Emily Burns

My dissertation argued that an international cultural discourse mythologizing American innocence strongly informed social and artistic practice in the late nineteenth century. I suggested that the wide community of Americans in fin-de-siècle France constructed social and artistic innocence against notions of French bohemian lifestyle. These claims to innocence were marked by sophisticated and pointed posturing; the “art of being naïf,” as Kant called it, is characterized by the paradox that any claim to innocence belies its very definition.

My postdoctoral work will develop the third chapter of my dissertation, “The Native as Naïve: Playing Indian in France,” into a book on the exportation of the culture of the American West to France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book will consider the appropriation of stereotypes of the American Indian by French artists and white American artists in Paris as a performance of naïveté. Real and imagined American Indians were prevalent in Paris, from the Sioux members of the Buffalo Bill Wild West to the numerous American artists who costumed themselves as Indians while studying in France. The cowboy, the other main figure from the American West exported to France, also appeared as a naïve character. More than merely vivified characters from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, displays of the Indian and the cowboy in Paris constructed uniquely “American” authenticities for an international audience. These parodied performances attempted to ameliorate the Gallicization of American art, exhibited a version of an imperialist nostalgia for a lost American West, and paradoxically sought to tame bohemian Paris in its next phase of cultural imperialism.