Main Street and Empire: The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization 9780813552941

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Main Street and Empire

Main Street and Empire The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization

ryan poll

Rutgers University Press new brunswick, new jersey, and london

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Poll, Ryan, 1975– Main street and empire : the fictional small town in the age of globalization / Ryan Poll. p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8135-5289-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8135-5290-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8135-5294-1 (e-book) 1. American literature—History and criticism. literature.

3. City and town life in literature.

States. 5. Literature and globalization.

2. Cities and towns in

4. Cities and towns—United

I. Title.

PS169.C57P65 2012 810.9'355—dc23 2011035598 Copyright © 2012 by Ryan Poll All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Manufactured in the United States of America

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

To Dylan, who came into my life while I was finishing my final chapter: May you always remember that the world is never fixed; that understanding should supersede judgment; that imagination is central to all thinking; that social justice is a fundamental value; and that you make a difference. And one more thing: always remember that I love you.

It is not by chance that I consider the township first. The township is the only association so well rooted in nature that wherever men assemble it forms itself. alexis de tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)

The history of a nation is only a history of its villages written large. woodrow wilson, Mere Literature (1896)

This is America—a town of a few thousand. . . . The town is, in our tale, called “Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.” But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois. . . . sinclair lewis, Main Street (1920)

You’ve Been Here Before. stephen king, Needful Things (1991)

The American small town . . . has vanished. fredric jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

Contents

1

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: The Small Town as a Modern Nation Form

1

Sacred Islands in Modernity: The Prehistory of the Dominant Small Town

21

An Unfinished Revolution: “The Revolt from the Village” Reconsidered

37

3

Mapping the Modern Small Town: A Circular Imaginary

53

4

A New Machine in the Small-Town Garden: Periodizing an Automodernity

70

The Formation of a U.S. Fascist Aesthetics; or, Welcome to Main Street

87

2

5 6 7 8

Staging and Archiving the Nation: Pedagogical Theater, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and U.S. Imperialism

101

“One Happy World”: The Postmodern Small Town and the Small-Town Postmodern

115

Global Belonging: The Small Town as the World’s Home

131

Afterword: The Global Village

159

Notes

167

Bibliography

191

Index

217

Acknowledgments

Thinking and writing are social processes, and I’ve been blessed to have so much individual and institutional support over the many years this project has developed. First and foremost, I want to thank Scott Shershow for his intellectual rigor, unlimited patience, and guiding hand. Colin Milburn, Richè Richardson, and Evan Watkins believed in this project from the onset and provided invaluable comments on multiple drafts and revisions. A special thank you to Steven Blevins, Mindi McMann, and Vanita Reddy for the endless conversations, suggestions, and encouragement. The shape of this project and the critical issues broached are indebted to the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College and, in particular, to the genius and generosity of Donald Pease. Thank you to everyone at Rutgers University Press. May all writers and scholars be so fortunate to work with a press that cares so much about the author, about the work, and about intellectual integrity. I want to especially thank my editor, Katie Keeran, who supported this project unconditionally and was instrumental in making it sharper and stronger at every turn. A special thank you to Tim Roberts for all of his excellent editorial and intellectual work. Judith Hoover, my fantastic copy editor, provided innumerable suggestions that made this study richer in style and substance. The insights, passion, organization, and precision of Mary Newberry, my indexer, are peerless. Thank you to all the anonymous readers for providing invaluable, detailed, and extensive feedback that pushed my thinking even more. Ariel Weygandt, thank you for formatting this document and for everything else.

xii / acknowledgments

I am grateful for my current institutional home at Northeastern Illinois University and, in particular, to the dynamic, progressive English Department; daily I am enriched by my students and my colleagues. This project progressed due to the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual community provided by Michael Armato, Tim Barnett, Debra Bruce, Marcia Buell, Vicki Byard, Chielozono Eze, Laurie Fuller, Emily Garcia, Brad Greenburg, Tom Hoberg, Julie Kim, David Leaman, Shahrzad Mahootian, Wamucii Njogu, Kris Over, Tim Scherman, Chris Schroeder, Toni Scott, Mary Thill, Eli Toynton, and Darlene Queen. In particular I want to thank Tim Libretti for being the best chair and the best mentor; every day he inspires me with his towering intellect, unwavering dedication, utopian imagination, and hospitable heart. A special thank you to my 2008 graduate class on the American small town and globalization that helped me clarify my project and realize its possible futures: Negin Ahmadi, Jeff Barry, Lisa Denapoli, Jacaro Jones, Tracy Kellam, Justin Kramer, Angela Lamondi, and Kathleen Rosario. This project was enriched by the conversations, energy, and passion of the best undergraduates anywhere: Adele Benteler, Rachel Brown, Cassandra Buchholz, Kristina Garcia, Lakeesha Harris, Patricia Dalinis, Aaron Leiva, Sherilyn Maddex, Brian Patrick, Kenn Sackett, John Valles, Janean Watkins, and so many more. To my family—all the Polls, Rushes, Kesselmans, Martons, Wassermans, Slutzkys, Karters, and Teplitskys—you provide a world of unending love and laughter. Mom, Dad, Reid, Marissa, Bubbie, and Zaddie: thank you for pushing me to follow my dreams, for encouraging me at every step of the way, for believing in me when I didn’t always believe in myself, and for loving me so unconditionally that I feel blessed every day. The only reason I can disappear into libraries for long stretches of time is because I know each of you is always on the other side. Grandma and Grandpa, I know you’re there too. And finally, none of this would be possible without my best friend (who also happens to be my wife). Ally, thank you for taking this journey with me and for enabling this journey to happen. Every day, you teach me how to listen more attentively, to imagine more boldly, to believe more faithfully, to love more recklessly, to care more profoundly, and to always, always laugh. Without you, nothing.

Main Street and Empire

Introduction: The Small Town as a Modern Nation Form

From 2006 to 2008 the Smithsonian National Museum of American History closed its doors to the public in order to undergo a two-year renovation. The museum’s director, Dr. Brent D. Glass, identified this renovation as a “major transformation” (“Opening Remarks”). A significant portion of the world’s third busiest museum removed itself from the public eye in order to rethink its state-sanctioned symbols and narratives within the recognized context of globalization (Trescott). During the years in which the Smithsonian temporarily closed, globalization signified, among other things, an aggressively expanding, uneven, and unequal world market and the United States conducting an open-ended global war on terror. When the museum announced that it would transform itself, it made sense to believe that this would be a sobering, reflective rethinking of the U.S. position within a changing, transnational context. Glass discussed the museum’s renovations in May 2006 at the international conference “Immigration, Integration, and Identity: Managing Diverse Societies in Europe and the U.S.”1 The conference’s organizing theme, evident by its title, is that the hegemonic West—Europe and the United States in particular—is losing its identity and perhaps becoming obsolete. In the conference’s three-part title, “immigration” is posited as a threat to “identity,” which must be reconciled by the middle term, “integration.” Glass, the conference’s opening speaker, foregrounds the need to forge a singular, unified national identity in a globalizing modernity of mass migration, cultural pluralism, and ethnic diversity. Glass explains that the “central challenge” in rethinking the museum’s design

2 / introduction

was to “construct a national narrative in a diverse and fragmented society.” The multiple, heterogeneous narratives that constitute the nation must be transformed, Glass insists, into a single, cohesive “national narrative” (“Opening Remarks”).2 According to Glass, the ability to construct a national narrative mandates a shared, common space; that space, he insinuates, is the American small town. The museum’s new entrance space is identified as the small town’s center, the town square.3 Glass explains that a town square is “an important symbol of community” and “integration.” The town square, similar to Main Street, functions as a synecdoche for the small town, and the small town is situated as a symbolic solution to the U.S. identity crisis in the twenty-first century; it is the small town that can symbolically “integrate,” order, and consolidate the nation in the current tumultuous chapter of global capitalism. Moreover the small town functions as a space of interpellation. Glass predicts that the town square will be used as a “performance space . . . for special events such as naturalization ceremonies” (“Opening Remarks”). The small town is figured as a space of national conversion that transforms foreign subjects and narratives into national subjects and narratives. The Smithsonian’s turn toward the small town is presented as a return to a familiar, knowable, recognizable space. The small town is posited as a stable, secure cultural referent that is not itself subject to history, but rather a geographic imaginary outside of history that becomes the ground of possibility for the nation’s history.4 The small town that the Smithsonian discursively uses to imagine and fix the nation’s identity is not, of course, a real, material place. Rather it is an abstract, ahistorical national imaginary. The small town has become a national icon that widely circulates in literary, cultural, and political discourses as an authentic American space and signifier. The geographer and historian Richard V. Francaviglia writes that the small town is “one of America’s cherished images” (Main Street Revisited xviii); the urban scholar Witold Rybczynksi writes, “The small town occupies an iconic position in American popular culture” (20); the American studies and literature scholar Wayne Franklin claims that the small town “exists not so much on the map as in our hearts and minds” (“Foreword” xiii);5 and the literature scholar Anthony Channell Hilfer claims that the small town is a “synecdoche and metaphor” for the nation (4). In the closing decade of the twentieth century, the film scholar and critic Emanuel Levy wrote that small towns “have featured so prominently in American culture that they have become a deeply

introduction / 3

rooted symbol in the country’s collective consciousness” (Small Town America 15). Thus in popular discourses the small town is assumed to be a nationally shared, familiar, and obvious space and signifier. However, I want to insist that there is nothing obvious about the small town.6 Although the small town is a national icon, there are surprisingly few studies that analyze its ideological centrality to the U.S. identity and imagination.7 Main Street and Empire addresses this critical need and brings together a wide range of texts, from Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street to Sarah Palin’s use of Main Street, to study how the small town is used to imagine and reproduce the nation throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. By recognizing the dominant small town as an ideological nation form rather than a real, material place and practice, Main Street and Empire foregrounds a critical paradigm that studies how the small town is used to shape and structure national narratives, epistemologies, and values. The dominant small town, I argue, has become a central form of U.S. exceptionalism that imagines the nation as an autonomous, contained, and innocent island community. What is at stake in this project is that despite its appearance as an island imaginary, the dominant small town proves central to the development of the U.S. empire and to the development of global capitalism.

The Dying Small Town in Modernity: A U.S. Master Narrative My claim that the small town remains ideologically central to the U.S. identity and imagination contrasts with a modern U.S. master narrative. In many contemporary discourses, the small town continues to signify an idealized national community, but it is frequently portrayed as a dying community in a globalizing modernity. Consider, for example, a book on the economic recession that began in 2008, Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010). The dust jacket reads, “Make no mistake, Jimmy Stewart, the honest, trustworthy banker (a.k.a. George Bailey) in It’s a Wonderful Life, is dead. And so is his small-town, virtuous bank—Bailey Savings and Loan. Today, a very different financial movie, It’s a Horrible Mess, is playing on Main Street. The economic horror show—produced by Wall Street and directed by Congress—is no Christmas story, but a tale of pervasive and massive financial malfeasance that has devastated the lives of millions of people around the globe.” Jimmy Stewart Is Dead opens with the recognition that the popular small town, exemplified by Frank Capra’s fictional town of Bedford Falls, has been destroyed, in large part, by

4 / introduction

Wall Street working in concert with the federal government. The death of the small town signifies the end of one era—what might be called a Main Street era—and the beginning of a new era: global capitalism. In this implied narrative, the small town is figured as a space of innocence and containment that is incompatible with this new era of global market relations. As the passage just quoted suggests, the death of the small town is not the death of a material community, but the death of a romanticized, national imaginary. Can this death-of-the-small-town narrative be the birth of a critical, theoretical turn in popular U.S. discourses? Is the nation moving away from containing symbols and imaginaries such as the small town and now engaging with the complexities and contradictions of a globalizing capitalist modernity? Does the death of the small town demarcate a critical awakening of the United States’ responsibilities for and to the conditions of globalization? We must not be too hasty in embracing this potential theoretical turn: the dominant small town, it turns out, is always dying in modernity. Consider, for example, the following examples: in 2003 three scholars from the diverse disciplines of history, English, and rural and regional studies declared that the small town “can be pronounced stone dead” (Davies et al. 4);8 in 1999 the historian Amy S. Greenberg wrote, “The small town once occupied a central place in American culture, society, and politics, but is largely a thing of the past” (267); in 1998 the historian Richard Davies published Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America; in 1994 the photographer David Plowden released Small Town America, a collection of black-and-white photographs that features deteriorating and decaying small towns across the United States, an anachronistic aesthetics that foregrounds the small town’s pastness; Plowden’s aesthetic choice echoes the filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich’s similar decision to use black and white in his 1971 cinematic adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s 1966 novel about a dying small town, The Last Picture Show; in 1991 the film critic Emanuel Levy offered an overview of twentieth-century American movies set in small towns—the book’s thesis is encapsulated by its title, Small-Town America in Film: The Decline and Fall of Community; and in 1990 the New York Times declared that the nation’s small towns were becoming “museum pieces” (D. Johnson). Going further back, in 1964 Wallace Stegner penned the introduction to the anthology A Vanishing America: The Life and Times of The Small Town, writing, “We can hardly be human without hating the megalopolitan sprawl that has overrun our authentic towns” (10). And in the previous decade

introduction / 5

Max Lerner, a prolific American historian, also pronounced the small town a dying space. Embedded within Lerner’s massive and influential history America as a Civilization: Life and Thought in the United States Today (1957) is the section “The Decline of the Small Town.” In 1947, ten years prior to Lerner’s observations, the best-selling magazine Collier’s reported on the “decline and decay” of small towns across the United States (cited in Davies et al. 260). These declarations of the small town’s death perform a movement similar to the perpetually moving “escalator” that begins Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973). Williams demonstrates that the disappearing rural has become a formula throughout modern English history (9–12).9 In modernity, he argues, every generation narrates the rural as a golden age that is killed by recent history. This same formula can be applied to the small town: throughout modernity the small town is narrated as an idealized social form killed by recent history. In fact in a U.S. context, one of the principal means of periodizing the emergence of modernity is the declared demise of the small town. The small town is always dying in modernity, and yet it never does die. This is because the dominant small town has become an abstract, deracinated, ideological form. To claim that the dominant small town is an ideological form might suggest a project that critiques and contrasts ideological small towns with historical, material small towns. However, I want to resist this potential project. Of course there are “real” small towns, but the dominant small town—the one that “exists not so much on the map as in our hearts and minds” (Franklin xiii)—is a reified national imaginary that is pervasive throughout U.S. literary and cultural production. Main Street and Empire does not seek to recover “real” small towns. Instead the project recognizes and analyzes the dominant small town as a complex ideological form that frames and shapes the U.S. identity and imagination throughout modernity. Ideological forms are not static; rather they are historical entities. Main Street and Empire historicizes the dominant small town in the age of a globalizing modernity. The dominant small town, I demonstrate, is a contradictory form. On the one hand, it underwrites the globalization of the U.S. empire and the globalization of capitalism. Yet on the other hand, it functions as a prominent form of U.S. exceptionalism by staging the United States as an innocent, contained island community.

6 / introduction

The Small Town as a Modern Nation Form Although the small town circulates as a national, common-sense signifier, my project turns the small town into a question. What makes a space—whether in literature, a film, or a presidential speech—legible as a small town, and conversely, what makes a space lose its legibility as a small town? Although some social scientists have used a population of 2,499 (and other numbers) as an objective measure to define the small town, there is something problematic and unsatisfactory about this methodology.10 As Anthony Channell Hilfer facetiously writes, with the addition of a single body a small town of 2,499 becomes “magically urbanized” (5). The dominant small town cannot be defined and secured by quantitative means; it is an ideological form that becomes legible by means of literary and cultural discourses.11 One of the key markers of the dominant small town’s identity is that it is the nation’s home.12 Therefore what is at stake in the question of the dominant small town’s legibility is the question of the nation’s legibility. This logic is exemplified by the name of Disney’s theme-park small town, Main Street, U.S.A. As its name suggests, Main Street, U.S.A. is a fantasy about the nation.13 According to this fantasy, the small town is first and foremost a national space. The term “small town” was invented to demarcate and name a uniquely U.S. geographic imaginary, in contrast to the “village,” which was popularly understood as an English geographic imaginary (Patton 2).14 In 1939, a year after the initial production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Ima Honaker Herron authored the first survey of the literary American small town. Although her emphasis is on literature, she begins her survey by discussing real, material small towns. Herron writes that the American small town has its material and cultural origins in the English village, which was initially “transplanted” to the new colony. However, as the United States emerged as an independent and sovereign nationstate, villages became referred to as “small towns” (The Small Town xiv). This discursive transformation from the “village” to the “small town” is an ideological operation that produces a unique U.S. space, or rather a space of U.S. exceptionalism. Instead of a relational space that must be understood within an expanding capitalist and colonial modernity, the small town is figured as an idealized, autonomous national community. The American small town, Herron writes, represents a “truly . . . American product” (xiv). This “American product,” I contend, is largely a literary invention that refuses to stay contained by the literary.

introduction / 7

Twenty years after publishing The Small Town in American Literature, Herron wrote an article that updated her literary analysis and included more contemporary works that center on the small town, such as Grace Metalious’s 1956 novel Peyton Place. The article repeats the claim of her previous work, but her diction slightly alters in a revealing manner. Similar to her 1939 study, Herron differentiates the village (an English space) from the small town (an American space), but whereas in 1939 she describes the American small town as “truly an American product,” in 1958 she describes the American small town as “a truly American place” (“Changing Images” 538, emphasis mine). This discursive shift from “product” to “place” is an ideological slip from a literary figure to the material “real”: the literary bleeds into the geographic, and the dominant literary small town becomes the blueprint for the small town: an abstract, deracinated, ideological form that can colonize much more than the U.S. literary landscape. The conjoining of the small town and the nation has a long ideological history that was solidified in the nineteenth century. The social geographer Joseph Wood argues that the idealized American small town is a nineteenth-century invention forged by “cultural elites” in a range of discourses, including fiction, travel memoirs, history, social reform, and lithography (“Build Therefore” 32; New England Village, 136–139). However, it is worth stressing the salient role literature plays in producing the small-town imaginary. Literature, and art more generally, is where fantasies are shaped. Throughout the nineteenth century the small town is an idealized space in the writings of many canonical American authors, including Louisa May Alcott, Henry Ward Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.15 Herron writes that in the nineteenth century the American small town had become a ubiquitous icon of “indisputable goodness, happiness . . . [and] democracy” (The Small Town 334). Similarly Hilfer writes that the nineteenthcentury American small town was “characterized by sweet innocence, an environment in which the best in human nature could flower serenely, a rural paradise exempt from the vices, complexities, and irremediable tragedies of the city” (3). Many literary and cultural historians name the New England village as the origin of the iconic American small town. Wood, for example, argues that the historical New England village was idealized in the nineteenth century to become the blueprint for the American small town.

8 / introduction

This same thesis is forwarded by the literature scholar Lawrence Buell (304–318). Commenting on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sketch of the New England village in “Uncle Lot” (1834), Buell writes, “Essentially the same image is rerun . . . throughout New England literature, from [Timothy] Dwight’s Greenfield Hill through Thornton Wilder’s Our Town” (305).16 However, as I demonstrate below, the dominant small town, from its ideological origin, transcends any regional, historical, and material specificity, and instead, functions as a deracinated ideological form.17 In “The National Longing for Form” (1990), Timothy Brennan provocatively suggests that every modern nation needs its own form.18 The dominant small town, I claim, is a U.S. nation form. The small town ideologically stages an authentic and autonomous American space, culture, history, and identity. This nation form instantiates a cultural logic in which a small town’s community is the nation’s community, a small town’s history is the nation’s history, and a small town’s epistemic regime is the nation’s epistemic regime. To recognize the small town as a nation form changes the way we read popular literary, cultural, and political texts that focus on small towns. For example, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) becomes a different play if we read the title as simultaneously announcing “our nation” (which I do in chapter 6). A nation form structures a nation’s master narratives, epistemologies, and values; in short, it structures what is recognized as “reality.” Etienne Balibar claims that a nation form inextricably fuses history and ideology to discursively construct a singular people with a shared unified history (“Nation Form” 138; “Paradoxes”). When ideologically successful, a nation form transforms individuals into “homo nationalis from cradles to grave” (“Nation Form” 137). A nation form therefore structures an individual’s constitutive and foundational identity and exists as a libidinally charged site to which subjects are affectively (and uncritically) attached; it is a site “where we have always been—and always will be—‘at home’” (139). Moreover a nation form attempts to erase the state’s foundational and continual violence and attempts to negate the state’s identity as a site of contestation between competing social groups. Recognizing the dominant small town as a nation form challenges Benedict Anderson’s pervasive definition of the modern nation as an “imagined community” that is predicated on “empty, homogeneous time” (22–36).19 The dominant small town’s prominent position in the U.S. imaginary illustrates how the nation’s legibility is predicated on conceptions of time and on conceptions of space. In modern nations, Anderson writes, “members of even the smallest nation will never know

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most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). The modern nation is a community of abstract affiliation that exceeds the subject’s everyday experiences. Anderson specifies that the reason modern nations need to be imagined is because they are not face-to-face communities such as small towns or villages.20 Early in Imagined Communities (1983) he writes, “All communities larger than primordial villages of face-toface contact . . . are imagined” (6, emphasis mine).21 Following this logic, the small town is a social form that precedes and predates the modern nation. The small town, in contrast to the modern nation, is ostensibly a real, material place and practice that can be experienced directly by the individual, and therefore it does not need to be imagined. However, Main Street and Empire complicates this binary: the small town, I argue, is an imagined community that is central to the United States’ imagined community. The small town’s ideological centrality to the United States returns us to an older understanding of the nation. “Nation” comes from the Latin natio, meaning “a local community, domicile, family, [or a] condition of belonging” (Brennan 45).22 In its initial conception, natio was understood as a prepolitical space that consisted of people from “the same descent . . . who are not yet integrated in the political form of a state but hang together . . . by settlement, common language, customs and traditions” (Habermas 282). The “nation” is etymologically and ideologically rooted in knowable, face-to-face communities. 23 Raymond Williams claims that the discursive transformation of natio into the modern “nation” is a movement from the material real to an ideological abstraction. “Natio,” he writes, is inextricably bound to a specific place and is “radically connected with ‘native.’” He continues, “We are born into relationships, which are typically settled in a place. This form of primacy and ‘placeable’ bonding is of quite fundamental human and natural importance.” Williams concludes that “the jump” from natio “to anything like the modern nation-state is entirely artificial” (cited in Brennan 45, emphasis in original). The modern nation, Williams insinuates, is an abstract, fictitious community, whereas “place” is a prediscursive material reality. Although my thinking is indebted to Williams’s work, at the center of my project is the insistence that “place” can be as much an ideological construct as the modern nation. More specifically the dominant small town’s ideological history reveals that there is not necessarily a radical “jump” from natio to the modern nation form.

10 / introduction

An Anachronistic Nation Form? Nation forms are not static; rather they transform with history. In 1923 the sociologist Thorstein Veblen—famous today for his scathing critique of the leisure class and for coining the phrase “conspicuous consumption”—identified the American small town as one of the most powerful “institutions” in “shaping public sentiment” and the nation’s “character” (Absentee Ownership 142). In the early twentieth century Veblen recognized that the dominant small town had become an ideological form that was central to the United States. However, over the course of the twentieth century, as illustrated earlier, the American small town seemed to transform from being ideologically central to marginal. So has the small town become an obsolete nation form? Arjun Appadurai observes that “one of the grand clichés of social theory (going back to Tönnies, Weber, and Durkheim)” is that localities are “under siege in modern societies” (179). If this cliché is prevalent throughout modernity, it becomes even more prevalent in a recognized global modernity. Theorists frequently describe globalization as the demise of unique localities. The sociologist Michael Featherstone, for example, writes that in globalization “localism and a sense of place give way to the anonymity of ‘no place spaces,’ or simulated environments in which we are unable to feel an adequate sense of being at home” (102) Similarly the sociologist Anthony Giddens claims that in globalization, places have “become phantasmagoric” (140). In their joint essay “The Fate of the Local” (2007), the anthropologists Melissa L. Caldwell and Eriberto P. Lozada Jr. review various competing conceptions of locality in globalization studies. Although they provide no definitive definition, they clearly articulate what locality is not in the age of globalization: “The transformed locality does not look like our imagined past of small towns where everybody knows your name” (509). The United States seems to have come a long way from the warnings of subaltern cultural producers such as José Martí and James Baldwin. Both warned against the dangers of the small town as a paradigm for an increasingly globalizing world that centered on an expanding American presence and power. Fearing that the United States would replace Spain as the dominant imperial force in the Americas and the Pacific—a fear that would materialize in 1898, when the United States assumed control over Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico—Martí began his celebrated 1891 essay, “Nuestra América,” by denouncing individuals who believe that the entire world can be confined to a village.24 In 1955

introduction / 11

James Baldwin similarly protested against using the village as a privileged paradigm to understand social relations. His essay “Stranger in the Village” suggests that if the West—and the United States in particular—is going to recognize a globalizing modernity, it must move beyond the village imaginary.25 These warnings may, at first glance, read like historical curiosities rather than concerns that address the present. Today globalization has become synonymous with urbanism, and myriad theorists from multiple disciplines use urban paradigms to make sense of our globalizing present. To name just a few recent critical and pedagogical rubrics, we now study the “global city” (Sassen; A. King), the “postmetropolis” (Soja), the “maximum city” (Mehta), “postcolonial urbanism” (Bishop et al.), “transnational urbanism” (M. P. Smith) and “megaslums” (Davis 1). The city is used to specify and make legible the promises and violences that constitute our present.26 And there is a material, historical reason for this turn to the city. As the urban scholar and theorist Mike Davis recently observed, we are living through a revolutionary period: for the first time in human history, more people live in cities than in rural areas. The present urban population is 3.2 billion people, and cities are currently growing by roughly a million people a week (Davis).27 Our globalizing modernity is an urbanizing modernity.28 Whereas the city has become a symbol of the future, the dominant small town has become a symbol of the past. The city and the small town circulating as opposing symbols is not a recent development. The historical and cultural geography scholar John A. Jakle writes that early in the twentieth century a discourse emerged that positioned “America’s small towns and big cities [as] opposite ends of an urban spectrum.” This “imagined dichotomy” is pervasive in popular U.S. literature and culture (“America’s Small Town/Big City Dialectic” 1). At the end of the twentieth century the political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain observed that the American small town “exists in narrative, whether ‘history’ or fiction,’ always ‘in contrast to’ . . . the city” (115). I want to suggest that in the twentieth and continuing into the twenty-first century, the ideological “other” of the dominant small town is not the city, but rather modernity. When the small town and the city are cast as opposites, the latter should be read as a synecdoche for modernity. Since the early twentieth century the dominant small town’s legibility has been predicated on being out of joint with modernity and appearing as an anachronistic form. In 1966 the historian Page Smith claimed to give “birth” to small-town scholarship with the publication of As a City

12 / introduction

upon a Hill: The Town in American History (viii). Initially Smith claimed that the small town does not need to be defined because its identity is “self-evident” (vii). The small town is a knowable, familiar space that most Americans know because, according to Smith, until the twentieth century most Americans called the small town home (vii). This assumption circulated throughout the first half of the twentieth century. For example, in The Age of Confidence: Life in the Nineties (1934), Henry Seidel Canby wrote, “The small town . . . is our heredity; we have made twentieth century America from it” (cited in Lingeman, Small Town 261–262). In 1954 the historian Lewis Atheron wrote, “In the nineteenth century . . . people were born into the small town as they once were born into the church. They ‘belonged’ by their very presence, and they had something larger than themselves to which to cling” (355). According to this modern national narrative, until the twentieth century the U.S. identity and imagination were tethered to the small town. “Not only,” Page Smith writes, “did most Americans live in town down to the end of the nineteenth century, but the literature they read was concerned with town life” (258). The small town was the nation’s geographic, cultural, and symbolic center. However, in the twentieth century the small town, according to Smith, has “vanished” (252). Henry Seidel Canby concurs: the close of the nineteenth century was “the last era in the United States when  .  .  .  everyone . . . knew what it meant to be an American” (cited in Lingeman, Small Town 258). The small town’s ostensible obsolescence in the twentieth century was materialized by Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A.29 Disney’s small town appears as an anachronistic place that gestures toward the past rather than to the present or the future. And this is precisely the point. In 1959 Walt Disney wrote, “Many of us fondly remember our ‘small home town’ and its friendly way of life at the turn of the century. To me, this era represents an important part of our heritage, and thus we have endeavored to recapture those years on Main Street, U.S.A. at Disneyland. . . . Main Street represents the typical small town in the early 1900s—the heartline of America” (cited in S. Watts, The Magic Kingdom 22, emphasis mine).30 Disney insinuates that what he provides is not fantasy, but memory—or to be more specific, national memory. To experience Main Street, U.S.A. is to experience the nation’s “heritage.”31 Main Street, U.S.A. is conspicuously and intentionally out of joint with modernity, situated “at the crossroads” of modernity, in “an era . . . where the gas lamp is gradually being replaced by the electric lamp, the plodding, horse-drawn streetcar

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is giving way to the chugging ‘horseless carriage’” (cited in S. Watts, The Magic Kingdom 22). In contrast to a modernity defined by proliferating technologies, mechanization, and automation, Disney’s small town is a premodern island community. The small town that is ostensibly “our heritage” is a retroactive, reactive, and romanticized narrative. The dominant small town is not killed by modernity; rather modernity proves the condition of possibility for the dominant small town. In contrast to the master narrative of the small town’s obsolescence in modernity, throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century the figure of the small town multiplies, proliferates, and disseminates. For example, the best-selling novel of the first quarter of the twentieth century is Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920) (Allen xiii); one of the best-selling novels of all time, which launched a popular movie and one of the most popular television shows in history, is Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place (1956) (Cameron viii, xvi); the most produced play of the twentieth century is Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) (Scott; Bryer 4); the most controversial and widely read story ever published in the New Yorker is Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948), set in a small town (Oppenheimer 128–129; L. Friedman 63); one of the highest grossing films of the 1980s is Back to the Future (1985), centered on the fate of the small town Hill Valley (“All-Time”); in the 1990s one of the highest grossing and most highly honored films of the decade is Forrest Gump (1994), a narrative framed by the small town (“All-Time”); Stephen King, one of the best-selling authors of the twentieth century, situates many of his horror-gothic works in small towns, such as Castle Rock (“Stephen King”); since the 1980s the United States’ unofficial Christmas movie is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), set in the small town of Bedford Falls (Willian ix); and Disneyland (1955) and Disney World (1971), the most popular tourist destinations in the world, each opens with Main Street, U.S.A. It may be tempting to dismiss the dominant small town as a conspicuous fiction. However, as I argue below, the dominant small town is a complex nation form that blurs the boundaries between fantasy and reality, ideology and history, counterfeit and original, general and specific, fiction and nonfiction. The dominant small town widely circulates not only in a range of literary and cultural discourses, but also in a range of nonfictional discourses. For example, it has been central to presidential candidates’ campaigns, from Warren Harding’s use of Marion, Ohio to Ronald Reagan’s use of Dixon, Illinois.32 Reagan (as have other politicians) discursively turned material spaces such as Dixon into small

14 / introduction

towns. In his 1965 autobiography, published to coincide with his campaign for governor of California, Reagan positioned himself as a smalltown subject. Dixon, he wrote, “shaped [his] body and mind for all the years to come after” (Reagan and Hubler 17). Similarly in his 1990 autobiography Reagan describes Dixon as a “heaven . . . where [he] learned standards and values that would guide [him] for the rest of [his] life” (27). Reagan continues, “As I look back on those days in Dixon, I think my life was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (29). Perhaps the most conspicuous use of the small town in recent years comes courtesy of the 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Palin incessantly aligned herself with small-town America, the place where the “real” America can be discovered. “Man, I love small-town U.S.A.,” she proclaimed, “and I don’t care what anyone else says about small-town U.S.A. You guys, you just get it” (cited in Healy).33 Palin elaborates elsewhere, “We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe . . . that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic . . . very . . . pro-America areas of this great nation. This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans” (cited in Stein). In these articulations, the small town is not a specific place in a specific region. Rather it is an abstract national imaginary that can be located anywhere or nowhere. The small town, however, is not the exclusive property of the Republican Party. During the first debate between the Democratic candidate Barack Obama and the Republican candidate John McCain, Obama allied himself with “Main Street” in contrast to the greed and corruption rampant on “Wall Street” (“Transcript of First Presidential Debate”). It is also worth remembering, however, that when Obama said, in off-thecuff remarks, that the problem with small-town Americans is that they “cling to guns or religion,” the Right lambasted him as “elitist” for not understanding “real America,” a phrase that became interchangeable with “small-town America” (“Transcript of Obama’s Remarks”; Whitesides). Once in the White House Obama wanted to prove that he did understand “real” Americans, and he embarked upon a “White House to Main Street Tour” (White House). In popular economic discourses, the small town also plays a central, structuring role. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize–winning economist

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and author of Globalization and Its Discontents (2003), identifies the economic recession that began in 2008 as a “near-death experience” of the global economy (“Moral Bankruptcy”). By now Stiglitz’s assessment is a familiar one. What may be less familiar is the figuration he uses to stage the recession: it is a “battle between Main Street and Wall Street” (Freefall 50). In this binary “Wall Street” signifies a disavowed space of capitalist corruption, whereas “Main Street” signifies the everyday America, the innocent America, and the “real” America. Stiglitz, of course, is not alone in using Main Street and Wall Street as tropes to help make sense of and narrate the economic crisis. Since 2008 the mainstream U.S. media has consistently employed this Main Street– Wall Street binary. To mention just a few examples of this cultural logic: when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner explained the 2009 “rescue” plan that could funnel up to $2 trillion dollars into the banking system, the Associated Press wanted to know how this plan would aid “Main Street” (“Bank Plan Basics” 38), and in 2009 CNN’s website launched an “i-report” section entitled “Main Street(s), USA” in which people can share their stories of economic struggle: “Main Street, USA. It’s a term we use to mean regular America, the part of the country that represents the towns and families and small businesses that make up the heart of the nation.” In the dominant national culture, Main Street signifies the nation’s “heart,” which is to say that it signifies the nation’s ideological center. As these examples intimate, Main Street is not so much a material place and practice as an ideological stage upon which the nation’s everyday and authentic narratives, epistemologies, and values unfold; moreover it is a stage where the nation’s authentic subjects can be located. Where does fiction end and reality begin?

The Dominant Small Town and the U.S. Empire In his ethnographic study of Disney’s small town Celebration (which I analyze in chapter 8), the American studies scholar Andrew Ross expresses shock at the United States’ obsession with the small town in late capitalism. Ross writes that the small town is a national icon that “focuse[s] more exclusively on the shape of the past than on the profile of the future.” He continues, “In a nation in imperial decline, like Britain, there were obvious reasons for this retrospective mood. But for a country like the United States, so long identified with progress and fastforward motion—a country that had always been viewed as the home of the future—the backward looking turn was as genuine and unlikely

16 / introduction

a heresy as this century [the twentieth] has produced” (52–53). As Main Street and Empire delineates, the nation’s libidinal attachment to the small town is not a recent trend, but part of a long ideological history. Whereas Britain nostalgically fixated on a village imaginary while its empire was declining, the United States began to identify with a smalltown imaginary while its empire was expanding. Main Street and Empire analyzes how the ideological small town stages the identity of the United States in the age of globalization, a period marked by the intertwined histories of the globalization of capitalism and the globalization of the U.S. empire. Many scholars argue that the expansion of the U.S. empire is largely responsible for shaping globalization.34 In the midst of authoring a massive series collectively entitled “The American Empire Project,” the history scholar Andrew J. Bacevich, a retired U.S. colonel, argues that globalization can be understood as “American globalism” and that the United States creates and “enforce[s]” the “norms” of the “international order” (9, 12). Similarly the political history scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood specifies that globalization is directed and dictated by the United States (Empire of Capital 127– 168),35 and the geography theorist and scholar Neil Smith specifies that globalization “was made in America and was built around U.S. interests and ideologies” (4). That the United States has become a global empire is a sociopolitical fact that cannot be reduced to a Left or Right political orientation. The historian Niall Ferguson argues that the American empire is unique because it’s an empire in denial. However, rather than lambast the United States for not being aware of its imperial past and present, Ferguson explains that the purpose of his study Colossus (2004) is to delineate the benefits and advantages of a “self-conscious American imperialism” (viii). What differentiates the U.S. empire from previous variations of empire is the country’s refusal to recognize itself as such. The historian Simon Schama observes, “The world has gotten into the habit of thinking of America as the tough-guy empire, trigger-happy cowboys addicted to the rush of military power. But that’s not the way America sees itself” (The American Future). This culture of denial and exceptionalism was encapsulated by Vice President Dick Cheney in his 2007 Veterans Day Address at Arlington Cemetery. Although the United States is an “empire of bases” that stretches across the world,36 and although the United States was in the midst of two wars that were soon to become the longest wars in U.S. history, Cheney told the crowd, “America may be a country founded in revolution, but we’ve never been a warrior culture. . . . We’re

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a peaceful nation” (cited in Schama). In his monumental study of the American empire, the globalization studies scholar Anthony Hall asks: How much longer . . . could the United States claim the power and privileges of its dominant role in global finance, global geopolitics, and global control of weapons of mass destruction without bearing the costs that have traditionally accompanied the possession of formal empire? How much longer would the rest of world tolerate the overt and covert interventions in their domestic affair[s] by a multifaceted superpower apparently unconstrained by any rules other than those attending its own internal calculations of self-interest? At what point might it become no longer feasible for the United States to claim all the rights and privileges of a global empire without assuming in more predictable, codified, consistent, and verifiable ways the large responsibilities that go along with an imperial role in planetary governance? (xv)37 In the past few decades American literature and cultural studies scholars have focused on decentering U.S. exceptionalism and forging postnational and transnational narratives and imaginaries.38 In 2009 the literary and critical theorist Donald Pease situated his work as a continual analysis of and assault on the “discourse of American exceptionalism” in order to forge a “post-exceptionalist American studies” (“Re-thinking” 19). However, Pease stresses that American exceptionalism remains central to the dominant U.S. culture (“Exceptionalism” 112). Main Street and Empire argues that the dominant small town is a prominent form of U.S. exceptionalism that stages the nation as autonomous, contained, and innocent.39 In The Sorrows of Empire (2004), the military scholar Chalmers Johnson writes, “As distinct from other people on this earth, most Americans do not recognize—or do not want to recognize—that the United States . . . [is a] new form of empire” (2). If most Americans don’t see their nation as an empire, what do they see? What frames their narratives and epistemologies? The dominant small town, I argue, offers an “imaginary” that mediates and mystifies the “relationship” of American subjects “to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser, “Ideology” 109).

