Fashion Nation: Picturing the United States in the Long Nineteenth Century by Sandra Tomc (review)

Abstract

promise seems to be a common theme in the study—in similar fashion, Victor Séjour’s brilliant literary career demonstrates transnational perspectives and intercultural literary strategies that would eventually be obscured by the categorical opposition of “American” and “French” literature. (As evidence, Séjour has yet to become a standard inclusion in anthologies of American literature, despite his clear qualifications.) While the decline of New Orleans’s theatrical diversity can be read as a jeremiad, this study also serves as a reminder for early American literary and cultural studies: exploring such historical dead ends may yet help us to remember American culture’s once-possible futures. The Crescent City’s playhouses were never interracial or intercultural utopias, of course, but they nevertheless showed the potential of performance in a distinctly “Creole America,” in which plays were staged in the gaps between cultures, as lively, complex dramas of identity, affiliation, and belonging played out against a hemispheric backdrop of imperial nostalgia and national expansion.