Rasmussen proceeds by pointing out that the absenceof indigenous writing was a “European production,

both materially, through destruction, and discur-sively” (29) through definitions tying literacy exclu-

sively to alphabetic forms of inscription. In ChapterOne on “Writing and Colonial Conflict,” she

denounces such possessive investment in alphabetismas a remnant of European colonial politics in the

Americas and argues that expanding the definition ofwriting to its non-alphabetic versions vastly enlargesthe pre- and colonial archive available for study. It also

pries us away from persistent cultural meanings and“dynamics of dominance” (4) arising from European

colonialism, making possible a future imagined arounda more equitable set of political, social, and cultural

relations. Well aware of the critiques of multicultural-ism’s historical obscurantism, Rasmussen argues that a

focus on negotiation and reciprocity, far from deflect-ing attention from the brutal cost of European colo-

nialism, highlights the knowledge of indigenouspeoples and the record of epistemological violenceperpetrated during the conquest and settlement of the

continent.Rasmussen proceeds by “an alternative literacies”

method (120), one attentive to the internal logics ofnon-alphabetic forms of writing extant in pre-Colum-

bian America and to their impact on and survivalwithin the American alphabetic texts. Thus in Chapter

Two, she turns to the historic encounters betweenHaudenosaunee and French diplomats in seventeenth-century North America to explain how the wampum

literacy and the condolence ritual practiced by the for-mer shaped the primary alphabetic record of these

events, the Jesuit Relations. In Chapter Three, sheexamines El primer nueva cor�onica y buen gobierno

(1615), a twelve hundred page epic by Guaman Pomachronicling the conquest of the Inca Empire, and

argues that by incorporating the textual logic of theby-then-banned quipus into the structure of his Span-

ish language chronicle, the Inca writer created a textenacting a reconciliation of two separate epistemolo-gies embedded in two radically different modes of

writing. The story of Poma’s chronicle’s resurfacing inthe early twentieth century serves as a metaphor for

the resurgence of indigenous knowledge and agency incontemporary times. This metaphor of resurfacing

organizes Rasmussen’s last case study as well, an exam-ination of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick through the

prism of the novel’s concluding metaphor: the coffin,covered with the reproductions of Queequeg’s

Marqueasan tattoos, buoying the only survivor of thePequod and ultimately delivering the paradigmatic

American narrative. In this context, Rasmussen’s ownbook hastens and celebrates the resurgence of indige-

nous knowledge and agency—in forms ranging frompolitical to cultural—that mark the late twentieth and

early twenty-first centuries.Rasmussen declares that at stake in her study is “the

vast and varied literary heritage of the Americas” (139)and she opens intriguing avenues for the exploration ofthis bounty. And yet Queequeg’s Coffin deals only

with one of its subsets, the instances of “inter-anima-tion” between European and indigenous literacies.

Surely there have been other occasions of such reci-procity in American history, not the least among them

the trans-indigenous exchanges examined in a recentstudy by Chadwick Allen (Trans-Indigenous: Method-

ologies for Global Native Literary Studies, 2012).Allen’s book focuses on the impact of indigenous non-

alphabetic forms of coding meaning on the indigenousart of the twentieth century, no doubt due to the avail-able archive. But with Rasmussen’s study pointing the

way, it’s easy to imagine such purview extending allthe way back to pre-Columbian times. That would be

a truly American genealogy in every sense, one thatRasmussen’s fascinating study inspires.

–-Monika Siebert

University of Richmond

Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The

Struggle over Segregated Recreation in

AmericaVictoria W. Wolcott. Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Starting in the late nineteenth century, millions ofurban Americans flocked to amusement parks and

pools during their leisure hours. We have all seen thoseimages: young men speeding along in bumper cars;

packs of teenagers roaming the midway; thousands offamilies cooling off in lavish swimming pools. But as

Victoria Wolcott demonstrates in Race, Riots, and

Roller Coasters, this halcyon vision is far from com-plete. Clouded by nostalgia, we have forgotten how

that carefree atmosphere was premised on the exclu-sion of African Americans. Racial segregation—often

enforced by white violence—was the dark side of theso-called golden age of public recreation.

