Inventing a Heartland

Over one third of my life has been spent in the Midwest—five years of early childhood in Sioux Falls and seventeen years of my adult life in Chicago. I thought I knew the Midwest well. After all, I had considerable personal experience with the region as a resident—my father worked for the Department of Agriculture's Rural Electrification Administration, which explains how my Brooklyn-based family wound up in South Dakota, and I got my second academic job in the region's largest city—and as an occasional tourist. In my four-plus decades in the academy, I absorbed a healthy dose of the substantial historical literature on race, labor, immigration, politics, and industry in the region. Apparently, though, I don't know the Midwest, for the world that is set forth in the study by anthropologists Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno, Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American West, is one that I hardly recognize. I suspect that that world may also come as something of a surprise to others who have lived in the Midwest or, for that matter, have only encountered it through literature, art, film, or television.

But then, Halvorson and Reno are not interested in the "Actual Midwest" (155) of the past or the present. That Midwest, they note in passing, was a complex and heterogeneous region, populated by waves of new migrants and immigrants—African Americans, Germans, Scandinavians, and people of Latin American and Arab descent, among others—working in industries that are rarely depicted, we are told, in art, cinema, and journalism. A vast quantity of scholarly literature—only a miniscule sample of which informs this book—would agree that the populations inhabiting the many states that make up the Midwest were and are extremely diverse. The Midwest of Imaging the Heartland is one that is embodied in myth and culture, characterized by sturdy, virtuous White farmers productively working the land. That widely held stereotype is not only marked by the erasure of peoples of color but—and this is their key point—the manufacture and deployment of Whiteness, as well.

What makes their study about more than just images is the importance they place on how those images function: the region, they explain, is "less a real place or collection of places"—a contention that would probably raise the eyebrows of real human beings who live in "the Midwest"—and "more a screen onto which various conceptions … are projected," rendering it a standard that "allows for normative claims about the state of the nation and fosters projects of structural violence from white supremacy to imperialism and nativism." (2) That's a point that the authors don't allow us to forget. They argue insistently and repetitively that the Midwest has operated as a "screen or stage on which to articulate whiteness and virtue" (4), a "screen or tableau against which" people could "project, test, and reinforce tropes and values of whiteness" (12), a "productive screen and site for the ongoing, dynamic work of white supremacy" (33), a "stage or screen onto which ideas of nation and race are projected and become entwined with imperial and racial projects at a global scale" (34), and a "blank canvas onto which writers, critics, artists, and their far-reaching national audiences struggled over images of Americans and American life." (44) The region also "serves as a stage that facilitates figurations of whiteness and tales of nationhood." (93) The book's core can be reduced to the formula: "The Midwest" → "whiteness" → "White supremacy."

Let's look more closely at the three terms. Why the Midwest? And does it deserve the importance Halvorson and Reno attribute to it? Every region of the country has its stories and is vital in its own way; the Midwest is no exception. But does it have a unique and particularly powerful role in reproducing White supremacy at home and abroad, as the authors maintain? Has the Midwest "swept everyone up in its narrative" and does it serve "as a standard … that allows for normative claims about the state of the nation and fosters projects of structural violence from...