and Mestizos
Where race and gender intersect in the West and the South
• How race is defined along America’s borders
(Mexican racialisation from Mexican War
through Bracero programme)
• Anti-miscegenation laws in South police
instability of racial categories (light-skinned
blacks)
• Citizenship debates in California (1849-51) and
Texas (1848): Are Native Americans citizens?
Can Mexican Americans vote?
Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
A Century of Dishonor (1881)
Ramona (1884)
Mexican ranchero class tries to defend land
rights against squatters, but loses money and
lands in court battles
Native Americans politically disenfranchised;
genocidal pogroms instituted by state
government sanction murder of 8,000+
Native Americans in 1850s
Native population in 1845 150,000. By 1880,
only 16,000 left
1850 CA legislature allows “vagrant” Indians
to become bond servants
1886 all Indian land deemed in public domain
Edna Ferber and the Mixed-Race
Protagonist in American Literature
• Cimarron (1929), no. 1
best-selling western with
a multiracial hero, filmed
in 1931
Images of the old West and South:
Racial Binaries in American culture
•
•
•
•
•
•
The Western (conflict between red
and white)
The noble but doomed savage
(George Catlin), cowboy and the
myth of the frontier (Frederic
Remington)
Theodore Roosevelt’s Winning of
the West (1889-1896), racial
conflict and extermination) and
Owen Wister’s Virginian (1901,
Native Americans written out of
West)
Zane Grey’s Vanishing American
(1925)
Stagecoach (1939, directed by
John Ford, starring John Wayne)
whites against the Indians, most
enduring view of West
Racial revisionism: Little Big Man,
Dances with Wolves, Geronimo
•
•
•
•
•
•
The Plantation Epic (black and
white society)
Women and the mythology of the
Lost Cause
Thomas Dixon (The Leopard’s
Spots, 1902; The Clansman,
1905) reinvent post Civil War
South as violent clash between
black and white
The Birth of a Nation (1915), racist
history of Civil War and
Reconstruction, regenerates KKK;
Micheaux’s Within Our Gates
contests view
Gone with the Wind (1936, 1939),
women’s narratives of Civil War;
new history of race and gender in
American South
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
(1982) and Tony Morrison’s
Beloved (1987)
Race and Gender in the Twentieth
Century: The West
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Historically, Mexicans have been looked upon as inferior, non-white race.
Parkman, Roosevelt, Dana all criticise Mexicans as lazy, mixed-race
degenerates
Mexican American Immigration and racial purity: Mexicans not in quotas but
only to satisfy big business’ need for cheap labour
Jim Crow laws affect Mexicans in South too– separate schools, churches,
restaurants, restrooms, etc., and votes often controlled by elite whites
Sharecroppers in Texas were black, white and Mexican—tensions develop
between poor whites and Mexicans
Indian Citizenship Act, 1924
1924: first Mexican and Canadian border patrol instituted in US
League of United Latin American Citizens, est. 1928 in Corpus Christi,
Texas to develop coherent, upwardly mobile, white Mexican population
Mexicans listed as white in 1920 census; listed as ‘other’ in 1930 census
Racialising “Okies” in the Great Depression
African American migration to California during WWII
Japanese internment, 1942
Sleepy Lagoon and Zoot Suit Riots
South’s Racist Legacy in Hollywood Cinema
Blackface and ‘playing Indian’
• In addition to perpetuating many racial stereotypes, Hollywood’s
censorship code forbade narratives which depicted mixed-race
couples (miscengenation). However, sometimes filmmakers got
around these strictures…
African Americans
in Hollywood
•
•
•
•
•
•
Oscar Micheaux most
successful black filmmaker in
1920s
Hattie McDaniel wins
Academy Award for Best
Supporting Actress, 1939
Actor Canada Lee (Body and
Soul, 1947) blacklisted by
HUAC
Dorothy Dandridge major
1950s sex symbol
In the Heat of the Night
(1967) with Sidney Poitier
and Rod Steiger landmark
Civil Rights film
Shaft (1971) Af-Am
alternative to classic white
detective films
Popular images of
Native Americans
Breaking Southern Belle Stereotypes in 1936…
The red dress is black: miscegenation and
demystifying race
The Politics of Race and Dress in the Civil War
South
‘Passing’ for white: cinema
confronts the imagined nature of
race in Imitation of Life (1934)
Performing Race: Imitation of Life
(1959)