Scouting for Boys: The Original 1908 Edition, and: Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women (review)

The intersection of masculinity, imperialism, and popular culture is a terrain rich for cultural analysis. The last twenty years has seen an explosion of work in the fields of masculinity studies, postcolonial theory, and popular culture studies, yet it is still relatively rare to encounter scholarship that convincingly integrates the three. And while the writings of Ann McClintock, Amy Kaplan, and Shelley Streeby, to reference the three names that come most immediately to mind, certainly represent a high-water mark for scholarship that works at this intersection, scholars are only now beginning to follow in their sizable footsteps.

Yet the signs of the intimate relationship between these three domains abound in this moment of particularly acute neoimperialism: from the use of sports broadcasts to affirm imperialist nationalisms; to the glut of Hollywood war films that have appeared since 9/11; to the rhetoric around "heroism" and "good guys and bad guys" in media discourse and the speeches of George Bush and Tony Blair (rhetoric that comes not so much from the western—even Zane Grey's most Manichean fictions were more tempered than this—than from popular discourses about westerns). In such a climate, politically-engaged scholarly work into the intersection of the imperial, the popular, and the masculine seems both necessary and urgent.

Equally necessary given the transnational dimensions of contemporary neoimperialism is the formation of a cross-cultural understanding of the historical dynamics of imperialism, particularly of the interrelationship of the differing forms of imperialism manifested by the two main architects of the current neoimperial endeavor, Britain and the United States. While not addressing this intersection, Oxford University Press's critical edition of the original 1908 edition of Scouting for Boys and Thomas H. Pauly's unfortunately-subtitled Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women suggest the many links between the popular cultures of U.S. and British imperialism. Indeed, when comparing these two newly-published texts, a number of common themes and practices emerge, from the functioning of the male body as a synecdoche for the empire, to the paradoxical formulation of a modernized version of masculinity in terms of a popular culture organized around a nostalgic fantasy of the premodern, to the ways in which a certain dominant construction of modern masculinity is modeled on the imagined virtues of the virility demonstrated by the colonized other.

The awareness of issues of imperialism is strikingly different in the texts themselves, suggesting the way in which the history of intracontinental United States imperialism, as compared to its largely intercontinental British counterpart, is still far from universally recognized, despite the important work done by a range of scholars on this issue in the last ten to fifteen years. Issues of imperialism and their relationship to masculinity are front and center in the introduction and editorial commentary that Elleke Boehmer provides for this scholarly edition of Scouting for Boys. Boehmer's introduction and notes serve as an excellent primer for readers unacquainted with the ways in which the scout handbook and the formation of the Boy Scout organization itself worked to mediate and provide imaginary solutions to a range of anxieties attaching to manhood and empire in the early twentieth century:

The appearance of Scouting for Boys coincided with a period of wavering self-confidence in Britain following the pyrrhic victory of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), a war marked by setbacks, stalemates, and stasis. The book did therefore, it is true, respond powerfully to British national anxieties: in this must lie at least one substantial reason for its success. Where the failing strength of the nation was mirrored in the alleged deterioration of the male physique at the time, a practical handbook that proposed physical training as well as lessons in strategy derived from the...