Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest

The Midwest has long had a significant impact on nationalism and white supremacy, upholding deep-seated convictions about the value of whiteness. Imagining the Heartland provides an answer to how and why the Midwest has played this role in the American imagination, arguing that whiteness, Midwestness, and Americanness are intertwined due to their shared ordinary and homogenized qualities. Neglecting the Midwest means neglecting the production of white supremacist imaginings at their most banal and influential.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 234 pages
Publication date: 21 June 2022
Publisher: University of California Press

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.

Weight: 328g
Dimension: 229 x 152 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520387614