Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative after 1848 by Andrea Tinnemeyer (review)

3 0 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 7 cusses ethnic identities in the context of Mormonism and the shifts in this focus as the church’s proselytizing brought its earlier philosophy into conflict with changing populations. Mary Jane O’Donnell recounts a more recent development— the changing demographics and culture of the Islamic Center of Southern California and the Center’s role in establishing an “American Islamic identity.” While all of these essays are engaging, the volume as a whole does not add much to our knowledge of the broader conflicts of race and religion in the American West. In fact, although both race and religion are addressed in the introduction, the editors do not offer any definition of their West. None of the essayists address the powerful influence of Protestantism on the concept of Manifest Destiny that influenced so profoundly the shaping of the West— including the role of race (white Euro-American capitalists) and religion (white Protestant conservatives) in the region. Nor does the volume address the role of American Protestantism in the attempts to eliminate and/or assimilate America’s Indians, surely a key element in the history of race and religion in the broader American West. Still, the student of the literary West who is particularly interested in the development of the urban West or the history of race and/or religion in the (far) Southwest will find useful background information in these accounts of encounters, racial and religious, in the West. Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative after 1848. By Andrea Tinnemeyer. Lin coln : U n iversity o f N eb rask a Press, 2006. 157 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Marissa López U niversity of C alifornia, Los A ngeles Andrea Tmnemeyer’s The Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative after 1848 explores the US-Mexican War’s restructuring of class, race, and gender in the United States. This book is not so much about the captivity narrative as a genre as about the identity politics it reflects. Tinnemeyer argues for the significance of the war to the national imaginary by establishing a connection between it and the American Revolution of 1776. Both, she argues, work through national growing pains via narratives of captivity. Tinnemeyer positions her project as an evolution of the captivity narrative but ultimately falls short of her mark. Though she makes several key insights about race, class, and gender in post-1848 U S culture, she has little to add to the generic discussion. The book’s great strengths are its close readings of understudied materials pertaining to an understudied topic. The US-Mexican War radically altered the United States’ self-perception, as its size more than doubled and its citi­ zenry rapidly changed. In contrast to its historical significance, there is a dearth B o o k R e v ie w s 3 0 9 of literary scholarship about the war. Tinnemeyer makes a valuable contribution to the field with perceptive analyses and creative archival work. Her first chapter revitalizes María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It1 (1872), reading it against newspaper and novelistic accounts of the real-life captivity of Olive Oatman. Ruiz de Burton, Tinnemeyer argues, revises the captivity genre from one that preserves East Coast whiteness to one that calls whiteness into question via geographical and transnational shifts. Tinnemeyer next treats interracial marriage as a romance of Manifest Destiny with readings of Timothy Flint’s Francis Berrian (1826) and Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero (193 7). Captivity here is the Cult of True Womanhood, and the chapter contends that racialized citizenship, homoeroticism, and pulp fiction redefined the gender of the national symbolic. The body as national symbol is the topic of chapter 3, which deals with war songs and how anxi­ ety about the changing face of the United States is enacted through lyrical disfigurations of the Mexican male body. In chapter 4, the body as symbol is destabilized. Tinnemeyer argues that cross-dressing female soldiers in Ned Buntline’s...