Richardson's photograph creates this notion of Americanness through the simple, yet very effective strategy of doubling. The photograph cap-tures various items from a vast archive of cultural concepts, symbols, and myths that are commonly associated with American culture and doubles them by pairing each of these items with a counterpart. The cowboy, the embodiment of American masculinity, meets his alter ego, the astronaut; the 'original' frontier, the vast territory of the West, collides with the 'final' frontier, the indefinite reaches of space; the asphalt highways and (empty) automobiles of a tamed civilization impenetrate the wilderness of untouched nature in the imaginings of American landscape. In his frontis-piece, Richardson assembles mythical figures and concepts that are deeply engrained in American culture and that re-surface again and again in liter-ature, film, music, paintings, photography, advertising, and other cultural products, which lets these notions appear to be 'typically' and 'naturally' American. However, as Judith Davidov reminds us, the crucial point here is that 'everything-the landscape before us and the moonscape on the screen, western hero and space explorer, the artwork itself-is a construc-tion, or what Baudrillard calls a simulacrum' (1998, 296-297; italics in the original). In other words, the Americanness of this piece is not intrinsic to the cultural concepts used by Richardson, but is carefully constructed through a process of performative doubling.

Baudrillard defines the simulacrum as an image that 'bears no relation to any reality whatsoever' and has become a truth in its own right (1999, 6). This definition can certainly be applied to Richardson's frontispiece: it depicts a version of America that does not correlate with the political, social, and economic 'realities' of the United States. Rather, it is a repre-sentation of a very specific imagining of American culture which is grounded in an elaborate system of stock concepts and images, whose manifestations in actual cultural products may vary and are contingent on the context in which they appear. However, the basic structure of these concepts essentially remains the same. What is more, it is precisely the transformability of these images/concepts and their ability to adapt to the course of time that contributes to their persistence in American culture. Their continued presence is so strong that it appears as if they indeed re-flected a 'reality' when, in fact, they represent an imaginary version of 'America.' Most crucially, it is through performance, through reiteration, through 'a stylized repetition of acts' (Butler 1990, 179) that specific stock concepts, such as the individual items depicted in Richardson's frontis-piece, have come to signify American culture, or Americanness.

I think that Richardson's visual representation of an imaginary America is an excellent example to illustrate how the cultural imaginary and performance work together in constructing Americanness, and how they sustain each other in the process. As an archive of images, affects, and desires that stimulate imaginings of 'America,' the cultural imaginary depends on constant reiteration, otherwise it could not reach a degree of institutionalization. Any kind of performance, on the other hand, needs to be embedded in a larger set of established performances, as every replication must be based on something that had been there before. Americanness emerges in the interplay of the cultural imaginary and performance, and is institut