During the 1920s, the black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as the internationally famous Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, while Elizabeth Stern, the native-born, illegitimate daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist produced the soul-searching immigrant’s narrative I Am a Woman—and a Jew (1926). The Education of Little Tree (1976), an ersatz Cherokee autobiography written by Asa Carter, George Wallace’s former speechwriter, has sold six hundred thousand copies to date.
These examples, while startling, are by no means singular. Over the past one hundred and fifty years, while rewriting themselves into new ethnicities, the authors of ethnic impostor autobiographies have escaped the trap of unwanted identities. Paradoxically, by successfully playing into current cultural stereotypes of their newly chosen ethnicities, they have mired their readers further in the structures of ethnic thinking. Through close readings of both famous and obscure impostor autobiographies, and by drawing on a context of social, cultural and economic history, I trace the development of the ethnic impostor autobiography from the ante-bellum South through the expansion of the frontier, and from the dislocations of immigration through the anomie of the post-war period. My work addresses the anxiety over racial and ethnic identity and its slipperiness as an issue of autobiography as well as a wider cultural phenomenon.
Autobiography, with its valorization of individualism and its emphasis on self-fashioning, is a form peculiarly suited to our national mythology; American ethnic autobiographies have traditionally been written, and read, as a means of helping frame the complex cultural relationships of a multi-ethnic society. If the American tradition of self-fashioning, with its commitment to Emersonian self-reliance, would appear to be distinct from ethnic autobiography, with its tradition of cultural ambassadorship, there is a point at which they converge, and that is in what I call the genre of the ethnic impostor autobiography. These narratives stand as monuments to the tradition of American self-invention, the notion that it is possible to remake oneself in a chosen image, as well as testaments to the porousness of ethnic identity.
The dominant strain in American autobiography emphasizes self-construction, as exemplified by Benjamin Franklin, who set out to outline for readers the thirteen steps he considered essential for self-improvement. The self in this model is mutable: the thrill of reading the autobiography is to see how one individual took the raw material of his or her life and formed it into something shapely, unique, successful.
While the self-created individual may be the loudest voice in American autobiography, it is certainly not the only one, for autobiography has also been an important vehicle for describing the minority experience in America. Even as Benjamin Franklin was publishing his autobiography (1771-1790), another form of memoir was emerging: the slave narrative. Through their eloquent testimonials, produced by the hundreds, slaves could and did persuade white Americans that they too were human, that they deserved the rights of American citizens. Nor were slave narratives the only form of nineteenth century ethnic autobiography: by 1854, when Henry David Thoreau published Walden, the American public had been reading Native American autobiographies for twenty years.
Ethnic autobiographies have fulfilled, and continue to perform, a number of cultural functions, but one purpose has remained the same: to offer the authentic voice of a minority group to a reading audience composed primarily of white middle class Americans. Through reading ethnic autobiographies, from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass ( 1845) to Black Elk Speaks (1932), from Black Boy (1937) to Down These Mean Streets (1967), Americans have been outraged, stirred, and sometimes moved to action. Both the reader and the writer of an ethnic autobiography understand the implied contract: the memoirist is not telling his or her own story as much as the story of a people.
Yet not every ethnic autobiography is what it purports to be. Although much has been written about "passing"—that is, from black to white—Americans also moved in the other direction, away from whiteness. In the case of non-white impostors, ethnic imposture offered an escape into another, more "exotic" identity. False ethnic autobiography offers us a range of voices which challenge our ideas about ethnicity, about the autobiographical "I," and about the very notion of self. Through studying these impostors we are forced to confront difficult questions: how much of ethnicity is a construction? Is there such a thing as an authentic ethnic or racial identity? And what is it about our culture that makes us accept these impostors so readily? Ethnic impostors force us to rethink our easy assumptions about identity; they expand the notion of the melting pot and make us question even our own identities, the basis for our sense of self.
Significantly, ethnic impostors appear in clusters during flash points of American history: in the decades leading up to the Civil War, when slavery was being debated, and it was unclear which ethnic groups were to be afforded full human status; during the 1920s, when immigration and Native American laws were changing, and when the Ku Klux Klan was on the rise.
Some impostors adopt the voice of another group in order to gain political effectiveness, such as the white abolitionists who spoke as slaves in order to present a compelling case for emancipation, or the English environmentalist Archie Bellamy, who in the 1930s assumed the Native American identity Grey Owl in order to insure that his ecological message be heard. Other impostors seem to have escaped the psychological prison of their own identity by speaking with the voice of an ethnic other: the WASP writer Daniel James broke his thirty-year writer’s block, which first presented itself after his appearance as an unfriendly witness before HUAC, by "becoming" the young Chicano activist Danny Santiago, while the sexual abuse survivor Elizabeth Stern took on the ethnic identity and national origins of the foster father who had abused her.
