Settler Colonialism and Imagining the Nation's Center as its Right

Abstract

Settler Colonialism and Imagining the Nation's Center as its Right David Roediger (bio) Thirty-odd years ago I interviewed the Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James at his flat in London. I wanted to hear about his time organizing African American and white Depression-era agricultural workers in the Bootheel of southeast Missouri, admittedly a push at the southern boundaries of the Midwest. James had a little to say on that subject but became electric when he turned the conversation to his reading of Hegel with newfound clarity while he lived among Missouri's sharecroppers and experienced them dialectically as being among the most "backwards" U.S. workers and as the very most "advanced." We could use lots more such subtle, hopeful, global, and multiracial situating of the rural Midwest. Britt Halvorson's and Joshua Reno's Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest provides us with entry to such a Midwest, along with a tragic account of the cultural work that goes into preventing us from seeing possibility in the region. Their provocative, compact book contests, especially in its forceful conclusion, tendencies to imagine the region as so monoracial that its whiteness need not even be named. Imagining the Heartland locates the Midwest as in—and sometimes at the head of—a world of heartlands and breadbaskets, especially those located in what the Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra has called the "White Anglosphere."1 Aware of word limits on my meditations regarding the book, I will mostly confine my praises to this paragraph and the next two, though they could be much multiplied. Halvorson and Reno are anthropologists but in Imagining the Heartland they have produced a fiercely interdisciplinary study also at home in art, history, politics, and film and media criticism. The book's theoretical and historical groundings are broad and apt, from Steve Martinot to [End Page 165] Sara Ahmed, from Faranak Miraftab to Cedric Robinson. The engaging writing includes spare but illuminating interludes of personal reflections and informal exchanges in which the authors reflect, for example, on the advantages white authors hold in getting credit for producing critiques of whiteness, even as the truths that they wrest from research are far more available to not-white people whose lives in the region have made whiteness anything but invisible and unremarked. The analysis of the short, midwestern fiction of Langston Hughes is a highlight in this connection. Midrange insights stud Imagining the Heartland: media as a "theatre of whiteness"; home as a place both "left behind" and inhabited; the role of the absurd in depictions of the rural Midwest; the region as a specifically "antislavery heartland" and the rare ability to say something truly new about Henry Ford, traditional values, industrial revolutions, and an anti-Jewish hatred that was at once home-grown and transnational. In thinking about how we might extend the analysis of Imagining the Heartland, and especially in thinking through the peculiarities of settler colonialism in much of the region, I want to follow the good example of Halvorson and Reno in drawing on the personal to open up a topic. When I taught at the University of Illinois in the early 2000s the youngish, Ohioraised and once actually edgy comedian Dave Chappelle appeared at the college's fieldhouse. The tiny local airport into which he would have flown literally emerged from endless miles of corn fields. Reflecting on those fields, Chappelle observed that whenever he saw corn—a pause followed—he thought of racism. The line is an almost perfect illustration of how whiteness is less invisible than pervasive to its potential victims. The way that corn weaves through Imagining the Heartland underlines how some of the resonances of Chappelle's remark reach beyond anti-Black racism. Halvorson and Reno usefully portray the white Midwest as a specifically settler colonial project.2 In analyzing this project the authors emphasize that a central settler justification for dispossession regarded land title as following use of the soil in settled agricultural production. Such a stratagem, for example in Illinois where I grew up and in Kansas where I now live, devolved into refusing to recognize Indigenous agricultural production—often specifically corn cultivation—when and...