Lafcadio Hearn's America: Ethnographic Sketches and Editorials

Abstract

Lafcadio Hearn's America: Ethnographic Sketches and Editorials. Edited by Simon J. Bronner. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Pp. x + 242, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, bibliography, index. $35.00 cloth) In a world of 24-hour cable news channels, endless talk-radio programs, and high- speed Internet access, the newspaper may be nearly forgotten. Though we curl up with a Sunday edition and a leisurely cup of tea, or hurriedly leaf through a daily while commuting to our jobs, the paper is far from our sole source of news and entertainment. A hundred years ago, however, such a claim would have been unthinkable. Journalists in that Golden Age of Print wrote for audiences that relied almost exclusively on print resources-newspapers and magazines-for understanding their world. While a few journalists of the era used the print medium to expand that world by elucidating the lives of Others, of people outside the mainstream of American life, no journalist achieved that goal more skillfully than Lafcadio Hearn. In the present collection, Simon J. Bronner forefronts Hearn's ethnographically centered journalistic work on the Others of the age. As Bronner shows in the introduction, Hearn's work has been valued for its local color and its literary worth and has been praised for its journalistic merits, but here Bronner makes the further case that much of [Hearn's] journalism was ethnographic because he chew symbolic significance from the communication behavior he directly observed (1). For Bronner, Hearn's ethnographic sketches are panes through which we can see into the lives of Jews, African Americans, Creoles, and other Others during the turbulent times when American was dealing with industrialization, modernization, and immigration-a time when the developing nation needed to challenge traditional practices in order to accommodate unprecedented change. The works collected here date from the years 1873 and 1894, with Cincinnati (America's largest city at the time) and New Orleans as the contextual backdrops. Bronner divides the collection in thirds. The first section, Communities and the 'Under Side' of America, contains engaging pieces detailing the lives of those who lived on the levee in Cincinnati; the Cincinnati Fire Department; the workings of the county jail; and the city's poor. The second section, 'Enormous and Lurid Facts': Language, Folklife, and Culture, consists of interesting, pointed studies of, for example, superstitions in New Orleans; black minstrels; Hearn's own experience with a medium; and-an outstanding comparative piece-Jewish and gentile butchering methods. …