Slippery Characters

by Browder, Laura

• ISBN13: 9780807848593
• ISBN10: 080784859X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities.Significantly, notes Browder, these ersatz autobiographies have tended to appear at flashpoints in American history: in the decades before the Civil War, when immigration laws and laws regarding Native Americans were changing in the 1920s, and during the civil rights era, for example. Examining the creation and reception of such works from the 1830s through the 1990s--against a background ranging from the abolition movement and Wild West shows to more recent controversies surrounding blackface performance and jazz music--Browder uncovers their surprising influence in shaping American notions of identity.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(12)
Slave Narratives and the Problem of Authenticity	13	(34)
Staged Ethnicities: Laying the Groundwork for Ethnic Impersonator Autobiographies	47	(28)
Writing American: California Novels of Brown People and White Nationhood	75	(36)
One Hundred Percent American: How a Slave, a Janitor, and a Former Klansman Escaped Racial Categories by Becoming Indians	111	(30)
The Immigrant's Answer to Horatio Alger	141	(30)
Passing As Poor: Class Imposture in Depression America	171	(32)
Postwar Blackface: How Middle-Class White Americans Became Authentic through Blackness	203	(28)
To Pass Is To Survive: Danny Santiago's Famous All Over Town	231	(40)
Conclusion. Rewriting the Ethnic Autobiography	271	(8)
Notes	279	(14)
Bibliography	293	(12)
Index	305