By way of a case study, Paul Kane's Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America (1859), this course will examine how race and class were used to produce a colonial stereotype for Victorian popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in the pre-Civil War United States. That stereotype-the Red Man-fed the contemporary literary and art world's voracious appetite for representations of wilderness North America. In the course of the production and dissemination of this type of the Other, the image of the wilderness West, including Edmonton, was also being carefully constructed along lines of race, class, and gender.
A century and a half ago, artist/traveller Paul Kane (1810-1871), an Irish-born Torontonian, travelled from eastern Canada to Vancouver Island and back. His route lay through territory then controlled by the Hudson's Bay Company, the largest monopoly ever to exist in North America; moreover, Kane travelled almost exclusively with HBC brigades. Thus, corporate imperialism played a vital role in how Kane experienced the people and places of western North America. It also bore significantly on the publication of Wanderings of an Artist (1859), which is attributed to Kane but which was written for him, probably by his English publishers. This text provides an extremely revealing case by which to study the stereotype of the Red Man. The cultural analysis of its production by the English publisher, Longman's, involves the examination of the surviving field notes which Kane did himself write, and the surviving draft manuscript, which is not written principally in his hand but which he corrected, and on which the book was very loosely based. Similarly, a comparison of Kane's many field sketches with the stylized studio oil paintings made of "Noble Savages" by him once he returned to Toronto yields important information about the metamorphosis of stereotypes in imperial/colonial economies.
Both the narrative and visual texts of Kane's oeuvre-a highly representative one-will be studied in the light both of the works of his contemporaries such as George Catlin, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Margaret Fuller, and John Mix Stanley, and of some current theories of representation (for example, Stelio Cro, The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom, Vincent Crapanzano Hermes' Dilemma & Hamlet's Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation) of colonialism (for example, Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian), and of wilderness (William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place).