Re-Centering the Center

Abstract

The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland, William Barillas. Ohio University Press, 2006. American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age, Philip Joseph. Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Chicago Dreaming: Midwesterners and the City, 1871–1919, Timothy B. Spears. Chicago University Press, 2005. I began writing this in a coffee shop near Holland, Michigan, the famed destination for Dutch immigration throughout the late nineteenth century and still an important center of Dutch and Christian Reformed denominations. Its prosperity was long based on furniture built from woods harvested from the local forests and the fruits and vegetables processed by the enormous Heinz plant at the head of Lake Macatawa situated nicely between the St. Lawrence and Mississippi shipping lanes. So far, this fits the image of the Midwest as a region as a mostly white, agrarian and industrial, and Protestant national center where ethnic difference is based on which northern European nation one's ancestors left to move here—the narratives we recognize as the raw materials of regional or local color writing during its “ascendency” in the terms of Donald Weber, around a century ago.