The Nation’s Home / The World’s Home When President George W. Bush began referring to the United States as a “homeland” after 9/11, prominent U.S. scholars in the humanities

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intervened. Amy Kaplan, for example, argued that the use of the word “homeland” marks a radical break from “traditional images of American nationhood as boundless and mobile” (“Violent Belongings” 8). The canonical images used to represent the United States, she continued, are “metaphors of spatial mobility rather than the spatial fixedness and rootedness that homeland implies.” Examples of such mobile metaphors include “a nation of immigrants, a melting pot, the western frontier, manifest destiny [and] a classless society” (8). Similarly Pease argues that the employment of the metaphor “homeland” carries extraordinary “performative force” that breaks from previous conceptions of the United States (“From Virgin” 205).40 Main Street and Empire argues that President Bush’s use of “homeland” is not a radical break from the nation’s tradition; rather I argue that the United States does have such an ideological history, and that this history is tethered to the dominant small town. The small town is a national icon, a national tradition, and a national myth. The political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain provocatively claims, “As Americans we have been shaped by small-town life whether that is or is not the life we have lived” (115). Main Street and Empire takes Elshtain’s observation seriously and casts a wide archival net in order to analyze a range of literary, cultural, and political texts from various contexts, genres, and discourses. In contrast to nearly all other critical works on the small town, Main Street and Empire does not look at the small town in relation to the United States alone. Instead I insist that the small town must be analyzed within an international context. In this regard I hope to open a new critical conversation about the dominant small town and its relation to globalization and to U.S. imperialism.41 As the United States becomes a global empire, the dominant small town becomes a global form that naturalizes and exports U.S. narratives, values, and knowledge regimes throughout the violently uneven histories and geographies of globalization. Although this project is critical of the United States, I want to make clear that by no means am I anti-American. The healthiest democracies are those that are the most aware and critical of their own habits of thought and practice. In this light I hope that Main Street and Empire is read as pro-American. I should also inform the reader in advance that this project is indebted to Marxist literary and cultural criticism. To be clear: I am not against market economies categorically. Marxism, a diverse, critical archive that cannot be reduced to simplistic formulas, helps illustrate the limitations of capitalism and offers methodologies

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to help recognize various forms of violence, suffering, and struggle that remain invisible and beyond the realm of care to many uncritical cheerleaders of the market economy. The role of the humanities, in my estimation, is to help us see the world with more awareness, more humility, more complexity, more compassion, and more hope. This project is neither comprehensive nor exhaustive. Instead Main Street and Empire uses exemplary texts to historicize and think about the small town’s ideological form and to trace how this form becomes refigured as capitalism globalizes and as the U.S. empire globalizes. I hope that this work suggests and provokes new questions and new ways of thinking about the small town in relation to a host of bigger issues, including U.S. identity and imagination, narrative production, globalization, and U.S. imperialism. I hope this project inspires scholars, teachers, and students to turn to texts and genres that feature the small town, including canonical novels (such as Toni Morrison’s Sula), celebrated movies (such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt), Broadway musicals (such as The Music Man), popular music (such as John Mellencamp’s “Small Town”), superhero comics (such as Superman; to pass as human, Clark Kent must be at home in Smallville), reality television (such as the Paris Hilton vehicle The Simple Life), young adult fiction (such as Melissa Walker’s Small Town Sinners), national news reports (such as Charles Kuralt’s On the Road segments), gothic television series (such as David Lynch’s Twin Peaks), radio shows (such as Garrison Keillor’s “News from Lake Wobegon”), fantasy novels (such as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods), horror video games (such as Silent Hill), online worlds (such as Second Life), corporations that use the image of the small town (such as Walmart), and how the United States uses the figure of the small town during the nation-state’s darkest hours (such as propaganda supporting the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II). Main Street and Empire is at the beginning of a critical conversation, not the last word.

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Sacred Islands in Modernity: The Prehistory of the Dominant Small Town

In this chapter I focus upon and analyze the small town’s ideological form. This formal analysis follows the methodology of Marx and Freud, each of whom privileges form over content in analyzing the commodity form and dream form, respectively. For both Marx and Freud, “the point is to avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of content supposedly hidden behind the form: the ‘secret’ to be unveiled through analysis is not the content hidden by the form (the form of the commodities, the form of the dreams), but, on the contrary, the ‘secret’ of the form itself ” (Žižek, The Sublime 11, emphasis in original). The “secret” of the dominant small town, I argue, is that it is a nation form and an island form. To begin thinking about the small town’s form, I want to briefly turn to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004).1 The movie centers on what appears to be a preindustrial village in 1897. The inhabitants of this unnamed village speak with an arcane English dialect, wear clothes that vaguely resemble the style of colonial America, appear devoutly religious, and are wedded to their village. The community’s commitment to a life circumscribed by the village’s physical borders is reinforced by their apparent fear of the outside world. The townspeople speak incessantly about mysterious, threatening creatures called (ironically) “Those We Don’t Speak Of.” These nebulous creatures lurk in the foreboding wilderness beyond the village’s borders. The film’s twist is that the unnamed village does not exist in 1897, but rather in the present, and Those We Don’t Speak Of are not real foes,

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but imaginary bogeymen invented by the village elders. The village, we learn, was founded by traumatized subjects who met each other at a support group for people who have lost loved ones due to violent crimes. Spearheaded by a multimillionaire, the group purchased a large expanse of land, surrounded it by a gigantic fence, and hired myriad guards to maintain the borders between an avowed inside (the village) and a disavowed outside (everything beyond the village’s borders). The village is a reactionary island community that cocoons its subjects from an increasingly violent, urbanizing modernity. The “secret” to the village’s identity is its island form. Although the village elders cast the surrounding wilderness as a threatening outside, this “wilderness” is essential to the village’s legibility. The surrounding wilderness is part of the village’s private property and helps create the illusion that the village is an autonomous, contained island community with clearly demarcated borders. The constitutive other of the village, therefore, is not the wilderness; it is modernity. At the film’s end the audience learns that the village is an ideological fiction. However, for those subjects interpellated by the village—the founders’ children—it frames and structures “reality.” If we read the film allegorically (which seems to be Shyamalan’s intent), then how should we read this American village? Are contemporary Americans closer to the village elders, who know that the village is a fictional form yet desire it anyway? Or are Americans closer to the children, who believe that the village is a real, self-contained world? Or do contemporary Americans recognize, ridicule, and reject the village as an obvious fiction? Or is it possible that Americans paradoxically occupy all three subject positions? In his study of violence, Slavoj Žižek writes that the modern desire for the village is “the desire to recreate a closed universe of authenticity in which innocence is protected from the corrosive force of modernity” (Violence 25). The dominant American small town is a reaction to modernity and, I want to suggest, a reaction to a globalizing U.S. empire. In Shyamalan’s film the elders decide to “situate” their island community in 1897. This desired context positions the village at the edge of the twentieth century and at the edge of the emergence of the United States as a global empire. A year later, in 1898, the United States defeated and assumed Spain’s position as a transnational empire. Spain’s colonies— Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—became U.S. colonies. As exemplified by Shyamalan’s film, the dominant small town is a modern form that gains its legibility by appearing and operating as an autonomous, contained island community that disavows knowledge of,

sacred islands in modernity / 23

and responsibility for, a globalizing modernity that is inextricably linked to U.S. imperialism. Or to put it another way, the small town is a form of U.S. exceptionalism that allows the United States to not recognize its own imperialist history and identity. In this chapter I delineate the long ideological history that imagines the American small town as an island form, a trope that resounds throughout U.S. literature, culture, and politics. Although today the small town seems divorced from the project of U.S. imperialism and out of joint with modernity, this was not always the case. The dominant small town, like all ideological forms, is historically mediated and hence changing.2 Prior to the twentieth century the dominant small town was imagined as an island form that was central to the twinned projects of U.S. nationalism and U.S. imperialism, and an island form that was central to shaping a new, U.S. modernity.

Islands Forms and Sacred Spaces In his lecture “Different Spaces” (1967), Michel Foucault provocatively claims that while time has been desacralized in modernity, perhaps, he surmises, “we have not yet arrived at a practical desacralization of space.” Our spaces, Foucault continues, “are still controlled by an unspoken sacralization” (177). This sacralization of space is evident in the hierarchical binaries that structure our everyday lives, such as private versus public spaces, domestic versus political spaces, and leisure versus work spaces (177). Space, as Foucault makes clear, is not simply a passive container to be filled; it is a dynamic form that structures knowledge regimes and power formations. In an interview with Paul Rainbow, Foucault claims, “Space is fundamental in any form of communal life” and it is “fundamental in any exercise in power” (“Space, Knowledge, and Power” 252).3 Sacred spaces are ideological spaces that structure, essentialize, and fix dominant narratives, epistemologies, and values.4 In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said highlights the importance of space to the contentious process of identity making, meaning making, and world making: “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings” (7). As Said insinuates, the opposite of sacred spaces are not profane spaces, but historical spaces whose meanings are the site of ideological struggle.

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Foucault credits the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard for teaching him “that we are living not in a homogeneous and empty space but, on the contrary, in a space that is laden with qualities, a space that may also be haunted by fantasy” (“Different Spaces” 177). Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958) studies how sacred spaces remain central to a seemingly secularized Western modernity. Bachelard proposes a new study that he calls “topoanalysis.”5 He defines this new mode of analysis as “the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives” (8). Topoanalysis—a name that deliberately echoes “psychoanalysis”—situates space as foundational to human identity and memory. In contrast to Freud’s conception of memories as fluid and fluctuating, Bachelard proclaims that memories can be fixed and secured. This is because whereas Freud analyzes memories in relation to the vicissitudes of time, Bachelard insists that memories must be analyzed in relation to the security of space: “Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are” (9). “Fixed” memories—memories that constitute an individual’s identity— are framed and preserved by spaces that “enclose,” “protect,” and “cradle” (7). Bachelard insists that in order to understand a subject, it is essential to understand his or her “inhabited” and “intimate” spaces. And the most foundational spaces function as island-like spaces. What Bachelard calls “inhabited spaces,” Foucault recognizes as “sacred spaces.” Although Foucault learns from Bachelard, he does not follow him. In fact Foucault develops and defines the term “heterotopia” against Bachelard’s conception of space. Whereas Bachelard focuses on intimate, inhabited, and enclosed spaces that stabilize and secure memories and identities, Foucault focuses on “heterogeneous” spaces “by which we are drawn outside ourselves” (“Different Spaces” 177). Heterotopias are spaces of alterity that disrupt and challenge the knowledge/ power formations secured by sacred spaces. At the conclusion of “Different Spaces,” Foucault identifies the “sailing vessel” as “the heterotopia par excellence” (185). This is because it “is selfenclosed and, at the same time, delivered over to the boundless expanse of the ocean, and . . . goes from port to port, from watch to watch, from brothel to brothel, all the way to the colonies” (185).6 This metaphorical ship never remains fixed in any singular spatial configuration or relation. Instead it travels between and through multiple spaces. If ships are the symbols of heterotopia par excellence, then islands, I propose, may be recognized as symbols of sacred spaces par excellence. (I am referring, of course, to ideological islands and not real, material islands, which are dynamic, heterotopic spaces, as elaborated upon in recent postcolonial

sacred islands in modernity / 25

scholarship.)7 As an ideological form, an island is enclosed, protective, and cradling, and it enables the production and reproduction of fixed knowledge and power regimes. To further analyze the island’s ideological form, I briefly turn to Fredric Jameson; after Jameson, I will turn to a figural island: the American small town. Before Jameson theorized the utopian dimension present in all literary and cultural texts (a thesis previously articulated by Ernest Bloch), he analyzed utopia as an imaginary geography.8 In the essay “Of Islands and Trenches” (1977), Jameson foregrounds utopias as island forms. He reflects on the utopian genre and concludes that it is both critically useful and socially dangerous. Utopias are useful pedagogical tools that help make visible the ideologies and violences that constitute a capitalist modernity. Moreover utopias imagine models for alternative social relations and structures. However, as Jameson recognizes, utopias are violent forms because they are constitutively exclusive. They are founded and gain their legibility by means of regulated borders that separate an avowed utopian space from a disavowed outside. For example, in the genre’s inaugural text, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), King Utopus establishes a new community by constructing a massive trench that separates the promontory from the mainland. In order to create a more perfect society, he must first construct an island community. Jameson argues that the transformation of a space into an island is the “act of disjunction/exclusion that founds Utopia as a genre.” This “act,” he continues, is “the source of everything problematic about it” (“Of Islands” 100). The borders that separate a utopia from the outside become epistemological and ethical borders as well. A utopian community cares primarily about its contained island form and not with social relations beyond its borders. In its dominant articulation, utopia is an island form that exemplifies what Foucault calls “sacred space.” The sacred, utopian island form that is ideologically central to the U.S. identity and imagination is the small town.

A Sacred Island Form The self-proclaimed first historical study of the American small town tacitly recognizes its object of investigation as a sacred island form. As broached in the introduction, in 1966 the historian Page Smith announced that his book, As a City upon a Hill: The Town in American History, gave “birth” to small-town historical scholarship (viii). And

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indeed many scholars concur. The American studies scholar Park Dixon Goist identifies Smith’s study as “the starting point for any discussion of the American town” (“Town” 16). Smith describes his work as an attempt “to develop a language and a series of concepts” in order to understand “the role of the town in American history” (ix). But his historical analysis does not demystify the small town’s form and function as much as it calcifies and perpetuates the small town’s ideological form. Smith demarcates two types of American towns: the “cumulative” and the “colonized.” These two types of towns represent two competing communal forms and two competing social imaginaries. Cumulative towns, according to Smith, are capitalist spaces in which “the economic motive” is “paramount” (33). Cumulative towns follow a familiar geographic trajectory in a capitalist modernity. As capitalism develops, towns grow into industrializing, expanding, complex nodes that become more and more “heterogeneous,” both socially and culturally (32). The cumulative town is a capitalist community committed to the principles of growth, accumulation, and “rugged individualism” that will, if successful, become a city (33). Smith’s definition of the American cumulative town coheres with Marx’s account of the transformation of space in a capitalist regime. In The German Ideology (1845–1846), for example, Marx and Engels write, “In the place of naturally grown towns . . . [capitalism] created the modern, large industrial cities which have sprung up overnight” (185). What is surprising, though, is Smith’s delineation of an alternative American town: the “colonial town.” Whereas the cumulative town is a capitalist community committed to development, the colonial town, in contrast, shuns “material growth and expansion” and “often remain[s] modest in size” (P. Smith 32). The colonial town is a space of exception that exists outside of capitalism. Moreover, this space of exception fosters relations and values that contrast capitalism’s ideology of individualism. In the colonial town, values remain “oriented towards the community rather than the individual,” and the community works to “banish . . . greed, factionalism, poverty, and inequality” (307). The colonial town, more specifically, is a space of U.S. exceptionalism. Whereas the cumulative town can appear anywhere in the world, the colonial town is defined as a uniquely American space. Another name for the “colonial town,” according to Smith, is the “small town.” Smith argues that the American small town should be recognized as a “symbol and image as well as a reality” that is central to “our national life” (306–307). The American small town is central to the nation’s identity and imagination and symbolizes an authentic national

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island community that ostensibly exists outside of a capitalist modernity. This space of U.S. exceptionalism, Smith elaborates, is a sacred space. Smith’s central claim is that the origin of the American small town is the “covenanted community” (6). The idea of a covenanted community comes from John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” The sermon, written while Winthrop crossed the Atlantic Ocean, identified the “New England” as a “city upon a hill,” which was ostensibly “a new community on a new scale” (P. Smith 5). The Massachusetts colony established “a new community on a new scale” (P. Smith 5). Rather than a community understood on a horizontal scale (a historical scale), this new covenanted community existed on a “vertical” scale, in direct, unmediated relation to God (P. Smith 6). The humanities scholar Frederick M. Dolan argues that Winthrop’s sermon should be recognized as a founding U.S. fiction,9 an attempt to “simultaneously . . . discover and . . . invent a metaphysical origin for the American nation” (8). The city upon a hill names a community whose identity is foundationally and inextricably bound to God, rather than a colonial and capitalist history. This imaginary geography is not constituted by a social contract, but by a divine contract. The “covenanted community” is imagined as a “harmonious, self-identical, enduring unity” that is separate and distinct from its profane surroundings (Dolan 30). The city upon a hill, in short, is imagined as a sacred island community.10 What Dolan recognizes as a founding national fiction, Smith identifies as a historical, material reality. Shockingly, Smith’s study is not an ideology critique. According to Smith, Winthrop’s discursive model became the blueprint for real American small towns (4). The covenanted community that originated in New England, Smith contends, perfectly replicated throughout the United States (see 3, 7, 11, 307). He writes, “One of the most important attributes of the covenanted community was that it could reproduce itself almost to infinity once its essential form had become fixed” (6–7). Rather than help us critically understand the small-town form, As a City upon a Hill discursively produces and perpetuates the dominant small town as a fixed, sacred, highly mobile nation form. What is at stake, as Smith’s study unwittingly reveals, is that the dominant small town is a nation form and an imperialist form that can be located anywhere and can ideologically implant the United States in any space.

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“A lovely island once adorn’d the sea” The small town in Smith’s study is a classless, conflict-free island utopia that should be critically recognized as a form of U.S. exceptionalism.11 This imaginary has its roots in early U.S. literature. Philip Freneau’s 1772 poem is widely considered the first literary representation of the American small town (Herron, The Small Town 33). In a letter dated 22 November 1772, Freneau told James Madison, his former Princeton classmate and the future president of the United States, that he had just self-published a poem entitled “The American Village” (Herron, The Small Town 33). Freneau (1752–1832) was a fervent nationalist who is today considered a “poet of the Revolution” and recognized in some circles as the “father” of American poetry (Nickson).12 For his Princeton commencement, he composed a poem entitled “Rising Glory of America” (1771). Written five years before the United States won political independence from the British Empire, the epic poem imagines an autonomous American Empire that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. “The American Village” (1772), published a year after “Rising Glory of America,” was part of a nascent literature that helped shape a national culture. In order to understand what makes a village an American village in this historical context, it is necessary to understand its ideological “other”: the British village. Freneau’s poem responds to and rewrites Oliver Goldsmith’s popular contemporary English poem “The Deserted Village” (1770), which exemplifies a pervasive literary trope of the vanishing British village in the late eighteenth century due to an aggressively expanding capitalist modernity.13 The poem begins by glorifying the village of Auburn: “Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain, / Where health and plenty cheer’d the labouring swain” (Goldsmith 1–2). However, the reader soon learns that the village is no longer a space that exists in the present. Rather it exists only in the mediated channels of memory and imagination: Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn, Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn! Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen And desolation saddens all thy green Only one master grasps the whole domain. (35–39)14 The village, once a communal space, has been transformed into private property owned by “one master.” The poem documents capitalism’s process

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of privatization that, among other things, destroys traditional communities and traditional ways of life.15 Freneau posits the American village as the binary opposite of Goldsmith’s English village. The second stanza of “The American Village” begins: Though Goldsmith weeps in melancholy strains, Deserted Auburn and forsaken plains, And mourns his village with a patriot sigh, And in that village sees Britannia die: Yet shall this land with rising pomp divine, In it’s own splendor and Britannia’s shine. (9–14, emphasis in original) Ima Honaker Herron writes that Freneau “transplanted” Goldsmith’s village onto U.S. soil (The Small Town 34). However, it is important to recognize this “transplanted” village as a refigured village. Whereas the British village is a dying space over which Goldsmith “weeps,” the American village is posited as a thriving community “rising on the green” (Freneau 18). Similar to Winthrop’s city on the hill, the American village is described “with rising pomp divine”; it thrives with the grace of God. What is at stake in Freneau’s poem is that a declining village becomes a symbol of a waning nation-state, while a “rising” village becomes a symbol of an expanding nation-state. In Freneau’s poem, the American village is not a geographic form contingent on historical, material, regional, and/or economic factors. Rather it is a deracinated island form that can be located anywhere. The village in the second stanza is described as “Lost in the bosom of this western land” (20). The adjective “lost” does not connote the need for help; it signifies the village’s strength as an independent, self-sufficient island that can prosper in any space. By situating the American village somewhere in the “west,” Freneau insinuates that the American village is a reproducible nation form that can flourish in any space, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. In this cultural logic, the American village can help realize the imperialist dream of a continental empire that Freneau articulated a year earlier in “Poem of the Rising Glory of America.” My claim that Freneau figures the American village as an island is strengthened by the appearance of a literal island later in the poem. This intrusion of a literal island has baffled some literary critics. The literature scholar Richard Vitzhum, for example, claims that Freneau’s poem

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“suddenly breaks . . . at line 86” (27). In the epic poem, line 86 marks a shift in focalization from an American village to a lengthy description (seventysix lines) of a utopian island. After informing us that “Charity . . . pours her blessings” over the village,” the poem’s attention suddenly turns to “A lovely island [that] once adorn’d the sea” (81–82, 87). This “lovely island” is subsequently described as “happy,” “sacred,” and “blest” (92, 117, 141). This utopian island, we learn, is destroyed by tumultuous waves: But envious time conspiring with the sea, Wash’d all it’s landscapes, and it’s groves away. . . .  Bare sands alone now overwhelm the coast, Lost in it’s grandeur, and it’s beauty lost. (155–156, 161–162) Freneau’s mourning for this lost utopian island seems to mirror Goldsmith’s mourning for the lost British village. However, whereas Goldsmith’s village is irretrievably lost to a capitalist modernity, Freneau’s utopian island becomes reincarnated. The poem’s lengthy description of the utopian island should not, as Vitzhum claims, be read as a “major break” in the poem. Instead it should be read as a formal description of the American village. In Freneau’s poem, the utopian island and the American village are interchangeable figures. Freneau writes of the wooded utopian island: In the dark bosom of this sacred wood, Had fate but smil’d, some village might have stood Secluded from the world, and all it’s own, Of other lands unknowing, and unknown. (117–120) The poem begins by describing the American village residing “in the bosom of this western land” (20), and in the passage above declares that a village could flourish in the island’s “bosom of this sacred wood.” The utopian island and American village are linked by the shared adjective “bosom,” and Freneau explicitly states that the only communal space possible on the utopian island is a village. Furthermore, just as the American village is situated in the “west,” so too is this utopian island, which exists “Between New Albion and the Mexic’ Bay” (88). Today New Albion is better known as California. (In 1579 Sir Francis Drake christened the Pacific region “New Albion” in honor of Queen Elizabeth).16 Freneau locates this utopian island where he fantasized the American empire would one day reach—to the Pacific Ocean. In its literary origins the American village is an island form that fulfills multiple ideological functions. First, it demarcates a unique national

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space that becomes legible by opposing the British village. Second, it is a nation form that supports an expanding U.S. empire. And finally, it functions as a form of what will later be identified as U.S. exceptionalism. Whereas the American village’s form enables the expansion of the U.S. empire, its content—its community—is presented as innocent and “harmless.” The island community, Freneau writes, is composed of “harmless people, born to small command” (19). Paradoxically, the dominant American village is imagined as an innocent island community and as a nation form that is central to the building of the U.S. empire. In the early nineteenth century this trope is repeated in what would become one of the canonical texts on the United States: Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (volume 1, 1835; volume 2, 1840).

Tocqueville’s Praise of a New/Old Empire The gender and women’s studies scholar Miranda Joseph observes that the preponderance of twentieth-century scholarship on the topic of community “invokes Tocqueville’s Democracy in America . . . as the Golden Age of community” (Against 3, 5). The number of popular scholarly texts that read Tocqueville as describing the national ideal is astounding: David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), Max Lerner’s America as a Civilization (1957), Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man (1977), Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979), Robert Neely Bellah’s Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985), Amitai Etzioni’s The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society (1994), and Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital (1995) (Joseph, Against 5). These texts signify a trend that narrates the twentieth century as the decline of American community—a trend, Joseph notes, that is deeply reactionary.17 This popular “return” to Tocqueville is not a turn toward Democracy in America as a historically specific text. Rather, as Donald Pease writes, Democracy in America has been “elevated . . . into a transhistorical representation of U.S. democracy’s unchanging transcendental essence” (“Tocqueville’s Democratic Thing” 23).18 More specifically for my purposes, this popular turn toward Tocqueville is a turn toward an idealized American town.19 This logic is explicit in Hannah Arendt’s controversial On Revolution (1963), a comparative study of the American and French Revolutions. Arendt argues that Tocqueville was “right” when he “traced

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the origin of the American Revolution to the spirit of the townships” (310).20 Democracy in America posits the United States as a grand experiment that shows the rest of the world its future. In order to understand U.S. democracy, Tocqueville insists that one must recognize the following hierarchy: “The township is first in order, then the county, and last the state” (1:61). In contrast to Europe’s centralized and powerful states, the United States offers a decentralized model of politics where the local— emblematized by the township—is both the smallest unit of measurable political life and the foundational space of politics. 21 For Tocqueville, the newly formed republic is not so much the United States of America as the United Towns of America. Tocqueville presents the town as an autonomous, contained island community that is self-sufficient and self-defining. Each town, he writes, is “a little independent nation” (1:67). The town’s independence, Tocqueville argues, is a barometer of the nation-state’s enlightenment: “The difficulty of establishing a township’s independence rather augments than diminishes with the increase of enlightenment of nations” (1:62). The more a nation-state’s towns resemble independent islands, the more enlightened the nation-state. By this criterion, the United States proves to be the most enlightened of nations. The radical experiment of the United States is its commitment to a nation-state comprising multiple, independent island communities that resemble autonomous, diverse nations. In a sense the American town is a modern incarnation of a Greek polis; therefore, it simultaneously gestures toward the future—showing Europe a new political organization— and gestures toward the past by returning to democracy’s so-called origins. Tocqueville admires the United States for being a decentralized nation-state that does not concentrate sovereignty in a centralized “transcendental” figure such as a king; instead the United States refigures and resituates sovereignty as immanent in the people (Hardt and Negri 164). This figuration of the “sovereignty of the people” is made possible because of the American town. Tocqueville claims, “The dogma of the sovereignty of the people came out from the township” (1:59). The American town, he writes later in Democracy in America, is “like great meeting houses with all the inhabitants as members” (1:279). The town is a community in which all individuals directly participate, and therefore it is a space in which an individual’s identity is constitutively political. It goes without saying that Tocqueville does not describe real, material

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American towns but an abstract, deracinated, idealized, and ideological form.22 A nation-state composed of towns, Tocqueville argues, is a means to build a modern democracy and a means to build a modern empire. Near the end of Democracy in America Tocqueville states that one of the greatest threats to the United States is a tyrannical leader who would seek to centralize power and sovereignty (2:690). Such a tyrannical leader would eradicate the independent townships that generate a pluralistic democracy: “In past ages there had never been a sovereign so absolute and so powerful that he could . . . subject all his people indiscriminately to the details of a uniform code” (2:690). Tocqueville illustrates his warning to the young nation-state by turning to the Roman Empire. In his historical lesson, the Roman Empire dissolved because it concentrated and centralized its sovereignty. However, prior to this detrimental turn, Rome flourished as an empire because it allowed “different peoples” to “preserve  .  .  .  very various customs and mores” (2:690). Rome became a successful, expanding empire because it did not incorporate its conquered lands into a homogeneous, monolithic, centralized body. Instead Rome enabled a decentralized empire comprising multiple, independent localities. Tocqueville implies that the United States is in the process of achieving an analogous empire. Therefore the American town becomes structurally equivalent to a Roman locality. Just as the Roman Empire expanded by means of autonomous island communities, so too, Tocqueville insinuates, does the United States. Whether or not Tocqueville’s analysis has any historical validity, what interests me is the notion that the American town and the American empire are not antithetically related.23 Rather the American town becomes a privileged means to expand the American empire. The town at the center of Democracy in America is an ideological island form that is foundational to the intertwined projects of U.S. nationalism and U.S. imperialism. According to Tocqueville, the American town is a form that can be reproduced in any space and that expresses the nation’s essence wherever it is located. “A township in Ohio is very like one in Massachusetts,” he writes (1:81). Similar to Freneau’s “American Village,” Tocqueville’s American town is a repeatable form that can implant the nation in any space. Therefore, the dominant American town should be recognized as a nation form and as an imperialist form. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, scholars of globalization and American politics, claim that Tocqueville was “the first person to

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meditate at any length on American exceptionalism” (327). While this is true, we should also recognize how Tocqueville perpetuates American exceptionalism in his description of the American town.

Scripting an Emerging Empire: The Global Dissemination of the American Town In the nineteenth century the American town became a dominant nation form. At the cusp of the twentieth century, the Princeton historian Woodrow Wilson, two decades away from becoming the twentyeighth president of the United States, situated the town at the center of the national imaginary. “The history of the nation,” Wilson wrote in 1896, “is only the history of its villages written large” (Mere Literature 214). Rather than the burgeoning cities of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia existing as the nation’s material, cultural, and symbolic centers, Wilson claimed that the American village expresses the nation’s essence.24 For Wilson, the nation is not an abstract imagined community that comes into being because of print media. Rather, the nation can be experienced directly and daily; in a formula we have seen before, Wilson figures the village as the nation’s home, and as the nation’s epistemic and narrative foundation. According to Wilson, the nation can be experienced and understood in any village, whether in one of the original thirteen colonies or in one of the newly incorporated states such as Utah (which was incorporated on 4 January 1896). According to this cultural logic, to know any village is to know the nation. Regardless of its historical, regional, economic, demographic, and social context, a space’s identification as a “village” demarcates it as an authentic nation form and community. When Wilson argues that the historian should turn to the village to write the nation’s history, he assumes that the village exists as a stable, secure empirical referent. However, this chapter, and my project as a whole, illustrates that the village is not a secure site from which history is written. Rather it is an imaginary geography that must be written into existence. The village figured as the nation’s essence comes from Wilson’s essay “The Course of American History” (1896), which posits a single, unified, teleological narrative that results in the emergence of an overseas U.S. empire. When Wilson wrote the essay he was five years away from completing his massive, five-volume A History of The American People (1901), which narrates the development of the United States into a global power. On the final pages of volume 5, Wilson documents the U.S.

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military intervention in China at the end of the nineteenth century in order to ostensibly free China’s ports from the colonizing powers of England, Germany, and Russia. He writes that at the dawn of the twentieth century the United States has assumed the role of a world power with “conspicuous success” (299). As Wilson’s History comes to a close, the future of the United States is a global one. For Wilson, the emergence of the United States as a global power should not be understood as a move away from the village imaginary. Rather he suggests that the village remains central to a globalizing United States. In “The Course of American History,” the essay in which Wilson states that “the history of the nation is only the history of its villages written large,” he claims that “local history” should be written “with lifted eyes,—the sort which has an horizon and an outlook upon the world” (Mere Literature 216, emphasis mine). The task of the historian, he implies, is to understand the American village’s relation to a rapidly globalizing world that is being shaped by a rapidly globalizing American empire. The American village therefore must be understood as central to the nation’s history and to the world’s history. To rephrase Wilson’s formula, we can say, “The history of an imperialist nation is the history of its villages written large.” At the conclusion of “The Course of American History,” Wilson acknowledges Frederick Turner’s then recent thesis of the American frontier’s primary importance to the nation’s character.25 Despite the Census Bureau’s 1890 declaration of the frontier’s purported closure, Wilson urges his reading public to think beyond the nation’s recognizable borders. The essay’s final paragraph points toward the imperial adventures that await beyond the Pacific: “The westward march has stopped, upon the final slopes of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens. . . . Let us resume and keep the vision of that time; know ourselves, our neighbors, our destiny, with lifted and open eyes; see our history truly, in its great proportions . . . and so be the people who might have again the heroic adventures and do again the heroic work of the past. ’Tis thus we shall renew our youth and secure our age against decay” (Mere Literature 246–247). Across the Pacific Ocean, “heroic adventures” await that will continue “the course of American history.” This exhortation for the United States to become a global empire may not initially cohere with Wilson’s claim at the onset of his essay that to know a village is to know the United States. However, for Wilson, as for Freneau and Tocqueville, the American village ideologically functions as the nation’s home and as a highly mobile island form that can

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implant the nation in any space—both within and beyond the nationstate’s shifting borders. Up until the twentieth century the American village was understood as a sacred nation form that was central to the twinned projects of U.S. nationalism and U.S. imperialism. But in the twentieth century a paradigm shift seems to occur. As delineated in the introduction, in the twentieth century the dominant small town becomes reimagined as an anachronistic island form that becomes increasingly distant from modernity and from the scenes of U.S. imperialism. As the twentieth century progresses, this seemingly anachronistic nation form becomes rechristened the “small town.” As the following chapters argue, the small town—despite its anachronistic aura—remains central to a globalizing modernity and central to an expanding U.S. empire.

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An Unfinished Revolution: “The Revolt from the Village” Reconsidered

Two decades after situating the village as the nation’s foundational form, Woodrow Wilson became president, the United States entered the first recognized global war, and Sinclair Lewis published Main Street (1920). Lewis’s satirical novel makes visible and critiques the reified cultural logic that positions the small town as an authentic American space. The novel begins, “This is America—a town of a few thousand. . . . The town is, in our tale, called ‘Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.’ But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere” (2). Although Gopher Prairie is located in Minnesota, Lewis makes explicit that Main Street is not a regional narrative. Rather he critically identifies the small town as a deracinated, abstract, autonomous island form that ideologically transcends material and historical specificity. “The story would be the same,” Lewis writes, “in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be told Up York State or in the Carolina Hills” (2). Lewis’s introductory paragraph resembles Wilson’s 1896 formulation that the small town is a microcosm of the nation. However, Lewis radically rewrites Wilson’s formula. As analyzed in the previous chapter, Wilson claimed that to know any American village is to know the nation. Whereas Wilson assumes each village is a unique national space that produces its own national narratives, Lewis critically presents the small town as a singular, fixed nation form that produces the “same” national narrative again and again. Lewis focuses our attention not on the small town’s content, but on its ideological form. The dominant small town, he suggests, is a highly mobile form that can be located anywhere

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within the United States, and, as I will explore in subsequent chapters, anywhere outside of the United States. What is at stake in the small town’s mobility, as Lewis’s introductory paragraph insinuates, is that it ideologically implants and expands the nation-state. To assess the importance of the small town to the U.S. identity and imagination in the early twentieth century, one need look no further than the reception of Lewis’s novel. The publication of Main Street catalyzed a national reading community and a national debate. In his study of the 1920s, the historian Nathan Miller writes, “The publication of Main Street ranks with that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as one of the few literary events with a profound political or social fallout, for it established a new way of looking at small-town America” (64).1 Main Street was a national best seller whose publication was recognized as a national “event” (Allen xiii; Hilfer 158). The prominent literature critic and scholar Malcolm Cowley reflects, “In the year 1921, if you visited the parlor of almost any boarding house, you would see a copy of ‘Main Street’ standing between the Bible and ‘Ben Hur’” (cited in Allen xiii).2 In 1921, a year after Main Street’s publication, the literature critic Carl Van Doren wrote, “The reception of Main Street is a memorable episode in literary history. Thousands of people doubtless read it merely to quarrel with it; other thousands to find out what all the world was talking about; still other thousands to rejoice in a satire they thought to be at the expense of stupid people never once identified with themselves; but that thousands and hundreds of thousands read it is proof enough that . . . the war was on” (163–164). The “war” that Van Doren references is not the recently concluded world war, but an ideological war that centered on the small town. Van Doren calls this war “the revolt from the village.” Van Doren coined the phrase “the revolt from the village” in a 1921 article published in the Nation. The article begins by observing that U.S. literature since the Civil War has been “faithful to the cult of the village” (146). In the fledgling U.S. literary canon, the American village had become a “sacred” space with a “cult” following that no individual dared to “disturb” (147). (Once again the dominant American town is recognized as a “sacred” space.) However, the publication of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915) inspired a literary movement that, according to Van Doren, should be recognized as a paradigm shift.3 During this period a number of literary texts were published that challenged the American village as a sacred space, including Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett (1920), and what Van Doren recognizes as the peak of the movement, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920).

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Early in Main Street, Carol Milford, the young, idealistic protagonist fresh out of college, hastily marries a suitor and moves with him to his hometown, Gopher Prairie. Although Carol is initially excited about the move because of the many village stories she has read, when she arrives at her new home she quickly discovers the enormous discrepancy between literary villages and real, material villages.4 Gopher Prairie proves not to be a utopia, but a bastion of conservatism and closed-mindedness. Throughout the novel Carol reads various texts in search of new perspectives and new ideas that transcend the small town’s myopia. At one point she turns her attention to “subversive philosophers and writers,” including the Danish proletariat writer Martin Andersen Nexø (1869– 1954) and the Swedish radical feminist Ellen Key (1849–1926) (306). In this context Carol reads two other radical writers: Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson (306). Lewis explicitly situates his novel within a recent, modernist American movement that sought to subvert the nation’s ideological identification with the dominant village imaginary. Twenty-five years after the revolt from the village ostensibly ended, Richard Wright discussed the novels that gave him hope that the United States could be reimagined. In Black Boy (1945) Wright claims, “What enabled me to overcome my chronic distrust was that these books— written by men like Dreiser, Masters, Mencken, Anderson, and Lewis— seemed defensively critical of the straitened American environment” (282). All five authors were central to the revolt from the village. The revolt from the village is a modernist movement that recognizes the dominant village as an ideological form that must be critiqued and conceptually transgressed. In the early twentieth century, to critique the U.S. village was to critique an imaginary geography that was central to the nation’s identity and imagination. Therefore to revolt against the dominant village imaginary was to simultaneously revolt against the dominant national imaginary. Rather than situate the revolt from the village as a dated movement, as many contemporary scholars do, I argue that it remains an unfinished literary and critical modernist project.5 In this chapter, I want to begin thinking about how the dominant small town frames narratives and shapes literary genres. More specifically, I analyze how the dominant small town structures the Bildungsroman, a literary genre about an individual’s development and about the development of a historical consciousness.6 In the twentieth century the dominant small town plays a central role in a new variation of the Bildungsroman, what may be called an American Bildungsroman.7 I argue that Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, one of the central texts of

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the revolt from the village, can be productively read as a critical example of this modern genre.

