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Invisible Natives
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Book Presentation:
This incisive, provocative, and wide-ranging book casts a critical eye on the representation of Native Americans in the Western film since the genre's beginnings. Armando Jos Prats shows the ways in which film reflects cultural transformations in the course of America's historical encounter with "the Indian." He also explores the relation between the myth of conquest and American history. Among the films he discusses at length are Northwest Passage, Stagecoach, The Searchers, Hombre, Hondo, Ulzana's Raid, The Last of the Mohicans, and Dances With Wolves.Throughout, Prats emphasizes the irony that the Western seems to be able to represent Native Americans only by rendering them absent. In addition, he points out that Native Americans who appear in Westerns are almost always male; Native women rarely figure into the plot, and are often portrayed by white women rendered "Indian" by narrative necessity. Invisible Natives offers an intriguing view of the possibilities and consequences--as well as the historical sources and cultural origins--of the Western's strategies for evading the actual portrayal of Native Americans.
About the Author:
Armando José Prats is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of The Autonomous Image: Cinematic Narration and Humanism.
Press Reviews:
Prats makes a serious addition to that growing body of literature.... Prats's book considers a wide variety of films—from classic silents like 'The Covered Wagon' to revisionist westerns of the 1990s like 'Dances with Wolves' and 'Geronimo'—taking sufficient time to offer careful, nuanced readings.
Choice
When we do see Native Americans in Hollywood Westerns, Prats suggests that they are often mute (or if they do communicate, do so in grunts and hand gestures), nameless, sometimes even faceless. They are defined by their otherness, and their otherness is itself defined by absence—absence of a voice, of a name, of a face.... Invisible Natives will be appreciated by scholars interested in representations of Native Americans, the American Frontier, and by all those who watched Saturday matinees as a child.
Great Plains Quarterly
Armando José Prats's Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western weaves together the texts of the western genre, from classic to revisionist, to identify the male 'native other' and his role in the mythology of the American West. Prats writes poetically about the ignominious and savage effect of manifest destiny as it was reshaped by Western mythology into heroism and an excuse for American nationalism. Prats' examination of the Western illuminates the mythological status of the Native American, and shows how thewhite hero preempts the role of the Native. Prats' work is painstaking, convincing and strong. This book is a marvelous addition to both cultural and genre studies.
Suzanne Regan, California State University
In Invisible Natives, Armando José Prats argues that the formula western narrates the myth of conquest, a powerful mythology of triumphalist nationhood, by marginalizing the presence of Indians or by having white characters assume native identities and adopt native perspectives, thereby replacing indigenous others with cinematic facsimiles.
Blake Allmendinger, American Literature, December 2003
Invisible Natives is conceptually original, theoretically informed, and beautifully written. Armando José Prats is equally skilled in textual and visual analysis; his dazzling close readings of particular films are richly informed by subtle attention to film techniques and narrative structure.
Susan Scheckel, State University of New York, Stony Brook
Invisible Natives is the most complete account, and the most sophisticated analysis to date, of the portrayal of Native Americans in Hollywood fiction films. Armando José Prats has a thorough understanding of the cultural and political context from which individual film treatments emerge; and his analysis of particular films does full justice to the individuality of each work. This is an indispensable book for scholars of American film and of American culture in general.
Richard Slotkin, Olin Professor of American Studies, Wesleyan University
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