2005

Richards, Jeffrey H. "James Nelson Barker and the Stage American Native." Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 166-87. Richards focuses a good bit on the impact of Barker's models: "Barker's reading of Smith, filtered and transformed through [George] Colman and innumerable other plays of whites conquering Asians, is that history is less war and negotiation and more sex and theatre, and that the representation of sex on stage, tied to the potential consumption of the Native virgin, should be both coy and conquering." The message of the play is that "the phallic permeates not only love and war, but theatre and imperialism as well." The play is "nothing other than an elaborate fore-play, linking audience desire, authorial infantile sexuality, and imperial history in an endlessly repeated moment in which Native -- and natal -- innocence is teasingly consumed in an erotics of power." Barker "solidifies American identity as of overwhelming whiteness, capable of absorbing color without displaying any palpable makr of difference."