Geographical Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West by Blake Allmendinger (review)

Reviewed by: Geographical Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West by Blake Allmendinger Trent Brown Geographical Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West. By Blake Allmendinger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), 215 pp. When nineteenth-century Americans conceived of the West, they often imagined an opportunity to “light out for the Territory,” as Huck Finn put it, for a fresh start. In this brief but compelling book, Blake Allmendinger shows the American West not only as a place of economic opportunity and freedom from constraints, but also one especially suited for “self-transformation” (p. 1). The book’s nine chapters trace the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Each one tells of a career in the West, one of the features that makes this book distinctive. Readers familiar with media cultural sociologist and theorist Jean Baudrillard will note the author’s analytical sophistication. Still, the writing avoids the density of those analyses. The cast includes “a diverse international group of writers and artists, con men and charlatans, performers and posers” (p. 20). Scientist and geographer Clarence King exposed a salted diamond mine fraud in the Colorado Territory in 1872. But King himself led a double life, marrying an African American woman and passing as a Black man. While living in a segregated New York neighborhood, he navigated the color line to socialize at a club whose members included Theodore Roosevelt. Missouri native James Reavis attempted a bold swindle by fabricating documents claiming title to an eighteenth-century Spanish land grant. As with King, the forgeries of Reavis constitute one part of a larger performative act: that of crafting a new identity. And so also with Will James, a children’s literature writer and illustrator. Born in Quebec, James moved to the United States, took a new name, served time for cattle rustling, and acted as a stunt man in Hollywood westerns. James “sold himself to the public, becoming a cowboy, a commodity, a signature brand” (p. 59). James noted in an observation that could serve for almost any figure in the book: “People believed I was sincere. And I guess I was” (p. 61). North Carolina-born Sylvester Long, from a family considered “colored,” escaped by joining a Wild West show. With his “high cheek bones” and “copper-colored skin,” he “adopted a series of racial personas,” Cherokee, Blackfoot, and Ojibwe, taking advantage of the turn-of-the-century fascination with the “noble savage” (p. 64). His autobiography told of his Montana childhood as a Blackfoot. To appeal to contemporary notions of “authenticity,” with each assumed identity Long became more “primitive” (p. 70). With most of these characters “movement became synonymous with change” (p. 77). Willa Cather, some of whose most celebrated fiction chronicles Bohemian immigrants to the West, was herself a mobile figure, one who refused to conform to gender stereotypes. Cather [End Page 32] the bohemian artist was a vagabond, dispossessed, marginal figure (p. 92). Fluidity of gender and sexuality are further explored in the chapter on writer Yone Noguchi, who left Japan for San Francisco, taking advantage there of his “ambiguous sexuality” and the current vogue for “Orientalist art and culture” (p. 94). His work mixed Eastern and Western traditions. His American Diary of a Japanese Girl was written in a female persona. The American West attracted people from all parts of the world. Polish-born actress Helena Modjeska shows the possibilities for someone whose public work was literally the assumption of successive personas. Settling in California, Modjeska reinvented herself as “a supposed European aristocrat” (p.121) and became a sensation. One did not have to live in the West to inhabit it, as the example of Karl May shows. His bestselling novels set German immigrants on American prairies, where they “drink German beer, sing German songs, and read German newspapers” (p. 125). He gave his readers a new frontier to replace European forests, one where “the superiority of the Aryan race” triumphed over other settlers and Native Americans. Despite his claim that he had experienced what his novels depict, May knew the West only from books. Fittingly, the book closes with a chapter on...

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