Leaving the Small Town: A Modern Bildungsroman Winesburg, Ohio, composed of interlocking short stories, seems to follow the conventions of the modern Bildungsroman, a genre that focuses on the development of a young individual (typically white and male) as he enters, ostensibly for the first time, what is recognized as “history.”8 At the novel’s beginning, George Willard, the protagonist who wends through nearly all the stories, is a journalist who dreams of becoming a famous fiction writer. At the novel’s conclusion, he leaves the titular small town to follow his dreams in an unnamed city. This movement of leaving a provincial small town for the city is what Jerome Hamilton Buckley identifies as the Bildungsroman’s defining movement.9 Buckley summarizes the “typical Bildungsroman plot” as follows: “A child of some sensibility grows up in the country or in a provincial town, where he finds constraints, social and intellectual, placed upon the free imagination. His family, especially his father, proves doggedly hostile to his creative instincts or flights of fancy. . . . He therefore, sometimes at a quite early age, leaves the repressive atmosphere of home (and the relative innocence), to make his way independently in the city. . . . There his real ‘education’ begins” (17–18). Winesburg, Ohio follows this genre formula point-by-point: George Willard’s dream of becoming a fiction writer cannot be fulfilled in the constraining small town; his father disapproves of his son’s ambitions (while his mother unconditionally supports him); and at the novel’s end, he leaves the suffocating small town for a the city where his “real education” and his “real” life may begin. The Bildungsroman, like all genres, is a historical category. The literary scholar and theorist Franco Moretti usefully distinguishes between the “classical” and “modern” Bildungsroman. The classical Bildungsroman is defined by an individual discovering happiness, fulfillment, and meaning within a self-contained, stable community. In its classical form the Bildungsroman is a genre of place in which the individual learns to accept and embrace his everyday, contained locality (typically a village).10 The classical Bildungsroman, exemplified by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–1796), focuses upon a single individual who discovers his identity and achieves fulfillment in the place he has called home his entire life (Moretti, The Way 18–19, 26–27).

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The Bildungsroman, however, transforms with the development and expansion of capitalism. In a capitalist modernity, semiautonomous, contained places are rendered obsolete by a market logic that transforms all places into relational nodes and all subjects into deracinated wage earners. This radical, historical refiguring of social spaces and social relations is reflected in the Bildungsroman. Whereas in its classical form, the individual remains attached to a fixed social space, in the modern Bildungsroman the individual is defined by “mobility” (Moretti, The Way 4). In the modern Bildungsroman, Moretti writes, the individual “will never know the quiet happiness of ‘belonging’ to a fixed place” (4, 26). The individual “belonging” to a singular, stable space is “possible only in the precapitalist world” (27, emphasis in original). In a capitalist modernity there are no more island communities. In contrast to its classical form, which focuses on the individual within a contained, reproducible social space, the modern Bildungsroman focuses on the individual moving within and between multiple spaces and developing a historical consciousness.11 Moretti writes that the modern Bildungsroman uses the narrative “of a young individual” as “the most meaningful point for the understanding and evaluation of history” (The Way 227).12 The genre traces a subject’s entrance into history, a movement that has clear spatial correlations: the provincial town is imagined as a space outside of history, and the city as a space of history.13 This movement from the provincial town to the city is a one-way journey into a capitalist modernity, a movement figured as one from innocence to experience. The individual’s journey to the city, Buckley notes, frequently “brings a disenchantment more alarming and decisive than any dissatisfaction with the narrowness of provincial life” (20). This is because the protagonist often comes face-to-face with the dehumanizing conditions of a capitalist system in which “all that is solid melts into air” (Bakhtin, “Forms” 234–235; citing Marx and Engels, Manifesto 476). However, despite the dissatisfactions, struggles, and failures that the protagonist may encounter in the city, the Bildungsroman is a genre that, for the most part, supports the dominant ideologies of capitalism. The literary scholar Jeffrey L. Sammons argues that the genre is “intensely bourgeois; it carries with it many assumptions about the autonomous and relative integrity of the self, its potential self-creative energies, its relative range of options within material, social, even psychological determinants” (42). The Bildungsroman may be a progressive form, as the literary scholar and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin implies (“Forms” 234), but it is often a

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reactionary form in its commitment to the development of the isolated individual rather than the development of a larger collective. Although there are many competing and conflicting definitions of the Bildungsroman, the literary scholar James Hardin, who edited a comprehensive collection on the genre, cites Sammons’s definition as a good starting point (xxii–xxiii). Sammons writes that any novel that can be classified as a Bildungsroman must be grounded in the term Bildung, an “early bourgeois, humanistic concept of the shaping of the individual self from its innate potentialities through acculturation and social experience to the threshold of maturity” (xxii–xxiii). The dominant Bildungsroman underwrites and perpetuates the ideology of the modern, liberal subject who authors and defines his or her life and who exists within a narrative of progress. As stated earlier, Winesburg, Ohio seems to exemplify the modern Bildungsroman. However, something unexpected occurs at the novel’s end. Whereas in the modern Bildungsroman, the individual cannot retreat from history and return to a contained provincial town, in an American Bildungsroman, the individual can always go “home.”

Leaving the Small Town? During the entire composite novel George Willard dreams of leaving Winesburg to become a successful fiction writer, and at the novel’s end his dream seems to be coming to fruition. However, what initially seems like a familiar modern Bildungsroman becomes, in the final story, a complication of this generic classification. By the novel’s end the “adventure” that awaits Willard in the city is not an opportunity for individual development, but a dehumanizing, deforming experience that shatters the ideology of the centered, self-authoring individual.14 On the day Willard is set to leave Winesburg, he awakes at four in the morning and walks through and beyond the sleeping small town that he has called home his entire life. The significance of his departure registers on multiple levels. On a formal level it marks the novel’s end, and on a symbolic level the story begins by announcing that the month is April, a conventional trope of change. Moreover Willard’s arising before dawn and embarking upon a meditative walk signals the protagonist’s awareness of his departure’s significance: he is finally breaking free from the small town. At the novel’s end Willard’s dream of leaving for the city to become a writer is becoming a material reality. However, the novel’s ostensible

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Bildungsroman form that features a liberal subject authoring his own life is undermined by the metaphors operating at the narrative’s margins. The opening paragraph of “Departure,” the novel’s final story, suggestively links Willard to a series of tree parts: “Young George Willard got out of bed at four in the morning. It was April and the young tree leaves were just coming out of their buds. The trees along the residence streets in Winesburg are maple and the seeds are winged. When the wind blows they whirl crazily about, filling the air and making a carpet underfoot” (249). The opening paragraph posits an analogy between Willard and the leaves. His arising from bed echoes the leaves arising from their bud. In conjunction with the playful visual similarity of “bed” and “bud,” both Willard and the leaves are modified by the same adjective: “young.” Willard seems to be a subject in the nominal sense—a liberal, autonomous subject who chooses to depart the small town in an implied narrative of progress. However, the metaphoric connection between him and the leaves casts doubt on this identity. In the passage just quoted, the leaves are subject to their surrounding world. The paragraph emphasizes the strong, erratic winds that blow through the leaves and, we can assume, forcibly detach the leaves from the trees. The metaphoric logic suggests that we similarly read Willard as being subject to greater forces; more specifically, he is subject to history. The metaphoric link between Willard and the leaves is complicated by the paragraph’s shifting focus from the leaves to the seeds. The seeds are linked to the protagonist through a shared narrative of implied selfauthorship. In the quoted passage, the seeds are modified by the adjective “winged,” an image that connotes the clichéd narrative of an individual taking flight in order to fulfill his or her wishes and dreams. However, this narrative of self-authorship, a central feature of the Bildungsroman, is overturned. Rather than the seeds using their wings to define their course of flight, the paragraph concludes by revealing the futility of such a liberal project.15 Although the seeds take flight, they do not determine their own journey. Instead their fate, like that of the leaves, is determined by the winds that “whirl crazily about” (249). Like the “winged” seeds, Willard believes he is in control of his destiny, but self-authorship and self-determination prove illusory in the unpredictable, forceful winds of modernity.16 In the modern Bildungsroman, the individual must leave a provincial community to emerge as a modern subject. However, the American Bildungsroman, in which the dominant small town plays a central role, challenges this generic logic. In the American variation of the genre, the

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small town is not a form that prevents the emergence of the modern, liberal subject; rather it is a form that ideologically secures this identity. On the train headed away from the small town and toward the city, George Willard is approached by a train conductor named Tom Little. From the train conductor’s perspective, Willard is a familiar figure in a repeating narrative: “When the train started Tom Little punched his ticket, grinned and, although he knew George well and knew on what adventure he was just setting out, made no comment” (251). For Willard, departing the small town for the city is an “adventure” within a narrative of individual development and progress. Tom Little, on the other hand, knows otherwise. The passage continues: “Tom had seen a thousand George Willards go out of their towns to the city. It was a commonplace enough incident with him” (251). In contrast to the modern Bildungsroman that narrates the individual as a unique subject in a narrative of development, Little’s perspective insinuates that the modern Bildungsroman narrative is a myth. He knows that the future toward which Willard heads is not one of individual development, but a globalizing, capitalist modernity that transforms individual subjects into disposable commodities. By leaving the small town, Willard will cease to be recognized as a unique individual and instead become subject to a capitalist modernity in which individuals become undifferentiated, exchangeable, quantifiable figures. This logic is encapsulated by Little’s monologue, in which Willard is recognized not as a singular individual, but as a pluralized, repeatable figure: “Tom had seen a thousand George Willards go out of their towns to the city.” This shift from George Willard to “George Willards” is the shift from a logic of the modern Bildungsroman to the logic of commodities. In the awaiting city, Willard will not be a distinct individual who occupies the narrative center, but a replaceable, discardable figure. Although Willard initially imagines the city as a place of promise and opportunity where he can define his life, at the novel’s end the city is figured as a fixed, dehumanizing, capitalist space.17 In a telling passage, we learn that the train conductor knows his passengers better than city dwellers know their neighbors (250). The city toward which Willard heads is not given a proper name because, the narrative implies, the city is the same wherever it is located. In contrast, the small town is a geographic signature: there is only one Winesburg, Ohio. At the novel’s end, the narrative seems to definitively leave Winesburg, Ohio, and enter a capitalist modernity of interlocking spaces unified by an expanding capitalist market. The train that takes Willard into

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modernity “runs from Cleveland . . . [and] connects with a great trunk line railroad with terminals in Chicago and New York” (250). The train that carries him away from Winesburg carries him into a globalizing, capitalist modernity whose geographic and symbolic center is the city. Although Willard recognizes the significance of his departure from the small town, he does not recognize that his departure mirrors a larger national pattern. In 1920, a year after Winesburg, Ohio was published, the Census Bureau declared, or so it seems, the beginning of the end of small-town America. For the first time in U.S. history, the Census reported that more people lived in cities than in rural, isolated communities such as villages and towns.18 The 1920 Census Bureau became a central figure in a periodizing narrative that situated the rural—and the small town in particular—as a symbol of the nation’s past, while the city emerged as a symbol of the nation’s future. The historian George E. Mowry suggestively claims that the small town in 1920 occupies an analogous position to the frontier in 1890.19 Mowry’s twentieth-century history of the United States, The Urban Nation (1965), begins in 1920: “The changes resulting from this transformation from a rural to an urban nation were to be just as momentous as those that had accompanied the conversion of the frontier into a settled land” (1). Similarly Robert H. Wiebe’s influential study of the United States, The Search for Order (1967), narrates the development of the nation from a “a society of island communities” in the nineteenth century to the development of an interconnected, bureaucratic network in the twentieth century (xiii). In Wiebe’s history, rural communities are “island communities” that become increasingly anachronistic as the twentieth century develops. Tellingly Wiebe’s history of the demise of island communities concludes in 1920.20 Like 1890, 1920 seems to demarcate a new period: the emergence of an urban nation that would later become a suburban nation.21

A Modern American Bildungsroman Anderson presents the small town as a suffocating prison that arrests individual development, freedom, and diversity. More bluntly nearly every story in the composite novel portrays Winesburg as a conservative, bourgeois, racist, misogynistic community. For example, the story “Mother” presents Elizabeth Willard (George’s mother) as a depressed individual whose “girlhood dream . . . had long ago died” (24). When she was young Elizabeth had openly experimented with gender roles

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and with her sexuality. She flouted the small town’s mores by such acts as publically socializing with male guests of her father’s hotel and by her fondness for “wearing loud clothes” (30). Her adventurous spirit and gender experimentation is hinted at by the following snapshot: “Once she startled the town by putting on men’s clothes and riding a bicycle down Main Street” (30). The small town, though, chokes Elizabeth’s individuality and her attempt to depart from its narrow gender roles and “legitimate” sexual practices. When the story “Mother” opens, she is forty-five and defeated by the small town’s normalizing regime. In contrast to her younger self, full of life and ideas, Elizabeth now shuffles despondently through the small town.22 George Willard achieves what the preponderance of Winesburg’s citizens secretly desire: to leave. Throughout the collection, characters want to learn about the city and secretly long to experience the city. For example, when Elizabeth Willard was young, she insisted that the guests in her father’s hotel share their stories from “the cities out of which they had come” (30), and at the end of the story “Mother,” she expresses a rare moment of “joy” when her son informs her that he will leave the small town and live in the city (32–33). To move to the city is to move to a place that encourages and enables individual freedom. In contrast to the small town, the city is a space of hope, of promise, and of change. Leaving the small town is a liberating act.23 However, at the novel’s end an ideological twist occurs: the small town transforms from a prison into an idealized place. As the train rushes toward an unnamed city, Willard begins to dwell upon Winesburg, focusing on “little things” (252). The small town transforms from a geographic place into an imaginary where memory and imagination fuse. Willard remembers/imagines “Turk Smollet wheeling boards through the main street of his town in the morning” and “Butch Wheeler the lamp lighter of Winesburg hurrying through the streets on a summer evening and holding a torch in his hand” (252). What he remembers/ imagines is a reified preindustrial small-town imaginary that exists outside of capitalism. As the concluding story intimates, Willard’s physical departure from a material small town is the precondition for the emergence of a romanticized, ideological small town. The novel concludes as follows: “The town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint  .  .  .  [his] dreams” (252). At the novel’s end the small town is not a space left behind; instead it becomes a deracinated, ahistorical geographic imaginary. Throughout the novel Willard witnesses and

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experiences Winesburg as a suffocating, myopic, and violent space. However, once he leaves, he “remembers” it as a desirable space. Once left behind, Winesburg becomes a romanticized community. On the train that takes Willard to the city, Winesburg is no longer a material place and practice, but a “background” on which he can “paint” his “dreams.” Although Willard physically departs from the small town, he does not ideologically depart from the small town. In the modern Bildungsroman, the individual moves from a knowable small community into radically unknowable and unpredictable urban spaces where history is experienced. However, the conclusion of Winesburg, Ohio reverses this narrative logic. Instead of accepting his entrance into history, Willard fixates on the “little things” that constitute his life in Winesburg. These “little things” are static images that resist the logic of plot and historical change. At the book’s conclusion, his dreams transform from wanting to be a writer in the city to longing to return and belong to a small town. The final paragraph of the novel reads, “The young man’s mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood” (252). From the first line of the paragraph, the reader may assume that Willard’s “growing passion for dreams” refers to his desire to become a successful writer in the city. However, the third line makes clear that his dreams are focused on the small town and the “little things” that constitute the small town. The repetition of “little” in the final paragraphs contrasts with a different use of “little” circulating throughout the story: the name of the train conductor, Tom Little. Whereas the latter metonymically represents the one-way historical journey to the city, the former use of “little” signifies the romanticized, desired small town. Winesburg, Ohio, I want to suggest, critically anticipates the formation of a new American Bildungsroman that repeats throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century; in this new variation of the genre, the small town is not a space left behind, but a space to which Americans are invited and encouraged to return. To illustrate this claim, I turn to what has become the United States’ unofficial Christmas movie: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). In 1975, roughly the same year that prominent theorists identify as the beginning of postmodernity (Harvey,

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The Condition 140, 248), It’s a Wonderful Life entered the public domain. Since then the movie has become synonymous with Christmas. Prior to and throughout Christmas day, the film plays on a continuous loop on multiple television stations. A 2006 “scene-by-scene guide” to Capra’s film exemplifies its central position to the national symbolic. The book begins, “What is it about this film? There’s no denying it’s a classic. But over the past sixty years, It’s a Wonderful Life has somehow managed to transcend mere artistic expression, weaving its way into the very fabric of our holiday ritual. For countless Americans, getting into the proper holiday spirit goes hand in hand with watching George Bailey” (Willian ix). It’s a Wonderful Life has become an American Christmas ritual that teaches what it means to be an authentic American, and teaches that the small town is the nation’s authentic home. The film begins with a lingering close-up of a sign that interpellates the audience: “You Are Now in Bedford Falls.” Successive shots show images of a sleeping small town at night as snow descends everywhere. Although everyone is in bed, the empty streets resound with voice-overs of various small-town subjects who pray for the well-being of the protagonist, George Bailey (James Stewart). For example, as the camera shows the local pharmacy, Gower Drugs, a voice-over declares, “I owe everything to George Bailey. Help him, dear Father.” Another voice-over proclaims, “He never thinks about himself, God, that’s why he’s in trouble.” Even though the public square is closed for the night, the small town’s communal identity, the film makes clear, never goes to sleep. In the next scene we learn that these prayers ascend to heaven, reinforcing the notion that Bedford Falls—and the small town more generally—is a covenanted community. In heaven two angels discuss the despair overcoming George Bailey, and they decide to send the wingless angel Clarence to Bedford Falls. Bedford Falls becomes figured as a sacred space by being directly connected to heaven. Moreover its identity as a small town is reinforced by being linked to a prominent literary small town. After the angels tell Clarence of his mission, one of them asks Clarence what book he is reading. Clarence responds that it is Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). This seemingly extraneous detail metonymically links Bedford Falls to the small town of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.24 Moreover the small town—in contrast to the dehumanizing form of capitalism encountered in the city—underwrites a benevolent form of capitalism.25 The Bailey family operates a Building and Loan business whose goal is to help members of the working class become homeowners.

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This benevolent practice is exemplified by George Bailey helping the Martini family buy their first home. For years the Martini family, immigrants from Italy, had no choice but to “live like pigs” and rent from the slumlord Henry F. Potter. However, Bailey helps the Martinis gain their dignity and self-respect by providing the financial means for them to buy a home. Bailey is a capitalist hero whose business model is based on compassion and community, and not on profit and accumulation. In contrast to Bailey, Henry F. Potter symbolizes a dehumanizing form of capitalism. Potter cares about only one thing: profit. It’s a Wonderful Life mystifies capitalism by imagining two competing forms: benevolent capitalism and malevolent capitalism. In the film’s logic, these two forms of capitalism have geographic correlatives: benevolent capitalism is the practice of the small town and malevolent capitalism is the practice of the city. In the midst of the film, a nightmare sequence occurs in which Bedford Falls becomes the city of Pottersville. In a familiar binary, the small town and the city are posited as opposites. In contrast to the film’s opening, which visualizes the small town’s center as empty and quiet at night, Pottersville at night bustles with lascivious activities. When Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville, the town center is overtaken with establishments advertising in neon signs myriad venal pleasures, which the film codes as morally depraved. The camera pans over the following businesses: “Blue Moon,” a bowling alley that features “fights,” a hotel, “Midnight Club Dancing,” “Bamboo Room Cocktails,” a pawn shop, a sign advertising “20 Gorgeous Girls,” “The Indian Club,” “Dime a Dance,” and more. Gower Drugs is now a pawnshop called “Imperial Loan Co.,” Violet’s beauty shop is now a “Cut Rate Liquor Store,” and the theater that was earlier playing The Bells of St. Mary’s now advertises “Georgia’s Sensational Striptease Dance.” In contrast to the small town, the city is imagined as a capitalist space of sin. Although the same characters from Bedford Falls appear in Pottersville, they do so as fallen subjects. For example, Violet, who was an innocent boy-hungry girl and owner of a beauty shop in Bedford Falls, is now a prostitute in Pottersville. The film suggests that her new profession correlates to her living in Pottersville. Conversely, when living in the small town, Violet maintains her innocence while becoming a successful, respectable businesswoman. However, It’s a Wonderful Life does not present Pottersville as an inevitable future; rather Bedford Falls and Pottersville are presented as choices.26 The film’s central lesson, which George Bailey learns over the course of the film, is to love life and to love the small town. As Bailey learns, the small town is a sacred space that fosters the development of the

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individual and the community. Although earlier in his life he dreamed of traveling the world and becoming an architect, by the film’s end he renounces these dreams and learns that true happiness is found within the small town. The film, in short, reverses the logic of the modern Bildungsroman and presents the small town as an ahistorical space that a subject need never leave, and to which the modern subject should—at least symbolically—return. At the film’s end Bailey’s commitment to life is simultaneously a commitment to the dominant small-town imaginary. He learns to choose and embrace the small town, and every year Americans learn and relearn the same lesson. The small town’s enormous popularity and libidinal appeal, from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town to Walt Disney’s Main Street, U.S.A., is due, in large part, to the small town’s foundational identity as a communal space that allows the individual to belong.27 Narratives set in a small town, more so than narratives centered either in the city or the suburb, are primarily communal narratives that foreground a sense of belonging. Often small-town narratives are told in the first-person plural, as evident in texts critical of the small town, such as William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (1930), and in texts that celebrate small towns, such as Kent Haruf’s Plainsong (1999). Even when the small town is not narrated in the first-person plural, a sense of community is central to the small town’s legibility. Consider, for example, Garrison Keillor’s long-running weekly “News from Lake Wobegon,” “the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve”;28 titles such as Our Town; and the design of Disney’s Main Street, U.S.A. Unlike the other lands in Disneyland, Main Street, U.S.A. does not have any rides; instead its attraction is a sense of belonging while strolling up and down the small town’s main boulevard. This communal logic is encapsulated by Jan Karon’s best-selling Mitford series. As of 2011 the fictional small town is the setting of nine novels. Mitford’s popular appeal is not its narratives. As one reviewer claims, “Mitford lovers know that the plot of the books is not the point” (Crosby). Instead Mitford’s appeal is a sense of community experienced by characters inside the text and, I want to suggest, by subjects outside the text. We may aesthetically experience Mitford by reading the novels set in the small town or by a plethora of other activities produced by what has become a Mitford industry. In conjunction with the small-town fictional series, readers are encouraged to consume books that break the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. The official Mitford website informs potential consumers that they should purchase The Mitford

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Cookbook and Kitchen Reader so that their kitchens can be filled with the same “aromas and flavors that swirl within the little town with the big heart” (Mitford Books). Readers may also purchase a Mitford Christmas book because, as the website proclaims, “Mitford is the perfect place to visit at Christmas.” There is also a Mitford Bedside Companion to ensure that the small town maintains a prominent place in the subject’s life from morning until night. Moreover to ensure an active sense of belonging, the Mitford website includes a section entitled “The Porch,” where people can virtually congregate to discuss their everyday lives. Mitford is first and foremost a space of community in which consumers are encouraged to become citizens. Series such as Mitford, for the most part, stay within the physical and ideological borders of the small town. Moreover, in contrast to the characters in Winesburg, subjects find meaning and fulfillment within the small town’s borders. In an article published on the website Christianity, Phyllis Ten Elshof writes, “What most attracts people of both sexes from ages 10 to 90 [to the Mitford series], is how ordinary people find meaning in their relationships with God in the shops and homes and pews of Mitford.” Bakhtin argues that the Bildungsroman is a necessary literary genre in an expanding capitalist modernity. The project of the Bildungsroman “is primarily one of overturning and demolishing the world view and psychology” of contained localities “which proved increasingly inadequate to the new capitalist world” (“Forms” 234). However, in the modern American variation of the genre, individuals are able to return and remain in a contained locality and ideologically escape from the violences and contradictions that define global capitalism.29 Whereas the modern Bildungsroman is a narrative of individual development across multiple, disparate spaces, the dominant American Bildungsroman is a narrative of development within one contained, static, enclosed community that nourishes the individual and enables him or her to flourish and develop. Moreover whereas the modern Bildungsroman is about the development of a historical consciousness, the American Bildungsroman centered on the small town is about the disavowal of history. In an ideological reversal, the American Bildungsroman resembles the classical form of the Bildungsroman, defined by Moretti as a space where individuals discover their identity and fulfillment in the place they have called home their entire life. The dominant American Bildungsroman that posits the small town as a stable home to which Americans can and should return is a narrative of exceptionalism. The postcolonial novelist and literary critic Salman

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Rushdie writes that for the preponderance of the world, “home” has become “a scattered, damaged . . . concept” (93). In contrast, the dominant American Bildungsroman is about emplaced and rooted subjects rather than individuals who are deracinated, dislocated, dispersed, and dispossessed. In 1930 Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The secretary of the Swedish Academy introduced Lewis with the following remarks: “[He] asks us to consider that . . . [the United States] is not yet finished or melted down; that is it still in the turbulent years of adolescence. The new great American literature has started with national self-criticism. It is a sign of health” (cited in Cowley 297). Part of the nation’s literary and cultural “health,” according to the Nobel Committee, is its ability to critique the dominant culture and to create a reflective, self-critical, and open culture. The Nobel Committee recognized Lewis’s contribution to world literature, in part, for his critique of dominant ideological forms such as the small town. In his acceptance speech Lewis described the prominent place of the small town in the nation’s identity and imagination in the early twentieth century: “Our fictional tradition . . . [insists] that all of us in mid-Western villages were altogether noble and happy; that none of is would exchange the neighborly bliss of living on Main Street for the heathen gaudiness of New York or Paris or Stockholm” (“Nobel Lecture”). According to this “fictional tradition,” the small town is a utopian island community where happiness and meaning can be discovered by all. In contrast, New York is defined not by its relation to the United States, but by its relation to a transnational, capitalist, urban network that includes Paris and Stockholm. In this ideological formula, the small town is embraced as the nation’s authentic, contained home while the city becomes a disavowed space of transnationalism. The nation’s ideological identification with the dominant small town mystifies the fact that in the early twentieth century, the United States was rapidly growing as a globalizing capitalist empire that was largely responsible for shaping and abetting the expansion of a globalizing, capitalist modernity. The revolt from the village, as the following chapters make clear, is far from over.

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Mapping the Modern Small Town: A Circular Imaginary

In a capitalist modernity, there are no more island communities. Instead spaces become radically relational and inextricably entangled within capitalism’s globalizing system. As Marx theorized, capitalism functions because of an increasingly complex and transnational division of labor in which production, distribution, exchange, and consumption occur in geographically different and distant spaces. Marx urged the need to recognize and understand how these seemingly separate, disparate spaces are constitutively enmeshed (Grundrisse 236). As analyzed in the previous chapters, beginning in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century the dominant American small town was imagined as an autonomous, contained island community. However, we should expect this island imaginary to dissolve as a capitalist modernity develops, intensifies, and expands. And indeed this is what Franco Moretti discovered . . . sort of. For the past few decades Moretti has revolted against close reading. In a provocative, counterintuitive insight, he positions a commitment to close reading as antithetical to the project of studying world literature. His rationale goes something like this: because we don’t have endless time to carefully read the galaxies of literature that could be collected under the rubric of world literature, we need new reading strategies. Moretti moves away from the model of close reading and instead practices what he calls “distant reading” (Graphs 1–2). One of the forms of distant reading that he develops is “mapping,” a methodology that combines literary and geographic studies. Mapping, Moretti explains in his introduction

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to Atlas of the European Novel (1998), “allow[s] us to see some significant relationships that have so far escaped us” (3). Moretti literally draws maps of novels in order to delineate the spatial movements, flows, and patterns that occur over the course of a narrative. By mapping novels, he insists, new insights can be gleaned about historical, material conditions and relations that could not be discovered by the more common, institutional practice of close reading. In 2005 Moretti discussed a geographic imaginary that he ignored in his previous literary mappings: the village. He begins his essay “Maps” by addressing what he anticipates will be the reader’s skepticism toward such a project: “So you think ‘Yonville’ [the village in Madame Bovary], and imagine the village of two or three hundred people as a mere site of transit between larger places . . . easy” (Graphs 35–36). But, Moretti demonstrates, when we map village narratives our preconceived notions dissolve and “everything changes” (36). To illustrate this point, he maps Mary Mitford’s Our Village, a collection of immensely popular English village stories published in five volumes from 1824 to 1832. When Moretti mapped the stories in the first volume, he discovered a geographic pattern that he had never seen before: a circle. In the countless maps he produced for Atlas of the European Novel, Moretti notes that he “encountered all sorts of shapes—linear trajectories, binary fields, triangulations, multi-polar stories—but never a circular pattern” (Graphs 38). The twenty-four stories that compose Mitford’s first volume “arrange themselves in a little solar system, with the village at the centre of the pattern” (36–37). Mitford’s stories imagine the village as an autonomous, self-contained island community. This, Moretti stresses, is an ideological rewriting of history. When these stories were published, the idea of an autonomous village community in England was an obsolete imaginary. Beginning in the late eighteenth and continuing throughout the nineteenth century, the British Parliament passed a series of enclosure acts that transformed common land into private property. These acts destroyed small, rural communities throughout England and forced innumerable individuals into cities to become wage laborers.1 The effects of enclosure on village life are at the center of Oliver Goldsmith’s canonical poem, The Deserted Village (discussed in chapter 1). In 1770 Goldsmith recognized that the enclosure acts had demarcated the end of the village as a contained, sustainable island community. However, in Mitford’s first volume of village stories published in 1824, the village remains an autonomous island. Moretti writes that Mitford “reverses the direction of history, making her urban readers (Our Village was published by

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Whitaker, Ave-Marie-Lane, London), look at the world according to the older, ‘centred’ viewpoint of an unenclosed village” (Graphs 38–39). Mitford’s village, in short, is presented as an island community that exists outside of the capitalist modernity experienced by her urban readers. Moretti’s point is not that the literary village is an ahistorical, ideological form. Rather he is interested in how the literary village transforms due to the “forces” of history (Graphs 64). Although the first volume of Mitford’s stories imagines the village as a cocoon apart from a capitalist modernity, as the series continues this ideological imaginary proves impossible to maintain. As capitalism rapidly expands, the literary village transforms from a circular imaginary into a radically relational one. This transformation becomes evident when Moretti maps Mitford’s later village stories. He observes: In the 1824 volume . . . the village was the undisputed centre of the surrounding countryside: the centripetal effects of the force “from within” were omnipresent, while the force “from without” was nowhere to be seen: the narrator moved freely in every direction in her little idyllic world. . . . Two collections later, in 1828, the gravitational field is already weaker: the walks are less frequent, and their pattern has become wider, less regular; fewer stories take place in the village itself. . . . By 1832, it’s all over: the village’s centripetal force is reduced to nothing, and the bulk of the book moves away, thirty miles, sixty, more. (57–60) Although Mitford could initially rewrite history to imagine villages as island communities, eventually a capitalist modernity proved too powerful a force to overcome by means of creative flights of fancy: the literary village’s “centripetal” center could not hold. Moretti does not limit his analysis to nineteenth-century literary British villages; he also looks at nineteenth-century village stories from Germany and Scotland to make a bolder claim: throughout the nineteenth century a general pattern emerges in which literary villages, regardless of their national setting, transform from island communities into radically relational spaces within an expanding capitalist market. As the nineteenth century unfolds and capitalism becomes the dominant structure, the village genre, Moretti claims, ceases to exist (Graphs 63). History proves to be a “force” that “alters the initial narrative structure beyond recognition and reveals the direct, almost tangible relationship between social conflict and literary form” (64). By the end of the nineteenth century the village genre throughout Europe belongs to the past.

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In conjunction with being antithetical to capitalism, the village genre is also, according to Moretti, antithetical to nationalism. The village and nation become “two rival forms of collective identity” (Graphs 52, emphasis in original). The village is a form of communal belonging that opposes “national centralization” and instead imagines “alternative homelands” (52). Moretti does not turn his attention to the United States, but he implies that his analysis would apply to villages there as well. However, the dominant American village challenges Moretti’s thesis. Whereas Moretti insists that the village and the nation exist as competing forms of belonging, in the dominant U.S. imagination the village is not an “alternative homeland,” but a national homeland. Moreover, as I demonstrate in this chapter, whereas a capitalist modernity renders European villages obsolete, the dominant American village thrives. This chapter, inspired by Moretti’s methodology, delineates several ways to map Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Moreover in conjunction with mapping Anderson’s literary village, I also consider two “real” villages in Ohio: Canton and Marion. Both localities were transformed into political fictions for the election of President William McKinley in 1896 and President Warren G. Harding in 1920.

Mapping Winesburg, Ohio Moretti’s mappings of European literary villages disclose an important literary and historical pattern: prior to a capitalist modernity, villages were centripetal imaginaries. That is, villages functioned as autonomous, contained forms that frame and structure narratives. However, in a capitalist modernity, literary villages transform into centrifugal imaginaries that become increasingly peripheral to narratives. In contrast to this literary pattern prevalent throughout Europe, Anderson’s composite novel, published in 1919, begins with a map that presents the American small town as a contained, circular imaginary. The map in figure 1 displays the small town and only the small town, suggesting an island community radically distant from the transnational maps then dominating the national media in the wake of World War I.2 Although this map ostensibly represents Winesburg, Ohio (it shows, for example, the New Willard House), it is more of an ideological map of the American small town. In this map Winesburg appears cocooned from a capitalist modernity in which communities become radically relational nodes within an aggressively expanding world market.

figure 1. “Map of Winesburg, Ohio,” from Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, copyright 1919 by B. W. Huebsch. Copyright 1947 by Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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The map that opens Winesburg, Ohio erases the historical material conditions of the titular small town, and instead, presents the small town as an island community. However, I want to suggest that Anderson’s text critiques this ideological map. The map exemplifies the ideological imaginary that the novel—and the revolt from the village more generally— seeks to overthrow: the imaginary of an enclosed American pastoral. According to Leo Marx’s canonical study The Machine in the Garden (1964), the pastoral “has been used to define the meaning of America ever since the age of discovery, and it has not yet lost its hold upon the native imagination” (3). However, in the twentieth century the American pastoral has become a nostalgic trope: “The soft veil of nostalgia that hangs over our urbanized landscape is largely a vestige of the once dominant image of an undefiled, green republic, a quiet land of forests, villages, and farms dedicated to the pursuit of happiness” (6, emphasis mine). As Marx’s study exemplifies, in the dominant U.S. imagination, the American village is an ahistorical, fixed pastoral where “the pursuit of happiness” can be achieved and where the authentic “republic” can be discovered.3 This pastoral imaginary—a circular, island imaginary— gains its legibility by opposing the machine, the symbol for a globalizing capitalist modernity. Marx writes that the pastoral is evident in canonical American literature, including the “work of Walt Whitman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry James, [and] Sherwood Anderson” (16). Although he does not specify which Anderson text he has in mind, most likely he is thinking of Winesburg, Ohio. However, as I illustrate below, Anderson goes to great lengths to make clear that the titular small town was never a pastoral, and hence, never a circular imaginary.4 If we follow Moretti’s methodology and map Anderson’s novel, we see a centrifugal space that was never centripetal. From the onset Anderson presents Winesburg as a relational space within a capitalist modernity. For example, the main character of the opening story “Hands” comes from rural Pennsylvania (14); the following story tells of “transient guests who made the New Willard House their temporary home” (26– 27); the next story focuses on a doctor who came from Chicago (36); and the pattern continues. The small town is not a contained imaginary, but a complex relational node within an expanding market economy. In the story “Awakening,” Anderson writes, “In Winesburg, as in all Ohio towns of twenty years ago, there was a section in which lived day laborers. As the time of factories had not yet come, the laborers worked in the fields or were section hands on the railroad. They worked twelve hours a

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day and received one dollar for the long day of toil. The houses in which they lived were small cheaply constructed wooden affairs” (183–184). For the working class, Winesburg was never a pastoral island. Rather the town has always been a relational capitalist space whose production and reproduction is enabled by the exploitation of a mobile, exploitable working class. Two decades prior to the novel’s opening at the turn of the twentieth century, the working class lived in an economically segregated area where they had no choice but to live in “small cheaply constructed wooden affairs.” If the village is a longed-for pastoral where the pursuit of happiness is possible for all, as Leo Marx suggests, then the laboring class is excluded from this national fantasy. In a pastoral imaginary, the processes of production, distribution, and consumption occur, for the most part, in the same space. However, this is not the case in Winesburg. The story “Paper Pills” helps us create a cognitive map that links the exploited laborers picking fruit in the fields outside of Winesburg to the growing metropolises throughout the United States: “The apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people” (19). The workers laboring in the field help feed people in far-flung urban centers. Or, we can say more boldly, the condition of possibility for the celebrated cities that would largely produce high modernist culture is the labor occurring in rural spaces throughout (and beyond) the United States. As Anderson makes clear, the small town was never an isolated island of peace and harmony. Instead its history is one of economic instability. In the novel’s present (the turn of the twentieth century), Winesburg’s geography is marked by multiple signs of economic decline. For example, when two characters walk at night, they pass a barrel staves factory that is “now vacant” (133). And the New Willard House, the hotel that George Willard’s grandfather opened when Winesburg was a bustling hub for traveling businessmen, is now a “disorderly old hotel . . . that was unprofitable and forever on the edge of failure” (23). Throughout the novel Anderson presents Winesburg as a space that must be understood within an expanding, destabilizing, uncertain capitalist modernity. In the four-part story “Godliness,” he contextualizes American villages within a long capitalist modernity of perpetual “revolution” (56): In the last fifty years a vast change has taken place in the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact taken place. The coming of

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industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the building of the inter-urban car lines that weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses, and now in these later days the coming of the automobiles has worked a tremendous change in the lives and in the habits of thought of people in Mid-America. Books, badly imagined and written though they may be in the hurry of our times, are in every household, magazines circulate by the millions of copies, newspapers are everywhere. In our day a farmer standing by the stove in the store in his village has his mind filled to overflowing with the words of other men. The newspapers and the magazines have pumped him full. . . . The farmer by the stove is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us all. (56–57) This passage addresses the reader in the present, which, at the time of the novel’s initial publication, is the immediate aftermath of World War I. To understand the village, Anderson makes clear, we must historicize it within a long capitalist modernity where “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Engels, Manifesto 476).5 Anderson describes modernity as a continual “revolution” of social relations, including radical changes to transportation, communication, knowledge regimes, culture, and consumption habits. Although the passage begins with the limited perspective of “our people,” by the end, industrial capitalism has forged a unified, national market in which all people, whether they live in rural or urban spaces, now consume the same commodities, the same commodified culture, and the same commodified ideas: “The farmer by the stove is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us all.” In a capitalist modernity, the rural and the urban become analogous, mirroring spaces. Furthermore the passage suggests the emergence of a global market in which the citizens of Winesburg will soon resemble people from all over the world.6 The history that Anderson delineates mirrors Marx and Engels’s account. Just as Anderson’s sketch emphasizes the “growth of cities,” so too do Marx and Engels inextricably link the development of capitalism to the proliferation of expanding cities (Manifesto 477). Moreover Anderson’s insight that farmers in Winesburg now read the same magazines, newspapers, and books as people in urban centers is analogous to Marx

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and Engels’s recognition that capitalism erases the division between the rural and the urban. Capitalism, they presciently claim, creates “cosmopolitan” citizens and catalyzes the emergence of “world literature” and world culture.7

Alternative Mappings of Winesburg In contrast to the novel’s opening ideological map, Anderson suggests alternative ways to map Winesburg that foreground the village’s historical, material conditions. In the story “A Man of Ideas,” he writes about the presence of the Standard Oil Company in Winesburg: “In those days the Standard Oil Company did not deliver oil to the consumer in big wagons and motor trucks as it does now, but delivered instead to retail grocers, hardware stores, and the like. Joe was the Standard Oil agent in Winesburg and in several towns up and down the railroad that went through Winesburg. He collected bills, booked orders, and did other things. His father, the legislator, had secured the job for him” (94). In the late nineteenth century, when the novel takes place, Standard Oil was one of the most powerful companies in the nation (Tarbell, Nationalizing 193; Tarbell, History). In “A Man of Ideas,” Joe works for Standard Oil because of his political connections. The company’s political clout on the local, state, and federal level was notorious throughout the late nineteenth century. In 1886 Senator W. P. Frye of Maine declared that the Standard Oil Company was “a power which makes itself felt in every inch of territory in this whole Republic, a power which controls business, railroads, men and things” (cited in Tarbell, Nationalizing 203). Under the helm of John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil became a monopoly that controlled the production, refinery, and transportation of oil. In order to maximize sales and profits, it created its own detailed maps that divided the nation into manageable units: “The country was laid out into districts and subdistricts; companies and individuals were selected to undertake the distribution of oil; cities, towns, villages, and hamlets were covered by an immense network of agencies” (Beard and Beard 2:185). The map that begins Winesburg, Ohio mystifies the maps being produced by Standard Oil to maximize profits and to expand its market. Joe delivering gasoline throughout Winesburg is a symbol of the company’s aggressive, monopolizing development both nationally and internationally.8 One of the principal ways that the opening map of Winesburg, Ohio mystifies historical, material reality is how it represents the railroad. In

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The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx identifies and analyzes the antithetical relationship between the pastoral and the machine in U.S. literature. Since the Civil War, he writes, “the trope of the interrupted [pastoral]” has becomes a staple of U.S. literature (27).9 More specifically Marx analyzes literary texts throughout the nineteenth century in which the train disrupts the pastoral imaginary. The opening map of Winesburg, Ohio, however, challenges this literary and cultural pattern. In the map the railroad tracks stop abruptly at the small town’s borders and give way to empty, white space. In this map the railroad is not a part of an interstate, capitalist network; instead it becomes naturalized by and enfolded within the small town’s autonomous, contained, circular imaginary.10 Anderson’s novel challenges this ideological map and intimates a history in which both the railroad and the village are symbols of an aggressively expanding capitalist modernity. Anderson based Winesburg on his hometown, Clyde, Ohio, a town that was founded in 1852 because of the railroad.11 Thaddeus B. Hurd, the town historian, describes Clyde as follows: “Railroads were the lifeblood of the new town. Passengers and freight in abundance flowed east and west, north and south, with much interchange between the two lines. Trains ran constantly day and night” (160). Clyde’s economy was inextricably related to an expanding national market enabled by the railroad. This history informs Winesburg, Ohio. George Willard, for example, grows up in the New Willard House, a hotel on the railroad track that caters to traveling merchants and salesmen who crisscross the nation to serve a rapidly growing market. In the story “The Philosopher,” we learn about Doctor Parcival’s brother, who worked as a “railroad painter” on the “Big Four” (38). The Big Four Railroad was a conglomerate that consisted of the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis Railway (commonly abbreviated as CCC&StL). This is the railroad Willard travels on at the novel’s end; the train that takes him away from Winesburg “runs from Cleveland to where it connects with a great trunk line railroad with terminals in Chicago and New York” (250). American villages, especially in the Midwest, were never isolated islands; most were created because of the railroad’s expansion. In America as Second Creation (2003), the American studies scholar David E. Nye writes, “As the new railway lines went into operation, Americans began to realize that . . . a town could be invented in any spot where a railroad chose to plant one” (156). Throughout the nineteenth century this insight repeats and reverberates. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, writes the following in his journal: “I hear the whistle of the locomotive in the

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woods. Wherever that music comes it has its sequel. It is the voice of the civility of the Nineteenth Century saying, ‘Here I am.’ It is interrogative: it is prophetic: and this Cassandra is believed: ‘Whew! Whew! Whew! How is real estate here in the swamp and wilderness? . . . I will plant a dozen houses on this pasture next moon, and a village anon’” (cited in L. Marx 17). The sound of the train interrupts and disrupts Emerson’s reflection. What is of particular interest for this project is Emerson’s positing the train and the village as metonymic “machines” of an aggressively developing market economy. This same logic informs Josiah Strong’s Our Country (1885). Strong describes the rapidly transforming nation-state he witnessed while traveling at the end of the nineteenth century. He singles out the railroad as chiefly responsible for the radical reorganization of space: “In the middle States the farms were first taken, then the towns sprung up to supply their wants, and at length the railway connected it with the world; but in the West the order is reversed—first the railroad, then the town, then the farms” (cited in Nye 166). In this materialist account of U.S. and capital expansion in the West, the train came first and then towns and villages were built as capitalist nodes of an ever-growing market. Although Winesburg, Ohio undermines the ideological map that begins the novel, Anderson recognizes that the opening map remained, for most Americans, an accurate representation of the small town. As analyzed in the previous chapter, Anderson ends the novel with George Willard mentally reproducing this small-town island imaginary. When Willard leaves the small town, he “remembers” it as a space outside of a growing capitalist modernity; in short, he remembers and imagines a pastoral, centripetal space that mirrors the ideological map that opens the novel. In the concluding sections, I want to consider two “real” Ohio small towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: Canton and Marion.

