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KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 456 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [456], (1) Lines: 0 to 38 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [456], (1) 19. “I’m an Old Cowhand on the Banks of the Seine” Representations of Indians and Le Far West in Parisian Commercial Culture michael e. harkin What is it about Indians and the American West that has made them such an enduring source of European iconography? Christian Feest, addressing this “strange fact” clearly locates it in the realm of cultural imagination (Feest 1987a:1, 1987b:609). Excluding colonization by Euro-Americans, face-to-face relations between Europeans and Indians have always been extremely rare. Although the individual examples of Indians in Europe (Pocahontas in London; the Bella Coola in Germany; the Lakota, Arapahoe , and other Indian members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Europe) are intriguing, in the end they do not amount to much. Indians in Europe are, even today, so rare that they often acquire a sort of celebrity status (Deloria 1981; Feest 1987b; Haberland 1987). The roots of their importance in the European imagination cannot be the product of any pragmatic linkage. Rather, it is in the realm of cultural production that we must locate the phenomenon. Long an element in popular and literary imagination, from the time of the DeBry’s Grand Voyages (in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) to Voltaire’s Candide (in the eighteenth) to Chateaubriand’s Les Natchez (in the nineteenth), “la grande nature sauvage” of the uncolonized parts of North America has been attractive to literate French women and men. As the eastern parts of North America have been settled by Euro-Americans since the eighteenth century (much to the dismay of Chateaubriand, who met a French dancing master in the woods of upstate New York), and have become familiar to most French people, the lands west of the Mississippi, excluding the coast, remain a vast negative space, called “le Far West.” This space is only loosely speaking a geographical territory. Far more, it is a mental construct with great resonance not only for the French but for many Europeans and Americans (including some who live in the KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 457 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [457], (2) Lines: 38 to 54 ——— 6.5pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [457], (2) West itself). This great negativity, in which culture is replaced by nature, European races by Amerindian ones, is a structure of French culture of la longue durée. The question I will look at is not the origins but the recent history of this idea. Why has it been so thoroughly deployed in the past ten years in certain areas of Paris, such as, notably, Saint Germain des Prés? What does this signify about the historical moment in which the French find themselves? Saint Germain des Prés Saint Germain des Prés is one of the oldest quarters in Paris. It is the heart of the Left Bank sixième arrondissement, which includes the Sorbonne and many other educational and training facilities. Just to the south, within the sixième, is Luxembourg Gardens, which is home to the Sénat. But above all, Saint Germain des Prés is associated with France’s major cultural industries: literature, art, and film. Much more than any comparable place in the United States, Paris represents a centralization of all the functions of state and civilization. According to the logic of the specialization , this area of Paris is the center of matters educational and cultural (see Rabinow 1995:244–250). In the 1920s the bohemian artistic crowd, which included expatriates such as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, and Gertrude Stein, began to migrate north from Montparnasse to frequent cafes such as Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore. By the 1950s important literary and intellectual circles, such as the one centered...

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