Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature by Jason Richards (review)

For decades, scholars have been expanding the geographic and temporal lenses through which they study "American" identities, cultures, and texts. The logic of this reconsideration is simple and sound: the notion of an autochthonous, independent US literature and culture is inaccurate and, at bottom, in bad faith. What this project lacks in freshness, it makes up for in continued relevance. Decades after the transnational shift began, American exceptionalism and its tangle of assumptions persist. Indeed, the remapping of identities and relationships is a vast imaginative effort, one of several generations, in the very least.

This long revaluation requires textured analysis and new conceptual frameworks. In Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature, Jason Richards offers both. Triangulating modes of inquiry, Richards studies hiding-in-plain-sight relationships among white Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and white Europeans. For example, Richards combines insights from scholarship on blackface minstrelsy with those gleaned from settler postcolonial theory to bring Natty Bumppo's native and African American mimesis into sharp focus. This approach to James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers (1823) reveals the dependence of American whiteness on Native American, African American, and British Anglo-Saxon identities. Exploring new relationships among established schools of thought, Richards provides a model for redressing the insularity that has long shaped conceptions of US history, literature, and culture.

Richards borrows from nineteenth-century social theorist Gabriel Tarde, who viewed imitation, not essence, as the basis of identity. Tarde's notion that identity is contingent on one's response to others is particularly suggestive in the early American and antebellum contexts. As Richards notes, the theater's rapid growth in the early Republic reflected a longing for national culture keyed to an implicit understanding that Americanness would be achieved through imitation, specifically, through embodying and absorbing Native American, African American, and European identities. Engaging the work of Philip J. Deloria, Eric Lott, and Robert S. Levine, Richards delineates mutually constitutive relationships among diverse acts of cross-racial, cross-Atlantic mimesis. Imitation Nation makes an important contribution to the scholarship of blackface minstrelsy. But because mimesis took place offstage, too, Richards conceptualizes redface and blackface broadly to cover a range of cross-racial imitations.

While mimesis occurs wherever contact happens, it assumed particularly robust form in a new republic defined by remarkable diversity and dominated by descendants of white Europe who faced the unusual problem of defining themselves as, at once, white and not European. A unique postcolonial settler society, the early United States sought the temporal depth and legitimacy associated with aboriginal Indian identity, but it also imitated Britain's imperial dominance over nonwhite groups. Imitation Nation makes a compelling case that American identity emerged in the complex interplay of western and Atlantic frontiers. Literature helped shape national identity in this push-pull fashion: European models distinguished the white United States from its Native American and African American inhabitants, and these Others helped distinguish American literature and identity from European antecedents. This dynamic set at odds preoccupations with racial purity and American distinctiveness. That is, a distinctive white national identity required absorbing and excluding racial and cultural Others at the same time.

Citing Homi K. Bhabha's idea of mimicry from The Location of Culture, Richards opens a space for nonwhite agency in the production of national identity. Through mimicry, the disenfranchised, colonized, and enslaved exploit the slippage between the identities hegemonic regimes enforce and those same identities as performed by the oppressed. Mimicry and cross-cultural imitation, more broadly, energize what Richards calls "hybridity, the inevitable offspring of mimesis" (31). Imitation Nation sets the reality of hybridity against the fiction of white purity, as Richards argues: "If the colonial apparatus stabilized itself through a fiction of racial purity, the fact of hybridity cut through the homogenous myth, opening the door to a more democratic postcolonial future" (31). A robust conception of hybridity leads Richards to...