Branding Texas: Performing Culture in the Lone Star State. By Leigh Clemons. Austin: University of Texas Press, August 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-292-71807-4, $40.00. 202 pages.
Review by L. Kym Neck, City University of New York
from SJC post 2 (10/13/08)

Leigh Clemons’s Branding Texas provides an intriguing and useful study of the connection between performance and identity, arguing that over time a typical Texan has emerged within the cultural landscape and that he is white, male, larger than life, and probably somewhat out of touch with the larger socio-political world around him. Clemons covers a wide range of performances including memorial sites, museums, battle reenactments, television shows, plays, and even political figures, arguing convincingly that a Lone Star “brand” has emerged that can be packaged, sold, and marketed to the public, whether that public be local, national, or international in scope.
Clemons argues that Texan identity is rooted in Texas revolutionary pedagogy and cannot be separated from either the facts or the myths surrounding the Texas Revolution of 1835-1836, particularly the iconic siege of the Alamo and the site’s resulting physical manifestation as a memorial of honor and sacrifice. She traces the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Texan identity to the Texas Revolution, arguing that the construction of Texas history as it is performed and taught throughout the state has created the image of the rough-hewn revolutionary hero yearning to be free and willing to sacrifice his life in the face of oppression rather than submit.
In one of the book’s strongest through-lines, Clemons demonstrates how nonwhites and women have been largely erased from hegemonic constructions of Texas history and cultural memory. Despite the active participation of Tejanos in the Texas Revolution, and the connected uprisings against Santa Anna throughout Mexico during 1835-1836, within the historical pageantry of the Revolution Mexicans are portrayed almost exclusively as the villains. Continuing into the present, the book examines how Hispanics and other nonwhites remain surprisingly absent in plays and television productions about small-town Texas life. In one of the book’s strongest sections, Clemons identifies three women of varying ethnic backgrounds whose stories are interwoven with that of the Texas Revolution. She deconstructs the different ways in which they are used to further the construction of revolutionary pedagogy within the state. The gendered quality of the “Texan” is further explored in her examination of the performance of “authentic” behavior in recent productions. She deconstructs the play Greater Tuna as a “postmodern nostalgic pastiche” in which the female characters are played by men in drag, essentially “erasing women from the stage and the state” (84).
In contrast to the skillfully crafted arguments presented in Branding Texas, Clemons is somewhat vague about the criteria she employed in the selection of her data. The reader can only assume that she picked the historical sites and the performances she dissects because she believes them to demonstrate or be typical of “Texanness” in some concrete way, but her selection process is not explained. While the sites she examines and the plays and performances she reviews provide good support for her overarching argument, there is little in the way of contrasting viewpoints. Neither female nor non-white playwrights are examined at any length. The final chapter mentions a few alternative voices, but she concludes that in fighting against the stereotypes these performances are only reinforcing them. The primary female presence in the book is supplied through examinations of the Daughters of the Texas Revolution (DRT), and Clemons seems to imply that this organization, despite its exclusively female membership, only serves to reinforce the “Texan cultural identity’s dominant white, male narrative” (117). Although Clemons’s analysis clearly demonstrates the use of the DRT to promote Texan identity as white, it is hard to see it as exclusively promoting maleness, even if one disagrees with the DRT’s particular image of womanhood.Clemons is clearly arguing that the specific Texan identity she is exploring, one rooted in the Texas Revolution, has become the essential cultural identity of the state. In doing so, the book gives primacy to a single regional identity within the state to the exclusion of all others, and it does so with little justification of the data to support this primacy. Identity is not a solid and fixed construction, as Clemons herself has demonstrated, but her arguments do not acknowledge the possibility that there are other self-conscious and self-consciously performed “Texan” identities that overlay or coexist with the one she so clearly defines. Though the introduction mentions that “there are competing spaces and groups which vie for a dominant place” (7) within Texan cultural identity, this argument is not developed further. Instead, Clemons argues that the white maleness of the Texan “brand” is problematic but neither questions whether this “brand” is accepted by other Texans or presents alternative constructions.While Branding Texas is a strong critique of the hegemonic constructions of cultural memory and regional identity, it does not provide sufficient attention to alternative constructions, making it appear as if the identity of the white male Texan from the Revolutionary corridor (roughly Interstate 10 from Houston through San Antonio and south to the Rio Grande) is powerful enough to drown all other voices and claim the state for itself alone, a claim that remains hotly contested by Texans of varying ethnic backgrounds and genders. Any reader with a knowledge of Texas will question the implication that the Rio Grande Valley with its Mexican-American majority, the Texas Panhandle, liberal University-influenced Austin, and urban black Houston, just to mention a few regions within the state, have either utterly failed to present an effective alternative or have declined to press their claim to a Texan identity that includes them.Branding Texas provides a strong examination and critique of the hegemonic constructions of cultural memory and regional identity, grounding the processes of identity construction in the historical pedagogy of the state and examining how a variety of performances, theatrical, physical, and political, have served to create a Lone Star “brand” that is recognizable both to Texans and outsiders. Clemons’s book is a strong contribution to the studies of performance and identity and would be of interest to scholars from a number of disciplines including American and Texas history, anthropology, theatre, cultural studies, and museum studies.