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Abstract
In the Land of Enchantment takes the American Southwest as a site to explore how race, gender, and region produce new geographies of identity in the early twentieth century. The modernist Southwest was mapped by the growth of regional tourism, the extension of statehood to New Mexico and Arizona, the continued negotiation of the U.S.-Mexico border, and a fascination with Native American and Mexican American folkways. At the same time race in the Southwest—and in the U.S. and Mexico at large—was being codified in venues such as legislation and the census. The writers in this dissertation—Mabel Dodge Luhan, Jean Toomer, Josephina Niggli, and John Joseph Mathews—both rely on and contest these codifications as they conceive of different versions of a “new race” made possible by the Southwestern geography. These new racial geographies produce multiethnic modernism's break from the past, and look as strange to current ethnic literary canons as they did at the time of their invention.
Biographical, archival, literary, and visual materials enable an interdisciplinary, historicized, and comparative investigation of these racial geographies. In Mabel Dodge Luhan's four-volume autobiography, published between 1933 and 1937, the Southwest is characterized by the possibilities for interracial desire. Jean Toomer's archived fragments, produced largely in the 1930s and 1940s, find the Southwest, space of the mestizo, to be a more fitting home for his “new American race” than Harlem, space of the New Negro. Josephina Niggli's little-known novel Step Down, Elder Brother (1947) defines “Mexican” as a locational category, as a spatialized rather than a racialized identity. John Joseph Mathews' Sundown (1934) and Talking to the Moon (1945) create global “tribes of men” who exceed the boundaries of the reservation and Native American identity. By locating multiethnic modernism in the Southwest In the Land of Enchantment brings four writers from separate gendered and ethnic literary canons into conversation with one another, offering new ways to envision identities across racial boundaries.
