Book Reviews
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Book Reviews Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period. By Drew Lopenzina. Reviewed by Geoff Hamilton. 147 American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination. By Black Hawk Hancock. Reviewed by Christopher J. Wells. 148 Making Cinelandia: American Film and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age. By Laura Isabel Serna. Reviewed by Dolores Tierney. 149 Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, 25th Anniversary Edition. By Randall Balmer. Reviewed by Gene Deerman. 150 The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. By Robeson Taj Frazier. Reviewed by Keisha N. Blain. 151 The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture. By Scott Herring. Reviewed by Kevin J. Porter. 152 The Political Force of Musical Beauty. By Barry Shank. Reviewed by Kara Attrep. 153 A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America. By Keith P. Feldman. Reviewed by Bill V. Mullen. 154 Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy. By Daniel Geary. Reviewed by Brian S. Mueller. 155 Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment. By Michael Javen Fortner. Reviewed by Shannon King. 156 Cinema Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era. By Ellen C. Scott. Reviewed by Peter Catapano. 158 Don’t Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture. By Catherine Gunther Kodat. Reviewed by Andrew Wasserman. 159 Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings From the Upper Midwest, 1973–1946. By James P. Leary. Reviewed by Robert E. Walls. 161 Oklahomo: Lessons in Unqueering America. By Carol Mason. Reviewed by Colin R. Johnson. 162 On Race and Medicine: Insider Perspectives. Edited by Richard Garcia. Reviewed by David Colón-Cabrera. 163 145 Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli. By Ted Merwin. Reviewed by Shelby Shapiro. 164 Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture. By Jennifer Ann Ho. Reviewed by Jeehyun Lim. 165 Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images. By Finis Dunaway. Reviewed by Colin Fisher. 166 Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination. Edited by Erich Nunn. Reviewed by Tammie Jenkins. 168 South Side Girls: Growing Up in The Great Migration. By Marcia Chatelain. Reviewed by LaShawn Harris. 169 Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era. By Tiya Miles. Reviewed by Leigh Fought. 170 Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àse, and the Power of the Present Moment. By Omi Osun Joni L. Jones. Reviewed by Stephanie Leigh Batiste. 171 We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. By Richard Beck. Reviewed by Matthew Stewart. 172 West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands. By Emily Lutenski. Reviewed by Michael Nieto Garcia. 173 Editorial note: Book reviews are edited for typographical errors, and otherwise are printed as received. 146 Reviews RED INK: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period. By Drew Lopen- zina. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2012. The title of Lopenzina’s book—Red Ink— invokes an era of under-appreciated literary production by Native Americans, while punning on two crucial features of that production: its enduring vulnerability to revision and erasure by hegemonic cultural “editors,” and the blood-spattered historical context in which it took place. This is an impressively thorough and often compelling study; it highlights the processes of assimilation and the strategies of resistance visible in a range of colonial texts composed by indigenous authors while extending the bounds and enriching our understanding of Native American literary history. Lopenzina’s introduction anatomizes Euro-American cultural presumptions about Native literary presences, and surveys the efforts of Native authors in the colonial period to negotiate agency within print culture and reconcile (however precariously) indigenous and Western beliefs. As Lopenzina argues, “While Natives who entered into the realm of print discourse in the colonial period were not always, in their views and stances, in lock step with another or necessarily representative of all indigenous culture at the time, they nevertheless contributed to an emerging body of Native intellectual tradition that dynami- cally engaged the settler culture and stamped their own presence upon a period that, in response, has collaborated to deny their historical relevance” (9). The book’s chapters move through a consideration of the dynamics of “contact” and attempts by the European colonizers to deny or “unwitness” forms of Native American literacy and wider cultural achievement; the fate of Native Americans who studied at Harvard’s Indian College and helped administer New England’s first printing press; the Wampanoag’s textual efforts to defend and preserve their culture in the context of King Philip’s War; Samson Occom’s articulation of Mohegan survivance within the hegemonic conventions and disciplinary controls of eighteenth-century print culture; and finally the achievement of the Mohicans of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, who creatively managed their own literacy in order to secure a greater measure of control over their colonial destiny. 147 Red Ink effectively builds on recent scholarship investigating the dynamics of early Native American literacy—above all, Lisa Brooks’ The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (2008), which it complements in arguing for the long- standing importance of written communication in indigenous cultures and the particular significance of textual struggles for autonomy in the colonial era. One profound implica- tion of this scholarship is its complication of the familiar but simplistic privileging of orality over textuality as the “authentic” mode of indigenous expression. Native writing has a much longer and more intricate history than is often recognized, and, as Lopenzina demonstrates, “In many cases, access to the tool of alphabetic literacy was what preserved both individuals and entire Native communities” (168). If there is a prominent weakness in this study it is its tendency, on occasion, to lose the momentum of its argument within expansive commentaries on the historical contexts informing particular texts. Nevertheless, Red Ink represents an important, broadening contribution to our understanding of the history of Native American literary self-assertions. Geoff Hamilton University of Toronto AMERICAN ALLEGORY: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination. By Black Hawk Hancock. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2013. As a graduate student in Chicago, the sociologist Black Hawk Hancock thought he was simply pursuing a hobby but ended up finding a long-term research project. In American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination, Hancock interrogates issues of appropriation, whiteness, and racialized nostalgia within the predominantly white subculture of American swing dance revivalists. Fusing his training as a sociologist and professional dancer, Hancock approaches this task through a paradigm he terms “carnal sociology” which involves not only reflexivity and corporeal participation but also an investment in the rigor of embodied engagement with a particular movement practice. As such, his approach echoes the ethnomusicological principle of “bi-musicality,” which encourages dedicated applied practice as a musician within the musical culture one seeks to investigate. In the book’s first chapter, “Finding the Pocket,” Hancock uses Lindy Hop aesthetics and pedagogy to outline his carnal sociology approach. In chapters two and three, he discusses his own experience as a Lindy Hop instructor as well as the dialectic of de-racialization and racial fetishization driving the appropriation-as-kitsch consumer dynamic within contemporary Lindy Hop subculture. In the book’s final chapter, Hancock juxtaposes this predominantly white space with the contemporary African American practice of “Steppin’,” another form of dance descended from the lindy hop. The theoretical framework Hancock explicates in chapter one—tying together cor- poreal labor, embodied knowledge, and mastery through a heavy use of Wacquant—is the book’s most problematic section. In his laudable effort to build his “carnal sociol- ogy” paradigm and push other scholars to value embodied knowledge, Hancock implies, and at times outright suggests, that there exists a Platonic ideal of perfect dancing that constitutes the “real” Lindy Hop that only a privileged few “elite” dancers ever access. Even more troublesome is his implication that the pathway to this privileged embodied knowledge is through the sorts of systematically codified dance courses he was teaching during his research. As such, this element of Hancock’s thinking undercuts his subsequent analysis, where he so astutely critiques white dance teachers and dance studio owners’ to encourage appropriation precisely by de-racializing access to Lindy Hop participation. To be fair, Hancock’s lionization of labor and mastery does reappear in the book’s final, and in my opinion strongest, chapter where Hancock details his experience becom- 148 ing accepted within Chicago nearly exclusively black subculture of “Steppin’” dancers. Here, Hancock shows how his skill as a dancer demonstrated a genuine commitment that pushed through any skepticism about his intentions. Thus, while Hancock effectively demonstrates that in African American dance traditions talent often does matter in tra- versing