Beneath the Heartland Imaginary: An Interview with Alyosha Goldstein by Sarah Kanouse (original) (raw)

The “heartland” imaginary, especially as it is attached to something called the Midwest, evokes the idea of an authentic national essence at the core of the United States. It serves to cohere the idea of bounded national interiority, as well as envisioning a place that is distinct from the coasts and borders and, as such, is somehow more purely American, less corrupted with outside foreign influence. This goes hand in hand with this notion of a coherent, self-evident geopolitical totality of the United States that erases the legacies of colonization, the various forms of imperial overlay that make up a more fractured, contested, and fluid sense of place and belonging. It denies any history and ongoing present of colonization, of the ways in which everything about the so-called United States has been dependent upon violent conquests, the taking of lands, and the traffic in people and exploitation of their labor. So, the idea of the “heartland” really is a way to evoke something that is pure and apart, a more homogenous, less embattled place. This fantasy supposedly justifies what must be defended from the standpoint of white nationalism and such slogans as “we will not be replaced” (the coming white minority of the “great replacement”) that itself seeks to erase and replace in order to cast white Americans as under siege. Yet the peoples most extensively targeted by violence, such as in the 1832 Black Hawk War, removal policies and ongoing Native dispossession in the area, lynching of people of color in the region, attacks against transnational migrants, and unrelenting antiblack police violence find no place in the heartland imaginary.