Political Small Towns and the Emergence of a “New Capitalism” Early in Winesburg, Ohio a young boy overhears a conversation between one of the guests at the New Willard House and Tom Willard, George’s father and the only Democrat in the staunchly Republican town (24). The conversation is about the relationship between William McKinley, the Republican presidential candidate, and Mark Hanna, his campaign advisor. The guest tells Tom Willard, “Hanna is after money

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and nothing else. This McKinley is his tool. He has McKinley bluffed and don’t you forget it” (126). Although the boy who overhears this conversation slinks away because of his indifference to politics, I want to linger on this fragment because the dominant small town proves salient to McKinley’s and Hanna’s political imaginary. The abbreviated dialogue between Tom Willard and the hotel guest historically situates the reader in the midst of the 1896 presidential campaign between the Republican candidate, William McKinley, and the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan. Moreover the dialogue insinuates that the 1896 presidential election was controlled and dictated by the economic elite who worked in the service of an expanding capitalist modernity. In 1896 the man pulling the strings of McKinley’s campaign—both economically and ideologically—was Marcus Alonzo Hanna, a rich industrialist from Cleveland who made a fortune in diverse industries, including coal, iron, oil, and merchandising. Later in life Hanna became a politician committed to the political philosophy that the state’s main function is to protect and aid capitalist interests (Beard 240). Hanna helped McKinley become Ohio’s governor in 1891 and again in 1893, and at the close of the decade he worked tirelessly and successfully for McKinley’s presidential election in 1896 and for his reelection in 1900. When McKinley won the 1896 election, the Boston Evening Transcript (10 June 1896) declared that it was the inauguration of a “Hannaverian dynasty” (cited in Boller 177). This pronouncement proved to be prophetic. At the end of the twentieth century, a reporter for the Economist wrote, “In winning the election, McKinley and Hanna redefined their party to ensure Republican dominance for much of the next 30 years” (cited in Rauchway, “William McKinley and Us”).12 Winesburg, Ohio’s reference to McKinley and Hanna’s 1896 campaign not only links the novel to the past, but also, uncannily, to the future. In 2000 the New Yorker published an article on George W. Bush’s recent presidential election and the strategy used by Bush’s political architect, Karl Rove. Rove claimed that Bush’s 2000 election was a restaging of McKinley and Hanna’s 1896 campaign. The New Yorker reported, “Karl Rove has a riff, which he gives to anybody who will listen, entitled ‘It’s 1896.’ Every national political reporter has heard it, to the extent that it induces affectionate eye-rolling when it comes up. . . . Here’s the theory, delivered at Rove’s mile-a-minute clip: ‘Everything you know about William McKinley and Mark Hanna . . . is wrong. The country was in a period of change. McKinley’s the guy who figured it out. Politics were changing.

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The economy was changing. We’re at the same point now: weak allegiances to parties, a rising new economy’” (cited in Rauchway, “William McKinley and Us”).13 Rove positions Bush’s campaign as analogous to McKinley’s campaign. Each Republican, according to Rove, faced a “new economy.” But what does a “new economy” mean in the late nineteenth century? Is this “new economy” a precursor to the neoliberal economy embraced by the Bush administration?14 Charles Beard’s 1914 textbook, Contemporary American History: 1877– 1913 illustrates what was at stake in the 1896 election. Beard explains that he wrote the book so that young Americans will understand “contemporary history,” and he positions the campaign of 1896 (to which he devotes an entire chapter) as a “turning point in the course of American politics” (164). The late nineteenth century, Beard claims, gave rise to a “new capitalism,” and the central figure of this “new” capitalist formation was Mark Hanna (239–246). Hanna “believed consistently and honestly in the superior fitness of business men to conduct the politics of a country” and that “the chief function of the government was to help business and not to inquire into its methods or interfere with its processes” (245). The state’s primary objective, according to Hanna, was to protect and serve capital’s accumulation and expansion. As Beard makes explicit, the 1896 campaign was first and foremost about class relations and conflict. At the time of the election, the nation was in the wake of an economic depression catalyzed by the Panic of 1893. During the depression, more than fifteen thousand businesses and five hundred banks collapsed, and 20 percent of the workforce became unemployed.15 The economics historian John Steele Gordon writes that the depression of the 1890s “brought unparalleled economic suffering” because the United States had only recently developed into a highly industrialized, urbanizing nation in which a growing majority of people became dependent on a regular paycheck for their survival (264).16 Throughout the 1890s extensive class warfare raged, including, perhaps most famously, the Pullman Strike in 1894. In 1894 alone over 750,000 laborers engaged in labor strikes for fair wages and better working conditions (Tarbell, Nationalizing 232–233).17 In the 1896 election, McKinley and Bryan assumed diametrically opposed positions on the issue of class. Bryan’s position is clearly articulated in his canonical speech, “Cross of Gold,” first delivered at the 1896 Democratic convention in Chicago and repeated multiple times thereafter throughout his campaign.18 At the speech’s conclusion, Bryan uses a binary rhetoric of “us” (the working class) and “them” (the capitalists)

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and rhetorically asks, “Upon which side will the Democratic party fight, upon the side of the idle holders of capital or upon the side of the struggling masses?” (cited in Rhodes 18). In contrast, McKinley argued that “class” was a social fiction. In his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination, he claimed, “It is a cause for painful regret and solicitude that an effort is being made by those high in the counsels of the allied parties to divide the people of this country into classes and create distinctions among us which in fact do not exist and are repugnant to our form of government. . . . Every attempt made to array class against class, ‘the classes against the masses,’ section against section, labor against capital, ‘the poor against the rich,’ or interest against interest in the United States is in the highest degree reprehensible” (cited in Beard 168). According to McKinley, the United States is a peaceful, harmonious community, not one divided by class.19 To illustrate this fiction, the Republican Party needed a symbol; they chose the small town. Whereas Bryan campaigned throughout the nation-state, encountering diverse populations in their living and working spaces, McKinley engaged in a “front-porch campaign.”20 Rather than visit and experience the pluralistic, heterogeneous social spaces that constitute the United States, McKinley and Hanna invited the nation to Canton, Ohio. In this strategy, Canton was not cast as an industrializing city (which it was), but as a romanticized small town. Hanna and the Republican National Committee sent delegates to advertise this small-town campaign and solidified plans with railroad companies to make Canton a destination spot. The historian Margaret Leech writes that “low excursion rates from all parts of the country made the trip to Canton” feasible for many (88). Pilgrims to Canton journeyed to an orchestrated, constructed small town that was staged as the nation’s home. When people arrived in Canton, they experienced “the friendly town; the neat, unpretentious house and the porch hung with trumpet vines; and the First Methodist Church where McKinley worshipped with his mother every Sunday” (Leech 88–89). McKinley gave more than three hundred speeches from his front porch to over 750,000 people (Gould 11). In these orchestrated visits to “small-town America,” McKinley welcomed visitors to his home, shook everyone’s hands after his prepared speeches, and concluded with an informal reception (Leech 88). The small town at the center of the 1896 Republican campaign was a political fiction. Canton was presented as a contained, harmonious island community that existed outside of the violent vicissitudes of a capitalist modernity. In this political fiction, the American small town

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was presented as a pastoral community that does not become obsolete in a developing capitalist modernity. It is this ideological fantasy that Winesburg, Ohio, and the revolt more generally, seeks to demystify.

Political Small Towns, Part Two In 1920, the year that the revolt from the village ostensibly peaks, the dominant small town played a central role in shaping the dominant U.S. imaginary. In the wake of World War I, Americans had a choice between the vision of President Woodrow Wilson and the Republican candidate Warren Harding. Twenty years earlier Wilson, then a history professor at Princeton, linked the nation to a village imaginary. He wrote in 1896, “The history of the nation is only the history of its villages written large” (Mere Literature 214). However, two decades later Wilson’s perspective on the nation’s history was transformed radically. The historian William L. Langer writes that prior to World War I, Wilson’s writings were confined to domestic issues (“From Isolation to Mediation”). However, everything changed for Wilson because of the Great War. In May 1916 President Wilson gave a historic speech promoting the need to forge a league of nations. The speech makes explicit that the age of national isolation must come to an end; after World War I no nation could conceptualize itself as an island. Wilson proclaimed, “We are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world. . . . The interests of all nations are our own also. We are partners with the rest. What affects mankind is inevitably our affair as well as the affairs of the nations of Europe and Asia” (cited in Langer, “From Isolation to Mediation” 38). After the first recognized global war, it was time, Wilson urged, to think beyond the nation’s borders and to assume a transnational perspective. For Wilson, the American village was no longer at the center of the nation’s identity and imagination. Instead he insinuated the need for new imaginaries, symbols, and narratives. In 1920 Democrats ran on the platform that the United States should join the League of Nations.21 Republicans, in contrast, had a different perspective. Warren Harding ran on a platform that opposed the League of Nations and internationalism more generally. Throughout the campaign, Republicans engaged in an aggressive advertising campaign that the United States should “remain” autonomous, independent, and contained. For example, the Republican Party paid for jingoistic slogans to be strewn throughout the 30 October 1920 edition of Collier’s Magazine, including the following: “Absolute control of the United States by the

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United States”; “Independence means independence, now as in 1776”; “This country will remain American. Its next President will remain in our own country”; and “We decided long ago that we objected to foreign government of our people” (Sinclair 162). The image that symbolized this isolated, contained imaginary was the American small town. In speech after speech Harding stressed the need to return to the small town. “America’s present need,” he declared, “is not heroics but helping, not nostrums but normalcy, not revolution but restoration, not agitation but adjustment, not surgery but serenity” (cited in Miller 73). The space of “normalcy,” “restoration,” and “serenity,” Harding insisted, was the small town.22 In order to perform the nation’s isolation and independence from international entanglements and narratives, Harding’s 1920 presidential campaign was staged almost exclusively in his hometown of Marion, Ohio. The historian George E. Mowry writes that in the wake of World War I, “the handsome and affable man sitting on his front porch in Marion, Ohio, and talking in the backyard language of yesterday seemed to offer an end to all . . . [America’s] present troubles” (41). In a presidential campaign that mirrored McKinley’s 1896 front-porch campaign, Marion was staged as a small town, and the small town, it turned out, was just what the voting public wanted. Rather than the presidential hopeful traveling across the nation-state, citizens flocked to this orchestrated small town. Celebrities who made pilgrimages to the small town include Al Jolson, Eddie Foy, and Ethel Barrymore; Gertrude Stein called Marion her favorite American town; and the Chicago Cubs came to Marion to play an exhibition game (Noggle 211; Miller 63, 78).23 “What is the greatest thing in life?” Harding rhetorically asked during one front-porch speech, “Happiness. And there is more happiness in the American small village than in any place on earth” (cited in Miller 65). Harding portrayed the village as a pastoral island community, a trope that mirrors McKinley’s 1896 campaign and that George Willard imagines and longs for at the end of Winesburg, Ohio. Harding insists that the American village is a pastoral not located in the past, but rather one accessible in the present to which Americans should return. Harding, of course, is not suggesting that Americans physically return to villages; he exhorts them to ideologically return.24 When Harding insisted that the nation needed to return to the village, the United States was in the midst of a worsening recession, with five million Americans unemployed (20 percent of the labor force) (Miller 91).25 Rather than address this structural inequality, instability, and

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violence, and rather than think deeply about a world in which wars were fought on a global scale, the Republican Party offered the small town as an ideological escape from the material conditions of global capitalism and the material conditions of modern warfare. While the Republican Party offered the small town as a symbol of a contained, isolated nation-state, the United States emerged as “the new giant of the global trade network” (Buckman 9).26 John Steele Gordon specifies that after World War I, the United States became “by far the strongest nation on the earth and the new center of the Western world” (286). However, this “new center” conceptualized itself as a contained island community. In 1920 Harding was elected president in a landslide, winning by the largest margin in Republican history (Mowry 40; Langer, “Peace” 94).27 Subsequently the United States refused to join the League of Nations. While the rest of the world recognized the United States as a global power and force within a globalizing, capitalist modernity, the United States recognized itself as a circular imaginary. In the dominant U.S. culture of the early twentieth century, the map of the nation did not position the United States as a relational site within a globalizing modernity, but as a contained imaginary that echoes the opening map of Winesburg, Ohio.

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A New Machine in the Small-Town Garden: Periodizing an Automodernity

In the early twentieth century a new machine appeared in the smalltown garden: the automobile. In response, a popular U.S. narrative emerged that this new machine was destroying the nation’s home. The film scholar and critic Emanuel Levy observes that the trope of the automobile catalyzing the demise of the small town is pervasive in Hollywood films in the 1930s and 1940s. Commenting on the 1940 cinematic adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Levy writes, “[Like] other small-town films, Our Town is strategically situated in 1901, at the end of an era, just before the introduction of a most significant technological invention—the car” (“Our Town”). At the beginning of Wilder’s play Our Town (1938), the Stage Manager takes the audience back in history to 1901, an age before the automobile. At the turn of the century Grover’s Corners is presented as a vibrant, contained island community. However, the play (and the subsequent film) is about change, and the first change announced is the arrival of the automobile.1 In 1906, the Stage Manager informs us, the town’s “richest citizen” purchased the first automobile (5). But what is novel in 1906 becomes a symbol of the everyday when Our Town’s narrative concludes seven years later. In 1913 the Stage Manager reports, “Gradual changes in Grover’s Corners. Horses are getting rarer. Farmers coming into town in Fords. Everybody locking their doors now at night” (85–86). Despite the use of the adjective “gradual,” the transformations are radical. Our Town functions as a historical play that narrates the development of the twentieth century—symbolized by the arrival of the automobile—as the decline of the small town.

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Our Town periodizes the emergence of what I call an “automodernity,” a purportedly new modernity, symbolized by the automobile, that threatens the small town’s identity.2 Although an automodernity and the small town seem diametrically opposed, I argue that the former becomes the condition of possibility for the latter in a changing U.S. economy.

A Brave New Capitalist World In 1896, P. T. Barnum’s circus displayed exotic animals such as camels and elephants and featured the latest exotic technological wonder: “a horseless carriage” (Lynd and Lynd 252). However, what was exotic in 1896 became central to the global economy within the short span of three decades. When Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street was published in 1920, there were nine million automobiles registered in the United States; by the end of the decade, the number of registered cars had ballooned to twenty-three million (Goist, From Main Street 35). In the 1920s the automobile industry became the largest industry in the United States, and it was rapidly becoming central to a globalizing economy (Gordon 299).3 The rapid dominance of the automobile exemplifies Marx and Engels’s thesis that capitalism is a continuous history of revolutionary transformations in which “all that is solid melts into air” (Manifesto 476). The American studies scholar Peter Ling argues that the automobile, more than any other technological invention, unified the United States for the purposes of capitalist expansion and exploitation. Ling writes, “By linking the many constituent parts of the industrialized nation together, and particularly by incorporating hitherto self-sufficient or relatively isolated regions more fully into the cash economy, . . . [the automobile] served to transmit the heightened pace of industrial production to other phases in the cycle of capital accumulation” (1). In an automodernity, Ling claims, there are no more “island communities.”4 The automobile was the symbol of this new chapter in capitalism’s revolutionary history, and the face of this new chapter was Henry Ford. Ford’s centrality to understanding the social changes in the early twentieth century is evident in the popular periodizing name of this era: Fordism.5 Ford revolutionized social relations in the United States and beyond. In the 1920s Ford automobiles were being assembled in nineteen countries, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, India, Japan, Malaya, Mexico, and South Africa. In 1925 Ford opened an auto plant in Yokohama, which resulted in Ford’s dominance of the Japanese automobile market. In fact “Fordo” became a generic term for “car” in Japanese (Barnet 261).

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In the popular imagination outside of the United States, Fordism and Americanism were inextricably conjoined. More specifically the United States was understood as an expanding capitalist empire that wanted to enfold the entire world into a single, unified world market of mass production and mass consumption. The fear and anxiety caused by this image is exemplified in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World (1932).6 Although the novel critiques utopian texts such as H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods (1923), its final form was inspired by Huxley’s reading of Henry Ford’s My Life and Work (1922) (Murray 181). In Brave New World, the age of sovereign nation-states has transformed into a single, unified World State whose global culture is centered on the figure of Henry Ford, a substitute for Jesus Christ. In this World State, the phrase “Our Ford” replaces “Our Lord”; the symbol “T,” a reference to the Model T, replaces the cross; and the World State’s calendar is not organized by the birth of Jesus, but by Ford’s implementation of the assembly line in 1913. Brave New World anticipates that a fully developed Fordist mode of production mandates that subjects become homogeneous, standardized consumers in which “the last traces of individuality have been ruthlessly stamped out” (Bowering 98). The World Controllers produce subjects (by means of genetic modification and social conditioning) who are analogous to machines; whereas machines endlessly produce, the subjects in the novel endlessly consume.7 In his prescient essay, “Fordism and Americanism,” Antonio Gramsci identifies Fordism as a capitalist “revolution” (317).8 He argues that Fordism instantiates and institutionalizes a disciplinary factory regime of unprecedented standardization, productivity, and predictability. This factory regime was enabled, in large part, by Ford’s perfecting of the assembly line in 1913 in order to mass-produce automobiles.9 In a Fordist regime, the division of labor becomes increasingly transnational and increasingly simplified so that anybody can potentially work—and be replaced. This dehumanizing process renders all laborers into interchangeable, substitutable figures.10 Fordism, Gramsci writes, is “the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and man” (302). The theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri elaborate: “From the standpoint of capital, the dream . . . was that eventually every worker in the world, sufficiently disciplined, would be interchangeable in the global productive process—a global factory-society and a global Fordism” (247).11 This conjoining of Fordism and Americanism was predominantly recognized and analyzed outside of the United States; inside the United

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States a different narrative emerged. According to this alternative national narrative, the newest, dehumanizing chapter of capitalism was a foreign automodernity that threatened America’s foundational form: the small town.

Periodizing a New Modernity As stated earlier, Levy observes that throughout the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood films focused on the small town vanishing due to the arrival of the automobile. This narrative is repeated in a variety of cultural and literary forms. One of the earliest examples is Booth Tarkington’s 1918 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Magnificent Ambersons (adapted for the screen by Orson Welles in 1942).12 Although published in the midst of the revolt from the village, The Magnificent Ambersons perpetuates the ideology that the small town is the nation’s foundational form and ideal community. However, the small town, according to the novel, has become a space of the past that must now be remembered. In the novel Eugene Morgan, a character loosely based on Henry Ford, dreams of mass-producing a “horseless carriage” for mass consumption. When Morgan is first introduced, he is dismissed as a lofty “inventor” with an unrealistic dream (45). One character describes automobiles this way: “Those things are never going to amount to anything. People aren’t going to spend their lives lying on their backs in the road and letting grease drip in their faces. Horseless carriages are pretty much a failure” (45). However, what is initially deemed impossible becomes a reality in the course of the novel, and the result of this new invention demarcates the birth of one modernity and the demise of another: a Main Street modernity becomes an automodernity. The novel begins with an omniscient narrator explaining that the community at the novel’s geographic and narrative center is no longer legible as a small town. The “Midland town,” the narrator states in the second paragraph, has “spread and darkened into a city” (3). From the outset The Magnificent Ambersons establishes itself as a historical novel about the transformation of a small town into the city; in the opening pages, the city is metonymically linked to development and darkness; conversely, the small town is implicitly imagined as a space of containment and harmony. The urbanization of the small town is figured as a national paradise lost. In the opening chapter the narrator reminisces about the age before automobiles, nostalgically recalling a vanished era when the unnamed city was a small town. Prior to the automobile’s

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arrival, the omniscient narrator remembers, the space was a knowable community in which everyone knew each other and time unfolded leisurely. The narrator remembers, for example, when “a lady could whistle to [a mule-drawn train] from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once and wait for her while she shut the window, put on her hat and cloak, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the ‘girl’ what to have for dinner, and came forth from the house” (7). The small town is remembered as a communal form where, before the arrival of the automobile, people “had time for everything,” including “time to think,” time “to talk,” and time “to read” (7). The small town enables what a Fordist regime destroys. In The Magnificent Ambersons, the automobile becomes a symbol of a new modernity defined by constant mobility, endless growth, and ceaseless urbanization. As the automobile popularizes, the small town transforms into a sprawling city defined by unfettered and endless growth that demolishes the division between town and country. Late in the novel, the growing city is figured as a festering monster: “It was heaving up in the middle incredibly; it was spreading incredibly; and as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself and darkened its sky. Its boundary was mere shapelessness on the run” (202). The monstrous city swallows the countryside and transforms the entire landscape into a single, everexpanding city. Urbanization is defined by an absolute commitment to “Growing”; in contrast, the small town is defined by its commitment to containment (204). Moreover, urbanization is synonymous with the development and dominance of capitalism as a totalizing system. When the familiar town becomes a city, the church is replaced by a new “god”: “Growing.” “They were happiest when the tearing down and building up were most riotous, and when new factory districts were thundering into life” (204, capitalization in original). However, what should be a critique of capitalism becomes displaced and replaced by a narrative of social purity. The Magnificent Ambersons posits the automobile as a symbol of a foreign modernity that ushers in foreign practices and foreign bodies. Early in the novel an adolescent Lucy Morgan informs her friend George Amberson Minafer, “Papa says the city’s coming out this way” (57). Rather than recognizing how the small town becomes a city due to the dynamics of capitalism, a reactionary logic develops in which the city is cast as an external, threatening form that is diametrically opposed to the small town. George replies, “They say a lot of riffraff come to town every year nowadays. . . . Uncle Sidney was talking about it yesterday: he says he and some of his friends

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are organizing a country club, and already some of these riffraff are worming into it—people he never heard of at all!” (57). This Midland town transforms from a space where everyone knows his or her neighbor to one where strangers appear. These strangers do not belong to the community, nor can they be enfolded into the small town’s fabric; rather they “worm” their way inside like termites entering a house’s foundation. In the passage just quoted, the stranger is a metonym for the city, and both are situated as foreign, invading figures that threaten the small town’s legibility. This is a logic of xenophobia and racism that I will return to at the chapter’s end and elaborate upon in the next chapter. To hint at what is to come, let me say that when The Magnificent Ambersons opens by declaring that the small town “darken[s]” into a city, this is not an innocent description; when read within the novel’s economy, “darken” becomes a racially charged verb.

The (Mechanical) Reproduction of the Small Town As the twentieth century unfolds, the narrative of the automobile destroying the small town is transfigured. In one of the great ironies of modern U.S. history, Henry Ford became instrumental in the small town’s (mechanical) reproduction. Early in his career Ford became convinced that a capitalist regime of mass production and mass consumption would forge a future that would never look back. In 1916 he infamously proclaimed, “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a damn is the history we make today” (cited in Wallace 9). However, the United States’ entrance into World War I changed Ford’s perspective: now he denounced modernity and developed a newfound respect for history. But the history that Ford learned to respect was an ideological history framed by the small town’s ideological form. Ford critiqued the logic of development germane to a capitalist modernity, observing, “Improvements have been coming so quickly that the past is being lost” (cited in Conn 152). In response to modernity, he turned his attention to preserving the nation’s “heritage,” and in turn producing an alternative modernity, what may be called a “Main Street modernity.” In 1923 Ford purchased Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Wayside Inn was constructed in 1702 and made famous by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s book of poems Tales of a Wayside Inn, published in 1862. Ford not only restored the inn, but he also added a new wing and a ballroom and subsequently purchased the surrounding 2,667

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acres to construct one of the first U.S. museum villages. To ensure the village’s “authenticity,” Ford constructed a special highway that rerouted auto traffic away from the village (Wallace 10). The village’s legibility, in short, was predicated on appearing to be an autonomous, contained island community that existed outside of an automodernity. Ford explained the importance of this museum village as follows: “I’m trying in a small way to help America take a step, even if it is a little one, toward the saner and sweeter idea of life that prevailed in prewar days” (cited in Wallace 10). His village took a “step” back into an ideological past and, I argue, a “step” forward into an ideological future. Ford offered the same village imaginary that William McKinley used to win the presidency in 1896, the same village imaginary that Warren Harding used to win the presidency in 1920, the same village imaginary that Walt Disney will use to introduce guests to Disneyland, and the same village imaginary that Ronald Reagan will use to win the presidency in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Wayside Inn was only the beginning of Ford’s attempt to preserve the nation’s heritage. In Dearborn, Michigan, 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, he opened Greenfield Village, the largest outdoor museum in the United States. Similar to Sudbury, Greenfield featured an American space prior to—or outside of—an automodernity, and it quickly became one of the nation’s most visited tourist destinations. By 1940 over 600,000 people a year visited Greenfield Village, and by 1960 the annual attendance had surged above 1 million (S. Watts, People’s Tycoon 414). This planned community consists of nearly a hundred historic buildings, all deracinated from their original context and reassembled into a harmonious configuration. Ford’s accumulated fortune enabled him to acquire homes and buildings of individuals he admired and to relocate them to his manufactured village. Greenfield Village contains the home and bicycle shop of the Wright brothers, the courthouse where a young Abraham Lincoln tried cases, the homes of Robert Frost and Noah Webster, and the school where the prominent educator William McGuffey taught. Today Greenfield Village boasts 240 acres of land, yet the village proper comprises only 90 acres. The vast majority of the land is used to create the illusion that the village is an autonomous, contained community. The historian Steven Watts observes that Greenfield Village was constructed as “an idealized town rooted in no single region or culture” (People’s Tycoon 411). Near industrial Detroit, the 150 acres surrounding Greenfield Village were transformed into a pastoral landscape, with an

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artificial lake and pasture for imported farm animals to roam. In order to give the impression of an authentic village, Greenfield appears to be a self-sufficient island community that exists outside of a capitalist modernity marked by a pervasive auto culture. Whereas labor in a Fordist regime becomes mechanized, automated, and repetitive, in Greenfield Village a different regime of labor prevails: highly skilled handicraft labor. Throughout the village employees wear period customs and perform labor that has been rendered obsolete by Fordism, including the unalienated labor of blacksmiths, mechanics, farmers, and glassblowers. In 1926 a reporter for the Nation wrote, “With his left hand he restores a self-sufficient little eighteenth-century village; but with his right hand he had already caused the land to be dotted red and yellow with filling stations.  .  .  .  With one side of his brain he has dismissed all history as useless; with the other side he has indulged a passion which is almost a mania for the kind of history he can understand” (cited in S. Watts, People’s Tycoon 422). Despite the ideologies that underwrote Greenfield, Ford presented the village as a space of history. His close business associate Fred Black reported that Ford “always said the history of America wasn’t written in Washington, it was written out in the country” (cited in S. Watts, People’s Tycoon 423). Ford referred to Greenfield Village as an alternative Smithsonian Institute whose purpose was to educate the masses (cited in S. Watts, People’s Tycoon 409, 413). In 1929 he described Greenfield Village as “a history that is intimate and alive, instead of something in a book” (cited in S. Watts, People’s Tycoon 413). Greenfield Village’s success as a tourist destination is symptomatic of what James Howard Kunstler calls the “crisis of place in America,” which “has led to the creation of a gigantic industry dedicated to the temporary escape” from modernity (217). This “gigantic industry,” in large part, is a village industry. Greenfield Village is an early example of this industry, but perhaps the most famous example is Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A.13 From a critical distance, Main Street, U.S.A., like Greenfield Village, may seem like a conspicuous fiction that is as detached from reality as a talking mouse wearing clothes. However, as the geographer and historian Richard V. Francaviglia writes, Main Street, U.S.A. “has become one of the most sacrosanct places in America” (Main Street 144). Similarly Jean Baudrillard writes that Disneyland’s ideological appeal is that it offers “the religious, miniaturized pleasure of real America” (12, emphasis in original). As analyzed in chapter 1, a sacred space is an ideological space that essentializes and fixes narratives, values, and meanings.

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Like Greenfield Village, Main Street, U.S.A. functions ideologically as a historical space. Walt Disney contributed to this mystification by claiming that Main Street, U.S.A. was modeled after his hometown of Marceline, Missouri at the turn of the twentieth century. He proclaimed in 1959: Many of us fondly remember our “small home town” and its friendly way of life at the turn of the century. To me, this era represents an important part of our heritage, and thus we have endeavored to recapture those years on Main Street, U.S.A. at Disneyland. Here is the America of 1890–1910, at the crossroads of an era, where the gas lamp is gradually being replaced by the electric lamp, the plodding, horse-drawn streetcar is giving way to the chugging “horseless carriage.” America was in transition. . . . Main Street represents the typical small town in the early 1900s—the heartline of America. (cited in S. Watts, Magic Kingdom 22) Disney insinuates that what he provides is not fantasy, but memory—or to be more specific, national memory. To experience Main Street, U.S.A., Disney insists, is to experience the nation’s “heritage.”14 Main Street, U.S.A. replicates the cultural logic of Greenfield Village; both present the small town as an autonomous space that transcends regional specificity, and both present the small town as the nation’s authentic home. Like Greenfield Village, Main Street, U.S.A. is conspicuously and intentionally out of joint with modernity. Disneyland’s opening space is a social imaginary that is presented “at the crossroads of an era, where the gas lamp is gradually being replaced by the electric lamp, the plodding, horse-drawn streetcar is giving way to the chugging ‘horseless carriage.’” It is a space without mechanization, without automation, and, perhaps most conspicuously, without automobiles. Kunstler says that the reason for Main Street, U.S.A.’s popularity is obvious: “It is a well-proportioned street . . . blessedly free of cars” (220). Disneyland was constructed in the 1950s, “just when highway strips began to replace Main Streets everywhere . . . when corporate gigantism had started to kill off local economies and thereby destroy the character of small towns” (221). Main Street, U.S.A. may be a temporary escape from an automodernity, but it is also, of course, enabled by an automodernity. Disneyland is surrounded by oceans of parking lots, and beyond the parking lots are multiple-lane highways that direct driving tourists to this Main Street alternative. Despite its appearance as a threatened nation form in modernity, the dominant small town has become a commodified form that can be

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reproduced like any other commodity coming off the assembly line. Since Disney’s initial theme park opened in 1955, theme parks have been reproduced in Orlando (1971), Paris (1992), Tokyo (1983), and Hong Kong (2005). In each of these locations, Main Street, U.S.A. greets paying “guests.”15 The small town has become a reified form that can be replicated throughout the United States and, as I will analyze in subsequent chapters, anywhere in the world.

Domestic Tourism: In Search of the “Real” America Greenfield Village and Main Street, U.S.A. illustrate that in the twentieth century the dominant small town was imagined as an island community at the border of modernity—a border that was temporal and spatial. In the twentieth century the dominant small town was not just a past imaginary experienced through the distorting lens of nostalgia; rather it had become an alternative communal form accessible in the present.16 A tourist industry emerged that cast the small town as a lost national island that exists outside of modernity, and the only way to experience this national island is by means of a car trip. Consider, for example, the following recent travel guides: 5 Great Small-Town Getaways (1996), Country Towns of New York: Charming Small Towns and Villages to Explore (1999), and Rediscovering America: Exploring the Small Towns of Virginia and Maryland (2003). These guides, I want to suggest, discursively reproduce a national fantasy. To illustrate this claim, I want to briefly consider Bill Bryson’s bestselling travelogue, The Lost Continent (1989), in which Bryson reflects on his childhood, when the small town was a pervasive presence in popular culture. In all the Hollywood films he devoured as a child, the “one constant theme was the background”: the small town. “It was always the same place,” Bryson recalls, “trim and sunny with a tree-lined Main Street full of friendly merchants . . . and a courthouse square, and wooded neighborhoods where fine houses slumbered beneath graceful arms” (37–38). Regardless of what occurs in the foreground, “the background was always this timeless, tranquil place.”17 The small town imagined as an ahistorical fixed background is the image that concludes Winesburg, Ohio (see chapter 2). This national background is ubiquitous, Bryson notes, in movies, television, books, and advertising (37–38). He recalls childhood summer vacations when the family would drive countless miles to see America. During these trips he would keep a vigilant

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lookout for “timeless, tranquil” small towns (39). “It was inconceivable that a nation so firmly attached to small-town ideals, so dedicated in its fantasies to small-town notions, could not have somewhere built one perfect place—a place of harmony and industry, a place without shopping malls and oceanic parking lots, without factories and drive-in churches, without Kwik-Kraps and Jiffi-Shits and commercial squalor from one end to the other” (39). Most of the images he uses to describe the United States’ pervasive wastelands, from “oceanic parking lots” to “drive-in churches,” are related to the automobile. Bryson’s desire for an idealized, island community that exists outside of an automodernity is not dismissed as a childish fantasy: the complete title of Bryson’s travelogue is The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America. The book documents Bryson’s quest to discover and experience “lost” national islands. To reach these national islands, he must navigate the highways like sailors navigated the ocean in search of the island of Atlantis. However, in contrast to Atlantis, the small town is posited as a real, accessible paradise island. When the memoir opens, Bryson lives in England. While abroad, he explains that he “became gripped with a curious urge to go back to the land of . . . [his] youth and make what the blurb writers like to call a journey of discovery” (12). He undertakes a “journey” on which the personal is the national and the national is the personal; he seeks to discover both his authentic self and the authentic nation, and both are discovered in the small town. When Bryson completes his auto journey, he has “visited all but ten of the lower forty-eight states and [driven] 13,978 miles,” and he concludes, “I saw pretty much everything I wanted to see” (298). Bryson learns a lesson similar to the one George Bailey learns at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life: to embrace his hometown of Des Moines, which, at the book’s end, becomes figured as a small town. The Last Continent begins with Bryson living in England and concludes with his returning and committing to his boyhood home of Des Moines. The language he uses to describe his hometown discursively transforms the city into an ideological small town that echoes the small towns that pervade U.S. popular culture. He concludes, “People were out cutting the grass or riding bikes. I could see why strangers came in off the interstate looking for hamburgers and gasoline and stayed forever. There was just something about it that looked friendly and decent and nice. I could live here, I thought, and turned the car for home. It was the strangest thing, but for the first time in a long time I almost felt serene” (299). The small town is imagined as a space cocooned from a capitalist (auto)modernity.

