Overview

"When Buffalo Bill's Wild West show traveled to Paris in 1889, the New York Times reported that the exhibition would be """"managed to suit French ideas."""" But where had those """"French ideas"""" of the American West come from? And how had they, in turn, shaped the notions of """"cowboys and Indians"""" that captivated the French imagination during the Gilded Age? In Transnational Frontiers, Emily C. Burns maps the complex fin-de-siècle cultural exchanges that revealed, defined, and altered images of the American West. This lavishly illustrated visual history shows how American artists, writers, and tourists traveling to France exported the dominant frontier narrative that presupposed manifest destiny - and how Native American performers with Buffalo Bill's Wild West and other traveling groups challenged that view. Many French artists and illustrators plied this imagery as well. At the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, sculptures of American cowboys conjured a dynamic and adventurous West, while portraits of American Indians on vases evoked an indigenous people frozen in primitivity. At the same time, representations of Lakota performers, as well as the performers themselves, deftly negotiated the politics of American Indian assimilation and sought alternative spaces abroad. For French artists and enthusiasts, the West served as a fulcrum for the construction of an American cultural identity, offering a chance to debate ideas of primitivism and masculinity that bolstered their own colonialist discourses. By examining this process, Burns reveals the interconnections between American western art and Franco-American artistic exchange between 1865 and 1915."

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9780806160030

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Reviews

This is an art historical work engaged with visual and material culture. It is also about the transnational and multinational circulations of the American West that were at the center of a series of critical conversations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concerning politics, art, and modernity. Moreover, this is a work about Indian people as cultural producers and consumers, as performers and artists, and how they were central to the ways the American West was represented during this period. To this end Burns should be lauded for her thoughtful engagement with American Indian history and Federal Indian Policy as well as theories from settler colonial studies. --caa.reviews By situating her work at the crossroads of many disciplines, Burns transcends geographic, disciplinary, and methodological lines, demonstrating the richness and ingenuity of interdisciplinary scholarship, as well as its potential to inspire future novel directions in scholarship. -- Chronicles of Oklahoma

"By situating her work at the crossroads of many disciplines, Burns transcends geographic, disciplinary, and methodological lines, demonstrating the richness and ingenuity of interdisciplinary scholarship, as well as its potential to inspire future novel directions in scholarship"""". - Chronicles of Oklahoma"

Author Information

Emily C. Burns is Assistant Professor of Art History at Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama. Her work has been published in anthologies and in journals such as Panorama and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide.

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