Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building - Softcover

Drinnon, Richard

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9780805209785: Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805209786 ISBN 13: 9780805209785

Publisher: Schocken Books, 1990

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Their faces look out across a chasm of time. Stern and often stiff, they wear the high collars and hoop skirts, buckskins and ceremonial feathers of another era. The names of some are familiar—Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Sitting Bull, Annie Oakley. The names of others may be less well known, but they played a significant role in re-creating the American West. These are all people of the West, and their portraits give us a unique glimpse into a lost time and place.Faces of the Frontier showcases more than 120 photographic portraits of leaders, statesmen, soldiers, laborers, activists, criminals, and others, all posed before the cameras that made their way to nearly every mining shanty-town and frontier outpost on the prairie. Drawing primarily on the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, this book depicts many of the people who helped transform the West between the end of the Mexican War and passage of the Indian Citizenship Act.Accompanying the portraits are an introduction and two essays that provide historical context and help frame their interpretation. Frank Goodyear explores how photography influenced Americans’ understanding of the West by giving the region a face and by shaping public responses to western issues. Richard White questions the notion that these photographs accurately represent individuals and argues that the portraits’ subjects participated in a process that idealized them as types.This handsome volume is not only a record of the people we associate with the West during a remarkably formative eighty years but also a key to understanding what Americans then saw in the West, and how they saw themselves.

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From the Back Cover:

American expansion, says Richard Drinnon, is characterized by repression and racism. In his reinterpretation of "winning" the West, Drinnon links racism with colonialism and traces this interrelationship from the Pequot War in New England, through American expansion westward to the Pacific, and beyond to the Philippines and Vietnam. He cites parallels between the slaughter of bison on the Great Plains and the defoliation of Vietnam and notes similarities in the language of aggression used in the American West, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia.

Synopsis:

Richard Drinnon suggests that American expansion is characterized by repression and racism. In this book, he links racism with colonialism and traces this interrelationship from the Pequot War in New England, through American expansion westward to the Philippines and Vietnam.

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