Imagining the Heartland

White Supremacy and the American Midwest

Britt E. Halvorson

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780520387607
• eBook ISBN: 9780520387621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

An overdue examination of the Midwest's long influence on nationalism and white supremacy.

Though many associate racism with the regional legacy of the South, it is the Midwest that has upheld some of the nation’s most deep-seated convictions about the value of whiteness. From Jefferson’s noble farmer to The Wizard of Oz, imagining the Midwest has quietly gone hand-in-hand with imagining whiteness as desirable and virtuous. Since at least the U.S. Civil War, the imagined Midwest has served as a screen or canvas, projecting and absorbing tropes and values of virtuous whiteness and its opposite, white deplorability, with national and global significance. Imagining the Heartland provides a poignant and timely answer to how and why the Midwest has played this role in the American imagination.
 
In Imagining the Heartland, anthropologists Britt Halvorson and Josh Reno argue that there is an unexamined affinity between whiteness, Midwestness, and Americanness, anchored in their shared ordinary and homogenized qualities. These seemingly unremarkable qualities of the Midwest take work; they do not happen by default. Instead, creating successful representations of ordinary Midwestness, in both positive and negative senses, has required cultural expression through media ranging from Henry Ford’s assembly line to Grant Wood’s famous “American Gothic.” Far from being just another region among others, the Midwest is a political and affective logic in racial projects of global white supremacy. Neglecting the Midwest means neglecting the production of white supremacist imaginings at their most banal and at their most influential, their most locally situated and their most globally dispersed.

Index

Abraham, Nabeel, 159

African Americans: artistic representations of, 42, 77–78, 93; citizenship and, 54–55; classism and, 31–32; immigration and, 24, 129, 159–60; industrialism and, 128–29, 133, 139; media representations and, 31–32, 128–29, 133, 139–42, 151–52; nationalism and, 25; political participation of, 55; property ownership and, 50–51, 54–55; regionalism and, 55–56, 133, 141–42; systematic racism against, 24, 42, 54–55, 142, 154–55; urbanization and, 60; whiteness and, 24–25, 31–32, 54–55

agricultural mythology. See pastoralism trope

Alt-Right (2018), 146

alt-right movement, 73–74, 111, 146

American Dream mythology, 86, 157

American Gothic (Wood, 1930), 41–42, 63, 121

American Indians. See Native Americans

American Sniper (2014), 93

Anderson, Benedict, 186n62, 189n9, 192n65

Anishinaabe. See Ojibwe people

Ansley, Frances Lee, 53, 71

anti-lockdown protests, 11–12, 152

anti-racism, 3–4, 18, 42

Aptheker, Herbert, 26

artistic representations: African Americans and, 42, 77–78, 93; capitalism and, 92, 103; Christianity and, 110; colonialism and, 59, 94; fantasy and, 93–95, 100, 103–11, 187n19; films, 5–6, 16, 22, 42, 93–95, 97–98, 100–111, 187n17; heartland trope and, 43–44, 61–62, 93, 100, 107, 109, 121; identity and, 100; immigration and, 102–3, 108–9; insularity and, 71–87, 158; intimate others and, 91–92, 94, 96, 98, 100–103, 105, 108–11; landscapes and, 59; lost children and, 94; masculinity and, 95, 188n31; monsters and, 102, 105–7, 110–11, 187n19; nationalism and, 61, 93–94, 100, 110; Native Americans and, 47, 56; Nazism and, 79–86, 185nn57,60; novels, 13, 29–32, 100–101, 106, 139–40, 160; ordinariness and, 2, 4, 14, 29, 33, 44, 91–92, 96, 101, 106, 110–11, 120; overview of, 30–33, 91–94, 108–11; paintings, 6, 41–44, 47, 52, 75, 121, 158, 187n8, 188n31...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I: Challenging Ideas of the Midwest
• Section II: Regional Mythmaking
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Filmography in Chapter 4
• Appendix B: Bibliography of Media Articles in Chapter 5
• Notes
• References
• Index