Over the Edge

by Matsumoto, Valerie J.; Allmendinger, Blake

• ISBN13: 9780520211483
• ISBN10: 0520211480
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-01-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

From the Gold Rush to rush hour, the history of the American West is fraught with diverse, subversive, and at times downright eccentric elements. This provocative volume challenges traditional readings of western history and literature, and redraws the boundaries of the American West with absorbing essays ranging widely on topics from tourism to immigration, from environmental battles to interethnic relations, and from law to film. Taken together, the essays reassess the contributions of a diverse and multicultural America to the West, as they link western issues to global frontiers. Featuring the latest work by some of the best new writers both inside and outside academia, the original essays inOver the Edgeconfront the traditional field of western American studies with a series of radical, speculative, and sometimes outrageous challenges. The collection reads the West throughBen-Hurand the films of Mae West; revises the western American literary canon to include the works of African American and Mexican American writers; examines the implications of miscegenation law and American Indian blood quantum requirements; and brings attention to the historical participation of Mexican and Japanese American women, Native American slaves, and Alaskan cannery workers in community life.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix	(2)
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(14)
Part One: Imagining the West	15	(92)
1. Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West	15	(17)
Patricia Nelson Limerick
2. Toga! Toga!	32	(18)
Blake Allmendinger
3. Sacred and Profane: Mae West's (re) Presentation of Western Religion	50	(15)
Jill Watts
4. "I Think Our Romance Is Spoiled," or, Crossing Genres: California History in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don	65	(20)
Anne E. Goldman
5. A Westerner in Search of "Negro-ness": Region and Race in the Writing of Arna Bontemps	85	(22)
Douglas Flamming
Part Two: Crossing Boundaries	107	(146)
6. "Domestic" Life in the Diggings: The Southern Mines in the California Gold Rush	107	(26)
Susan Lee Johnson
7. Making Men in the West: The Coming of Age of Miles Cavanaugh and Martin Frank Dunham	133	(15)
Mary Murphy
8. Changing Woman: Maternalist Politics and "Racial Rehabilitation" in the U.S. West	148	(12)
Karen Anderson
9. Mobility, Women, and the West	160	(12)
Virginia Scharff
10. Plague in Los Angeles, 1924: Ethnicity and Typicality	172	(29)
William Deverell
11. The Tapia-Saiki Incident: Interethnic Conflict and Filipino Responses to the Anti-Filipino Exclusion Movement	201	(14)
Arleen de Vera
12. Race, Gender, and the Privileges of Property: On the Significance of Miscegenation Law in the U.S. West	215	(16)
Peggy Pascoe
13. American Indian Blood Quantum Requirements: Blood Is Thicker than Family	231	(22)
Melissa L. Meyer
Part Three: Creating Community	253	(132)
14. Crucifixion, Slavery, and Death: The Hermanos Penitentes of the Southwest	253	(19)
Ramon A. Gutierrez
15. "Pongo mi demanda": Challenging Patriarchy in Mexican Los Angeles, 1830-1850	272	(19)
Miroslava Chavez
16. Japanese American Women and the Creation of Urban Nisei Culture in the 1930s	291	(16)
Valerie J. Matsumoto
17. Competing Communities at Work: Asian Americans, European Americans, and Native Alaskans in the Pacific Northwest, 1938-1947	307	(22)
Chris Friday
18. Perceiving, Experiencing, and Expressing the Sacred: An Indigenous Southern Californian View	329	(10)
Louise V. Jeffredo-Warden
19. Dead West: Ecocide in Marlboro Country	339	(31)
Mike Davis
20. La Frontera del Norte	370	(15)
Jesus Martinez-Saldana
Contributors	385	(4)
Index	389