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Bryson’s travelogue blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, as do most travel guides that describe purportedly real small towns. Consider, for example, Bill Kauffman’s Country Towns of New York: Charming Small Towns and Villages to Explore (1999). The guide urges Americans to see real small towns such as Kinderhook and Geneseo. But the language used to describe these spaces replicates the fantasy of the small town as an island community outside of modernity. The opening reads, “There is a New York in which only stars scrape the sky. . . . [and whose] towns do not teem with tourists, its streets not clogged with cars” (ix). Undoubtedly such spaces exist. But what is disingenuous is that such a description is contextualized in a book aimed at inspiring tourists to visit these small towns, and, of course, the only way one can gain access to these rural spaces is by means of the automobile. “We’re an undiscovered country, touristically speaking, with a lode of lore and legend and beauty” (ix). Small towns are described as spaces outside of modernity, spaces where “human values” are championed over the capitalist logic of “progress” (ix). Driving tourists should come to these small towns to see a more humane and more authentic America. Kauffman presents the small town as a pastoral island outside of modernity to lure outsiders to rural New York. The town of Leroy, for example, is described as “picturesque and lazy, and it looks as if Norman Rockwell drew it” (27). This use of “lazy” is not derogatory, but an attribute of the small town’s singularity and resistance to the logic of capitalism. Ironically, Kauffman encourages driving tourists to visit Genesee Country Village, a reconstructed village built in 1966 and comprising “restored” regional buildings. The two-hundred-acre village echoes Ford’s Greenfield Village and other village museums. “Docents are posted in each building, wearing period dress.” However, Kauffman assures us, “there is nothing hokey or staged about the village. These are people recreating the lives of their forebears in a spirit of reverence” (28). Small towns, whether the staged fiction of Genesee Country Village or “real” small towns, are presented as contained islands that stage and house an authentic America.

A Fantasy of Innocence and Whiteness In the midst of Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962), John Steinbeck speculates about what constitutes the American character. He concludes that Americans embrace mobility and disavow emplacement: “Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people,

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never satisfied with where they are as a matter of selection? The pioneers, the immigrants who peopled the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady rooted ones stayed home and are still there” (80). Steinbeck ruminates that Americans “are descended from the restless ones” and that contemporary Americans have “inherited” this “restless” impulse. Following this logic, his “search” for America is not a search for an emplaced nation. Instead the United States is presented as a mobile nation, and Steinbeck’s car journey becomes figured as a national experience. After defining Americans as a rootless people, Steinbeck delineates a materialist history that links rootedness (an un-American characteristic) with capitalism: Only when agriculture came into practice—and that’s not very long ago in terms of the whole history—did a place achieve meaning and value and permanence. But land is a tangible, and tangibles have a way of getting into few hands. Thus it was that one man wanted ownership of land and at the same time wanted servitude because someone had to work it. Roots were in ownership of land, in tangible and immovable possessions. In this view we are a restless species with a very short history of roots, and those not widely distributed. Perhaps we have overrated roots as a psychic need. (81) Whereas “real” Americans are in constant motion and committed to dislocation, capitalism can be located in private property. At the travelogue’s onset, Steinbeck marks himself as a cosmopolitan subject who has “traveled in many parts of the world” (5). While in the United States he spends time in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. However, he is quick to point out that “New York is no more America than Paris is France or London is England” (5). To understand a nation, Steinbeck insinuates, a subject must move beyond and outside of modernity’s visible capitalist circuits. However, as Travels with Charley unfolds, authentic Americans are refigured from an unplaced people to an emplaced people. Steinbeck’s search for America concludes with his implicit recognition that the “real” America is located in the nation’s small towns. Early in the travelogue, he expresses a predilection for small towns over cities. He writes that cities are “like badger holes, ringed with trash—all of them—surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish” (22). Whereas cities are condemned as spaces of conspicuous consumption and mounting trash, a page later New England small towns

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are described as “the prettiest . . . in the whole nation, neat and whitepainted, and—not counting the motels and tourist courts—unchanged for a hundred years except for traffic and paved streets” (23). Motels, tourist courts and traffic, signifiers of an automodernity, sully the small town’s timeless, tranquil space. One of the narrative’s emotional pinnacles occurs when Steinbeck returns to his boyhood home of Salinas, California, near the travelogue’s conclusion. Driving into Salinas, he observes that the “narrow twisting . . . road,” has been replaced by a “four-lane concrete highway slashed with speeding cars.” The “little town” of Salinas has changed beyond recognition and beyond legibility. Steinbeck ruminates, “I have never resisted change, even when it has been called progress, and yet I felt resentment toward the strangers swamping what I thought of as my country with noise and clutter and the inevitable rings of junk” (148). Like Grover’s Corners and the anonymous Midland town at the center of The Magnificent Ambersons, Salinas is accessible only by means of memory/imagination. Steinbeck writes, “I remember Salinas, the town of my birth, when it proudly announced four thousand citizens. Now it is eighty thousand and a leaping pell mell on a mathematical progression . . . with no end in sight” (149). In contrast to present-day Salinas, marked by expanding roads, proliferating cars, accumulating junk, and foreign people, Steinbeck remembers/imagines when Salinas was a stable, contained island community. The remembered small town becomes a means to critique capitalism’s culture of unending development and accumulation. However, in the course of the narrative Salinas transforms from a material place into an idealized form. The end of the travelogue, which finds Steinbeck longing for smalltown life and culture, negates his earlier critical voice. Early in the travelogue his prose is reflective as he thinks about the complexity and seduction of history. He observes that the United States, like all nations, is “hungry for history” (63). However, he is quick to point out, history must be approached critically and suspiciously. To illustrate his point, he recalls that when Sinclair Lewis first published Main Street, his hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota (upon which Gopher Prairie is loosely based), responded with vicious ire for Lewis’s negative portrayal. But by 1962, the year Steinbeck published Travels with Charley, he could write that “Sauk Centre celebrates itself” for being the home of Sinclair Lewis (62). (This logic remains true today. If you visit the official City of Sauk Centre’s website, you will see myriad strategies that figure the city as a small town. The motto of Sauk Centre is “A View of the Past—Vision

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for the Future,” making the community synonymous with a past that remains viable and visible. Moreover if you search the tourist activities in the city, echoes of the fictional small town are everywhere. Tourists are encouraged to visit the Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home, the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center, and the Sinclair Lewis Campground. The twentyeight-mile hiking trial is named “Lake Wobegon Trail,” referring to Garrison Keillor’s fictional small town.)18 Steinbeck asserts that one must be critical “of history as a record of reality” because too often the “myth” of history “wipes out the fact” (63). Too often, when we think we are celebrating history we are in fact perpetuating an ideological narrative. To further prove this point, Steinbeck discusses his boyhood town of Salinas: “The then little town where I was born, which within my grandfather’s memory was a blacksmith shop in a swamp, recalls with yearly pageantry a glowing past of Spanish dons and rose-eating senoritas who have in public memory wiped out the small, desolate tribe of grub- and grasshopper-eating Indians who were our true first settlers” (63). The “history” of the small town, celebrated ritually, is a form of mythology that mystifies that the town was founded by means of colonial dispossession and genocidal violence. However, by the travelogue’s end, Salinas, and the small town more generally, becomes a romanticized form. Revisiting his old haunts in California, Steinbeck claims, “Tom Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in mothballs of memory” (156). Even though Steinbeck doesn’t return to Salinas the way Bryson returns to Des Moines, the small town remains an idealized home and place and, as I demonstrate below, a structuring imaginary. Steinbeck claims that he searches for authentic national spaces, not simulacrums such as Disneyland (123). But what he posits as an authentic place is closer to Disney’s fantasy than Steinbeck recognizes. Steinbeck’s memory of an idealized small town is underwritten by three intertwined fantasies: the fantasy of a place that was once outside of a capitalist modernity, the fantasy of innocence, and the fantasy of whiteness. In his travels throughout the United States he briefly travels south, stopping in Texas and New Orleans. It is only at the book’s end, as his search for the real America comes to a close, that America’s history of racism and segregation becomes visible: “While I was still in Texas, late in 1960, the incident most reported and pictured in the newspapers was the matriculations of a couple of tiny Negro children in a New Orleans school” (189). Six years earlier the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education overturned the Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling

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(Plessy v. Ferguson) that racial segregation was lawful and legal. Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing on behalf of the unanimous Supreme Court, declared, “in the field of public education the doctrine ‘separate but equal’ has no place.  .  .  .  Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”19 Although the nation-state ostensibly outlawed the practice of segregation, the enforcement of this rule was slow to nonexistent in many states. On 14 November 1960, known as “D Day” in New Orleans, federal marshals protected four African American first-graders attending all-white schools in the Ninth Ward.20 Steinbeck witnesses this history firsthand: “Four big marshals got out of each car and from somewhere in the automobiles they extracted the littlest Negro girl you ever saw. . . . The big marshals stood her on the curb and a jangle of jeering shrieks went up from behind the barricades” (194). Despite the federal ruling, throngs of protesters (called “Cheerleaders”) demonstrated against the integration of schools. In New Orleans, Steinbeck reports, the word “nigger” circulates regularly, and even more disturbing, there are innuendoes that lynching is still practiced (192, 193, 195). Steinbeck’s sojourn south induces nausea in the author (196, 197). The South undoubtedly was a hub of intensified racism, but Steinbeck limits the problem of racism and segregation exclusively to the region. It is only while in the South that the specter of racism emerges in the travelogue, insinuating that racism is more of a southern problem than a national problem. Similarly the solution to racism is posited as one that must emerge from the South. “Perhaps” Steinbeck offers, “I, more than most people from the so-called North, am kept out of real and emotional understanding . . . not because I, a white, have no experience with Negroes but because of the nature of my experience” (186). His formative “experience” was shaped and framed by the small town of Salinas, an imaginary that is ostensibly distant from and innocent of the South’s—and the United States’—racism. 21 Steinbeck describes the small town of Salinas during his childhood as a social utopia that was innocent of racism. He recalls that when he grew up there was only one African American family, the Coopers, and that they were embraced by and enfolded into the small-town community: “The Coopers were respected, and their self-respect was in no way forced” (187). In contrast to the pervasive phenomenon described by W.E.B Du Bois as “double consciousness,” the Coopers are ostensibly protected from the legacy and ramifications of racism. This is because Salinas is presented as a space of virtue and innocence that is cocooned

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from the larger national history and logic of racism. Because Steinbeck spent his formative years in Salinas, he deems himself “unfitted to take sides in the racial conflict” (188). The dominant small town proves to be a national imaginary and a structuring imaginary; it is only at the travelogue’s end, after Steinbeck has driven thousands of miles in search of America, that the issue of racism appears and the civil rights movement is even glimpsed. Steinbeck claims that his formative years in Salinas left him “little . . . prepared for the great world” (187). Just as Steinbeck’s small-town childhood cocooned him from the United States’ racism, so too is the book largely cocooned from the United States’ domestic warfare. Travels with Charley, at the end, can be read as a small-town text. Steinbeck may not go home literally, but figuratively, the small town becomes a structuring imaginary of an innocent, anti-capitalist, and white nation. Despite the racism engulfing the South, Steinbeck still claims at the book’s end that there is a single, unified national community: “Americans as I saw them and talked to them were indeed individuals, each one different from the others, but gradually I began to feel that Americans exist, that they really do have generalized characteristics regardless of their states.” He continues, “But if there is indeed an American image built of truth rather than reflecting hostility or wishful thinking, what is this image?” (185). The ideological image that produces and projects a singular, unified nation, I want to suggest, is the dominant small town—a nation form that can be experienced by means of imagination/ memory, or by car. As capitalism expands and develops as an aggressive, dehumanizing system and process, the dominant small town becomes imagined more forcefully as a reactionary island community and as a space of racial purity. This logic is exemplified by Henry Ford’s musings on the relationship between the small town and modernity. Greenfield Village, according to Ford, can be understood as a revolt against modernity: “The trouble with us today is that we have been unfaithful to the White Man’s traditions” (cited in S. Watts, People’s Tycoon 425). What frames these imagined Anglo traditions—synonymous with national traditions—is the small town. In an essay entitled “Small Town,” which appeared in Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, the automobile tycoon urged Americans to return to small towns, where “the better qualities of our nature have a chance” (cited in S. Watts People’s Tycoon, 425). As I analyze in the following chapter, the “qualities” fostered by the dominant small town are far from redemptive.

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The Formation of a U.S. Fascist Aesthetics; or, Welcome to Main Street

In Main Street, Sinclair Lewis satirically writes that the small town is “our comfortable tradition and sure faith” (2). Reflecting on this passage in 2009, the information and linguistics scholar Geoffrey Nunberg observes that this position remains unchanged: “80 years after it was coined, ‘Wall Street vs. Main Street’ is still a potent political slogan. We still feel the need to write our moral differences on our geography.” Whereas Wall Street signifies a disavowed space of capitalist corruption, dishonesty, and greed, Main Street signifies an avowed space of benevolence, authenticity, and community. In this chapter I counter this popular coding of Main Street. As capitalism continues to globalize, destabilize, and dehumanize, the dominant small town becomes imagined more forcefully as an island community. In the twentieth century the small town becomes a nation form that obsessively distinguishes and regulates who and what is “native” and who and what is “foreign.” The dominant small town, I contend, functions as a testing ground for citizenship: to be at home in the small town is to be at home in the nation, and conversely, to be excluded from the small town is to be excluded from the national symbolic.1 The geography scholar David Harvey writes that the “capitalist hegemony over space puts the aesthetics of place very much back on the agenda” (Condition 303). The aesthetic production of place is frequently a reactionary process grounded in the desire to escape from the conditions and logic of global capitalism. In an American context, the dominant small town is inextricable from the question of aesthetics. More

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specifically I suggest that in the twentieth century the dominant small town becomes legible by means of a fascist aesthetics. What constitutes this aesthetics is suggested by Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). At the conclusion of the essay, Benjamin insists that a progressive politics must produce an aesthetics that would be “useless for the purposes of Fascism” (218). Some of the terms that become aligned with a fascist aesthetics are “authenticity,” “heritage,” “organic,” “aura,” “immediate,” “ritual,” and “tradition” (220–224, 233). A fascist aesthetics imagines space as a homogeneous, ahistorical island community that vilifies social and cultural diversity.2 My claim that the dominant small town becomes legible by means of a fascist aesthetics should not be read as an ahistorical claim. Rather the dominant small town, like all ideological forms, is historically mediated. As I will explore in chapter 8, at the end of the twentieth century the dominant small town becomes a diverse, hospitable, cosmopolitan space.

It Can Happen Here In the early twentieth century a literary genre emerged that critiques the logic of U.S. exceptionalism and imagines how the United States can become a fascist state.3 The inaugural text of this genre is Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935), published fifteen years after Lewis’s Main Street. The novel provocatively and critically suggests that what was unfolding in Germany, Spain, and Italy could also occur in the United States. In Lewis’s speculative history, the Great Depression creates favorable conditions for the meteoric rise of the populist demagogue Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. Windrip wins the 1936 presidential election with the promise of economic salvation by any means necessary (any means, that is, except communism). Once president, he instantiates a fascist regime in which Congress and the Supreme Court are “castrated” (135), all fifty states dissolved (134–135), labor unions destroyed (145), and all political parties dismantled with the exception of the American Corporate State and Patriotic Party (142). Moreover in order to maintain totalitarian order, the United States creates “camps” to detain and silence all political and social dissidents (143–144). This U.S. fascist regime, like its European counterparts, is racist, misogynist, and homophobic. However, the state mystifies its violent practices by framing its politics as a return to “tradition.” In his presidential campaign, Windrip promises to return to traditional ways and practices: “All women now employed shall . . . be assisted to return to

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their incomparably sacred duties as home-makers and as mothers of strong, honorable future Citizens of the Commonwealth” (67, capitalization in original). All subjects outside of this “regime of the normal” are ostracized, punished, and in many cases, killed.4 While campaigning for the presidency, Senator Windrip promises, “All Negroes shall be prohibited from voting, holding public office, practicing law, medicine, or teaching in any class above the grade of grammar school, and they shall be taxed 100 per cent of all sums in excess of $10,000 per family per year” (67). As the novel progresses, this racism is taken to its logical conclusion: when he becomes president, we learn that Windrip “respected” the plan to “eliminate” all “Negroes” (144). What is the relationship between Main Street and It Can’t Happen Here? Or perhaps we should ask, how far is the distance from Main Street to It Can’t Happen Here? Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” initially published in the New Yorker on 27 June 1948, suggests that there is no distance at all. Her short story insinuates that the small town should be recognized as a fascist form.5 “The Lottery,” published three years after the Third Reich collapsed, centers on an unnamed small town and its annual tradition of ritualistic violence. Every year the town’s citizens congregate at the town square and participate in a tradition that requires the male head of each family to select a piece of paper out of a black box; this seemingly innocuous act leads to an individual being stoned to death. The small town’s communal identity is constituted, in large part, by uncritically repeating this annual ritual. Even though rumors circulate that other small towns have protested and even discontinued this tradition (297), the town elders—the keepers of tradition—refuse to entertain any alternatives; change of any sort is perceived as a threat to the small town’s identity. The story illustrates what Hannah Arendt calls the “banality of evil” (Eichmann). The community does not stone the lottery winner to death due to some communal pathology or some exceptional barbarity. Instead the small town perpetuates this systematic violence because of tradition. Every year the community performs the lottery because this is supposedly what has “always” been done. One of the town’s elders explains, “There’s always been a lottery. . . . Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves” (297, emphasis in original). This violent tradition takes on the guise of normalcy and, as this passage makes clear, becomes a marker of civilization. Without the tradition of the lottery, the town elder warns, people will be “living in caves.”

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“The Lottery” powerfully insists that traditions are “invented” in order to solidify communities at any cost, including systemic forms of violence (see Hobsbawm and Ranger). The story is not a critique of traditions in the abstract, but a specific critique of U.S. traditions. The community in “The Lottery” that practices and perpetuates this violent tradition is clearly an American small town. The subjects who populate the town have stereotypical Anglo-American names, such as Bobby Martin, Harry Jones, Joe Summers, and Steve Adams. Moreover the activities and organizations mentioned are stereotypically American, including “square dances,” a “teen-age club,” and a “Halloween program” (292). Upon the story’s publication in the New Yorker, the reaction was “instant and cataclysmic” (Oppenheimer 128). The literary scholar Lenemaja Friedman writes that after the story’s initial appearance, “a flood of mail . . . deluged . . . the editorial offices in New York.” “No New Yorker story,” Friedman continues, “had received such a response” (63). Similarly Jackson’s biographer Judy Oppenheimer writes, “Nothing in the magazine before or since would provoke such an unprecedented outpouring of fury, horror, rage, disgust, and intense fascination. Shirley Jackson struck a nerve in mid-twentieth century America the way few writers have ever succeeded in doing, at any time” (128–129). The public’s outrage toward “The Lottery” makes clear that the revolt from the village was far from over. The vociferous reaction was not simply because of the story’s depiction of barbarity, but more specifically because the story suggests that such barbarity could happen in the small town. (A thought experiment: Would the story cause an analogous uproar if it took place in an unnamed city?) “The Lottery” suggests that the small town should be recognized as a fascist form. I take Jackson’s insight seriously, but the reason for this categorization is not due to arbitrary violent traditions, as is the case in Jackson’s story. Instead, what makes the dominant small town a fascist form is its aesthetics of erasing racialized bodies and cultures, and instead producing and projecting an ethnically homogeneous space, culture, and people.6 In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois famously predicted that the twentieth century would be defined by the “color line” (10); this color line manifests itself as the border that frames the dominant small town.

The Revolt from the Village Reconsidered That the dominant small town is predicated on social and racial purity is central to Zona Gale’s remarkable short story “Dream” (1919), written in

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the midst of the revolt from the village. The story is set in Friendship Village, a literary geography that, in the first decades of the twentieth century, was “as recognizable an icon of small-town America as Winesburg, Ohio and Gopher Prairie” (Solomon and Panetta xiv). Between 1908 and 1919 five volumes of Gale’s stories set in the fictional village were published. As evident by its title, Friendship Village is a place of intimacy and community.7 However, by 1919 Gale was revolting against the dominant village imaginary that she helped perpetuate. “Dream” begins with communal excitement when a new family moves into town. When the town learns that the surname of the newcomers is Fernandez, a consensus develops that a cosmopolitan family must be joining their community. Mis’ Sykes, one of the community leaders, quips, “I guess when we write that name to our friends in our letters, they won’t think we live in the woods any more” (148). When Mis’ Sykes sees the deliverymen unloading “nice furniture,” she is certain that the new family will be a “distinct addition to Friendship Village society,” because, as she explains, “Folk’s individuality is expressed in folk’s furniture. You can’t tell me that, with those belongings, we can go wrong in our judgment” (147, 149). Later the community learns that Mr. Fernandez is actually Professor Fernandez (150), that the daughter attends the University of Chicago (152), and that the son fought in World War I (158). However, despite their extraordinary cultural capital, the Fernandez family cannot properly belong to Friendship Village. This is because they are African Americans. Upon meeting Professor Fernandez in person, the narrator, Calliope, immediately intuits “what this was going to mean in the village” (152). When Mis’ Sykes learns that her new neighbors are African Americans, her previous excitement and planned hospitality instantly vanish. She makes clear that under no circumstances will the Fernandez family be welcome in Friendship Village. This form of racism illustrates what Étienne Balibar calls “neo-racism.” According to Balibar, in the twentieth century a new form of racism emerges. Instead of using biology to justify white supremacy, neo-racism uses culture (“Neo-Racism” 21–22).8 All cultures, according to this modern racist logic, are equal. This may seem like a socially progressive position. However, according to neo-racism, different cultures have their own proper spaces. Neo-racism, in short, is a spatial logic that perpetuates segregation in the name of cultural difference. Gale’s “Dream” makes explicit that the dominant American village is popularly imagined as a white space, and the story helps illustrate the racial politics at stake in the revolt from the village.

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Gale’s critique is repeated in one of the most popular fictive small towns of the twentieth century: Peyton Place. Soon after its publication in 1956, Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place became one of the best-selling novels of the twentieth century. A year later it spawned a blockbuster movie, and soon after, it was translated into the most popular show in television history (1964–1969) (Cameron viii, xvi). Although the novel is notorious for its representation of sexuality, what is often overlooked is its critique of the small town’s constitutive racism.9 When Tom Makris, one of the novel’s central characters, moves from Pittsburgh to Peyton Place for a job in the town’s education system, he inquires about the small town’s history: “Peyton Place . . . is the oddest name for a town I’ve ever heard. Who is it named for?” (102). Throughout the novel, when this question is broached people turn taciturn. However, roughly a quarter of the way through the novel, a local elusively shares that Peyton Place is named for “some feller that built a castle up here, back before the Civil War. Feller by the name of Samuel Peyton” (102). As the novel unfolds, we learn more about this individual who founded the town, and yet whose identity and history are suppressed. Samuel Peyton is an African American who established the town “at a time when most folks looked on niggers as work horses, or mules” (329). However, Peyton Place publicly erases this history and instead projects itself as a “pure” white community.10 In the town it is socially acceptable to use the word “nigger,” and in one particularly disturbing passage several men insinuate that lynching remains a socially acceptable practice (83–84, 153, 158, 176, 332).

The Dangers of Community The dominant small town’s identity as a socially and racially pure community informs myriad fiction and nonfiction texts. Consider, for example, Page Smith’s self-proclaimed inaugural study of the American small town, As a City upon a Hill: The Town in American History (1966). As discussed in the introduction and chapter 1, Smith positions his study as the foundation of small-town historical scholarship (viii). Whereas the cumulative town (the precursor to the city) is defined by capitalist growth and “heterogeneous people,” the covenanted community (the precursor to the small town) is defined by stability and a “relatively homogeneous ethnic and religious” population (17). More forcefully, later in the study Smith identifies the small town as a space of “racial and cultural purity” (111); throughout As a City upon a Hill, the word

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“homogeneity” repeats like a refrain whenever the small town is mentioned. This exclusionary, racist logic informs Smith’s methodology. At the outset he curiously announces that he has excluded the South from his study. His rationale is as follows: “I have paid very little attention to the Southern town, in part because the presence of a large number of Negroes in Southern communities makes them to a degree unique” (viii). No one would deny that southern communities are “unique,” but aren’t all communities? The reason Smith excludes the South from his study, I want to suggest, is because of the ideological assumption that the small town is exclusively a white space.11 At stake in the dominant small town’s identity as a racially pure community is the prominent place of the small town in the U.S. imagination. The American studies scholar Park Dixon Goist claims, “The essential function of the small town for the American imagination has been to symbolize the idea of community” (From Main Street 13). The gender and women’s studies scholar Miranda Joseph specifies that community is “the defining other of a capitalist modernity”: “While community is often presumed to involve face-to-face relations, capital is taken to be global and faceless. Community concerns boundaries between us and them that are naturalized through reference to place or race or culture or identity; capital, on the other hand, would seem to denature, crossing all borders, and making everything and everyone equivalent” (“Community” 57, 58).12 The desire for community is frequently the desire to escape from the dehumanizing, destabilizing conditions of a capitalist modernity, and this desire intensifies as a capitalist modernity intensifies. The sociology scholar Zygmunt Bauman writes that “in an ever more insecure and uncertain world, the withdrawal into the safe haven of territoriality is an intense temptation; and so the defence of the territory—the ‘safe home’” (117). As the world becomes more “insecure and uncertain,” there is greater desire for an island community, and this desire may lead to a violently xenophobic culture and production of place.13 For this reason, Joseph insists that a project “examining the ‘seductions of community’ remains a crucial one” (“Community” 60). Many prominent thinkers argue that the concept of community is intimately linked to the logic of fascism. David Harvey, for example, claims that a desire for community easily “slide[s] into parochialism, myopia, and self-referentiality” that become the conditions for fascism (Condition 351). Similarly Slavoj Žižek writes that “the illusion” that a society can escape modernity and “return” to a “natural,” organic community is

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“the direct path to totalitarianism” (Sublime Object 5). In its dominant formation, community is committed to commonality. In her important critique, the political science scholar Iris Marion Young writes that community “participates in what Derrida calls the ‘metaphysics of presence’ [and what] Adorno calls ‘the logic of identity,’ a metaphysics that denies difference” (234).14 The ideal community, Young argues, is imagined as a unified, organic, authentic collective identity that is predicated on exclusion. This ideal celebrates containment and homogeneity and opposes openness and diversity.15 In an American context, this ideal community takes the form of the dominant small town.

A Microcosm of the Nation Perhaps the most famous “real” small town in the early twentieth century is Muncie, Indiana. In 1937 Life magazine declared, “Muncie, IND, is the most interesting small town in the U.S. For 12 years it has been surveyed, studied, talked about more than any other city its size in the world. Sociologists use it as a specimen, advertisers as a test tube” (cited in Igo 68). The reason Muncie was “the most interesting small town” is because the public learned that this Indiana town was the model for Robert and Helen Lynd’s sociological study Middletown: A Study in American Culture (1929). Middletown changed the discipline of U.S. sociology and solidified the belief that the small town was a microcosm of the nation. Upon Middletown’s publication, the New York World claimed, “No one who wishes a full understanding of American life today can afford to neglect this impartial, sincerely scientific effort to place it under the microscope slide.” A writer for the New Republic agreed, calling the study a “book . . . that will give the reader more insight into the social processes of this country than any other I know.” And the Nation declared, “Nothing like it has ever before been attempted; no such knowledge of how the average American community works and plays has ever been packed between the covers of one book. . . . Who touches this book touches the heart of America.”16 The sociological study surprisingly became a national best seller. In its first year in publication Middletown went through six printings, and at least thirty-eight colleges and universities were using the study in their courses (Igo 69). In fact, as the sociologist Dwight Hoover observes, Middletown “is one of the few social science books published in twentieth century America that have not gone out of print” (22).

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What distinguishes Middletown from other sociological studies is that the Lynds did not focus on communities believed to be so-called social problems (as was the focus, for example, of the Chicago School). Rather, their “explicit object . . . was a ‘representative’ community meant to stand in for the nation” (Igo 29).17 Middletown was not a sociological study of “others,” but a textual mirror that reflected the nation’s “everyday,” “normal” citizens. The historian Sarah E. Igo writes, “Just as a group of villagers could illuminate a whole society in Margaret Mead’s Samoa or Robert Redfield’s Tepoztlán, Middletown could stand for America” (81). Americans read Middletown, in other words, to learn about themselves. The success of the Lynds’ sociological study led one reviewer to proclaim the end of the “literary monopoly on Main Street” now that “sociologists have found Main Street worthy of a ‘survey’” (cited in Igo 73). The dominant small town triumphantly migrated from fictive discourses to nonfictive discourses. The unprecedented success of Middletown launched a small-town sociology genre. By the 1930s studies of the small town as a microcosm of the nation proliferated. Examples include William Lloyd Warner and Paul S. Lunt’s The Social Life of a Modern Community (1931), William Lloyd Warner’s Democracy in Jonesville: A Study in Quality and Inequality (1949), and August B. Hollingshead’s Elmstown’s Youth: The Impact of Social Classes on Adolescents (1949). In their sociological study, the Lynds use Muncie as a symbol of a typical American community and as a microcosm of the nation.18 They discursively transform Muncie from a historically and regionally specific space into the anonymous “Middletown.” This transformation enables Muncie to become legible as the dominant small town—an abstract, deracinated, highly mobile imaginary.19 Middletown linguistically signifies a small town in the “middle” of historical change. The Lynds position their study at the crossroads of a revolutionary social change between a stable, knowable way of life and a destabilizing, overwhelming way of life. “A citizen,” they write, “has one foot on the relatively stable ground of established institutional habits and the other fast to an escalator erratically moving in several directions at a bewildering variety of speeds” (498). The “stable ground” of “established institutional habits” is the small town; in contrast, the escalator, a symbol of the radical disorientation and decentering experienced by average Americans, represents an urbanizing, industrializing capitalist modernity. Middletown produces a historical narrative in which the small town—a microcosm of the nation—is losing its identity

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as a self-contained island community and transforming into a city that exists within and is defined by capitalism’s structuring network. Early in the study the Lynds write that modernity “descended upon villages and towns, metamorphosing them into a thing of Rotary Clubs, central trade councils, and Chamber of Commerce contests for ‘bigger and better’ cities” (5–6). In a formula we have seen multiple times already, prior to the twentieth century the small town was ostensibly an autonomous island community. However, in the twentieth century, a capitalist modernity “descended” and instantiated capitalist institutions such as “trade councils” and “Rotary Clubs.” In this historical narrative, a capitalist modernity is imagined as a foreign, invading process whose origin and development occur outside the small town’s borders. In this logic, U.S. villages and towns are not agents of this apparently new capitalist modernity; rather they are cast as modernity’s victims. At stake in this ideological formula is that the small town is imagined as a microcosm of the nation, and therefore the United States becomes allegorically cast as innocent in relation to capitalism’s development. The small town’s innocence is exemplified by the Lynds’ introduction, which portrays Middletown as a modern-day Atlantis that is swallowed by the waves of modernity: “We are coming to realize . . . that we today are probably living in one of the eras of greatest rapidity of change in the history of human institutions. New tools and techniques are being developed with stupendous celerity, while in the wake of these technical developments increasingly frequent and strong cultural waves sweep over us from without, drenching us with the material and non-material habits of other centers” (5). In this passage, modernity becomes figured as multiple, unstoppable waves that “sweep over us from without.” These waves of modernity displace the U.S. center with numerous, outside “centers.” The singular center being lost, the center that cannot hold, is the small town. Prior to a capitalist modernity, the small town is imagined as the nation’s single, clear, and coherent center. In contrast, modernity is defined by an overwhelming, bewildering multiplicity and pluralism in which subjects lose their orientation and direction. If a capitalist modernity is figured as giant waves, then the small town is implicitly figured as a sinking island community. As Middletown makes clear, the small town’s identity is predicated on being legible as an autonomous island community that exists outside of modernity. Igo writes, “Much like contemporary ethnographers busily documenting the ‘vanishing’ American Indian, the Lynds captured in their study’s pages the demise of an earlier, seemingly more authentic,

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American community” (41).20 When the Lynds discuss Middletown in the late nineteenth century, they identify it as a small town with desirable communal values. However, as the twentieth century unfolds, the Lynds narrate Middletown as becoming a “city,” and they begin referring to the community as a “pecuniary society,” a pejorative phrase that repeats throughout the study. The Lynds describe this process of urbanization as one of moral, communal, and national decline. In this transition from small-town America to urban America, subjects become consumers, the family unit disintegrates, church attendance plummets, neighbors become estranged, and community dissolves. This, of course, is an ideological formula in which the small town becomes the ideal of community and the city becomes synonymous with all social ills.21 So what makes Muncie a “typical” American community? Why did the Lynds choose Muncie as a microcosm of the nation? Does the community’s demographics mirror the nation’s demographics? At the text’s outset the Lynds explain their methodology in choosing Muncie, and they specify two guiding criteria: first, that the community “be as representative as possible of contemporary American life,” and second, “that it be at the same time compact and homogeneous enough to be manageable in such a total-situation study” (7). The community “selected” must be a “compact” space with a “homogeneous” population. Middletown’s population, the Lynds write, is composed of “native” Americans with only “a small Negro and foreign-born population” (8). By choosing a space of “native” Americans, the Lynds explain, they were able to “concentrate” exclusively upon “cultural” changes because of “a relatively constant native American stock” (8). The Lynds, however, did not select a community with a “constant native American stock.” Rather their sociological study discursively produces such a “homogeneous” community. In an important, corrective study, The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie’s African American Community (2004), the anthropologist Yolanda T. Moses recounts that when she was a sociology major in 1964, Middletown was required reading: “As a young African American undergraduate student, I read the book, not knowing that Muncie, Indiana had an actively engaged African American population. . . . So in some sense, the original Middletown study was a metaphor for the invisibility of people of color” (ix). Hurley Goodall and Elizabeth Campbell’s scholarship demonstrate that Muncie’s African American community was first documented in the 1840s and became well established by 1880 (53). In 1889 Muncie’s local newspaper, the Daily News, reported that its “colored population

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was increasing so rapidly it would soon be the largest colored population of any city of Muncie’s size in the state” (cited in Goodall and Campbell 55). The reason for this exponential growth was the city’s rapid industrialization and the subsequent promise of jobs. In the decade prior to the Lynds’ arrival, Muncie’s African American population made up 5.6 percent of the total population (57), and this percentage continued to grow at a remarkable rate in the ensuing decades. The Lynds, however, erased the presence of African Americans in the production of Middletown, and they also erased the fascist practices of the town. Throughout the 1920s, the years in which the Lynds conducted their study, “it was common knowledge,” Goodall and Campbell write, “that members of the Ku Klux Klan controlled the city’s government and political system” (36). This history is silent in the pages of Middletown. Although the Lynds employ nativist metaphors such as “American stock” in describing Muncie’s population, the question of who is a “native” American can be determined geographically: to be a “native” American means to be at home within the small town; in contrast, to be excluded from the small town is to be excluded from the national symbolic.22 The Lynds’ study of a “typical” small town is a discursive construct that is as fictive as Friendship Village or Peyton Place. However, fictions can have profound effects. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Toni Morrison argues that the dominant American identity, culture, and imagination are formulated and consolidated by erasing and silencing African bodies and voices: “Deep within the word ‘American’ is its association with race.  .  .  .  American means white” (47). This national imaginary is forged by the process of a “distancing Africanism” (8). The dominant small town performs this cultural and racist work.23

Coda: My Hometown In Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town (2009), the former American poet laureate Robert Pinsky shares memories about growing up in Long Branch, New Jersey within the context of concise, insightful readings of several novels and films that center on small towns. Pinsky’s self-conscious and critical study exemplifies how the dominant small town looms large in the U.S. imagination. His childhood memories of Long Branch are mediated by and entangled with popular small-town literature and film, including Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943). The specific, material town of Long Branch becomes

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inseparable from canonical, cultural small towns. Pinsky summarizes the appeal of the dominant small town as follows: “In a culture notionally built on speed, change, mobility, and expansion, the thought of a quiet, human-scale community has been comforting—a half-real, halfinvented shelter, refusing to explode under the successive historical pressures of slavery, economic depression, European war, technological change, imperial enterprises, and global missions, all the violent contradictions of clinging to a complacent provinciality while hurtling forward into the modern, the postmodern, or whatever comes after that” (13). As the twentieth century develops, the small town becomes more mythical than historical. However, Pinsky emphasizes, literary and cultural narratives centered on small towns cannot be reduced to “mere nostalgia” (18). Instead the small town has become a “spectral epitome of the United States itself” and a repository for the nation’s fantasies and dreams (18). Moreover, as Pinsky explains, the small town is also a repository of America’s “nightmares” (the subtitle of his study is “Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town”). In the dominant culture, the small town is a national utopia whose legibility is predicated on repressing the violences that constitute its foundation and history (what Pinsky poetically calls the small town’s “nightmares”). Pinsky’s framing of his childhood memories in Long Branch exemplify this cultural logic. When he introduces his hometown, it is a romanticized community. The first thing he describes is the movie theater that played Hollywood features, the Paramount. The author remembers a “Moorish lobby and golden marquee, its proscenium with large, busty caryatids for columns, its coffered and gilded ceiling” (21). The movie theater, a space that projects fantasies, is remembered as a space of fantasy; moreover, the movie theater is part of a larger space of fantasy, the small town.24 One of the central fantasies about the small town is that it is a stable island community in which “place, family and identity” are coterminous (27). The small town is “remembered” as being impervious to the destabilizing logic of a capitalist modernity. However, Pinsky’s study concludes with an image that overturns the small town’s idyllic identity. Behind this utopian veneer, Pinsky makes visible the racial politics that underwrites the small town’s legibility. His analysis of the small town in popular and personal history ends by lingering on a haunting image: on 2 July 1924 the Ku Klux Klan staged a Fourth of July parade through Long Branch. As the historian Judge Evans writes, this was not a small parade; rather the procession “took four hour to pass a given spot” (cited in Pinsky 90). Participants were

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prominent members of the town sending a warning to the town’s “outsiders,” including Jews, African Americans, and Catholics (90–93). Despite the small town’s appearance as a utopian community with a strong sense of history and unchanging values, its racist history discloses a strong, communal desire for a racially and ethnically pure, homogeneous community. Thousands of Broadways brilliantly suggests that the small town’s constitutive racism is disavowed. Instead, Pinsky writes, the small town frames “an indomitable American belief in our innocence” (38). This imagined innocence is a refusal to wrestle with America’s pressing legacy of racism. That the dominant small town is scarred with the history of racism is not, however, buried deep within the small town’s ideological image; rather, as Mark Twain suggests, this history is right on the surface. Pinsky opens his study of the dominant small town by quoting the subversive, scathing opening of Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1893–1894).25 The story begins with a pastoral description of Main Street: “All along the streets, on both sides, at the outer edge of the brick sidewalks, stood locust-trees with trunks protected by wooden boxing, and these furnished shade in summer and a sweet fragrance in the spring when the cluster of buds came forth. The main street, one block back from the river, and running parallel with it, was the sole business street. It was six blocks long, and in each block two or three brick stores three stories high towered above interjected bunches of little frame shops. Swinging signs creaked in the wind, the street’s whole length” (cited in Pinsky 4). After four paragraphs describing the small town as an idealized community, Twain interrupts this pastoral fantasy with two abrupt sentences: “Dawson’s Landing was a slaveholding town, with a rich slave-worked grain and pork country back of it” (cited in Pinsky 5). Despite the small town’s foundational violence, the town sees itself as innocent. The sentence following this historical, material description of Dawson’s Landing as a slaveholding community reads “The town was sleepy and comfortable and contented” (5). In the midst of his analysis of the small town, Pinsky asks, “Is an a-historical provincialism, convinced of its own innocence, the most monstrous kind?” (39). Such a community remains blind to its history and practice of racism, oppression, exclusion, and exploitation; instead it is committed to its innocence and to keeping critical thinking at bay. Thousands of Broadways claims that literary and cultural works that center on small towns are “urgent” (18). If we read such works critically, creatively, and relationally, we can discern the multiple histories haunting the dominant U.S. imaginary.

