Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination, and: The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America (review)

These distinctive meditations on the complex and contradictory logics of the freak show in U.S. mass culture chart new theoretical territory for their topic. Impelled by the critical interventions of disability studies, much recent work on freak shows is framed within the rhetoric of identity, using the freak's prodigious physicality to complicate a body politics conventionally—and inadequately, this criticism argues—limned as the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality. In their elaborations of this project, both Adams and Reiss open up lines of inquiry somewhat occluded by the identitarian critique; their studies bring the national historical backdrop into the foreground and, with it, provocative questions concerning the freak show's relation to the large-scale economic, social, and cultural transformations that structure its history. This line of inquiry directs attention to the crucial matter of how the public display of such spectacularly "other" bodies serves historically to both dramatize the limits of national belonging and project the uncanny specter of their unmaking.

Adams's Sideshow U.S.A. provides a compelling counterpoint to Robert Bogdan's Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (1988). Whereas conventional histories of the freak show narrate its decline as the public came to regard it as a form of exploitation rather than entertainment, Adams focuses on the proliferation of its iconography in the culture and the multiplicity of meanings its representations hold. Just as sideshow freaks provided "a stage for playing out many of the century's most charged social and political controversies, such as debates about race and empire, immigration, relations among the sexes, taste, and community standards of decency" (2), images of "freakishness," Adams argues, in visual and performance art, literature, popular culture, and even literary criticism rehearse and reframe long-standing as well as emergent social anxieties for contemporary audiences.

Adams's virtuoso critical performance is playfully organized into three "acts." The first of these locates early signs of the freak show's eventual obsolescence in the public controversies surrounding early-twentieth-century ethnographic exhibits of racial others and director Tod Browning's attempt to translate the freak show onto film. Adams argues that freaks' incursion into other cultural domains brought to a head contentious social debates elided by the sideshow in its traditional form. "Act 2" explores how the freak show recurs midcentury in the elite cultural realms of art photography, literature, and literary criticism. Adams's nuanced and persuasive readings show that while "freak" persists in this period as a symbol of social otherness, the conjunction of the freak body's lability with the inherent instability of the various cultural forms that carry it indicate reconfigurations of spectacle and spectatorship by which the line between deviance and normalcy remains permanently unsettled. "Act 3" turns to contemporary texts—Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Katherine Dunn's Geek Love (1989)—where references to sideshows emphasize embodied difference, whether figured via race or disability, as a locus for identity and community belonging. This roughly genealogical account culminates with a fitting coda: an analysis of present-day attempts to revive the freak show as an alternative art form and, in some cases, a forum for radical political critique.

Like Sideshow U.S.A., Reiss's book approaches the freak show's cultural politics from a somewhat marginal vantage point, examining the political meanings of race in the antebellum North, and a bizarre and largely overlooked episode in American culture, P. T. Barnum's traveling exhibition of a disabled, elderly, and infirm ex-slave named Joice Heth, whom Barnum promoted as the 161-year-old...