Book reviews 151

Of course, such exclusion did not go unchallenged.Throughout the twentieth century, African Americans

waged a near-constant battle to gain access to thesefacilities. In the course of six exhaustively researched

chapters, Wolcott details how African Americans chal-lenged the recreational color line. Ultimately, she

deepens our understanding of the civil rights move-ment—revealing new spatial, temporal, and methodo-

logical approaches to this well-studied subject.Wolcott situates each of her local case studies

within wider developments in twentieth-century urban

and civil rights history. The Chicago riot of 1919—provoked by white-on-black violence at a segregated

beach—illuminates how segregation was codified andenforced in both the north and south. The richly

textured case of Cincinnati’s Coney Island Amuse-ment Park illustrates how activists, emboldened by the

1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, turnedaway from racial liberalism towards more radical

strategies. Later, examples of direct action (and whiteresistance) at pools in Louisville, beaches in Chicago,and roller-rinks in Detroit speak to the nationwide

movement to claim public space in the early 1960s.And in a long post-1960s denouement, Wolcott exam-

ines how whites abandoned supposedly “unsafe”desegregated amusements for car-dependent theme

parks in the suburbs.Focusing strictly on public amusements is an inge-

nious move. Rather than constraining her scope, itallows Wolcott to expand the usual boundaries of civilrights history. Most provocatively, it helps to under-

score the movement’s spatial dimension: its groundingin the sometimes violent struggle for contested places.

Access to housing, economic opportunity, the vote—they were all essential, too. But as Wolcott argues,

scholars need to recognize African Americans’ pursuitof “physical access to spaces of consumerism and lei-

sure” (50–51). Acknowledging that protests literally“took place” on a contested landscape situates civil

rights within the “broader struggle” over the “controlof and access to urban space” (3).

Moreover, as recreational segregation was enforced

by practice and custom as well as law, her story is nec-essarily national in scope. Wolcott is by no means the

first scholar to expose the canard of southern excep-tionalism: Thomas Sugrue, Joseph Crespino, and

Matthew Lassiter have all helped to complicate thenorth/south civil rights binary. Still, Race, Riots, and

Roller Coasters animates their critiques with dozens ofcase studies drawn from across the United States.

Wolcott also broadens the traditional cast of civilrights actors. Here, commonly overlooked teenagers

and housewives figure prominently in spontaneousstruggles over leisure space. By placing these ordinary

(and often nameless) consumers at the center of theframe, Wolcott shifts our attention away from legal

victories, formal protest, “personality-centered socialmovement history” (237) and an alphabet soup of acro-

nymic civil rights organizations. The fight for recrea-tion, we learn, was informal, grassroots, improvisatory—that is to say, utterly human in scale.

For all of its revelatory power, this book is notwithout its flaws. Wolcott’s themes and narrative

thrust sometimes get lost in a thicket of case studies—the unfortunate consequence of doing social history at

the national level. Concentrating narrowly on spacesrather than on people and personalities allows for some

brilliant historiographical insights, but it does notalways lend itself to absorbing storytelling. And as we

seldom follow any actors (white or black) for verylong, there is a tendency for them to appear static—locked in a totalizing racial dialectic that forecloses any

opportunity for cross-racial accord or understanding.Despite these criticisms, Race, Riots, and Roller

Coasters is a significant contribution to the growingcorpus that attempts to rethink the traditional contours

of the civil rights movement. Uncovering the neglectedstruggle over public amusements, Wolcott deepens our

understanding of the relationship between civil rights,urban history, and popular culture in twentieth-cen-tury America.

–-Dylan S. Gottlieb

Temple University

Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the

Nineteenth-CenturyKyla Wazana Tompkins. New York: New York University

Press, 2012.

Hawthorne’s Jim Crow cookie. Frado’s mouth

propped open in punishment in Harriet Wilson’s Our

Nig. Chloe’s “sauciness” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The

plumpness of Alcott’s Aunt Plenty. A reader of KylaWazana Tompkins’s Racial Indigestion will never seethese images the same way again.

Tompkins provides five case studies that explorethe complex nineteenth-century dynamics that figure

the act of eating in racialized terms. As Tompkins

152 Book reviews