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Staging and Archiving the Nation: Pedagogical Theater, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and U.S. Imperialism

The United States is in the midst of a neoliberal regime committed to privatization, and in the process gutting all public spheres and shared commons. One of the effects of this regime is the evisceration of public schools (Giroux and Pollock, University in Chains; Segall). Due to a lack of funding, Manuel Dominguez High School in Compton, California, has not had a theater program in decades. In 2001, for the first time in twenty years, students performed a play at the school. Catherine Borek, an energetic English teacher, helped reintroduce live theater to the predominately African American and Latina/o student population. The play chosen for this reinauguration was Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938).1 Borek explains that Our Town was selected because it is a “universal” play that ostensibly speaks to early twenty-first-century Americans as much as it spoke to the play’s initial audiences in the early twentieth century.2 As Borek suggests, Grover’s Corners, the fictional small town at the play’s center, has become a geographic imaginary that any and all (national) subjects can relate to and learn from. Grover’s Corners is positioned as a national mirror in which students should “see themselves reflected” (“OT” press kit). Despite the racial, ethnic, and class differences between Compton and Grover’s Corners, it is not a complete surprise that Our Town was selected for Dominguez High School’s first play in over two decades. Our Town has become the most produced play of the twentieth century and a cultural ritual in middle schools, junior highs, high schools, summer camps, and regional theaters (Scott; Bryer 4). In 1989 the literary scholar Donald Haberman claimed that “almost every American has seen a

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school performance” of Wilder’s play (6),3 and a decade later Jackson R. Bryer, also a literary scholar, observed that Our Town is not only the most produced play in American history, but that “it may well receive more performances worldwide than any play in any language” (4). Over the course of the twentieth century Our Town has ideologically become the American play, and as Bryer suggests, Grover’s Corners now circulates on a global stage. In this chapter I argue that Our Town should be recognized as a form of pedagogical theater. In contrast to Brecht’s pedagogical theater that challenges the cultural dominant, Wilder’s pedagogical theater, I demonstrate, reproduces the cultural dominant.4 More specifically Our Town teaches that the small town is America’s home and that the nation’s authentic subjects are small-town subjects. What is at stake, I argue, is that Grover’s Corners is an imaginary founded on the disavowal of a globalizing U.S. empire.

Recasting Althusser’s “Theoretical Theater” Our Town’s central position in the U.S. imagination was recently exemplified by a New York Times’ review of a 2009 Off-Broadway production. The review posits Our Town as a national rite of passage that most Americans have experienced. “Most regular theatergoers,” the reviewer assumes, “have probably paid at least one visit to Grover’s Corners.” This presumed familiarity with the imaginary small town informs the entire review: “We temporary inhabitants number just 150 at each performance” (Isherwood). Our Town, the reviewer implies, is not a play that audiences watch from a critical distance; rather the play invites its audiences to enter the small town’s communal structure. Viewing subjects become “inhabitants” who are enfolded into the expansive adjective “our” of the play’s title. Our Town’s national popularity can be explained, in part, because it interpellates its audiences as members of Grover’s Corners. To think about this process of interpellation and its ramifications, I want to briefly turn to Althusser’s pedagogical theater. In his “little theoretical theater” that features only one “scene,” Althusser famously stages interpellation by casting a police officer who “hails” a random individual. “Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-andeighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that

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‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else)” (“Ideology” 118, emphasis in original). This “theoretical theater” allegorizes how an individual becomes interpellated as a subject. However, the policeman is a poor casting choice because he conflates RSAs (repressive state apparatuses) and ISAs (ideological state apparatuses).5 Whereas RSAs are conspicuous forms of violence and power (for example, the police and the army), ISAs appear as everyday, normal relations and spaces that seem distant from scenes of violence and power.6 In order to maintain this important ideological distinction, I want to suggest a casting change to Althusser’s theater; in lieu of the police officer, I propose that the Stage Manager from Our Town is a better casting choice. In contrast to Judith Butler’s position that interpellation “works by failing” (197), casting the Stage Manager in the role of the hailer foregrounds how interpellation works by succeeding.7 In Our Town, the Stage Manager interpellates audience members as citizens of Grover’s Corners. Consider, for example, the following dialogue addressed to the audience near the play’s beginning: “Here’s the grocery store and here’s Mr. Morgan’s drugstore. Most everybody in town manages to look into those two stores once a day” (5). After describing the imaginary town, the Stage Manager “looks at the audience for a minute” before asking, “Nice town, y’know what I mean?” (6). This address, I contend, better illustrates the process of interpellation than the police officer’s address. Whereas the police officer is an explicit figure of discipline and force, the Stage Manager appears benevolent and trustworthy. For example, the latter, unlike the former, uses contractions and folksy language, a diction and syntax that suggest he is one of “us,” the common, everyday people. Throughout the play the Stage Manager asks the audience to “remember” their small-town childhood. In Act I, for example, he describes the following scene: “There’s an early-afternoon calm in our town: a buzzin’ and a hummin’ from the school buildings; only a few buggies on Main Street—the horses dozing at the hitching posts; you all remember what it’s like” (27). Twentieth- and twenty-first-century audiences cannot “remember” such a small town, because it is a sentimentalized fiction divorced from any historical, material reality. However, the Stage Manager hails Our Town’s audiences as small-town subjects and hails the memories of audiences as small-town memories. I want to make an intentionally provocative claim: the dominant small town, exemplified by Grover’s Corners, is an “imaginary” that mediates and mystifies the “relationship” of American subjects “to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser, “Ideology” 109).

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Creating a Pedagogical Archive There is a curious moment in Our Town that has not received the critical attention it deserves. Early in the play the Stage Manager announces than an archive will soon be constructed in Grover’s Corners that will last for a “thousand years” (33). This desire to archive broaches a series of questions. First, why this desire to archive? What are the historical conditions that catalyze this desire? What is included in and what is excluded from this archive? And what are the social and political implications of this archive that will last for a millennium?8 The archive preserves texts that exemplify Grover’s Corners, such as the town’s newspaper, the Sentinel. What the archive preserves, in short, is a textual small town. In a sense the archive mirrors the play: both preserve/produce an American small town in the dawning years of the twentieth century. The Stage Manager explicitly positions the newly constructed archive as a pedagogical apparatus that will teach future generations about the small town. One of the archive’s principal lessons is that the small town and the nation are inextricably conjoined. The archive preserves texts of obvious local significance, such as a copy of the town’s newspaper, and texts of conspicuous national significance, such as the Constitution of the United States. The literary scholar Lincoln Konkle writes, “Despite its abstract theoretical style, Our Town is emphatically rooted in the concrete American setting. Many signifiers of American history are found in the play dialogue: The Pilgrims, the Indians, the Constitution, the Louisiana Purchase, the Civil War, the Monroe Doctrine, World War One, the Lindbergh flight . . . Ford automobiles, baseball, The New York Times, high school, the drugstore soda fountain, small town gossip, and so forth” (Thornton Wilder 137). Our Town creates a structure of feeling that is both local and national. To know our town, the play suggests, is to know the nation, and to belong to our town is to belong to the nation. The archive is a pedagogical apparatus that teaches that the small town is the nation’s home, a lesson that has become central to Our Town’s production history and criticism. In 1976 the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., produced a series of plays to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial; the first play planned for the series was Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (Goldstone 138). More recently, in 2005 the Intiman Theater in Seattle launched an ambitious five-year project under the rubric “The American Cycle.” The objective of this cycle was to explore “classic” U.S. narratives whose “content . . . is rooted in civic engagement, cultural inclusiveness, community participation and nationally recognized education

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programs.” The inaugural production for this cycle was Our Town. The Intiman Theater used a racially and ethnically diverse cast to illustrate that the play pertains to all American subjects;9 this same logic informs the production at Manuel Dominguez High School discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In literary criticism, Donald Haberman writes that the “subject” of Our Town is “Being an American” (Our Town 15, capitalization in original);10 David Castronovo writes that Our Town has “entered our consciousness as if it were a protracted dramatization of the Pledge of America” (3, capitalization in original); and Lincoln Konkle calls Our Town Wilder’s “most American play” (Thornton Wilder 132). As these examples insinuate, the title Our Town exists besides the unwritten title Our Nation.11 While creating the archive, the Stage Manager announces that he will place a copy of Wilder’s Our Town into the cornerstone (33). This metatheatrical self-archivization seems paradoxical. An archive is created, in part, because history is understood as radically contingent and ephemeral; an archive attempts to preserve history so that it will not be forgotten in an unknowable future. However, the history that unfolds within Our Town seems to be a cyclical, unchanging pattern that is socially reproduced from generation to generation.12 The small town’s cyclical temporality is encapsulated by the three acts that organize the narrative: Act I is called “Daily Life” and begins with the birth of twins; Act II chronicles “Love and Marriage” (making the heteronormative assumption that all people marry); and Act III is concerned with death. The death in Act III is not a final ending, but the birth of a new cycle; Acts I and III are linked in a self-enclosed, self-contained loop. This conception of history was not lost on the viewing public. When the play first premiered, the media critic Robert Coleman’s 1938 review was entitled “Our Town Presents Life Cycle in a Village.” The literary scholar Francis Fergusson observes that the play’s cyclical conception of history is reiterated in a variety of tropes; the play moves from “morning to night, from the cradle to the grave, through the marriage to the funeral” (557). Our Town seems to offer a homogeneous, predictable understanding of history. If the play posits the small town’s history as cyclical, then why does the Stage Manager archive the play? In other words, why archive what is posited as beyond historical change? In its initial production, Grover’s Corners appears as a cocooned island community that enables its audience to temporarily escape history.13 The small town’s narrative ignores the recent horrors of World War I, the Great Depression, the nation’s pervasive racial, ethnic, and gender inequalities, and the fact that another

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world war was fast approaching.14 Our Town seems to escape history and its own historicity by foregrounding a cyclical conception of time. However, I want to stress that the archive’s creation is a response to history. As stated earlier, the Stage Manager explicitly positions this newly constructed archive as a pedagogical apparatus. It is created, he explains, so that “people a thousand years from now’ll know a few simple facts about us—more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight” (33, emphasis mine). The archive teaches something “more” and, I want to suggest, something different from these two named historical events. Both events symbolize a globalizing modernity. The Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) refers to the conclusion of World War I, a war recognized as occurring on a global scale. Similarly the Stage Manager uses Charles Lindbergh’s historic feat of being the first pilot to fly nonstop over the Atlantic Ocean (20–21 May 1927) as a symbol of a globalizing age; it is a flight that literally moves beyond U.S. borders and figuratively gestures toward a transnational imaginary. Both events mandate an epistemic framework that exceeds containing imaginaries such as the small town and the nation, and significantly both the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight occur outside of Our Town’s narrative, which unfolds from 1899 to 1913. Our Town periodizes an emerging globalizing modernity. The play begins at the edge of the twentieth century, when the small town remained an autonomous island community, and concludes in 1913, the year prior to World War I. Whereas World War I, the Versailles Treaty, and the Lindbergh flight signify a globalizing modernity, the archive preserves/produces a Main Street modernity—an innocent age of containment symbolized by the small town. The archive is created in response to this “new” globalizing modernity, and one of the archive’s central pedagogical lessons, addressed to future generations, is that the small town, America’s authentic home, is ontologically opposed to and incompatible with this globalizing modernity. Walter Benjamin defines modernity as the “liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage” (“Work of Art” 221). In the dominant national culture, modernity is a narrative recognized retrospectively when a nation’s “heritage” and traditions are perceived to be under threat.15 Our Town is a historical narrative about the emergence of a globalizing modernity, a narrative made possible because the small town is imagined as the nation’s “cultural heritage” and a space where “traditional value[s]” exist. In a pattern we have seen before, Our Town periodizes the twentieth century as a new globalizing modernity that is indexed by the small town’s decline.16

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It is important to stress that the dominant small town, exemplified by Grover’s Corners, is an ideological form and not a real, material place and practice. Therefore we must ask, Why does the play posit the small town and this ostensibly new modernity as mutually exclusive? To answer this question, we need to recognize that the archive—and the play more generally—is haunted by a history that it attempts to disavow: the intertwined history of a globalizing U.S. empire and the history of a globalizing market. As many scholars note, globalization is largely shaped by an expanding U.S. empire. The geography theorist and scholar Neil Smith specifies that globalization “was made in America and was built around U.S. interests and ideologies at the beginning, not the end, of the twentieth century” (4). These are the years in which Our Town unfolds. Rather than read the play as a nostalgic lament for the small town, Our Town should be read as a reaction to and a refiguration of globalization that has ideological ramifications beyond the small town’s seemingly parochial borders. The common ideological assumption about Our Town is that it expresses an ahistorical, universal truth about the human—or rather national—condition.17 In contrast, I historicize the play to contend that Grover’s Corners political unconscious is a growing, globalizing U.S. empire.18 To substantiate this claim, I locate, historicize, and analyze the traces of U.S. imperialism that haunt the play. Although Our Town may seem distant from the history of U.S. imperialism, I follow Edward Said, who insists that literary critics have a responsibility to think about the connections between culture and empire. In the past few decades there has been increased attention to the intersections between U.S. culture and U.S. imperialism. Still, I believe Said’s observation regarding U.S. imperialism remains valid: U.S. imperialism differs from its British and French counterparts in a conspicuous manner. Said writes, “For citizens of nineteenth-century Britain and France . . . empire was a major topic of unembarrassed cultural attention” (Culture 9). In contrast, throughout the twentieth century the dominant literature and culture of the United States produced a structure of innocence that denied knowledge of and responsibility for U.S. imperialism.19 Grover’s Corners functions as a national archive that disavows knowledge of the nation’s imperial, globalizing history, and instead teaches that the history of the United States is a Main Street history. Said claims, “We are still the inheritors  .  .  .  [of a culture] by which one is defined by the nation, which in turn derives its authority from a supposedly unbroken tradition. In the United States, this concern over

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cultural identity has of course yielded up the contest over what books and authorities constitute ‘our’ tradition” (Culture xxv). I want to suggest that at the center of the U.S. “contest” to define “our” tradition and “our” identity is “our” town.

Archiving a Main Street Modernity As stated earlier, Our Town seems to escape history and its own historicity by foregrounding a cyclical conception of time. The small town’s cyclical temporality is encapsulated by the three acts that organize the narrative: Act I begins with the birth of twins, Act II chronicles “Love and Marriage,” and Act III is concerned with death. However, the play is also framed by three linear dates: Act I unfolds in 1901, Act II in 1904, and Act III in 1913 with the world on the precipice of the first global war. These historical dates are not incidental. Near the play’s beginning, the Stage Manager informs the audience that Grover’s Corners is 86 percent Republican (24). (In 1938, the year of the play’s initial production, for a community to identify itself overwhelmingly as Republican was to implicitly oppose the New Deal and to remain committed to an ideology of localism that did not need “outside” [read, federal] assistance.)20 Curiously, though, the only political figure mentioned in the play is a Democrat. In the play’s opening moments, the Stage Manager introduces the audience to the small town and points to a building that serves both as the town hall and the post office: “Bryan once made a speech from these very steps here” (5). The Bryan that the Stage Manager refers to is William Jennings Bryan. Why this reference to Bryan at the play’s outset? Why, in this town identified as almost exclusively Republican, is the only political figure mentioned a Democrat? To answer these questions, we must look at Bryan’s politics at the turn of the century, when the play begins. Bryan was the promising Democratic presidential candidate in 1896 and 1900, and in both campaigns he was opposed and defeated by the Republican William McKinley.21 Our Town’s narrative begins on 7 May 1901, a year after Bryan’s second defeat in his bid to become president. As explored in chapter 3, the key to the 1896 battle between Bryan and McKinley was class warfare; four years later the key issue was U.S. imperialism. A year before the play begins Bryan’s 1900 campaign centered on his persistent and staunch critique of the United States’ recent imperialist adventures, which included the seizure of Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico.22 In his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination in 1900, Bryan claimed,

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“Imperialism might expand the Nation’s territory, but it will contract the Nation’s purpose. It is not a step forward toward a broader destiny; it is a step backward, toward the narrow views of kings and emperors” (cited in Springen 21–22). The key question, according to Bryan’s turn-of-thecentury campaign, was “whether this nation shall remain a homogeneous republic or become a heterogeneous empire” (Bryan 142). Bryan positioned the United States at a crossroads: a vote for McKinley was portrayed as a vote for the United States becoming an empire, while a vote for Bryan was portrayed as a vote for the United States “remain[ing]” a contained republic.23 Significantly Our Town’s historical narrative begins in 1901, a year after the United States crosses this temporal Rubicon and “begins” its march toward becoming a global empire. Our Town aligns itself with Bryan’s anti-imperialist politics. Bryan is the only politician mentioned in the play, and he is mentioned in the context of the early twentieth century, a time that the play periodizes as a transition from a desired Main Street modernity to a disavowed globalizing modernity shaped by a globalizing U.S. empire.24 However, despite this position, a careful reading of Our Town discloses that Grover’s Corners remains haunted by U.S. imperialism. In 1901 (Act I) an adolescent Emily Webb tells her future husband, George Gibbs, about a speech she delivered in class that day. Emily explains that she was initially supposed to give a speech about the Monroe Doctrine. However, “at the last minute,” Emily says, “Miss Corcoran made [her] talk about the Louisiana Purchase instead” (28). How are we supposed to read this “last minute” change? Both the Monroe Doctrine and the Louisiana Purchase are products of U.S. imperialism, yet there is a profound ideological difference between the two. The literary scholar John Carlos Rowe argues that in order to understand U.S. imperialism, it is important to recognize the ideological distinction between “internal” and “external” imperialism (15). “Internal” imperialism is the state incorporating territory that is adjacent to its recognized borders, whereas “external” imperialism is the state incorporating territory that is not adjacent to its recognized borders. Rowe calls this conceptual distinction a “great paradox of U.S. history” (78), because only “external” imperialism is recognized as imperialism, whereas “internal” imperialism is coded as a form of natural growth. This distinction enables the fictional narrative that the United States emerged as an imperialist nation only in 1898. In contrast, prior to 1898, U.S. expansion such as the Louisiana Purchase, which increased the size of the nation by 140 percent, is narrated as organic development.25

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Initially Emily was supposed to deliver a speech on the Monroe Doctrine. During the early twentieth century, when the play takes place, the Monroe Doctrine was central to the nation’s project of becoming a global empire.26 In 1904, the year in which Act II unfolds, Theodore Roosevelt established a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in order to establish and rationalize the United States as an “international police power” (Murphy vii).27 The teacher’s “last minute” change from the Monroe Doctrine to the Louisiana Purchase—from an “external” to an “internal” form of imperialism—is an attempt to exorcize the specter of U.S. imperialism. Our Town’s anxiety about the United States’ identity as a growing empire is further revealed a few moments later, when Emily discusses her day with her mother. Once again she mentions her speech, but this time she mentions only the Louisiana Purchase. The Monroe Doctrine becomes an unspoken ghost. Emily explains that her speech was delivered “like silk off a spool” (31); just as silk seamlessly spills off a spool, so too, according to the ideology of internal expansion, does the nationstate naturally expand westward. The play’s attempt to exorcize the history of U.S. imperialism only foregrounds the theme more forcefully. As Freud claims, the repressed always comes back to haunt. Perhaps the most conspicuous trace of U.S. imperialism occurs when the Stage Manager first mentions the archive. After informing the audience that he will place Wilder’s play in the cornerstone, he compares the United States to the Babylonian Empire: “Y’know—Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ’em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts . . . and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney,—same as here” (33, ellipses in original). The Stage Manager generalizes that all common people, regardless of their specific historical conditions, are the same: the families of ancient Babylon are imagined to be the “same as here.” Babylonian subjects are posited as analogous to U.S. subjects. According to the Stage Manager, Babylonian subjects are not responsible for the “contracts of the sale of slaves,” nor for Babylon’s identity as an empire. Instead they are cast as simple, innocent folk who go about their everyday, banal lives. Our Town, in short, teaches a lesson of U.S. exceptionalism: an empire’s everyday subjects are neither related to nor responsible for the violent practices of empire. The play positions the small town as the nation’s home and narrates the small town as an autonomous, isolated island community that is radically distant from a globalizing modernity and ignorant of the United States’ development into a world power.

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The traces of U.S. imperialism found throughout the play offer a different rubric in which to read the archive created at the play’s outset. As stated earlier, the archive contains a series of dichotomous yet complementary texts: those that exemplify Grover’s Corners and those that exemplify the nation. The small-town documents archived ostensibly supplement the national documents. The Stage Manager hopes that by archiving Wilder’s play, future generations will be able to learn “more” about the nation than are taught by recognizable national texts such as the Constitution of the United States and the New York Times, also archived in the cornerstone. However, Our Town does not simply tell us “more” about the nation. Rather the play insinuates that Wilder’s text is a more authentic representation of the nation’s narrative. The narrative of Our Town, in other words, is the master narrative of our nation. In his critique of U.S. imperialism, Tariq Ali, a prominent intellectual of the international left, asks in exasperation, Why don’t Americans recognize their nation-state as an empire? “They assume,” Ali states, “that an empire consist[s] . . . of colonies abroad that . . . [are] ruled and staffed by people you sent from the imperial country, whether it was Britain in India, France in Algeria, Germany in Namibia, or Belgium in the Congo. And they . . . [say] ‘Well, we don’t do it like that’” (Ali and Barsamian 13– 14). If most Americans don’t see their nation as an empire, what do they see? What frames their narratives and epistemologies? How far removed are Americans from Grover’s Corners’ ideological borders?

Small-Town Subjects and National Subjects I want to return to my proposition that the play interpellates its audience as small-town subjects. To be a small-town subject does not necessarily mean that a person lives or has lived in a small town; rather the ideological success of Our Town is that it teaches and reinforces that audiences identify with the dominant small-town imaginary. The play works ideologically when audiences feel at home in Grover’s Corners, which is to say when they feel included in the elastic plural pronoun “our” in the play’s title. To be interpellated as a small-town subject is to be a rooted, emplaced subject. The characters that populate the play rarely transgress the borders of Grover’s Corners, either physically or ideologically. Early in the play George Gibbs, one of the central characters, articulates his plans to go to agricultural college after high school. However, near the play’s end, George tells his soon-to-be-bride Emily that he will not go to college

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because, he recognizes, everything that is meaningful in life is contained within the small town: “Being gone all that time . . . in other places and meeting other people . . . Gosh, if anything like that can happen I don’t want to go away. I guess new people aren’t better than old ones. I’ll bet they almost never are. . . . I don’t need to go and meet the people in other towns” (70). George’s decision to remain within Grover’s Corners is a commitment to familiarity, homogeneity, and predictability and against narratives and encounters with “others.”28 This refusal to physically transgress one’s knowable community is not particular to George Gibbs; it is a position that runs throughout the play. George’s father, Dr. Gibbs, discloses an active hostility toward leaving Grover’s Corners. Even though his wife dreams of traveling to Paris, Dr. Gibbs refuses to entertain this notion because, as he explains, leaving one’s locality can make one falsely “discontent” with home (20).29 Our Town teaches that small-town subjects are committed to their locality regardless of historical, material conditions and changes. When the Stage Manager tells the audience about “daily life” in the small town, he points out that 90 percent of all young people go to high school and “settle down right here to live” (26). This fact projects a geographically rooted and stable community that opposes modernity’s prominent features of migration and mobility. Our Town teaches that the citizens of Grover’s Corners are born in town, stay in town, and die in town; this cycle has been going on for centuries, and it is one, the play suggests, that should continue into the twentieth century. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville argues that unlike feudal forms of government, “democracy makes men forget their ancestors” (2:508). However, in Grover’s Corners, families can trace their genealogies to before the country’s founding. The Stage Manager tells the audience, “The earliest tombstones in the cemetery up there on the mountain say 1670–1680—they’re Grovers and Cartwrights and Gibbses and Herseys—same names as are around here now” (6). The names on the tombstones, dating a full century before the official birth of the United States, are the same names that populate the drama’s present. (In the final act the Stage Manager returns to the town’s graveyard and once again mentions the “old stones” that date back to “1670, 1680.” These stones, he emphasizes, represent a “strong-minded people that come a long way to be independent” [86].) Our Town can be read as a “birth of a nation” narrative in which the small town is figured as the nation’s cradle and home. Moreover, as evidenced by the same family names existing from the late seventeenth century to the present of the early twentieth

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century, the dominant small town is as an island community that perfectly reproduces itself from generation to generation. Grover’s Corners’ identity as a self-contained island community is reinforced when the Stage Manager gives the geographic coordinates of the small town: “The name of the town is Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire—just across the Massachusetts line: latitude 42 degrees 40 minutes; longitude 70 degrees 37 minutes” (4). If you go to an atlas and plot these coordinates, you will be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.30 The small town figured as an island community divorced from any larger history ideologically removes the small town from the United States’ violent, imperial history, which includes the genocide of indigenous peoples, the slave trade, and state support of a growing, exploitive capitalist system. Just as citizens of Grover’s Corners physically remain within the small town’s borders, so too does their knowledge. This is even true of the Stage Manager. Although he is presented as an omniscient figure who can see into the past and the future, his knowledge proves to be bordered by the small town. When World War I is broached, he encounters an epistemological impasse. In Act I, set in 1901, he introduces the audience to the town’s paperboy, Joe Crowell Jr. With his ability to see into the future, the Stage Manager states, “Want to tell you something about that boy Joe Crowell there. Joe was awful bright—graduated from high school here, head of his class. So he got a scholarship to Massachusetts Tech. Graduated head of his class there, too. It was all wrote up in the Boston paper at the time. Goin’ to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France.—All that education for nothing” (9). The Stage Manager has nothing substantial to say about World War I, and this is precisely the point: the play suggests that our knowledge should be framed and structured by an enclosed, bordered locality. Early in the play the Stage Manager informs the audience, “In our town we like to know the facts about everybody” (7). This penchant for facts, however, is limited by a radical commitment to empiricism. The “everybody” to whom the Stage Manager refers to is the members of Grover’s Corners; everyone and everything outside of the small town’s borders are designated as beyond the realm of understanding, and hence beyond the realm of responsibility. The dominant small town enables what might be called a “smalltown episteme,” in which the only knowledge recognized and avowed is knowledge framed by the small town. This small-town episteme is a way of seeing and a way of not seeing: what small-town subjects see is a Main Street modernity; what they don’t see is a globalizing capitalist

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modernity shaped by an expanding U.S. empire. The small-town episteme, in short, is an island episteme, an episteme of innocence and of blindness.

Coda: The Small Town and A New Economic Order The small town may be an ideological form, but it has real material consequences. Near Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, a different small town exemplifies how American towns can be central to shaping globalization. The emergence of the United States as a center of global capitalism was facilitated, in large part, because of a small town in New Hampshire. In 1944, a year before World War II’s conclusion, forty-four allied nations congregated at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to ratify what is commonly referred to as the Bretton Woods Agreement. In this small town Western leaders shaped and stabilized (at least temporarily) the world’s economic infrastructure, laying the groundwork for both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; furthermore the Bretton Woods Agreement established the U.S. dollar as the dominant currency against which all other currencies are assessed and valued. 31 To a large extent our current world (dis)order emerged out of a small town, which, on a symbolic map, is located near Grover’s Corners.

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“One Happy World”: The Postmodern Small Town and the Small-Town Postmodern

For the past few decades postcolonial scholars have stressed that the categorization of places as “anachronistic” is underwritten by the intertwined projects of Western imperialism and Western modernity. In Time and the Other (1983), Johannes Fabian argues that anthropology discursively produces anachronistic places and people by projecting its objects of investigation into a temporal order outside of Western modernity (31). Similarly, in Imperial Leather (1995), Ann McClintock writes that imperialism constructs “anachronistic” places that delimit “prehistoric, atavistic and irrational . . . [bodies that are] inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity” (40). And in Provincializing Europe (2000), Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that historicism—the West’s belief that history is a single narrative of progress—“makes it possible to identify certain elements in the present as ‘anachronistic’” (12). To demarcate a place as anachronistic ideologically situates it as fundamentally out of joint with modernity. Anachronism is a nomination deployed by those at modernity’s imagined center (imperial “First World” states) to demarcate “others” at modernity’s ostensible periphery (the “Third World”)—or, as Chakrabarty puts it, those in modernity’s “waiting room.”1 Therefore anachronistic places are projected outside of an imperial state’s symbolic. But what about anachronistic places located within an imperial state? This is a question at the center of Philip K. Dick’s 1959 novel, Time Out of Joint. The novel’s protagonist, Ragle Gumm, discovers that what he believes to be reality—an autonomous, isolated small town in the year 1959—is a

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fabricated façade. As the narrative unfolds, Gumm learns that the year is not 1959, but 1998. Similarly he learns that his hometown is not a selfcontained island community, but a state-constructed studio within a global empire identified as “One Happy World.” Not only is time out of joint, as the title announces, but so too is space out of joint; just as Gumm learns that the year 1959 is a historical fiction, so too is the small town posited as an analogous geographic fiction. The small town’s ideological form is at the center of Time Out of Joint. In Dick’s novel, the small town is created and controlled by the global empire, One Happy World. This is not an abstract, generic empire; One Happy World is a thinly disguised allegory of the United States. Time Out of Joint challenges the dominant U.S. cold war narrative that casts the Soviet Union as a malevolent, expanding empire and the United States as a contained, isolated community.2 In the novel the world’s economic, geographic, militaristic, and symbolic center is the United States. However, despite being a global power, the United States in Time Out of Joint disavows its identity as an empire and ideologically assumes a position of containment and isolation symbolized by the small town. In this chapter I use Time Out of Joint to argue that the dominant small town is not a geographic imaginary that opposes the U.S. empire, but rather one that is mobilized for an expanding U.S. empire, which, in Dick’s novel, is becoming an interplanetary empire. To recognize the small town as the nation’s “authentic” home—a cultural identification at the heart of popular U.S. cold war culture—is predicated on a failure to recognize the United States as a growing, globalizing empire. The dominant small town is not only a cold war nation form; it is also a postmodern nation form. Today Philip K. Dick is frequently situated as a postmodern science-fiction writer.3 Fredric Jameson, one of the prominent theorists of postmodernism, suggests that Time Out of Joint prefigures postmodernism.4 However, Jameson does not fully recognize the dominant small town’s centrality to his own theorization of postmodernism. In the age of a growing, globalizing U.S. empire, the dominant small town, I contend, remains central to the U.S. identity and imagination.

The Small Town as a Cultural Dominant Although Ragle Gumm learns that the small town is an anachronistic form, when the novel was composed the small town was a dominant cultural form. In the late 1950s and continuing into the 1960s the American

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small town was a popular, pervasive imaginary that imagined a white, bourgeois, heteronormative nation. This imaginary circulated in a variety of media, including visual arts, such as Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers (fifty-one covers from 1950 to 1959); television, such as Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963), The Donna Reed Show (1958–1966), and The Andy Griffith Show (1960–1968); films, such as the 1962 Hollywood adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), which was nominated for eight Academy Awards, It Happened to Jane (1959), featuring Doris Day and Jack Lemon, and the Walt Disney film Pollyanna (1960); and perhaps best exemplified by Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place (1956). Whether celebrated or criticized, the small town was ubiquitous in U.S. cultural production during the cold war.5 The opening pages of Dick’s novel seem to replicate this dominant geographic imaginary. The protagonist lives in a white, well-to-do small town of heteronormative families, standardized homes, manicured lawns, and bicycling children. A reader in 1959 encounters a familiar, reified, recycled place. But Dick does not simply reproduce the dominant small-town imaginary. Rather he calls it into question. Although it is important to critique the exclusionary practices that constitute this ideological space in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality, I want to focus instead on how the small town appears as an autonomous, self-contained world.6 In the first half of the novel nearly all the characters are fully interpellated by the small town and define themselves—explicitly and implicitly—as small-town subjects who do not inquire about what exists or occurs beyond the town’s boundaries. If ideology, as Jameson writes, is a “strategy of containment,” then the dominant small town exemplifies ideology’s form (Political Unconscious 53). As Time Out of Joint unfolds, Gumm discovers that the small town is an ideological apparatus created by a totalitarian empire, One Happy World. This empire constructed the small town in order to shield subjects, especially Gumm, from knowledge of the world beyond the town’s boundaries. The small town therefore is an ideological form that forecloses subjects from recognizing that they live in an empire. If the small town precludes subjects from recognizing narratives of imperialism and empire, then what narratives does the small town enable? In asking this question, I am implicitly recognizing the small town as a chronotope that shapes narratives and discourses.

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A Small-Town Chronotope: Bakhtin and the Conditions of Narrative In his foundational study of literary geography, Mikhail Bakhtin coined the term “chronotope” to insist that time and space must be thought together as a single, inseparable unit (“Forms” 84).7 Bakhtin challenges the Enlightenment tradition that posits space and time as separate, abstract categories. Instead he analyzes how specific spaces shape conceptions of time, and conversely, how specific temporalities shape conceptions of space.8 Moreover, and of greater importance for this chapter, Bakhtin studies how chronotopes become the ground of possibility for narratives and discourses (“Forms” 250, 351). Although Bakhtin does not discuss a small-town chronotope, the small town in Time Out of Joint seems to be structurally equivalent to an “idyll chronotope” (224–236). According to Bakhtin, an idyllic chronotope is “an organic fastening-down, a grafting of life and its events to a place, to a familiar territory with all its nooks and crannies. . . . This little spatial world is limited and sufficient unto itself, not linked in any intrinsic way with other places, with the rest of the world” (225). The idyll chronotope appears as an autonomous, contained island community that is isolated from the outside world, a place that frames a cyclical conception of time (Bakhtin, “Forms” 225; Speech 22). Narratives framed by an idyll chronotope are determined and predictable: an individual’s life unfolds in a single place and follows the same script as that of his or her predecessors and successors. It is a place, Bakhtin writes, “where one’s children and their children will live” (“Forms” 225), a knowable community that perfectly reproduces from generation to generation. As Time Out of Joint makes explicit, the dominant small town, like the idyll, is a self-contained chronotope that seems to be separate and distinct from social relations that exist beyond its boundaries. When Gumm learns that the small town is a fabrication controlled by the state, a character from the outside asks incredulously, “Didn’t it ever occur to you to wonder where you lived? The name of your town? The county? State?” (229). Gumm never considered these questions because the small town, like the idyll, is “sufficient unto itself, not linked in any intrinsic way with other places, with the rest of the world” (Bakhtin, “Forms” 225). To be interpellated by the dominant small-town chronotope forecloses a subject’s ability to recognize the small town as a relational site within larger geographic scales and wider historical narratives.9 The small town’s disavowal of the outside means that its context, just

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like the idyll’s, becomes ideologically immaterial. In Time Out of Joint’s opening, the small town seems to be a midwestern town such as Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, or perhaps a New England small town such as Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire; it is only later in the novel that we learn that it is a constructed studio in western Wyoming. The critical insight offered by the novel is that the dominant small town’s legibility is predicated on being a deracinated, autonomous island community that is not specific to any region or territory. The small town, in other words, can be located anywhere and everywhere. Similar to the idyll, the small town appears fixed from day to day and from generation to generation. When one of the characters discovers that the small town is a fabricated fiction, he reflects on the small town’s ontology: “a sunny universe. Kids romping, cows mooing, dogs wagging. Men clipping lawns on Sunday afternoon, while listening to the ball game on TV. We could have gone on forever. Noticed nothing” (108). This logic of perfect social reproduction means that the small town is not subject to history, but is sheltered from history. However, Bakhtin emphasizes that chronotopes are not selfgenerating. Rather they are subject to history, and therefore chronotopes must always be historicized.10 According to Bakhtin, the idyll chronotope is linked to a precapitalist mode of production that becomes anachronistic with the emergence of a capitalist modernity. The idyll’s ruin “becomes one of the fundamental themes of literature towards the end of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth [century] . . . [due to] the new capitalist world” (“Forms” 233).11 Chronotopes are historical formations, and the idyll becomes obsolete with a globalizing market economy that disallows autonomous and contained spaces and imaginaries; or to put it differently, in a capitalist modernity there are no longer any island-like chronotopes. Although the small town and the idyll seem to be structurally analogous, there is a key difference between these two chronotopes: the small town, in contrast to the idyll, does not become anachronistic in modernity. Rather, as Dick provocatively suggests in Time Out of Joint, it is an ideological form that is central to an expanding U.S. empire.

