The Overture, 'Recovering Otis,' picks up where Bogdan left off, with Otis Jordan, the Frog Man.

This well researched study is cleverly organized not into an introduction and three parts, but an overture and three acts, followed by an epilogue. takes its place alongside Robert Bogdan's Freak Show and Rosemarie Garland Thomson's Freakery (in which Adams has an essay) as a landmark analysis of the freak show through the lens of disability studies. Reviewed by Lynn Rose (Department of History, Truman State University) Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination.Ĭhicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Read Less about Sideshow U.S.A.Rachel Adams. 'Because of its subject matter, this interesting and complex study is provocative, as well as thought-provoking.'- Virginia Quarterly Review Read More about Sideshow U.S.A. At the beginning of a new century, Adams sees it as a form of living history, a testament to the vibrancy and inventiveness of American popular culture, as well as its capacity for cruelty and injustice. Celebrated by some, the freak show’s recent return is less welcome to those who have traditionally been its victims. Taken up in these works of art and literature, the freak serves as a metaphor for fundamental questions about self and other, identity and difference, and provides a window onto a once vital form of popular culture.Īdams’s study concludes with a revealing look at the revival of the freak show as live performance in the late 1980s and the 1990s.

With this history in mind, Adams turns from live entertainment to more mediated forms of cultural expression: the films of Tod Browning, the photography of Diane Arbus, the criticism of Leslie Fiedler, and the fiction Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, and Katherine Dunn.

begins by revisiting the terror and fascination the original freak shows provided for their audiences, as well as exploring the motivations of those who sought fame and profit in the business of human exhibition. Empty of any inherent meaning, the freak’s body becomes a stage for playing out some of the twentieth century’s most pressing social and political concerns, from debates about race, empire, and immigration, to anxiety about gender, and controversies over taste and public standards of decency. Freak shows, she contends, have survived because of their capacity for reinvention. But as Rachel Adams reveals in Sideshow U.S.A., images of the freak show, with its combination of the grotesque, the horrific, and the amusing, stubbornly reappeared in literature and the arts. A staple of American popular culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the freak show seemed to vanish after the Second World War.

Sideshow U.S.A. by Rachel Adams