“We Know We Belong to the Land”: The Theatricality of Assimilation in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!

PMLA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Most
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
United States History ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Rodgers And Hammerstein ◽  
American Society ◽  
Theatrical Strategies ◽  
States History

In the early twentieth century, a period of mass immigration, Jewish assimilation into mainstream American society was largely a theatrical venture. The musical theater, a predominantly Jewish field that portrayed a variety of American experiences, offers powerful illustrations of theatrical strategies of Jewish assimilation. The groundbreaking Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! (1943), created during one of the most anti-Semitic periods in United States history, exemplifies how ethnic outsiders demonized a racial other in an effort to be considered white and thus to be included in the utopian (theatrical) community of America.

scholarly journals What the eyes can’t see

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (35) ◽  
pp. 171-198
Author(s):  
Bruno Franco Medeiros
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
United States History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
States History ◽  
The Ideal

Over the last years, Monteiro Lobato has been rightfully accused by Brazilian and Latin American scholars of expressing racist and eugenic ideas in his body of work. In this article, we take a step further and add to this traditional portrait of his literary production an analysis of the impact of a new set of technological media during the first decades of the twentieth century on his writings. We discuss how these two main issues – i.e., technology and race – played out in Lobato’s historical representation of Brazil’s past and future and the influence that the United States could play in it. We show how a revisionary and racist version of the United States’ history and the ideal of an American technological prosperity in the 1920s inspired one of Lobato’s most contentious novels, the technological dystopia O Presidente Negro, ou O Choque das Raças, published in 1926.    

Reminiscing the past, pointing to the future: immigrant memoirs from the early- twentieth-century United States

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
Anita Jarczok
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Future ◽  
American Society ◽  
The One

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that memoirs, which are usually examined in terms of their connection to the past, are often oriented towards the future. Using immigrant memoirs from the early twentieth century United States, this essay shows that immigrant authors wrote their memoirs with a specific audience in mind, an audience they believed they can instruct. One the one hand, immigrants addressed American citizens, and wanting to gain their sympathy, they described the difficulties of the immigrant life. On the other hand, they wrote for their fellow immigrants to show them that determination pays off and one can have a comfortable, or even successful, life in a new country. Their aim was to envision and promote a better future for the American society, a future based on tolerance and equality.

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