Constructing a Small-Town Culture in a Global Empire From the state’s perspective in Time Out of Joint, the small town is an anachronistic fiction. However, for subjects living within the small town, it functions as a cultural dominant. What must the state do to maintain

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the fiction that the small town is an enclosed, self-contained chronotope that mirrors the idyll chronotope? How does the state transform a plot of land in western Wyoming into a “typical” small town? In asking this question, I am not asking about the small town’s physical layout; rather I am asking about the specific discourses and texts that the state introduces and disseminates in order to make a random space legible as a small town. Which discourses and texts enable and maintain the small town’s legibility as an island community, and conversely, which are deemed a threat? Or, to put it differently, which discourses and texts are desirable because they foreclose subjects from recognizing that they live within an imperialist state? Early in the novel we learn that Vic Nielson, Gumm’s brother-in-law, recently joined the Book-of-the-Month Club. This, of course, is not the actual, historical club (just as Nielson is not really Gumm’s brother-inlaw). Rather it is a state-controlled ideological apparatus. Therefore, we can assume, the state carefully screens and selects which books may circulate in the small town and which are prohibited.12 When Nielson tells a close friend about a novel he recently received from the club, his friend retorts that people don’t need to read novels because the only ones that circulate are “sex novels about small towns in which sex crimes are committed and all the dirt comes to the surface” (11). In this humorous, metatextual moment, Dick critiques what his novel initially seems to be: an example of a popular small-town genre that features sexually explicit content. The beginning of Time Out of Joint primarily focuses on a burgeoning affair between Gumm and a married woman. At first Time Out of Joint seems to be part of a salacious small-town genre that includes Henry Bellamann’s Kings Row (1940)—later turned into a Hollywood movie starring Ronald Reagan (1942) and then a television series (1955–1956)—and the most popular example of the genre, Peyton Place (1956), published three years prior to Time Out of Joint. But why would the state allow this literary genre to circulate? After all, Peyton Place, for example, does not represent a tranquil small-town community; it is rife with sexual scandal and violence, including instances of abortion, incest, molestation, and rape. In fact it can be argued that this popular small-town genre, exemplified by Peyton Place, is a form of ideology critique. Novels within this genre typically begin with an iconic, bourgeois small town that prides itself on its communal identity and values. However, during the course of these narratives, this imaginary is subverted by disclosing what happens behind closed doors or, as a character in Time Out of Joint declares, by revealing all the “dirt”

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hidden beneath the “surface.”13 This genre makes visible the dominant small town’s contradictions and hypocrisies. And yet the critique offered by novels such as Peyton Place are not deemed a threat to One Happy World; it is the state, after all, that allows this literary genre to circulate. This small-town literary genre coheres with a general cultural trend within the state-constructed small town: an incessant preoccupation with sex. In conjunction with the small-town genre that explicitly focuses on sexual relations, the state also allows Alfred Kinsey’s study of sexuality to circulate. In Time Out of Joint’s opening pages, a character thinks about his wife catching him in a “new eroticism not yet recorded in the Kinsey reports” (9). This is an allusion, of course, to Kinsey’s controversial and popular research on human sexuality that challenged the conservative, heteronormative values celebrated by the dominant U.S. cold war culture.14 Kinsey’s name circulates in the small town as if his findings were a recent cultural phenomenon. However, this is a bit anachronistic; the pinnacle of Kinsey’s popularity coincided with the release of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953,15 but by 1959, the small town’s ostensible historical date, Kinsey was no longer the popular cultural referent he was in the early 1950s. Therefore Kinsey’s circulation in the state-constructed small town is slightly out of joint. One Happy World disseminates small-town novels and Kinsey’s report in order to curtail the desire of subjects to examine social relations beyond their subjectivity, their sexual relations, and most important for the state, beyond the small town’s physical and ideological boundaries.16 One Happy World, in short, disseminates texts and discourses that are insular, contained, and deracinated from larger social relations. This position is further reinforced by what the state desires to be the master hermeneutic for interpreting reality: a popular, reified form of psychoanalysis.17 Bill Black, an undercover agent for One Happy World, must act as a subject fully interpellated by the small town. He achieves this goal by pretending to be committed to psychoanalysis. The small town’s citizens believe that Black is a bureaucrat who “had an interest in psychoanalysis” and who sincerely uses “Freudian jargon . . . in his conversation” (33). Early in the novel, when Gumm begins to suspect that something is ontologically awry in the small town, Black dismisses Gumm’s suspicion with a psychoanalytic explanation: “A reversion to infancy due to stress. Your feeling ill. The tension of the sub-conscious impulses to your brain. . . . Many adults revert to infancy during illness” (33). Black actively propagates this reified form of psychoanalysis as a master hermeneutic in order to shield Gumm and the rest of the small

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town’s subjects from recognizing that they live within a global modernity shaped by a global empire. If the state’s objective is to situate psychoanalysis as a master hermeneutic within the small town, then their objective has succeeded. Nearly all the subjects privilege psychoanalysis as the principal means to render the world legible and understandable. For example, Gumm’s “sister” Margo, exclaims, “Freud has shown that there’s always a psychological reason” (85). Moreover when Gumm discovers that the small town is a fabricated fiction (and therefore evidence that not everything can be reduced to “psychological reasons”), he knows that his neighbors would reject his claim of a world beyond the small town’s borders and counter his claim with a psychoanalytic explanation. Everyone, Gumm observes, parrots “the psychiatrist” (183).18 While psychoanalysis can be a powerful form of critique, One Happy World disseminates a reified form of psychoanalysis in order to shield subjects from recognizing that they live within a global empire. Time Out of Joint positions psychoanalysis as analogous to the small town; both are forms of insularity and containment.19 When Gumm convinces his neighbor that the small town’s ontological inconsistencies cannot be reduced to Freudian explanations, the neighbor responds, “Then you don’t think you’re losing your mind. . . . You don’t think it’s in you; it’s outside” (71). Time Out of Joint insinuates the need for subjects to develop an “outside” hermeneutics—a historical, material hermeneutics that helps explain and map the world beyond a subject’s immediate, empirical surroundings. The novel suggests that the first step toward developing such an outside hermeneutics is to move beyond the small town’s ideological form. However, as I illustrate below, even when Gumm does leave the small town, in many ways he still remains entrapped within a small-town chronotope.

A One-Happy-World Chronotope Upon transgressing the small town’s boundaries, Gumm discovers that he lives in the global empire One Happy World. What he believed to be reality—the world of an autonomous, contained small town—is a fiction constructed by the state. To achieve this mystification, the state constructed its ideological opposite: an island community. Whereas One Happy World is a global empire that does not recognize an outside, the small town is a contained community with clear and distinct borders that separate an avowed inside from a disavowed outside.

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However, Time Out of Joint brilliantly suggests that a small-town chronotope is analogous to what might be called a “One-Happy-World chronotope.” Just as the small town seems to be a self-contained world, so too does One Happy World. The structural similarity between these two geographic formations is signified by the empire’s name, which connotes a singular, coherent, unified imaginary. One Happy World is both the state’s name and an official position that there is “no future in interplanetary travel” (228). Despite the capability of space travel and exploration, One Happy World has ostensibly ceased all interplanetary operations in order to forge an identity that is territorially and epistemologically bound by the Earth. In other words, what makes One Happy World legible is analogous to what makes the small town legible: both maintain their communal identities by disavowing all relations beyond their ideologically demarcated boundaries. Time Out of Joint challenges Carl Schmitt’s infamous political theory that every state needs a clearly defined enemy in order to solidify its imagined community. As the novel suggests, what a state needs is not necessarily an ideological enemy, but an ideological outside. One Happy World, like the small town, secures its identity as a coherent, contained community by discursively producing and disavowing an outside. A character fully interpellated by the state proclaims, “One Happy World is good enough, better in fact than a lot of arid wastes that the Lord never intended man to occupy” (228). Although One Happy World is a global empire, its identity is predicated upon and made legible by this disavowed outside, described as “arid waste.” The state’s ideology of isolation and independence is corroborated by One Happy World’s ostensible commitment to economic isolation and independence. We learn, for example, that in 1993 President Moraga “signed into law the bill that terminated American economic development on Luna” (232). This economic withdrawal from a terrain considered outside of the state reinforces an ideology of containment and furthermore enables a cultural logic of nativism. One state subject, for example, applauds the state’s legal decision to cease economic activities on the moon as follows: “I wouldn’t be caught dead using a salad bowl made out of Luna Ore.” “Don’t buy Lunar,” he continues. “Buy at home” (232). One Happy World, like the dominant small town, is recognized as home. This ideological identity gestures toward the state’s success in creating a nation that provides individuals with their foundational social identity, and moreover gestures toward the state’s success in producing a nation that appears as a contained community and not as an expansive empire.

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The state emphasizes home and domesticity while claiming to be antiimperialist. However, this official discourse mystifies the fact that One Happy World’s drive coheres with capital’s drive of continual expansion and accumulation. One Happy World has not only integrated the entire planet into a single state, but there are textual clues that this empire continues to expand. When Gumm suffers a breakdown, the state initially takes him to Venus, where “high government officials” frequently visit (224). This detail suggests that the state is not an Earth-contained empire, but one whose imperial interests extend beyond the planet’s boundaries. Furthermore when Gumm escapes the small town, he discovers a newspaper from 10 May 1997 with the headline “VENUSIAN ORE DEPOSITS OBJECTS OF DISPUTE” (163). The article reports on “litigation in the International system of courts concerning the ownership of property on Venus” (163). One year prior to the narrative’s present, the article reveals, One Happy World was fighting for control over Venus’s resources. This legal dispute discloses a history of interplanetary expansion and colonization at odds with the state’s official position of isolationism. In conjunction with being an expanding interplanetary empire, One Happy World is also a totalitarian state. Late in the novel we learn that the state has constructed and operates “concentration camps” in Nevada, Arizona, and throughout the Midwest (235, 251).20 These traces provoke disturbing questions: How many concentration camps exist within One Happy World? Who is held within these camps and why? What occurs in these camps hidden from view? And should we read the small town as a type of concentration camp? One Happy World controls both the repressive state apparatuses (which is to be expected) and the ideological state apparatuses, including what Althusser identifies as the most important ISA: education (“Ideology” 103). The state writes all textbooks and curricula, and in a brief, telling passage, we learn that there is a single “official” history taught in all schools (Dick 228). We can assume that this state-written history eliminates all oppositional positions and erases the narratives of the state’s victims, such as those within the concentration camps. Furthermore we can surmise that this “official” history forges a single narrative of progress that culminates with One Happy World as the realization of social harmony and political perfection. One Happy World is an empire that refuses its own imperial identity—a refusal that mirrors the U.S. position during the cold war. This is not a coincidence; a close reading of the novel discloses that One Happy

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World is a thinly veiled allegory of the United States. Although there are no explicit passages that articulate this homology, there are enough clues strewn throughout the novel for the attentive reader to make this assessment. For example, the president of One Happy World lives in the United States (233); federal laws are written and codified within the United States (222); One Happy World’s enemies are detained within concentration camps located within the United States; and Gumm, who unknowingly works for One Happy World, is contained within a small town located in western Wyoming. Both One Happy World and the dominant small town are island chronotopes that delimit subjects from recognizing that they are citizens of an expanding empire.

The Small Town and Postmodernism I want to suggest that the dominant small town is not only central to the United States’ cold war culture, but also to the United States’ postmodern culture. As many scholars attest, any attempt to define postmodernism is limited at best. In fact the literary scholar and theorist Brian McHale writes that every definition of postmodernism is a “fiction” in its own right (4).21 Nevertheless, no matter how it’s defined and redefined, there is always, as the literary theorist Linda Hutcheon emphasizes, a “politics of postmodernism.”22 In this section I read Time Out of Joint in relation to Jameson’s canonical writings on postmodernism in order to think more critically about postmodernism’s politics. I turn to Jameson’s work in part because he turns to Time Out of Joint. Although Jameson considers the novel for only a few pages in Postmodernism (1990), I want to suggest that the dominant small town occupies a more prominent role in theorizing the postmodern condition than Jameson recognizes. In fact Gumm’s daily life in the small town uncannily mirrors what subjects are supposed to experience within the dominant postmodern condition. In Postmodernism Jameson implicitly recognizes that the ideological small town is at the center of the United States’ dominant cold war culture. Jameson writes that despite some pockets of alternative cultural practices, the era was mostly “Peyton Place, best-sellers, and TV series” (280). In this articulation Peyton Place becomes a symbol of all cultural texts that feature small towns and a symbol more generally of the dominant U.S. culture. Throughout the cold war, Jameson implies, the dominant small town produces and regulates what the literary scholar and social theorist Michael Warner calls the “regime of the normal.”23

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But what about when this cold war culture gives way to a postmodern culture? Does the small town remain ideologically central to the U.S. identity and imagination? Jameson suggests that one way to demarcate the emergence of postmodernism (and hence the emergence of global capitalism) is to recognize that real, material small towns become obsolete. As early as 1971 he described the small town as out of joint with the emergence of global capitalism (Marxism and Form);24 similarly, in his 1976 essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” he claims that in the era of global capitalism the American small town has become “extinct” (33); in the same essay he describes the small town as an “outmoded paradigm” (33); in Postmodernism he declares that the American small town “has vanished” (281); and in his 2010 study Valences of the Dialectic, he writes that the latest chapter of global capitalism (represented by Walmart) demarcates “the irrevocable destruction of the American small town” (421).25 The only small towns that survive in postmodernism, Jameson implies, are ideological small towns. However, I want to emphasize, in a way that Jameson does not, that the ideological small town remains pervasive throughout the dominant U.S. postmodern culture. Jameson gestures at this insight throughout his writings. For example, he delineates a postmodern genre that he identifies as the “nostalgic film”; this genre can also be identified as the “small-town film.” The “inaugural film of this new aesthetic discourse,” Jameson claims, is George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) (Postmodernism 19). Although Jameson doesn’t make this explicit, all of the films he mentions that belong to this genre, including American Graffiti and Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), are set in small towns. Jameson writes that in Body Heat, for example, the “small-town setting allows the camera to elude the high-rise landscape of the 1970s and 1980s” (20). “Everything in the film,” he continues, “conspires to blur its official contemporaneity and make it possible for the viewer to receive the narrative as though it were set . . . beyond real historical time” (21). In postmodernity small towns have become reified fictions that ideologically block subjects from recognizing the complex, historically mediated social relations that constitute global capitalism. In other words, the only small towns that exist in postmodernism are those that replicate the state-manufactured small town in Time Out of Joint. Just as the small town that interpellates Ragle Gumm mystifies all historical, material conditions, so too does the small town circulating in postmodern culture.26 Just as Gumm must revolt from the small town, so too must postmodern U.S. subjects.

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Postmodernism is the cultural dominant of late capitalism, a period of capitalist development that demarcates the emergence of a world market (Jameson, Postmodernism 6).27 To be the cultural dominant of global capitalism, postmodernism must not challenge capital’s logic of endless accumulation and expansion; instead it must ideologically dissolve the contradictions and conflicts of capitalism. Postmodernism mystifies the ability of subjects, specifically First World subjects, to narrate and map how their everyday lives and spaces are inextricably bound to and enabled by capitalism’s global network.28 This mystification is due, in large part, to postmodernism’s “spatial turn” (54, 365). In contrast to modernism, which is primarily occupied with questions and representations of time, postmodernism marks a preoccupation with space (16, 365). Postmodern culture features a new type of space that Jameson identifies as “global space.”29 This new space occludes a subject’s ability to map and locate himself or herself within capitalism’s global network (44). Rather than understand how space both mediates and is mediated by global capitalism, global spaces appear as self-enclosed and self-contained. To exemplify global space, Jameson turns to John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, which “aspires” to be a “total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city.” Jameson continues, “the minicity of Portman’s Bonaventure ought not to have entrances at all, since the entranceway is always the seam that links the building to the rest of the city that surrounds it: for it does not wish to be a part of the city but rather its equivalent and replacement or substitute” (40). As this example illustrates, global space functions as a postmodern chronotope that forecloses a subject’s ability to think historically and to recognize everyday spaces as constituted by a global, capitalist network (ix, xi).30 Rather than turning exclusively to the city in order to exemplify and understand postmodernism, we can also turn to the small town. If we use Jameson’s analysis, Time Out of Joint proves to be a paradigmatic text for understanding postmodernism, and the dominant small town proves to be a paradigmatic global space. In the age of the U.S. global empire—an age that spans modernism and postmodernism—the dominant small town offers an “imaginary” that mediates and mystifies the “relationship” of American subjects “to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser, “Ideology” 109). In conclusion, I want to turn to one more science fiction text that recognizes the small town as a dominant nation form and as a dominant imperialist form: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950).

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Colonizing the Future Despite its anachronistic aura, the dominant small town is a highly mobile form that can implant the nation in any space—even, as Ray Bradbury speculates, on Mars. In The Martian Chronicles’ imagined future, the United States at the end of the twentieth century is a global empire that is becoming an interplanetary empire. The novel begins in the year 1999 with the United States turning its attention to colonizing Mars. Three years later the country is in the midst of a full-blown colonial invasion: “The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke. And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness” (78).31 Six months after making colonial contact “a dozen small towns had been laid down upon the naked planet,” and in the short span of three years ninety thousand Americans had succeeded in transforming Mars from an alien landscape into a “familiar” landscape (78). This process is achieved by blanketing the planet with small towns. Describing a typical small town on Mars, Bradbury writes, “On Sunday nights you could see red, blue, and green stained-glass light in the churches and hear the voices singing the numbered hymns. . . . And in certain houses, you heard the hard clatter of a typewriter, the novelist at work; or a scratch of a pen, the poet at work” (88). The Americans who live in these small towns do not recognize themselves as imperial subjects, but as everyday, national subjects who are no different from other small-town subjects, whether in New Hampshire, Ohio, Mississippi, or California. Although the small towns on Mars may appear to be spaces of banality and innocence, Bradbury makes explicit that the small town should be recognized as central to U.S. expansionism. Prior to Mars being transformed into a “familiar” national landscape, the United States launched three unsuccessful missions. I want to take a closer look at the third expedition. The first two expeditions vanished without a trace, so when the third expedition begins, Mars remains terra incognita. The third expedition is composed of seventeen men, and when they land on Mars they expect to find a completely alien landscape. Yet what they find instead is something uncanny. “It’s a small town,” one of the men observes (33). A second follows, “It’s a small town the like of Earth towns” (33). The dialogue that unfolds between these men posits the small town as a common, familiar geographic form that is germane not only to the United States, but more generally to the entire planet (the small town

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is like “Earth towns”). Therefore the small town is situated as a global form and, given that the small town exists on Mars, a universal form. The astronauts present various theories as to how and why a familiar American small town appears on Mars. Captain Jack Black hypothesizes that the historical development of Mars could be identical to the historical development of the United States. Black asks the archeologist on board, “Do you think that the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate and evolve in the same way . . . ?” (33). This question assumes that the United States is a civilization within a narrative of “progress.” Moreover Black’s question as to whether it is possible for two civilizations to evolve identically and simultaneously positions the small town as a marker both of civilization and of progress. It is only when the astronauts see a small town on the planet that Mars is recognized as a civilized place within a narrative of progress. Although each of the men sees a single small town, each believes that it is his hometown. Lustig, the first astronaut to recognize the small town as his hometown, observes, “It’s a good, quiet, green town, a lot like the old-fashioned one I was born in” (35). Hinkston, a scientist, also remarks that the small town “looks like home to [him]” (35). Soon even the captain, the most skeptical member of the group, succumbs to this belief. As this scenario suggests, the dominant small town is an abstract, ideological form, and yet U.S. subjects (mis)recognize it as a space that is singular, historical, and personal: the general small town becomes legible as everyone’s specific hometown. In this small town the impossible proves possible. It is a place where the dead are alive and where childhood never ends. Lustig, for example, drinks iced tea with his grandparents, who have been dead for thirty years, and Captain Black embraces the “reality” that he is in his boyhood home talking with his parents, who had been killed in a train accident years earlier (44).32 The dominant small town, the story suggests, is a space of fantasy where the logic and constraints of reality are suspended. At the story’s end Captain Black’s critical faculties return. He ponders whether the small town may be a deadly trap planned by Martians to lure the astronauts: “What a startlingly wonderful plan it would be. First, fool Lustig, then Hinkston, then gather a crowd; and all the men in the rocket, seeing mothers, aunts, uncles, sweethearts, dead ten, twenty years ago. . . . What more unsuspecting? What more simple?” (47). Black’s hypothesis proves true; the small town is a (deadly) fiction. Although the Martians initially used the small-town imaginary to lure and kill the early American colonizers, eventually Mars is transformed

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into a Main Street simulacrum. In “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986), Jameson warns of a growing “global American postmodern culture” (316).33 As I argue in my concluding chapter, the dominant geographic imaginary of this global culture may be the small town.

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Global Belonging: The Small Town as the World’s Home

At the beginning of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, the protagonist Carol Milford fantasizes about living in a small town while attending the fictional Blodgett College (7–8). Several years after graduating, she marries a suitor whose chief appeal is that he comes from a small town. Rather than inquire about and reflect upon the specificity of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, Carol imagines her future life in the small town “with a purely literary thought of . . . [small-town] charm” (38). For Carol, the American small town is an idealized community that has been shaped by myriad literary small towns she has consumed throughout her formative years. As Lewis suggests, the dominant small town is a literary geography that repeats and recycles throughout U.S. literature. Main Street dramatizes the abyss separating the ideological small town from historical, material towns. While traveling to Gopher Prairie, Carol is shocked by the towns observable through the train window. “They’re so ugly,” she proclaims (28). (Carol later apologizes to her husband and explains that her vehement reaction was caused by reading “too many books” that describe small towns as realized utopias [35].) Her husband attempts to assuage his newlywed’s distaste by claiming that in due time, the observable towns will resemble the small town fixed in her imagination. But Carol retorts, “What’s the use of giving them time unless some one has desire and training enough to plan them? Hundreds of factories trying to make attractive motor cars, but these towns—left to chance. No!” (28). In an industrial capitalist modernity capable of massproducing aesthetically pleasing commodities such as cars, Carol cannot

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accept that there are social spaces beyond such control. Her desire for the small town is a desire for an aestheticized space in which the “ugly” is eliminated. In this chapter I argue that in late capitalism the fictive small town lodged in Carol’s imagination—the one that widely circulates in popular U.S. literature—has become a material place and practice that frames a neoliberal fantasy of capitalism. More specifically the dominant small town stages a fantasy that fetishizes consumption while erasing the constitutive violences of capitalism from production to pollution. Moreover, the dominant small town, I argue, becomes a racially and ethnically diverse form to which all subjects can belong—that is, as long as a subject’s identity is first and foremost that of a consumer.

An American Fantasy of Capitalism Main Street foregrounds the dominant small town as inextricable from a prominent U.S. fantasy about capitalism. As Carol grows increasingly critical of Gopher Prairie, she meets Miles Bjornstam, a Swedish immigrant who is ostracized from the town because of his critical views of capitalism. Miles’s critique is informed by the Marxist-influenced economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen. For example, he uses the phrase “leisure class” (135), a reference to Veblen’s canonical socioeconomic study The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), and when Carol examines his bookshelf she sees “a book by Thorstein Veblen” (136). Later in the novel, as Carol develops as a critical thinker, she begins to read Veblen (305). While Lewis was writing Main Street, Veblen was also writing about the need to revolt from the village. Veblen concluded his 1915 study, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, with a rigorous critique of the American town. In contrast to the dominant literary culture that represented the American small town as a utopian island community, Veblen insisted that the American town should be recognized as a relational, exploitive capitalist community (333, 147–151). Veblen emphasized that real, material towns practice and perpetuate the same economic exploitation popularly imagined to occur exclusively in the city. In his 1923 study, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America, Veblen identifies the American small town as “one of the great American institutions; perhaps the greatest, in the sense that it has had and continues to have a greater part than any other in shaping public sentiment and giving character to American

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culture” (142). The American town at the center of the U.S. imagination is an ideological form that mystifies the workings and relations of capitalism. The dominant small town should therefore be understood as an ideological form and as an aesthetic project that attempts to erase the exploitation and suffering at the center of capitalism’s structure of profit and accumulation. That the dominant small town is an aesthetic project is central to Veblen’s insight that it is primarily a literary invention: “Its name may be Spoon River or Gopher Prairie, or it may be Emporia or Centralia or Columbia. The pattern is substantially the same, and is repeated several thousand times” (142). The dominant small town repeats throughout the U.S. literary and cultural landscape, and it exists, Veblen insinuates, as a nation form that Americans (mis)recognize as a social ideal. This idealized community renders the violences of capitalism beyond the realm of visibility, and hence beyond the realm of legibility and responsibility. The dominant small town “repeated several thousand times” is an island community of stability, order, and cleanliness in which the only element of capitalism that is visible is consumption. Veblen wants Americans to recognize that Main Street’s array of consumable goods is enabled by a structure of exploitation that occurs “outside” the small town’s borders. This thesis is central to Main Street. After Carol’s husband makes disparaging remarks about the farming community that surrounds Gopher Prairie, she muses, “I wonder if these farmers aren’t bigger than we are? So simple and hard-working. The town lives on them. We townies are parasites, and yet we feel superior to them” (67). Later in the novel, while Carol attends a bourgeois play, she shifts her attention away from the stage to a conversation occurring outside of the theater between two farmers. One farmer tells the other of a suspected collusion between the merchants, financiers, and other capitalist elites who run Gopher Prairie: “That’s the way these towns work all the time. They pay what they want to for our wheat, but we pay what they want us to for their clothes. Stowbody and Dawson [the former is a president of a bank and the latter is a moneylender and real-estate owner] foreclose every mortgage they can, and put in tenant farmers. The Dauntless [the local paper] lies to us about the Nonpartisan League [founded in 1915 to protect farmers], the lawyers sting us, the machinery-dealers hate to carry us over bad years, and then their daughters put on swell dresses and look at us as if we were a bunch of hoboes. Man, I’d like to burn this town!” (266–267). At the novel’s outset, the literary small town fixed in Carol’s imagination is more real than the empirical towns she encounters. As the novel

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progresses, she recognizes that what makes a space legible as a small town is the aesthetic and symbolic elimination of all traces of capitalism’s constitutive violences. One of the town’s economic elites, for example, claims that in Gopher Prairie “you don’t get any of this poverty that you find in the cities—always plenty of work—no need of charity—man got to be blame shiftless if he don’t get ahead” (132). From the perspective on Main Street, capitalism appears as a fair and balanced system in which any individual can succeed as long as he or she is willing to put in an honest day’s work. Later in the novel, when Carol suggests to the Thanatopsis Club (composed of the town’s economically elite women) that they should study and help the poor in town, her idea is immediately shot down. One member retorts, “There isn’t any real poverty here. . . . Papa says these folks are fakers. Especially all these tenant farmers that pretend they have so much trouble getting seed and machinery. Papa says they simply won’t pay their debts. He says he’s sure he hates to foreclose mortgages, but it’s the only way to make them respect the law” (166). From within the small town’s borders, stories of suffering due to economic exploitation are deemed fictions. After all, on Main Street no such suffering is visible and legible. Carol is determined not to be a passive consumer of the small town’s dominant ideology. Instead she seeks to become a critical thinker. In the middle of the novel she ventures beyond Main Street—the small town’s physical and symbolic center—to explore Gopher Prairie’s outskirts. There she “discovered misery and dead hope” (132), the working poor who live in “tar-paper” shacks. In these “slums,” she sees “recently arrived” immigrants living in “an abandoned stable” and people of all ages searching for scraps of food and energy sources, including a “man of eighty . . . picking up lumps of coal along the railroad” (132). This space is paradoxically proximate to and yet a world away from Gopher Prairie, and it is space cast “outside” of the small-town imaginary. However, this outside enables Main Street’s celebration of consumption. In the course of the novel Carol learns to read Gopher Prairie as a space of systemic exploitation and suffering. By learning to critique the dominant small-town imaginary, she simultaneously learns how to read capitalism. She recognizes that Gopher Prairie is an ideological form enabled by exploiting social relations outside of its material and ideological borders. More specifically Gopher Prairie is enabled by exploiting farmers, factory workers, and the mass reserve army of labor—all of whom are rendered invisible from within the small town’s regulated borders.

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A Global Fantasy of Capitalism As Main Street unfolds, Carol learns that the small town is an ideological fiction produced and propagated, in large part, by popular U.S. literature. Outside of literary and cultural representation, the dominant small town does not exist. However, over the course of the twentieth century this small-town trope has become a material reality. The opening of Disneyland in 1955 illustrates the materialization of this trope. Main Street, U.S.A., the “land” that begins Walt Disney’s fantasy theme park, coheres with the small-town image affixed in Carol’s imagination at the beginning of Main Street. Disney’s small town is an aestheticized island community in which everything is compressed and miniaturized to produce the effect of a close-knit, cocooned community. Disney explains, “We had every brick and shingle and gas map made five-eighths true size” (cited in S. Watts, Magic Kingdom 23). This production, the historian Steven Watts writes, “establish[es] an intimate sense of comfort and security” (23). To further enhance this affect, Disney’s small town maintains an aesthetic image of order and cleanliness. Every day Main Street is steam cleaned, and employees continually work to eliminate all traces of trash.1 The architect Robert Venturi claims, “Disney World is nearer to what people want than what architects have ever given them.” Disney’s theme park, Venturi continues, is “the symbolic American utopia” (cited in Harvey, Condition 60). Robert Baron, a museum and arts consultant, distinguishes theme parks from history museums as follows: themes parks function as a place where visitors are supposed to “live inside mythic metaphors,” but history museums encourage visitors to “stand outside these metaphors” and to reflect on their multiple meanings (cited in Wallace 125). Theme parks, in brief, attempt to foreclose forms of critical inquiry. Main Street, U.S.A. invites subjects to “live inside” its “mythic metaphor” of the small town, and many people have accepted this invitation. The architect Paul Goldberger observes that Disney manufactured “a kind of universally true Main Street—it’s better than the real Main Street . . . could ever be” (cited in Francaviglia, Main Street Revisited 160). As I demonstrate below, Disney’s Main Street has become the blue print for small towns in late capitalism. Main Street, U.S.A. is not only the realization of an ideological, literary trope, but also the materialization of a dominant fantasy of First World capitalism. Disneyland’s small town is a controlled environment that encourages subjects to ritualistically consume.2 Guests of Disney’s

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theme parks “fully participate in the ideology of global capitalism,” where “the duties of citizenship are equated with consumption” (Klugman et al. 43). Although Main Street, U.S.A. ostensibly represents an open, public space for leisurely strolls (for all guests who first pay the exorbitant entrance fee), it is better understood as a giant shopping aisle that celebrates a culture of consumerism. Main Street, U.S.A. offers a fantasy of First World capitalism that fetishizes one part of capitalism’s cycle—consumption—and mystifies all the other social relations within capitalism. To achieve this fantasy of consumption, Disney’s small town, and the park as a whole, appears as a self-sufficient island. Mitushiro Yoshimoto, a scholar of Japanese cinema and comparative literature, argues that what distinguishes the theme park, inaugurated by the opening of Disneyland in 1955, from its predecessor, the amusement park, is that “the theme park tries to create an autonomous, utopian space cut off from the rest of society” (186). To create and sustain this fantasy of a self-contained world, Disneyland has only one entrance, and once inside, guests cannot see anything beyond the theme park’s borders (186). Inside this island community “consumption activities . . . [are] naturalized, so that visitors consume without being aware of it” (187). As exemplified by Main Street, U.S.A., the dominant small town in late capitalism has become a global space. Since 1955 Disney theme parks have reproduced across and beyond the United States, in Orlando (1971), Tokyo (1983), Paris (1992), and Hong Kong (2005). In each of these locations Main Street, U.S.A. greets paying guests with the promise of unending consumption. Consider, for example, the following description of Main Street, U.S.A. on a blog site devoted to Hong Kong Disney: “As we move along Main Street . . . you can do what Main Street is renowned for . . . Shopping! Have a great time spending your money on plush toys, photo frames, lollies and so much more in shops like the Emporium or Midtown Jewelry.”3 Main Street, U.S.A. naturalizes, normalizes, and disseminates a First World fantasy of capitalism. In many ways it is the prototype of the American shopping mall. In his canonical article, “The Malling of America,” William Kowinski writes, “Malls are designed for Disney’s children. Stores are pressed close together; they have small low facades. In fact, everything about malls is minimized . . . the mall is laid out with few corners and no unused space along store rows so that there are no decisions to make—you just flow on” (cited in Francaviglia, Main Street Revisited 164). The aesthetic production of Main Street, U.S.A. becomes reproduced in shopping malls throughout the United States and throughout the reach of global capitalism.

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As the global proliferation of Main Street, U.S.A. illustrates, the dominant small town is no longer exclusively a nation form. Rather, it has become a global form that stages a global consumerist culture in which all subjects can potentially belong. As the United States established itself as a global empire, the dominant small town transforms from the nation’s ideological home into the world’s ideological home. The small town’s claim to universalism, of course, is the U.S. empire remaking the world in its own ideological image.

Global Belonging To think further about the small town as a global form in which all subjects can potentially belong, I want to turn to Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show. The film centers on Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), an affable small-town insurance salesman. Unbeknown to Truman, his banal life is the focus of the world’s most popular television show, The Truman Show. What Truman assumes to be his hometown of Seahaven is actually the world’s largest studio, containing over five thousand concealed cameras that capture his every waking (and sleeping) moment. What Truman believes to be “reality”—his family, his friends, his small town, even his memories—is controlled and manipulated by a transnational corporation. The Truman Show is a twenty four-hour reality television program that has been on the air for thirty years and commands a global audience of over 1.5 billion people in over 220 countries.4 The film situates the television phenomenon The Truman Show as a form of global culture by showing a series of scenes in which people from all backgrounds watch Truman’s day-to-day existence. One of the spaces we see is “the Truman Bar,” a place for people to congregate and to share their obsession with Truman’s life in Seahaven. The television show produces a global community, and the dominant small town—exemplified by Seahaven—has become a global symbol. (The studio that houses Seahaven, an announcer informs us, is one of two artificial structures visible from outer space, the other being the Great Wall of China.) In contrast to twentieth-century representations of the small town as an exclusively white space, Seahaven offers an ostensibly open and welcoming community, as underscored by its diverse cast and audience. Whereas in Zona Gale’s 1919 short story “Dream,” the presence of African Americans threatened the small town’s “integrity” (see chapter 5), at the end of the twentieth century Truman’s neighbors are African Americans and race is a nonissue. However, this seemingly diverse community

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does not represent social progress; rather the small town serves the interests of an expanding, capitalist U.S. empire. As the movie suggests, The Truman Show television program is an auxiliary to the latest phase of U.S. imperialism. In the globally disseminated show, English is the universal language, American clothing is global style, and consumption is foundational to an individual’s identity. Weir’s film corroborates David Harvey’s thesis that the United States has maintained its hegemonic power throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century by remaining a global center of ideological production. The preponderance of the world, Harvey writes, “has been entrained politically, economically, and culturally in globalization through Americanization. . . . The emulation of U.S. consumerism, ways of life, cultural forms, and political and financial institutions has contributed to the process of endless capital accumulation globally” (New Imperialism 41). As The Truman Show critically dramatizes, the small town has become a global form that naturalizes and normalizes both Americanization and capitalism, and it interpellates subjects—regardless of race and ethnicity—as First World consumers. The Truman Show is about the production and reproduction of the everyday.5 For thirty years, twenty-four hours a day, the show’s global audience has watched Truman Burbank perform banal daily rituals, from brushing his teeth to eating his meals. His entire life unfolds exclusively within the small town’s parameters. Therefore the everyday consumed by the show’s global audience is a small-town everyday. The show’s creator and producer, Chritof, claims that the show is important because it “gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions.” I want to suggest that what gives people these positive feelings is the small-town setting that frames and shapes Truman Burbank. In an age of global capitalism defined by radical instability, insecurity, and displacement, the small town offers what global capitalism has rendered obsolete: stability, predictability, and containment.6 One of the central arguments of this project is that the dominant American small town gains its legibility by appearing as an island community that disavows modernity. In The Truman Show this trope is made explicit: the small town of Seahaven is a literal island that Truman Burbank never leaves. Although Seahaven is a literal island, in global capitalism there are no island communities. As The Truman Show makes clear, the dominant small town both enables and is enabled by global capitalism. While seemingly a form of benign amusement, The Truman Show television program is the face of a corporation that operates on a global scale.

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The transnational corporation behind the show requires a labor force the size of “an entire country,” and the show, we learn, generates “enormous revenues . . . equivalent to the gross national product of a small country.” The show accumulates profits that surpass other nation-states’ economy by blurring the divide between entertainment and advertisement; to put it bluntly, The Truman Show is one long advertisement. It is not interrupted by advertising breaks because everything that appears on the television show—from clothing and cleaning products to actual houses—is a commodity available for consumption. In global capitalism everything is “assimilated into commodity production” (Jameson, Cultural Turn 134). The Truman Show is Disney’s Main Street, U.S.A. writ large. However, whereas Main Street, U.S.A. is an emplaced fantasy of consumption open for limited hours, The Truman Show offers a virtual Main Street open twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, for people to endlessly consume. Seahaven has become a capitalist center in which culture is economics and economics is culture.7 Moreover the movie brilliantly insinuates that the show’s global audience is as manipulated as Truman Burbank. Just as Truman is interpellated by the small town, so too is the show’s global audience. The Truman Show interpellates its viewers as consumers who are urged to consistently and continually buy. The show generates enormous profits by producing a cultural/economic logic that conflates consumption and belonging. The endless commodities displayed within Seahaven’s borders become affectively charged symbols of the small town. In other words, people consume objects displayed on the show so that they can virtually belong to the small town.8 In many ways The Truman Show retells Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint. Both narratives feature a protagonist who does not realize that his life is framed by a fictional small town; during the course of each narrative, the protagonists sees cracks in what each believes to be reality; and each protagonist discovers that the small town is not a contained world, but a prison. Although the small town proves to be an Orwellian nightmare for both Ragle Gumm and Truman Burbank, for the global audience who consumes The Truman Show the small town is a desirable community. When viewing the television show, the film suggests, the audience experiences more enjoyment than when doing anything else in their own unfulfilling, alienated lives. For example, throughout the movie we see snippets of despairing individuals who watch The Truman Show, including a man who never leaves his bathtub and two garage attendants whose only engagement and excitement, however ephemeral,

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come from watching the show. In contrast to the audience’s alienated lives under global capitalism, The Truman Show offers a sense of community. Seahaven is a contained island community where neighbors say hello to each other, everyone knows each other’s name, and everyone has the basic necessities of life, including a home and a stable job.9 Seahaven’s identity as a small town is reinforced by frequently referencing popular cultural U.S. small towns. For example, in the film’s opening moments Truman leaves his house and is enthusiastically greeted by his neighbor’s dog, Pluto. The name signifies both the Disney character and, more generally, the small-town imaginary central to the Disney brand (see S. Watts, Magic Kingdom 3–6). When Truman watches television, his only options are small-town programs. At one point a television announcer enthusiastically proclaims, “Tonight we present the endearing, much-loved classic, Show Me the Way to Go Home, a hymn of praise to small town life where we learn that you don’t have to leave home to discover what the world’s all about. And that no one’s poor who has friends.” This fictional small-town movie within the fictional small town highlights the dominant small town’s insularity and self-referentiality. Seahaven repeats and perpetuates the reified themes of small-town culture. Show Me the Way to Go Home, for example, recycles the familiar themes of “home” and “friends.” In fact the line “no one’s poor who has friends” echoes George Bailey’s declaration at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). It is a lesson that the producers of The Truman Show television program reiterate continuously and that the show’s devoted global audience has internalized. At the movie’s end Truman Burbank, like Ragle Gumm in Time Out of Joint, escapes the fabricated small town and enters “reality.” When Truman walks through the studio’s hidden door for the first time in his conscious life, cameras cease to follow him. He ostensibly enters a realm of freedom. But does such freedom exist? Does Truman sail to a brave new world beyond capitalist and corporate control? Rather than read the film’s final image as Truman reaching a free “outside,” in global capitalism the categories of “inside” and “outside” are no longer operative.10 If freedom is understood as an unmediated, nonsurveillanced, unmanipulated life, then the “outside” of Seahaven is no more free than the “inside.” Seahaven’s culture—a corporate culture of First World consumption where Americanization is synonymous with globalization—is the same dominant culture that circulates outside of Seahaven’s borders.

