Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot by Michael Rogin (review)

Book Reviews 145 toric of tricultural harmony" (8) in the promotion of Santa Fe. The notion that relations between Native Americans, Hispanics, and Anglo-Americans have, from their first meeting, been harmonious has, Wilson argues, concealed "long-standing cultural and class frictions" (8). Wilson's observations on cultural selectivity and appropriation concentrate primarily on ethnicity, and he is also effective in exploring the class dimensions of Santa Fe's development. Missing however, is any sustained exploration of how gender fits into the story of the Santa Fe myth. A growing literature exists on the role of gender in tourism and cultural selection (see, for instance, the articles on this theme in Gender and History, Volume 6, no. 3, 1994). Tapping into this field would add an important dimension to his discussions of colonialism and commemoration. Overall, The Myth of S1:mta Fe is a well-conceived exploration of cultural selection that will be of interest to students of tourism, architecture, and cultural history in general. Wilson writes passionately about past events and the implications they have for the present. The presentation of his argument -including an innovative chapter in which he temporarily undercuts the dominance of his own narrative with a collection of dissenting observations and commentaries-is a refreshing attempt both to reach out to the reader and to deal with some of the questions raised by Hayden White and others about the role of authorial intention and narrative structure in the writing of history. His parting call to replace the myths he has interrogated with newer, more progressive myths that will accept and deal with the dark side of Santa Fe's past will prove both alluring to some, and unsettling to others. Michael Dawson Queen's Uniuersity Michael Rogin, Blackfc1ce, White Noise:JewishInnnigrantsin the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. xvi + 339. This is a learned and provocative book. In tracing the roots of American film, the quintessential popular art form of modern America, Michael Ragin takes us back to the origins of blackface minstrelsy, the most popular art form of the nineteenth century. He traces a line from there to the film culture of the twentieth century. Both art forms reflect a democratization of culture and both carry, according to Rogin, the racial history of the American people. 146 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadtenne detudes anzencames The most fascinating part of the early sections of this book relate to the way in which minstrelsy permitted movement across boundaries in terms of both race and gender. If race and gender were rigid categories in nineteenthcentury America, in minstrelsy they became fluid and permeable. In spite of his awareness and exploration of this fluidity, Rogin ends up with a fairly unambiguous evaluation. Minstrelsy degraded blacks and that degradat10n provided the ultimate basis for white identity. What made white Americans different from Europeans was the farmer's interactions with people of colour, blacks, and Indians. In a way, Rogin gives this the same kind of defining significance that Turner gave to the frontier. That excludes a vast amount of American history, but it is the prism Ragin uses to explore American culture from the beginnings of Jim Crow to the late 1940s, when the racial and ethnic dimensions of film lose their coupling and diverge in different directions. He uses minstrelsy and film as a way of engaging issues of American identity, race, and particularly what he sees as the tangled relations of Jewish ethnics and African Americans. The discussion of minstrelsy is prelude to the core theme of the book, the uses white ethnics make of the black presence in American culture. While this purports to study the role of race in American culture, it is really about the role of race in white American culture. In a variety of contexts and in any number of variations, Ragin keeps coming back to his basic theme: Assimilation is achieved via the mask of the most segregated; the blackface that offers Jews mobility keeps the blacks fixed in place. By wiping out all difference except black and white, blackface turns Rabinowitz into Robin (the lead in the Jazz Singer), but the fundamental binary opposition...