Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest by Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno (review)

Abstract

I Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest, anthropologists Britt Halvorson and Joshua Reno undertake the difficult work of historicizing popular perceptions of the American Midwest in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. This presents a difficult task because, as the authors argue, there may be no swath of the country considered more ordinary and banal. And yet, despite this seeming innocence, various tropes of the region have perpetuated ideals of whiteness for centuries. Framed principally as a critical study of region, Imagining the Heartland consists of five chapters that address how the Midwest has operated as a “screen” or “stage” through which ideologies of whiteness have been reinforced at various periods of United States history (4). They consistently argue that region, like territory, is not so much a natural property of a place as it is a normative claim about who belongs (50, 152). Beyond the current caricature of the forgotten, working-class, white voter of the Trump era, they ask why this, along with other popular perceptions of the Heartland have heightened significance at the historical moment they do (23-24). The answer they offer lies in the qualities so often associated with the Midwest as banal, average, a sort of national middle. Yet, to counteract claims that the Trump era is unprecedented in its conflation of whiteness and the Midwest, Halvorson and Reno’s analyze a vast set of materials that span over a century and a half. Historical junctures that feature prominently throughout the text include native dispossession in the 19th