IN THIS ISSUE -- AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW (AMHREV@INDIANA.EDU)
Volume 100, Number 1, February 1995
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
Marking: Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History
by Thomas C. Holt, 1
ARTICLES
Boundaries and the Victorian Body: Aesthetic Fashion in Gilded
Age America
by Mary W. Blanchard, 21
Identity, Race, Gender, and Modernity in the Origins of Gilberto
Freyre's Oeuvre
by Jeffrey D. Needell, 51
The Problem of Survival for the Angevin "Empire":
Henry II's and His Sons' Vision versus Late Twelfth-Century
Realities
by Ralph V. Turner, 78
Corporate Space, Communal Time: Everyday Life in Shanghai's Bank
of China
by Wen-hsin Yeh, 97
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Our first essay is the Presidential Address of Thomas C. Holt.
Starting with W. E. B. Du Bois's and Franz Fanon's struggles to
make sense of the imposed racial identity with which they were
marked, Holt maps the received views of how racism is produced,
including the idealist, materialist, psychological, and
culturalist. While valuing the insights in the best work based on
these conceptual schemes, Holt finds the schemes inadequate. In
compensation, he develops an analysis based on the practices of
everyday life in which racism is reproduced and naturalized
through subtle and not-so-subtle markings of the racial Other,
markings that allow ordinarily rational people to commit
irrational acts and, under certain stimuli, extraordinary acts of
outrage. After working through the intellectual roots of this
type of analysis in European history and philosophy, Holt turns
to an examination of specific American mechanisms in the shaping
of racial identity, giving particular attention to minstrelsy and
other enduring expressions of popular culture. He describes the
appropriation of African-American life and creativity by the
dominant culture in order to resolve tensions in its own
adjustment to rapid change and notes that this use of racialist
images powerfully reinforced stereotypes of blacks and
institutionalized racist identities. Holt ends his address with
some observations on the difficulties of emancipating ourselves
from these markings, especially when conservative national
leaders trivialize attempts to alter the everyday behaviors that
stigmatize minority groups.
Fashion and aesthetic self-presentation are occupying an ever
more important place in mainstream history writing. Mary W.
Blanchard points out that by looking more closely than we have at
the female realm through popular sources on the decorative arts
we can reorient thinking about past artistic eras. Blanchard
deploys such sources to challenge the established notion that
aesthetic modernism during the 1870s and 1880s was associated
primarily with male artists in the public sphere. Women did not
stay confined to an interior space during this era but
participated in a vogue for "aesthetic" dress and appeared in
public wearing non-corseted garments described by writers of the
time as works of art akin to painting and sculpture. At the same
time, some men moved to interior spaces to experiment with new
possibilities for male dress and adornment. Secondary arts of
dressmaking and bodily ornamentation rose to high art and created
a cultural space for experimentation with sexual boundaries.
Women could flirt with bohemian theatricality, while men could
model themselves on the dress and posturing of the "invert" Oscar
Wilde. A reaction in the 1890s returned male fashion to the
"manly" values of the imperialist age; in the female realm,
aesthetic dress became mainstream and lost its critical bite.
Ralph V. Turner looks at a pre-nationalist vision of political
unity that has been obscured because of the emphasis of English
and French historians on modern nation-building. Turner examines
the sources of strength, unity, and potential long-term survival
of the Angevin empire of the twelfth century. While he finds
evidence of a vision of empire based in a loose family alliance
system, Turner also notes the many obstacles to the realization
of this scheme, obstacles both self-inflicted by enmities within
the Angevin family and externally applied by the power of the
rival Capetian monarchy.