Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T19:08:00.897Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Surrogate Americans: Masculinity, Masquerade, and the Formation of a National Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Extract

This essay explores the layered, ideologically contradictory, and psychologically overdetermined ways national identities take form. The setting is the birth of the new American nation, the opening moments of George Washington's first administration. As European Americans from Benjamin Franklin to D. W. Griffith tell us, this is a white man's story about his “Black … and Tawney …” (br)others (Franklin, qtd. in Ferguson 169).

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Affecting History of the Dreadful Distresses of Frederic Manheim's Family. To Which Are Added, the Sufferings of John Corbly's Family. An Encounter between a White Man and Two Savages. Extraordinary Bravery of a Woman. Adventures of Capt. Isaac Stewart. Deposition of Massey Herbeson. Adventures and Sufferings of Peter Wilkinson. Remarkable Adventures of Jackson Johonnot. Account of the Destruction of the Settlements at Wyoming. Philadelphia: Printed for Mathew Carey by D. Humphreys, l794.Google Scholar
Bayles, W. Harrison. Old Taverns of New York. New York: Allaben Genealogical, 1915.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K. “Of Mimicry and Man”. October: Anthology. Boston: MIT P, 1987. 125–33. Rpt. in Bhabha, The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. 85–92.Google Scholar
Burrows, Edwin G., and Wallace, Mike. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Bushman, Richard. “American High-Style and Vernacular Cultures”. Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era. Ed. Greene, Jack P. and Pole, J. R. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984. 345–83.Google Scholar
Bushman, Richard. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York: Knopf, 1992.Google Scholar
Deloria, Philip. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Dowd, Gregory Evans. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Dwight, Timothy. “A Valedictory Address to the Young Gentlemen, Who Commenced Bachelors of Arts, at Yale College, July 25th, 1776”. American Magazine Dec. 1787:4247; Jan. 1788: 99–103.Google Scholar
“Esau.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1947 ed.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Robert A. The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Filson, John. The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon…. Norwich: John Trumbull, 1786.Google Scholar
Filson, John. The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke…. Wilmington: James Adams, 1784.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. The Standard Edition. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1959.Google Scholar
Friedenberg, Daniel M. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Land. Buffalo: Prometheus, 1992.Google Scholar
Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers. New York: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972.Google Scholar
Hatley, Tom. The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Philadelphia: Prichard and Hall, 1788.Google Scholar
Laplanche, J., and Pontalis, J.-B. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York. London: Norton, 1973.Google Scholar
“Masquerade.” Def. 1. The Oxford English Dictionary. Compact ed. 1979.Google Scholar
Oklahoma! 1955. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. CBS / Fox Video.Google Scholar
Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975.Google Scholar
Rebora, Carrie, and Staiti, Paul et al. John Singleton Copley in America. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995.Google Scholar
Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: Published for the Inst. of Early Amer. Hist. and Culture, Williamsburg, VA, by U of North Carolina P, 1992.Google Scholar
Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Sayre, Gordon M. Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997.Google Scholar
Sheehan, Bernard W. “The Indian Problem in the Northwest: From Conquest to Philanthropy”. Launching the “Extended Republic”: The Federalist Era. Ed. Hoffman, Ronald and Albert, Peter J. Charlottesville: Published for the US Capitol Hist. Soc. by UP of Virginia, 1996. 190222.Google Scholar
Shields, David S. Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America. Chapel Hill: Published for the Inst. of Early Amer. Hist. and Culture, Williamsburg, VA, by U of North Carolina P, 1997.Google Scholar
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1973.Google Scholar
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “Dis-covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion.‘” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 841–73.Google Scholar
Kathy, Squadrito. “Locke and the Dispossession of the American Indian”. Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays. Ed. Ward, Julie K. and Lott, Tommy L. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 101–24.Google Scholar
“Surrogate, sb.” The Oxford English Dictionary. Compact ed. 1979.Google Scholar
Waldstreicher, David. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Inst. of Early Amer. Hist. and Culture, Williamsburg, VA, by U of North Carolina P, 1996.Google Scholar