Abstract
Question: “Why were the Mexicans at the battle of Buena Vista like good wine?” Answer: “Because they both run from the grape.” Hardly a distinctive riddle in the wake of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo that closes the U.S.-Mexican War. More surprising, however, is its publishing venue: this anti-Mexican puzzle, reproduced in Eric Lott’s 1993 study Love and Theft, is printed at the bottom of a page of lyrics for the song “Why does dat Darkey follow me so?” in the Minstrel Songbook of 1848. If we consider that the popularity of the minstrel show, according to Lott, peaks in 1846, we can read this kind of performance not only as working out the tensions surrounding the slavery question, but as a way of handling the repercussions of the Mexican War as well.1
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Notes
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 171. Further references will be cited in the text.
Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 25, 12.
Frank Dobie, San Francisco: A Pageant (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933), 133. Further references will appear in the text.
Jose David Saldivar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xiv. Further references will be cited within the text.
Donald E. Pease, “National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Identities,” in Donald Pease, ed., National Identities and Post Americanist Narratives (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 1–2. Pease celebrates an ongoing paradigm shift in American Studies that has already involved “a complete overhauling” of the field’s “ruling assumptions.”
See Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987). Further references to this book will appear in the text. For literary models, see: Philip Fisher, ed., The New American Studies: Essays from Representations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire,” in Emory Elliott, ed., Columbia History of the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Pease, ed., National Identities and Post Americanist Narratives; Carolyn Porter, “What We Know that We Don’t Know: Remapping American Literary Studies,” American Literary History 6:3 (Fall 1994); and Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). Additional citations to these studies will appear in the text.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 5. Additional citations will appear in the text.
Alok Yadav, “Nationalism and Contemporaneity: Political Economy of a Discourse,” in Cultural Critique 26 (Winter 1993–94), 210. Further citations will appear in the text.
Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 144. Further citations will appear in the text.
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950). Additional references will appear in the text.
Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (1901; New York: Viking Penguin, 1986).
Arlik Dirlik in Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 42. Further references to essays in this volume will appear in the text.
Ivan Doig, Dancing at the Rascal Fair (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 171.
Jose David Saldivar, The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
In this respect, literary theory follows along in the wake of electronic mass marketing. Paeans to the “World Wide Web” are uttered with the same expansive cheerfulness as is the announcement of the dissolution of national borders. But if the Web stretches across the globe, it originates in a very tiny area of it: Northern California’s Silicon Valley. See David Kaplan’s The Silicon Boys and Their Valley of Dreams (New York: Morrow, 1999) for a geographically and economically historicized account of the genesis of the electronic age and its continued dominance by the corporations and venture capitalists of the South Bay, as well as Lisa Nakamura’s trenchant critique of the raced parameters of cyberspace in “Race,” in Thomas Swiss, ed., Key Terms for the World Wide Web and Culture, (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming 2000).
Brian W. Dippie, “American Wests: Historiographical Perspectives,” in Patricia Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 135. Additional citations will appear in the text.
Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 89, 58. Additional references will appear in the text.
Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 176.
Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 47.
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© 2000 Anne E. Goldman
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Goldman, A.E. (2000). Introduction Location, Location, Location. In: Continental Divides. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299705_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299705_1
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