Emily C Burns Transnational Frontiers sku-397984003

Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France is an illustrated hardcover by Emily C Burns in the Native American History Books category, sku-397984003. It is part of The Charles M. Russell Center Series on Art and Photography of the American West, series #29. Burns examines how images of the American West moved between the United States and France from 1865 to 1915.

After Buffalo Bill’s Wild West traveled to Paris in 1889, the New York Times reported that the show would be “managed to suit French ideas.” Burns considers where those ideas came from and how they shaped French views of cowboys and Native Americans during the Gilded Age.

She describes how American artists, writers and tourists carried a frontier narrative that assumed manifest destiny to France, while Native American performers in traveling shows challenged it. French artists also used western imagery: at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, cowboy sculptures presented an adventurous West, while portraits on vases portrayed American Indians as frozen in primitivity.

The book also examines how Lakota performers navigated assimilation politics and sought opportunities abroad, and how French views of the West informed debates about American identity, primitivism, masculinity and colonialism.