“Here Comes the Show Boat!”: Show Boat and the Case for Regionalism

Scholarship on stage and film adaptations of Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel Show Boat has focused on issues of race and/or gender, but reframing the conversation through the critical lens of regionalism reveals that Show Boat is also deeply invested in early twentieth-century debates about modernity and nationalism. In particular, film adaptations display increasing anxiety about modernity, adopting elaborate folk strategies to conceal their own sophisticated technology. The case study of Show Boat further reveals that film musicals in the first half of the twentieth century take up the cultural work of regionalism and nationalism.