When ethnic identity is up for grabs in America, impostors appear to make their claims, and they often find a receptive audience. The reception of these works stands, too, as a reminder of how willing we are to believe: I Am a Woman—and a Jew was a success when it was first published, and is still taught in college courses on women and Judaism. Long Lance (1928) was praised extravagantly by the international press, and sold well both in Europe and North America. Danny Santiago’s Famous All Over Town was the 1982 recipient of the prestigious Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award. Thus, rather than being freakish curiosities, these ethnic impostor autobiographies have been influential in shaping American notions of identity.
The first chapter of Under Cover: Ethnic Imposture and the Construction of American Identities introduces and explores the concept of ethnic imposture as it has been invented in sources ranging from the written—newspapers, autobiographies—to the performed—plays, films, and song lyrics. Using examples drawn from popular music and film as well as written text, this chapter develops the categories used to analyze the genre in the rest of the work.
The second chapter examines the ways that Native American impostors have used ersatz Indian identities to escape binary definitions of race. Starting with early frontier encounters and continuing to the present day, I discuss the role of Native American identity as a cultural Rorschach of the currently "authentic," through showing the ways that Indian impostors have changed over the years to meet the demands of a changing culture, from fake "savages" to noble savages, Nazis, environmentalists, and the current rash of New Age spiritual Indians.
In the third chapter, I focus on impostor slave narratives to discuss the development of a politically driven ethnic identity. Many of the more than one hundred slave narratives published between 1760 and 1865 were written by abolitionists intent on providing the American public with a rhetorically persuasive, "authentic" voice against slavery. Slave narratives, elicited and edited by white patrons, became a fixed genre, in which each slave’s story tended to be formally adapted to reader expectations, and in which readers and writers alike expected the author to be speaking as a representative of a people.
In the fourth chapter, I examine the development of performance-based identity in mid-to-late nineteenth century America, using a variety of sources, ranging from etiquette books written for black as well as for white audiences, to press releases and newspaper reviews from dramatic performances. I explore the rise of what I call performative ethnicity, manifested not only by tensions between the middle class desire for sincerity and authenticity and the rise of self-fashioning in post-bellum America, but also by such staged ethnicities as blackface performance and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Although middle-class whites feared what Karen Haltunnen calls "confidence men and painted ladies," late nineteenth century etiquette books customarily included a chapter on how a reader could change his or her name. The tension between the anxiety over origins and the desire to alter ethnicity led, I will argue, to a new form of ethnic autobiography (false and otherwise) that began appearing at the turn of this century, one which stressed authenticity as well as assimilation into mainstream American culture.
In the fifth chapter, I examine ethnic fakes during the twenties. With legislation only recently absorbing Indians into the body politic and restricting the influx of Eastern European Jews and others, and with the spectacular resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the nation had begun to negotiate the relationship of race and ethnicity to a more generalized sense of American citizenship and identity. I examine I Am a Woman—and a Jew within the context of an increasingly visible immigrant culture, in which one of the functions of the ethnic autobiography was to make a persuasive case for the existence and assimilation into American culture of the "alien" other.
The sixth chapter addresses the notion of racial authenticity in jazz. I trace the evolution of racial politics within jazz from its origins to the present day, using saxophonist Mezz Mezzrow’s 1946 memoir, Really the Blues, as a fulcrum for the discussion: Mezzrow, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, made a conscious decision, following a 1918 epiphany, that "I was going to be a musician, a Negro musician." As the twenties turned to the thirties, critics and musicians began to develop racially essentialist arguments about jazz, such as claiming that it is possible for a listener to detect from the sound of a record whether an instrumentalist is black or white.
During the fifties, when "conformity" was discussed, dissected, and feared, white middle class Americans saw African-American identity as being uniquely "authentic." In the seventh chapter I focus on post-war blackface—not as a performance for the entertainment of an audience, but as something middle-class whites embarked upon as a full-time identity, or as a spiritual quest. I trace this new form of blackface from Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay "The White Negro" to John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1960) to Grace Halsell’s best-selling Soul Sister (1969) to the Symbionese Liberation Army, whose white members appeared in blackface and adopted Swahili names.
Using Danny Santiago’s Famous All Over Town, a novel which represents ethnic imposture as a fundamental element of the American experience, I conclude with the argument that fake ethnic autobiographies both point up the limitations of cultural nationalism and remind us of how strongly racial and ethnic expectations shape the mainstream acceptance of these narratives. While impostor ethnic memoirs may give the lie to "one-drop" and similarly essentialist theories of ethnicity, their positive reception seems to underscore the extent to which many members of the dominant culture subscribe to such ideas.