The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School (review)

Set in the context of America's "Gilded Age," Mauro's visual culture history centers on the trope of the "before and after" portraits used to mark the progress and practice of assimilating Indians into Americans at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. His aim is to show how Richard Pratt, the school's administrator, used photographs to argue that "by means of aesthetic transformation, these groups were to be converted from an assumed state of degenerate Otherness into model 'American' citizens" (1).

To begin his analysis, Mauro builds on the work of Albert Boime in The Art of Exclusion, which suggests that the mingling of ideological predetermination with aesthetic convention has parallels in other media. The Art of Americanization also functions as a dynamic correlative to Elizabeth Hutchinson's argument in The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890-1915 regarding the mainstream interest in Native American material culture as "art" that spread across the nation from west to east and from reservation to metropolis.

Relying on Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes, Mauro articulates a method that critically analyzes the visual imagery produced at Carlisle to argue that photographs functioned as a way of showcasing the ideal of American citizenship. Yet, what is most striking and important about this work is Mauro's choice of visual evidence, namely the photographs created through the collaboration between Pratt and John Nicholas Choate, a professional photographer from the town of Carlisle, as well as photographs produced (respectively) by documentary photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston and an Indian student, John Leslie.

Mauro begins by framing the work of all three photographers through sociology, noting that the boarding school was a "total institution" akin to other sites known for the management and oppression of people, including mental hospitals, prisons, and concentration camps. Through this postulation Mauro relies on Gramsci to argue that "the intent of the Carlisle photographs was to show this process of rationalizing the body and mind of the worker" (3). Mauro then turns to panopticism as theorized by Foucault as another means for understanding the social spaces of Carlisle that required "before and after" portraits, and the studium and punctum used by Barthes to offer innovative readings of Carlisle's photographs. For example, Mauro suggests that an image titled Croquet, featuring several female students "casually yet conveniently arranged before the camera," offers the viewer "the feeling of leisure and ease" that is "balanced by the presence of a male groundskeeper on the far right, who is watching over the young women" (111). This "overseer trope," Mauro notes, was typical of nearly all of Johnston's images. Even more important and evocative is Mauro's claim that such imagery circumscribed the students "neatly into the architectural fold of the campus grounds" and with this representation Johnston offered "no vision of the world beyond the campus" (112). Here Mauro draws on Foucault and the work of scholar and curator Barb Landis to note that the school grounds served "as a panoptic architectural device" that Pratt saw as useful for containing students both physically and perceptually (122).

Mauro's story is as much about the production of photographic evidence aimed to manage public perceptions of Carlisle and its successful assimilation of Indian pupils as it is a story about changes in manhood, nationhood, and technology that marked the end of the nineteenth century in the United States. For instance, the photographs by Johnston that appeared in The Red Man and Helper (the school's main literary periodical) illustrate both that Pratt erased Johnston's participation by neglecting to mention her name, "even though by 1901 she enjoyed an international reputation," and how the album she made worked to confirm the methods, aims, and results of the school (110). In other words, Mauro suggests that the photographic series created by Johnston but controlled, edited, and circulated by Pratt between 1902 and 1904 sought to...