Main Street and Empire: The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization by Ryan Poll (review)

If any setting seems removed from the transnational metropolis of modernity, it is Main Street, USA, a fantasy locale depicted by Walt Disney, Norman Rockwell, and other nostalgic visionaries. The archetype ranges in size and temperament from Grover’s Corners, to Winesburg, Ohio, to Bedford Falls, but it is usually comprised of a town square or village green, a row of mom-and-pop storefronts, and a folksy cast of characters. For decades, jeremiads have lamented the demise of a romanticized Main Street economy as it is ostensibly crushed by an industrialized WalMart behemoth. We have all heard the polarizing Wall Street-vs-Main Street or global-vs-local rhetoric in the mainstream media.

Much work in American Studies has demonstrated the centrality of iconic small towns in civic and national culture, where Main Street often exemplifies an idealized and innocent stable community. Main Street and Empire similarly posits that the small town symbolizes the past, while the city symbolizes modernity. Ryan Poll’s work is unique in arguing that the small town trope is actually a complex ideological form, pivotal to the development of U.S. imperialism and intercontinental capitalism. Small town America, to Poll, is a source of national identity that is used as an abstract in dominant narratives. Main Street has long been a signifier of national values, because, even as the United States’ power grew, the country refused to recognize itself as an empire.

Main Street and Empire focuses on the small town’s ideological history as an island form; this aspect of American exceptionalism facilitated obliviousness to the nation’s imperialist personality. The book is grounded in Marxist literary and cultural criticism. It alleges that a “small-town episteme” in the prevailing small town canon is what blinds small-town subjects to a globalizing capitalist modernity. One strength is Poll’s willingness to look beyond U.S. borders and analyze the small town in an international context. The book’s chapters evaluate literature, political discourse, sociological studies, and physical small towns, including Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (1920), Sarah Palin’s campaign speeches, Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown (1959), and Celebration, Florida. Greater attention to photography, paintings, and other visual representations of Main Street would strengthen the book; however, the author’s métier is literary analysis, and treatment of exemplary texts is certainly sufficient for the author to support his assertions.

One particularly intriguing chapter uses Philip K. Dick’s 1959 dystopian novel Time Out of Joint to exhibit how the governing small town is mobilized for an expanding empire. Even in the era of postmodernism, Main Street as a geographic imaginary remains relevant to U.S. identity. Main Street and Empire is a solid addition to the cadre of work in American Studies that grapples with the intersections between landscapes, globalization, imperialism, “national character,” literature, history, and cultural representations. The canonical small town may be a myth, but it is not, as is often asserted, an obsolete one.