law, on the one hand, and on the other, as a tool by which those settlers can co-opt those virtues and eliminate the Natives themselves. In this case, Richards sees the rhetoric of white purity, including Natty Bumppo’s, undermined by repeated suggestions of questionable ancestry and possible miscegenation. A similar kind of reversal takes place in the reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where Richards sees Stowe’s well-known use of blackface tropes accompanied by instances of whiteface imitation such as Tom’s portrait of a blackface George Washington: “Ironically, whereas whites imitated blacks by wearing blackface, Tom is imitating white culture by blackening George Washington” (p. 121). This kind of black resistance to the literal and figurative violence of minstrelsy, in turn, becomes central to the book’s final chapter, which takes up a series of nineteenth-century novels by black Americans that counter the exaggerations of blackface caricature “with their own avenging distortions,” including Martin Delany’s Blake, which answers Uncle Tom’s Cabin by relocating black nationalism from Liberia to the United States (p. 164). Richards’s method sometimes relies on an expansive sense of “performance.” He writes, for example, that “by writing the black body [Washington] Irving engages in a blackface performance, replete with the desires, fears, disguises, and racial burlesque that crystallize in minstrelsy” (p. 73). To point out the similarities between blackface performance and such modes of writing is powerful and persuasive; to say that this kind of writing is blackface performance (to move from analogy to identity) is to unnecessarily minimize or even erase the significance of embodiment and audience. At other times, Richards attends to the importance of medium more precisely, as when he contends that for Cooper’s character Natty Bumppo “[m]etaphoric redface and blackface allow the hunter to turn Native, turn black, and then back again to white, registering the racial privilege of these performance modes, which served as mediums for white personal and national self-discovery” (p. 105). To an important degree, the metaphor is the message. And the message of Imitation Nation is compelling. Writing at the meeting point of historicist study of cross-racial performance and postcolonial theory, Richards finds ways to use the recent intensity and depth of argumentation about the signification of blackface minstrelsy to his advantage. Synthesizing the existing scholarship in clear and engaging prose, Richards takes up the contradictory impulses of blackface, redface, and whiteface. In Imitation Nation, the seeming contradictions resolve into paradoxical but forceful statements of cultural logic. In both historical and literary studies, this book deserves a wide and attentive academic audience.

中文翻译：

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德克萨斯州的奴隶制与自由：法庭上的故事，1821-1871 年

一方面，法律，另一方面，作为一种工具，这些定居者可以利用这些美德并自己消灭土著人。在这种情况下，理查兹认为白人纯洁的言辞，包括纳蒂·邦波的言辞，被反复暗示可疑的血统和可能的混血所破坏。在阅读汤姆叔叔的小屋时也发生了类似的逆转，理查兹看到斯托著名的黑脸比喻使用伴随着白脸模仿的实例，例如汤姆的黑脸乔治华盛顿的肖像：“具有讽刺意味的是，白人模仿黑人穿着黑脸，汤姆正在通过黑化乔治华盛顿来模仿白人文化”（第 121 页）。这种对吟游诗人字面和比喻暴力的黑人抵抗，反过来，成为这本书最后一章的核心，它讲述了美国黑人的一系列 19 世纪小说，这些小说“用他们自己的报复性扭曲”来反驳黑脸漫画的夸张，包括马丁·德拉尼的布莱克，它通过将黑人民族主义从利比里亚迁移到美国来回答汤姆叔叔的小屋（第. 164）。理查兹的方法有时依赖于广泛的“表现”感。例如，他写道，“通过写黑人的身体 [华盛顿] 欧文参与了一场黑脸表演，充满了在吟游诗人中具体化的欲望、恐惧、伪装和种族滑稽表演”（第 73 页）。指出黑脸表演和这种写作方式之间的相似之处是有力而有说服力的；说这种写作是黑脸表演（从类比到身份）是不必要地最小化甚至抹杀了体现和观众的意义。在其他时候，理查兹更准确地关注媒介的重要性，正如他争辩说对于库珀的角色纳蒂·邦波“[m]隐喻的红脸和黑脸允许猎人变成本地人，变成黑色，然后再回到白色，注册这些表演模式的种族特权，作为白人个人和民族自我发现的媒介”（第 105 页）。在一个重要的程度上，隐喻就是信息。模仿国家的信息是引人注目的。在跨种族表现的历史主义研究与后殖民理论的交汇点写作，理查兹想方设法利用最近关于黑脸吟游诗人的意义的争论的强度和深度对他有利。理查兹在清晰而引人入胜的散文中综合了现有的学术，接受了黑脸、红脸和白脸的矛盾冲动。在《模仿民族》中，表面上的矛盾化解为自相矛盾但有力的文化逻辑陈述。在历史和文学研究中，本书值得广泛而专心的学术读者。