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This book can be read as a companion to The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (University of California Press, 1999), since it takes up some of the latter’s claims and arguments and extends them into the early 1910s. It argues, for instance, that the Americanization process—specifically, the concerns about constructing a distinctive American national identity— continued to frame early cinema’s institutionalization as a popular mass entertainment , particularly if certain categories of spectators formed its core audience—namely, recent working-class immigrants, women (especially young working women), and children. It also argues that early cinema, as a mass entertainment, has to be conceived in terms that reach beyond the production of film texts and their promotion in the trade press to focus on distribution and exhibition practices, as well as regional or even local discursive traces of their promotion and reception. Yet this book differs from the earlier one in that its analyses are shaped by several related theoretical constructs. The initial impetus came from Benedict Anderson’s notion of a new kind of “imagined community,” the nation, that emerged through “the interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communication (print), and . . . a general condition of irremediable linguistic diversity.”1 Specifically, Anderson focuses on “the novel and the newspaper” as forms of “print capitalism ” that fostered a national consciousness in the nineteenth century by creating “unified fields of exchange and communication,” giving “a new fixity to language,” and, in turn, giving certain languages—for instance, English —more power.2 As a corollary to his provocative framework, this book focuses on moving pictures as a new technology of communication, one that epitomizes the general transformation at the turn of the last century that produced a more or less unified arena of exchange and communication inIntroduction Are you an imitation American? herbert kaufman, Cleveland Leader (20 August 1911), C2 3 creasingly dominated by visual culture rather than by print culture. My own interest in the role that moving pictures played in this process is twofold. One is how the diverse audiences attracted to moving pictures, much like Anderson ’s network of people joined together as readers, constituted—or were represented as constituting (or not)—an “imagined community of nationality.” Yet another goes beyond Anderson to analyze how the films themselves, or certain kinds of films, and the stars that performed in them may have represented an “imagined community of nationality” on the screen. Anderson’s “imagined community of nationality” seems strikingly relevant for a creole society like the United States in the early twentieth century, when a more or less homogeneous “white nation” was “imagined” in the context of extreme, even violent, social fractures—class, race, and ethnicity being the principal fault lines.3 Or, as Eric Hobsbawm so succinctly puts it, describing the United States’ “problem” of how to assimilate a “heterogeneous mass” of immigrants: “Americans had to be made.”4 Consequently, my analyses also are shaped by a more complicated notion of “Americanization,” the most widespread of the terms used by those concerned with the issue of national identity at the time—others included “the melting pot” and “cultural pluralism .”5 The late nineteenth century, Matthew Jacobson and others argue, saw “a fundamental revision of whiteness itself” as the basis of national identity.6 In the earlier part of the century, the “salient feature of whiteness” had been its contrast to “nonwhiteness,” or, as Alexander Saxton bluntly writes, “white citizens” were given “equal opportunities. . . through the enslavement of African Americans, the extermination of Indians, and territorial expansion at the expense of Indians and Mexicans.”7 Now, its internal divisions—”the shifting perception of racial difference among ‘free white persons’. . . took on a new and pressing significance.”8 This was especially noticeable in “the discourse of immigration restriction,” which, under the influence of AngloSaxonism and eugenics, “favored a scheme of hierarchically ordered white races.”9 Yet this discourse, Jacobson adds, had its ironic “compensations”: if the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Slavs became “less and less white in debates over who should be allowed to embark for American shores,” they also became “whiter and whiter in the debates over who should be granted the full rights of citizenship” (in contrast to Asians and American “Negroes”).10 It was this further distinction, or emphasis, that divided those who sought “to protect the national character from the dangers posed by the immense immigration of the times” and...

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