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The Small-Town Trope Made Real What complicates any analysis of The Truman Show is that Seahaven, the small town that is a television set, is a “real” small town. Peter Weir shot the film on location in Seaside, Florida, a ninety-acre planned community that occupies a prominent place in contemporary architecture. Seaside was the first built community of New Urbanism, an architectural movement founded and popularized in the 1980s by the husband-andwife team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. The architectural movement is a critique of and alternative to the suburban sprawl that has radically reshaped American geography since World War II.11 Suburbia, Duany and Plater-Zyberk argue, is a geography of privatization that privileges the isolated, bourgeois home (Duany et al., Suburban Nation). Suburbs are designed for maximum privacy, with single-family homes spaced far apart by wide lawns and wide streets. The United States becoming a “suburban nation,” Duany and Plater-Zyberk argue, has led to the steady decline and disappearance of a vibrant public sphere.12 This insight is corroborated by popular twentieth-century U.S. fiction and film. A slew of novels document the alienation, myopia, boredom, and vacuity of suburbia, including Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955), John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961), Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives (1972), Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm (1984), and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land (1997). More recently movies such as Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999), Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven (2002), and Todd Field’s Little Children (2006) perpetuate this trope.13 In contrast to suburbia, Duany and Plater-Zyberk propose, new places need to be developed that prioritize and inspire community. In what might be considered New Urbanism’s manifesto, “The Second Coming of the American Small Town” (1992), Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck argue that to create a better tomorrow, we need to turn back the clock, so to speak, and return to the “traditional American town” (21). The essay’s title uses religious discourse to insinuate that the small town, a relic from the past, will be our geographic savior. Small towns are “like magic.” To illustrate this claim, the authors turn to Disney’s Main Street, U.S.A. The people who flock to Disneyland, they contend, “do not spend as much time on the rides as they do wandering along Main Street, USA” (28). Duany et al. imply that experiencing Main Street U.S.A. is analogous to experiencing a “real” small town. Where does fiction end and reality begin? “The Second Coming” ends with the assertion that many

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Americans are “ready for the return of the town” (47), and those who are not ready “need to be reacquainted with their small-town heritage” (48). I am sympathetic toward any attempt to build better communities; however, New Urbanism’s “return” to a “small-town heritage” is a return to an ideological past. New Urbanism’s small-town blueprint is the materialization of the dominant small town that Carol Milford learned is an ideological fantasy. The first small town designed by Duany and Plater-Zyberk was Seaside, Florida, in 1992. The urban scholar Witold Rybczynski writes, “By calling Seaside a town, planning it like a town, and incorporating small-town features such as picket fences and front porches, Duany and Plater-Zyberk were tapping into a powerful cultural tradition” (21). Time magazine featured Seaside in its 1990 “Best of the Decade” issue and predicted that it would “become the American planning paradigm” (cited in Rybczynski 21). Since Seaside, New Urbanist communities (often called neotraditional communities) have been built across the United States, from Kentlands, Maryland to Laguna West, California.14 The most famous example of such a community is Disney’s Celebration, which opened in 1994.15 Celebration is located twenty miles south of Orlando, but it feels—and it was designed to feel—a world away. Celebration’s chief appeal is that it appears to be an island community that exists outside of modernity. In his study of Disney’s town, Andrew Ross writes, “Many residents believe they have taken a step out of the frenzied pace and sequence of modernity by choosing to move there” (208). Celebration figures itself as a small town by producing and projecting a fixed aesthetic image of a space outside the developmental logic of a capitalist modernity; Celebration appears as a compact, stable, unified, orderly, and clean community.16 Following the New Urbanist doctrine, homes in Celebration crowd together and hover near the street to create the impression of an intimate, cocooned community. Many prominent critics, including the famed urban geographer Jane Jacobs, identify Celebration as a postmodern simulacrum, a thesis corroborated by the journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins.17 In their study Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney’s Brave New World (2000), Frantz and Collins recall that when they initially arrived in Celebration, they were struck by the town’s “make-believe quality.” They observe that there was “an artificiality to the whole enterprise. . . . Some houses that appeared to have second-floor dormers were actually only single-story buildings; the dormers, complete with windowpanes painted black to simulate a darkened space, were fake” (20). Celebration’s use of façades

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is the same aesthetic code used to produce Disney’s Main Street, U.S.A. and the small town that frames Truman Burbank. The aesthetic production of Celebration’s small-town image is exemplified by its Town Hall. The journalist Alex Marshall describes Celebration’s Town Hall as follows: it “features a forest of columns out front, perhaps meant to remind residents of ancient Athenian democracy. But no governments exist therein. What’s inside is the manager of the homeowners association, the company manager hired by Disney to supervise its creation, who sends out little messages asking people not to put strong-colored curtains in their front windows” (21). Moreover Celebration markets itself as a “small town.” Throughout the 1990s its website proclaimed that the community offers “the best from the most successful towns of yesterday.” Similarly the town’s promotional material announces that Celebration is “a community rich with old-fashioned appeal . . . where memories of a lifetime are made” (cited in Sully). Celebration projects and narrates itself as a stable, secure island community outside of the destabilizing, disorienting, and displacing conditions of modernity. In a useful analysis of the small town’s ideological form, Marshall compares Celebration to its neighboring town, Kissimmee (1–39). Whereas the former appears as a stable ahistorical island community that ideologically transcends the vicissitudes of capitalism’s cycles of booms and busts, the latter is currently an economically struggling town with flagging home sales and empty storefronts. But this wasn’t always the case. Kissimmee was founded in the mid-nineteenth century and established a thriving economy based on the production and distribution of sugarcane and cattle. The adjacent lake, Tohopekaliga, enabled the town to become a major shipping port. In the late nineteenth century the train replaced the ship as the leading mode of transportation in the region, and Kissimmee transformed itself into a successful railroad town, becoming one of the largest cattle producers and distributors in the United States. However, capitalism is a system of constant revolution and destabilization. Just as shipping became a subsidiary mode of transportation in the region due to the popularization of the railroad, so too did the railroad become subsidiary to the automobile. As the twentieth century progressed, Kissimmee could not adapt to capitalism’s constantly transforming system, and the town slid into economic devastation (Marshall 1–3). Since the opening of Disney World in 1972, Kissimmee has attempted to transform itself into a tourist town. It has relocated its

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commercial center from Main Street to Interstate 192 in an attempt to appeal to drivers on their way to Disney World, now the center of the Orlando-area economy. Marshall writes that for miles and miles U.S. 192 is “lined . . . with hotels shaped like alligators and giant glass-walled souvenir shops and shopping malls, all waving mile-high signs at the people driving by” (4). This sketch of Kissimmee’s history illustrates how every community must adapt to survive in a constantly changing market economy. In contrast, the dominant small town, exemplified by Celebration, projects an image of an autonomous, contained island community that is outside of a capitalist modernity. This, of course, is a radical mystification. Despite its appearance as an island community, Celebration is “part of the ecosystem of U.S. 192” that “survives because its Main Street is mostly filled with tourists” (Marshall 14). It is “an automobile-oriented subdivision dressed up to look like a small pre-car-centered town” (6). However, today it is Celebration, and not Kissimmee, that is popularly recognized and celebrated as a small town. In the late twentieth century the U.S. government, following a logic similar to New Urbanism’s, promised that any community could become a small town by following its state-sanctioned master script. In 1977 three rural communities—Hot Springs, South Dakota; Galesburg, Illinois; and Madison, Indiana—were selected to pioneer the National Main Street Program, which was launched nationwide in 1980. The objective of this federally funded program is to reverse and rectify the trend of economic devastation that rural communities have experienced throughout most of the twentieth century. The solution to economic decline, according to the Main Street Program, is for localities to transform themselves into small towns in order to become visible and viable in the violently uneven geographies of globalization. As of 2009 thousands of communities in forty-one states have implemented the state’s master script (Main Street: National Trust). These newly re-formed small towns exist on the margins of a capitalist modernity, signifying the radical economic disparity within the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation-state and challenging any theory of a coherent, cohesive nation. The Main Street Program mandates that all business owners unify in order to develop, solidify, and disseminate an image of the small town. For a space to make itself legible as a small town, it must focus on “design, promotion, cooperation, and economics” (Francaviglia, Main Street Revisited 177). Francaviglia explains that the “program requires team-like cooperation” in which “merchants  .  .  .  agree to maintain

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similar hours, to restore buildings, and to develop a positive, even aggressive, attitude towards marketing their resources in the hope of winning customers” (177). For a space to be legible as a small town, the business community must unite to aesthetically produce an image of a singular, uniform, and stable community. What the community must project, in short, is an image of a vibrant, healthy, and autonomous economy. The irony, of course, is that if a community actually had such an identity, there would be no reason for it to seek and implement the small-town blueprint provided by the Main Street Program. In a desperate attempt to survive in a ruthless globalizing market, these communities attempt to commodify and project themselves as small towns, which is to say, these communities work to produce an aesthetic fiction that mystifies capitalism’s material conditions. I use the word “fiction” intentionally here; Francaviglia writes that the Main Street Program is indebted to Walt Disney’s Main Street, U.S.A. (178). The Main Street Program stresses that for a space to succeed as a small town and attract outside capital, it must construct a Main Street that differentiates and singularizes its community. David Harvey writes that one of the “central paradox[es] of place” in late capitalism is that “the less important the spatial barriers, the greater the sensitivity of capital to the variations of place within space, and the greater incentive for places to be differentiated in ways attractive to capital” (Condition 295–296). And indeed the Main Street Program emphasizes the image of singular, unique places. The motto of the Program is “Protecting the Irreplaceable,” and for its twenty-fifth anniversary it released a press kit announcing, “25 years empowering communities, protecting our sense of place, strengthening local economies” (Main Street: National Trust). The small-town master script offered by the Main Street Program suggests that if communities are to become legible as small towns, they must echo the trope of the dominant small town that circulates in popular U.S. literature and culture. Consider, for example, Main Street Success Stories (1997), published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The text celebrates communities that have succeeded in turning themselves into small towns. Main Street Success Stories begins, “Welcome home to Main Street . . . ” (Dane 1, ellipses in original). The text invites—or interpellates—its reader into a familiar national imaginary. The turn to the small town is posited as a return to a place called “home,” both for the subject and the nation. (The interpellated subject is positioned as already at home in the small town.) The opening phrase, “Welcome home to Main Street,” drifts off into a series of ellipses that suggests a logic of

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daydreaming. The ellipses offer the reader an opportunity to recall the pervasive images of small towns that pervade popular American culture. And if the reader draws a blank, the text fills in the gaps: “Main Street conjures up rich images of Saturday nights . . . Independence Day parades, hot coffee, Ward and June Cleaver, city hall, the past, and the American Dream” (Dane 1, ellipses in original). These state-sanctioned images of the small town are reified images in which history has been “liquidated” (Baudrillard 2). The small town’s legibility is predicated on an aura of the nation’s history, but the history and heritage emphasized and advertised in order to attract outside capital must not, to paraphrase Jameson, be history that hurts. Instead communities must offer the façade of history, an ideological operation achieved by transforming a material space into one that evokes small-town simulacra such as the small town at the center of Leave It to Beaver. To follow the state-sanctioned script is to erase all traces of social violence and to aesthetically create a small town that evokes stereotypes about Main Street. As the Main Street Program implies, the small-town master script can potentially be realized in any space. I want to briefly turn my attention to two Main Street communities. The first is particularly pertinent to American literary studies: Hannibal, Missouri, the childhood home of Mark Twain and the basis for the fictional St. Petersburg, the setting of both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).18 Although technically a city, Hannibal today advertises itself as a small town, an ideological identity achieved in part by staging itself as the nation’s home. Hannibal’s identification as a small town is reinforced by foregrounding the life of Tom Sawyer while marginalizing the life of Huckleberry Finn. Walking through the streets of Hannibal, a tourist can see the house where Mark Twain grew up and the house where Tom Sawyer grew up. Moreover Hannibal stages “real” appearances by Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher. Fiction and nonfiction bleed into each other to produce the image of a small town. Tom Sawyer’s narrative is celebrated in Hannibal while Huck Finn’s narrative is marginalized because each character represents a different ethos. At the conclusion of Huckleberry Finn the eponymous protagonist flees from the small town of St. Petersburg. The novel’s final lines famously read, “But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before” (298). Huck signifies the ethos of movement and migration. In contrast, although a prankster who challenges

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figure 2. Hannibal, Missouri.

the regulating norms of the town, at the conclusion of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the eponymous protagonist remains rooted and emplaced in the small town.19 Hannibal’s use of Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher helps stage an autonomous, innocent island community that socially reproduces itself from generation to generation. Hannibal must fictionalize itself and its history in order to become legible as a small town. While certain archives are celebrated and placed center stage, such as the “life” of Tom Sawyer, other archives must be suppressed. Today when walking through Hannibal, it is easy to forget that this was once a slaveowning town. I want to briefly look at one more community that uses the Main Street Program’s script to become a small town, the boyhood town of Ronald Reagan: Dixon, Illinois. In his 1965 autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me?, Reagan writes, “All of us have to have a place we go back to; Dixon is that place for me” (17). Today Dixon is part of the Main Street Program, attempting to transform itself into the image that Reagan aesthetically produced in his autobiographies and speeches. The Reagan family

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figure 3. Hannibal, Missouri.

moved to Dixon in 1920, when Ronald was nine. Although Dixon was an industrial, commercial hub to the surrounding region when Reagan lived there, in his biographical writings and speeches he transformed Dixon into an idealized small town that formed his personal and political life. In his 1965 autobiography, written to coincide with his campaign to become governor of California, Reagan positioned himself as a smalltown subject. Dixon, Reagan writes, “shaped [his] body and mind for all the years to come after” (Where’s the Rest 17). Similarly in his 1990 autobiography, he describes Dixon as “heaven”: “[Dixon] was a small universe where I learned standards and values that would guide me for the rest of my life” (An American Life 27). A few pages later he writes, “As I look back on those days in Dixon, I think my life was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (29). In a logic we have seen repeated again and again, the small town is an ideological form that blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, reality and fantasy, history and ideology. The ideological small town informs Edmund Morris’s experimental biography of Reagan, Dutch (2000).20 When Morris turns his attention to

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Dixon, his prose morphs into the format of a screenplay and the small town becomes a Hollywood setting: “Were I to script a documentary called, say, The Ronald Reagan Story, I would  .  .  .  begin the Dixon sequence with a frame full of falling snow. The camera would start a slow advance through the flakes, moving forward and downward, with a sense of imminent arrival. . . . Then I’d have Dutch read from his own autobiography” (55). Although Morris states that his movie would be a documentary, what he offers is more fiction that history. The opening segment of this documentary echoes Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Like Capra’s film, Morris’s film begins with a small town blanketed in snow accompanied by a series of voice-overs. The first voice-over belongs to Reagan reading from his 1965 autobiography: “A small town of ten thousand. . . . It was to be home to me . . . until I was twenty-one. All of us have a place to go back to; Dixon is that place for me” (Morris 33). Later in this “script,” Morris introduces a choir who sings “Blest be the tie that binds” (34). This is the song that wends through Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (see Wilder 34, 46, 59, 79, 94, 95). Today, to become legible as a small town, Dixon must project an image of a community that hides its material reality of deindustrialization, poverty, and dwindling job opportunities.

A Global Form As analyzed earlier, in The Truman Show a transnational corporation employs a labor force the size of an “entire country” to create its small-town brand. Although it generates profits “equivalent to the gross national product of a small country,” the Truman Corporation mystifies its global social relations by focusing exclusively on the façade of a self-enclosed Main Street. This logic is not simply a flight of Hollywood fantasy; in the latest chapter of global capitalism, the dominant small town functions as an aesthetic form that attempts to eliminate all traces of capitalism’s constitutive violences. The dominant small town’s legibility is predicated on projecting capitalism’s oppression and exploitation outside of its borders, and hence beyond the realm of visibility and legibility. From the view on Main Street, a market economy seems like the best of all possible worlds: a world of community and a world of cheap, abundant commodities. In conclusion, I want to suggest that the dominant small town is central to the U.S. neoliberal regime. To make this claim more specific, I want to briefly turn to Walmart. The world’s largest private company is committed to offering commodities at the lowest prices possible; what is beyond the company’s concern

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figure 4. Dixon, Illinois.

is how those commodities are produced so cheaply.21 Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Walmart brands itself as a small-town company. Walmart is the largest corporation in the world, operating over nine thousand retail stores in fifteen countries, employing over two million people worldwide, and with sales exceeding $400 billion.22 In 2004 the investment banker Peter J. Solomon advised, “The principal strategic question for every American retailer and consumer goods manufacturer is: ‘What’s my relationship to Wal-Mart?’” (cited in Strasser 53). Walmart has the local, national, regional, and global power “to rezone . . . [U.S.] cities, determine the real minimum wage, break trade unions, set the boundaries for popular culture, channel capital throughout the world, and conduct a kind of international diplomacy with a dozen nations” (Lichtenstein 4). The historian Nelson Lichtenstein identifies Walmart as the “template” of twenty-first-century capitalism, demarcating a “new stage in the history of world capitalism” (4). This identification is reinforced by the historian Bethany E. Moreton. In 1999 Fortune magazine released a special issue on the “Businessman

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of the Century.” As Moreton notes, there was no suspense as to who would be honored with the title: “Who but Henry Ford, pioneer of mass production, could plausibly stand for the entire international economic order of the previous one hundred years?” (57). But who would metonymically represent the next century of capitalism’s revolutionary history? According to Moreton, the answer is hinted at in the same issue of Fortune: the semifinalist for this designation was Sam Walton. Moreton provocatively suggests that what comes after Fordism (1914– 1973) is “Wal-Martism”: “The period since 1973 has relied increasingly on the ‘niche’ production and consumption of ever more disposable items, a retreat from the state regulation and social safety nets that stabilized the boom-and-bust business cycle, highly flexible labor markets and work arrangements, [and] an explosive acceleration of circulating capital and credit” (58). To this list we can add an intensification of job insecurity and widening social inequalities. Walmart’s global operations exemplify why we need to think, conceptualize, and imagine on multiple geographic scales that range from the local to the global. To understand Walmart’s operations, Lichtenstein focuses on four women occupying four different (yet inextricably bound) social positions within Walmart’s transnational system: a regular consumer at Walmart; a woman who lost her job as a grocerystore cashier after Walmart moved to town (this job supported a household with five children); an assistant manager at Walmart who makes $40,000 a year after ten years of demanding, labor-intensive work; and a woman who works on an assembly line in Guangzhou (the third largest city in China) to produce a sliver of the commodities offered on Walmart’s shelves. Despite their differences, all four women are bound by Walmart’s template of twenty-first-century capitalist exploitation. For the sake of space, I will highlight two of these women: the consumer and the producer. Chastity Ferguson is a symbol of working-class individuals and families throughout the United States who have made Walmart a part of their everyday life. Ferguson, a hotel cashier in Las Vegas who earns $400 a week, explains that she shops at Walmart “because it’s cheap. . . . You can’t beat the prices” (quoted in Lichtenstein 6). Rather than lambasting American consumers for shopping at Walmart, Lichtenstein sympathizes with working-class individuals and families who have no choice but to shop there because of a U.S. economy in which full-time job opportunities and wages are shrinking rapidly and in which social services are evaporating.23

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At the opposite end of the globe, Li Xiao Hong works in a Guangzhou factory that manufactures millions of Mattel toys that Walmart sells. Li works ten-hour shifts for five and a half days a week, performing grueling, repetitive, assembly-line labor in deplorable working conditions and under stringent guidelines to keep up with production demands: “Li is the fastest worker on a long, U-shaped assembly line of about 130 women. They put together animated Disney-themed dolls. . . . Li’s hands move with lightning speed, gluing the pink bottom, screwing it into place, getting the rest of the casing to adhere, tamping it down with a special hammer, pulling the battery cover through the slats, soldering where she glues, then sending it down the line. The entire process takes twenty-one seconds.” And for this labor Li is paid roughly $65 a month (Lichtenstein 6). Although she does not work directly for Walmart, her social conditions are inextricably tethered to Walmart’s capitalist “template.” Walmart’s always low prices are enabled by a new capitalist model in which capital moves with greater ease and efficiency across the globe in search of the most exploitable labor and the most favorable conditions to maximize profits (tax breaks, state kickbacks, corrupt or corruptible governments, etc.).24 Lichtenstein’s important analysis makes clear that the notion of a postindustrial world is an illusion maintained by fetishizing certain forms of labor (retail, finance, clerical, entertainment, etc.). In contrast, he emphasizes that we are in the midst of the “most sweeping process of proletarian industrialization since the dawn of the factory revolution nearly two centuries ago” (8). The belief in a postindustrial economy is maintained because the invisible side of global capitalism—invisible, that is, to First World consumers—is the process of production. Lichtenstein powerfully periodizes global capitalism not as a break from industrialization, but as an exacerbated and intensified form of industrialization. “More people,” he writes, “labor on an assembly line today . . . than at any other time in human history. Still more sell, talk, or manipulate a keyboard under assembly-line conditions. The postindustrial age, heralded by so many pundits and academics, has not yet arrived” (8). Walmart’s corporate structure and image help produce and perpetuate the illusion of a postindustrial world. Walmart is Main Street, U.S.A. writ large: a space where commodities magically appear in superabundance. (However, in contrast to Disney’s small town, in Walmart the commodities magically appear at rock-bottom prices.) For the millions of consumers who have made Walmart a part of their everyday lives, what is mystified is the other side of global capitalism: the side of

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production that Lichtenstein identifies as the “most sweeping process of proletarian industrialization since the dawn of the factory revolution.” The expansive dissemination of Walmart stores and Walmart becoming synonymous with the everyday for millions of individuals conceal a global system of intensified exploitation that enables a world of cheap commodities to fill hundreds of thousands of aisles throughout the United States and beyond. Not only is Walmart Main Street, U.S.A. writ large, but (not coincidentally) it brands itself as a small-town company. In his autobiography, Made in America (1992), the founder of Walmart, Sam Walton, provides one folksy anecdote after another to illustrate the prominent place of the small town in shaping his values and the values of his company. “As you can see,” he writes after two hundred pages, “we thrive on a lot of the traditions of small-town America” (207). In his branding narrative Walton figures himself as an everyday small-town subject, figures Walmart as a small-town company, and figures Bentonville, Arkansas, Walmart’s headquarters, as a typical small town. The memoir begins with Forbes magazine naming Walton the “richest man in America” and the media swarming Bentonville. Walton writes, “I really don’t know what they thought [they would find]. . . . So they found out all these exciting things about me, like: I drove an old pickup truck with cages in the back for my bird dogs, or I wore a Wall-Mart ball cap, or I got my hair cut at the barbershop just off the town square” (2). When Fortune magazine visited Walton in Bentonville, they noted his concerted effort to make “the world’s largest enterprise continue to feel as small and folksy as Bentonville. And whatever makes Wal-Mart feel small and folksy only makes it stronger” (cited in Lichtenstein 20). The anthropologist Mary Jo Schneider, who did fieldwork on Walmart’s corporate culture, writes, “Walton projected the image of successful small town merchant: genuine, polite, civic-minded, and wholesome” (293). U.S.A. Today described Walton as “a billionaire everyone can love. . . . A televised version of Walton’s life would resemble the ‘Andy Griffith Show,’ not ‘Dallas’” (cited in Moreton 76). Dan Fox, an advertising executive, observes, “The entire Wal-Mart phenomenon they’ve become is born of a small-town psychology. Their advertising evokes a distinctly American theme, and they post a greeter at the door who says hello to you just like someone would in a smalltown store” (cited in Fitzgerald 3). Moreton delineates the multiple “paradoxes” that constitute Walmart, but perhaps the central paradox is that although it is a global corporation, it projects itself as a small-town company with “Main Street values”

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(59). Schneider details the culture of Walmart’s annual shareholders meetings from the 1970s through the 1990s and analyzes its “corporate message” over that time period (292). Her title gives away her thesis: “The Wal-Mart Annual Meeting: From Small-Town America to a Global Corporate Chain.” However, I think Schneider’s evidence can be read to support a different thesis. While her thesis is undoubtedly true from a material analysis, ideologically, Walmart remains wedded to a smalltown imaginary. In fact Schneider’s conclusion reads, “The videos and rhetoric of the Wal-Mart annual meetings are full of images of a small town America . . . that spreads American values to the rest of the world” (299). As Schneider reports, Sam Walton created the mirage of a small-town culture in which all workers are ostensibly equal and where every worker is valued. In contrast to a corporate culture that is hierarchical, impersonal, and dehumanizing, Walton branded Walmart as a human, smalltown company whose values remain unchanged since he opened his first dime store in the small town of Bentonville in 1950. A small-town culture is an ideological imaginary in which community comes before the individual, human values (synonymous with Main Street values) triumph over the dehumanizing values of Wall Street, and a democratic workplace prevails over the hierarchy of bureaucratic corporations. Walton institutionalized a series of practices that enacted and perpetuated this ideology of a small-town culture. For example, employees are called “associates,” the personnel department is the “people division,” and on identification badges and in conversations, first names are used (Lichtenstein 17). A small-town culture appears as a classless, democratic culture. However, as Lichtenstein writes, Walmart offers a “faux egalitarianism” and “faux classlessness” (17, 18). Walmart began as a small-town company, and its values, according to its corporate culture, remain tethered to Main Street. In contrast to the big city’s culture of technology, Walmart proclaims it has remained the same face-to-face company since 1950. In a 1991 annual meeting, Sam Walton declared, “We are no tech, not high tech or low tech” (cited in Schneider 295, emphasis in original). In opposition to the dizzying, disorienting, and deracinating revolutions in late capitalism, Walton offered an image of a company whose habits have remained fixed since midcentury, when small-town television shows such as Father Knows Best filled American homes. However, behind the façade of a fixed, old-fashioned small-town company, Walmart’s global network is enabled by sophisticated computer technology that manages the company’s transnational

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distribution, inventory, cataloguing, personnel hours, and sales data across multiple regions (Schneider 295; Rosen). In fact the sociologists Edna Bonacich and Khaleelah Hardie identify Walmart as the catalyst in creating a “logistics revolution.” In 2003 Fortune described Walmart as “the company that almost singlehandedly made the bar code ubiquitous by demanding 20 years ago that suppliers use it” (cited in Bonacich and Hardie 170). In the early 1980s the company purchased a $24 million satellite system, and by 1988 it had the largest private communications network in the United States (171). Perhaps the most prominent way Walmart portrays itself as a smalltown company is in its origin story. Sam Walton’s first store, Walton’s 5 & 10, opened in 1950 in Bentonville. Today the store, proudly facing the town square, functions as a Walmart museum that offers visitors an atmosphere and feeling of “small-town Americana” (Schneider 292). The museum contains the original dime store, described by Walmart’s corporate webpage as follows: “Begin your self-guided tour where it all began. Walton’s 5 & 10 is a step back in time chock full of retro toys, candies, souvenirs, and actual memorabilia for sale. From whirly pops and wax lips to Ol’ Roy coloring books and sock monkeys, you’ll get a taste of what it was like to shop back in the dime store era.”25 Walmart’s small-town brand romanticizes the past and makes a point of disavowing modernity. Rather than locate its headquarters in one of the conspicuous centers of global capitalism, such as New York, Paris, or Tokyo, Sam Walton decided to make Bentonville Walmart’s home. Bentonville, though, is not a typical small town. Rather it has become a hub in the globalization of capitalism. In 1990 Bentonville’s population numbered 11,000; by 2003 the population had leaped to 26,500, and Benton County, where Bentonville is located, is one of the fastest growing counties in the United States (Hopper). Mainly because of Walmart, in 1998 the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport opened. The airport’s director, Kelly Johnson, rhetorically asks, “How many airports in a community this size can you say have coast-to-coast service?” The first year the airport opened, official records reported that 329,216 people boarded a plane. A decade later, in 2007, the number doubled to 598,886 people (Chandler). Today more than five hundred vendors have established offices near Walmart’s Bentonville headquarters, and tens of thousands of global suppliers make business trips to this ostensible small town (Petrovic and Hamilton 131). Walmart’s annual meetings are now held in the Bud Walton Arena, a $34 million complex that can seat twenty thousand (Schneider 292), and the Walton Family Foundation donated

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$800 million to spearhead and operate what promises to be one of the world’s premier art museums, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.26 The museum is located in Bentonville. Despite being a global corporation, Walmart continues to brand itself as a small-town company. In 2008, at the beginning of the global recession, it launched Operation Main Street, a program that highlights the company’s values. The purpose of the program is to help families afford their Christmas gifts. The company explains its philanthropy as follows: “Operation Main Street initiatives have saved shoppers an estimated three-hundred million dollars thus far this holiday season. In the remaining days for holiday shopping, Walmart projects it will save its customers another $100 million over and above its everyday low prices” (“Walmart”). The image of Main Street—a metonym for community, charity, and goodwill—conceals Walmart’s primary objective. Even though the U.S. economy was sinking into a recession that threatened to become a depression, with unemployment and underemployment skyrocketing, home prices plunging, and despair prevailing, Walmart wanted to make sure that people continued to consume and continued their unsustainable habits and lifestyles. What Moreton identifies as Walmart’s central paradox—the largest corporation claiming to be a small-town company—can also be identified as ideology at work. The function of ideology, in part, is to mystify social contradictions and conflicts by offering a cohesive imaginary. Walmart uses the dominant small town, in other words, to mystify the historical, material conditions of global capitalism. It is not alone, of course, in using the small town as a branding imaginary. The historian Roland Marchand details how corporations have attempted to produce and broadcast their image in order to shield their exploitive practices. At the end of the nineteenth century the American corporation was vilified for radically refiguring and destroying social relations throughout the United States. Marchand summarizes: “The traditional potency of the family, the church, and the local community suddenly seemed dwarfed by the sway of the giant corporation” (2). Corporations needed to control and project a new image, and an industry was created in order to manufacture the mirage of a “corporate soul.”27 Corporations, in other words, needed to project an image and an ideology that mystified their real, material conditions. At the end of the nineteenth century the U.S. court system identified the corporation as an autonomous “‘person’ . . . with its own identity” (Bakan 16). The legal scholar Joel Bakan proposes the following

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provocative thesis: If we take seriously that the corporation is a person, then an honest evaluation of the corporate person is that it is a “sociopath”: an “uncaring” and “amoral” individual (17). And yet, as Marchand explains, corporations spend big money to hide their sociopathic character and instead create and advertise a “brand.” Clay Timon, the chairman of Landor Associates, the world’s oldest and largest branding firm, describes corporate brands as “souls.” Brands, he says, produce “intellectual and emotional bonds” with consumers (cited in Bakan 26). One of the primary ways American corporations produce the mirage of a corporate soul is to tether their image to the small town. Walmart is not an exception in its small-town branding; this is a long-standing pattern. At the end of his massive study of how corporations create the image of a soul, Marchand documents how corporations “returned” to Main Street during and after World War II: “Although there was no grand conspiracy among major corporations to plant their symbolic roots in the terrain of small-town America, still the pervasive fusion of corporate image with Main Street did not lack a basic logic, conscious or unconscious” (349). The image of Main Street is attractive to corporate America because Main Street is considered a space outside of the dehumanizing, destabilizing, and exploitive logic of capitalism. As Marchand documents, the image of Main Street and the corporation are not mutually exclusive; rather the former becomes the ideological soul of the latter. This logic continues into late capitalism. In 1992 Jim Crimmons, the director of strategic planning and research at DDB Needham Worldwide, explained why the small town continues to play a prominent role in corporate advertising: “It may be that [advertising] agency people have rediscovered a truth that’s been a constant over time, which is that although most people live in or near large cities, two-thirds would prefer to live in a small town” (cited in Fitzgerald 3). Similarly an executive at a competing advertising agency observes, “What we’ve found is that as complicated and complex as all our lives have become, the notion of small-town America is a very simple and unifying concept for the whole country. . . . It’s something everyone responds to at a deep level, and we believe in our heart it exists somewhere” (cited in Fitzgerald 3). Corporations from Walmart to Burger King use the image of Main Street to conceal their primary objective: profit at any cost. David Harvey writes that as global capitalism becomes more destabilizing, dislocating, disenfranchising, and dehumanizing, “the more pressing the need to discover or manufacture some kind of eternal

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truth. . . . The revival of interest in basic institutions (such as the family and community), and the search for historical roots are all signs of a search for more secure moorings and longer-lasting values in a shifting world” (Condition 292).28 To this list of “basic institutions,” we can add the small town. The desire for and the popularity of the small town cannot be reduced to mere escapism; rather the dominant small town has become an aesthetic form that erases the violences that constitute global capitalism, which is the reason corporations use the figure of the small town in the first place. In a sense the dominant small town’s form is similar to that of a corporation: both can be understood as “externalizing machines.” 29 Bakan claims that a corporation’s “built-in compulsion to externalize its costs is at the root of many of the world’s social and environmental ills” (61). The American studies scholar David Karjanen elaborates on this logic of externalization in his analysis of Walmart, which, he writes, “embodies the contradictions and dichotomies of . . . [this] new stage in the history of capitalist development. . . . Wal-Mart claims that it saves U.S. consumers upwards of $100 billion per year. But this business model can flourish only by externalizing many of its most important social and economic costs” (161). Walmart can offer the lowest prices because it systematically demolishes the social safety nets and regulations institutionalized by the New Deal and replaces it “with a global system that relentlessly squeezes labor costs from South Carolina to South China, from Indianapolis to Indonesia” (Lichtenstein 4). As The Truman Show implies, and as Walmart’s branding narrative exemplifies, to understand global capitalism we need to look beyond the conspicuous spaces of accumulation, such as New York, London, and Tokyo.

Afterword: The Global Village

The dominant small town in late capitalism has become a global image, a global form, and a global ideology. To appreciate the ideological force of the dominant small town, it is useful to move from Main Street, U.S.A. to another section of Disneyland: the ride “It’s a Small World.”1 This movement, I want to suggest, is from the small town imagined as the nation’s home to the small town imagined as the world’s home. As the United States developed into a global empire, the dominant small town became refigured as a global form that naturalized and exported U.S. narratives, values, and knowledge regimes throughout the violently uneven geographies of globalization. On the one hand, “It’s a Small World” may seem progressive in its celebration of cultural diversity, pluralism, and inclusivity. However, on closer inspection, the ride offers only the façade of diversity and a faux global consciousness.2 It visualizes globalization as an intimate, knowable community where everyone exists on an equal playing field and where everyone everywhere has an equal opportunity to pursue happiness. (In fact the ride imagines a world where everyone has already achieved a state of sustained happiness.) Despite the appearance of diversity, “It’s a Small World” presents globalization as comprising homologous spatial communities with homologous temporal patterns. In other words, what is happening in one community mirrors what is happening in all other communities throughout the world. Or we can say that spatial and cultural differences become translated into homologous small towns. The ride imagines globalization as a benevolent, harmonious, flattened world

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in which all cultural practices and all social differences are subsumed into a singular imaginary. In Disney’s visualization of globalization, laboring bodies, spaces of poverty, and images of despair are nowhere to be seen. Of course, this is Disneyland, and perhaps we shouldn’t expect a family-friendly ride to be an honest look at global material conditions. However, “It’s a Small World” is not simply an innocuous ride with a catchy song. Rather the ride visualizes what has become one of the dominant metaphors used to “explain” globalization: the global village.3 The geography theorists and scholars Cindi Katz and Neil Smith note the ubiquity of spatial metaphors for describing social reality in late capitalism. Spatial metaphors are ubiquitous because space is assumed to be knowable and transparent, and hence can translate complex social formations and processes into something that can be easily grasped: “It is precisely . . . [the] apparent familiarity of space, the givenness of space, its fixity and inertness, that make a spatial grammar so fertile for metaphoric appropriation” (69).4 Because of this assumed fixity and knowability, spatial metaphors are used to secure and stabilize meaning. To explain globalization, the most pervasive spatial metaphor employed in the First World is the global village. The global village, I want to suggest, is the dominant small town repackaged for the latest chapter of global capitalism. “Global village” was first coined by the media theorist Marshal McLuhan in the 1960s to describe a world becoming more interconnected and intimate due to new media technologies.5 Gayatri Spivak argues that the global village imaginary is “colonialism’s newest trick” (330), and the literary scholar Sue-Im Lee elaborates that the global village has become “the dominant term for expressing a global coexistence altered by transnational commerce, migration, and culture” (“‘We Are” 316). One of the most prominent contemporary uses of the global village comes courtesy of the popular economics journalist Thomas Friedman. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), Friedman describes the world as “tied together into a single globalized marketplace and village” (xvii).6 The global village ideologically transforms globalization from a contested and conflicted historical process into a fixed thing without any outside or alternative. Moreover the global village imagines the world as singular, unified, and flat. The global village operates as a master metaphor that defines and delimits globalization across a range of discourses. Consider, for example, the following recent studies: An A-to Z Guide to Understanding Current

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World Affairs by the anthropologist David Levinson and the environmental and women’s studies scholar Karen Christensen is framed by the title The Global Village Companion (1996); the telecommunications scholar Heather E. Hudson describes the conditions of the information age in her book From Rural Village to Global Village (2006); the historian Aleria Gennaro Lerda edited the collection Which “Global Village”?: Societies, Cultures, and Political-Economic Systems in a Euro-Atlantic Perspective (2002); the international affairs scholars Susan Ariel Aaronson and James T. Reeves wrote the monograph Corporate Responsibility in the Global Village: The Role of Public Policy (2002); and the literature scholar Kathleen Dixon wrote The Global Village Revisited: Arts, Politics, and Television Talk Shows (2009). The global village is an imaginary actively promulgated and disseminated by the United States. For example, in order to help children of military families understand and narrate their lives, the Department of Defense Education Activity invited students in military schools to share their stories. However, this wasn’t an open invitation. Instead the department provided the frame in which students should make sense of their lives; they were asked to reflect on their lives as “residents of a ‘global village’” (Living in a Global Village vi). This framing forecloses students from narrating the dislocation, disorientation, and difficulty many of them may have experienced. The essays collected in the state publication Living in a Global Village (1997) celebrate the bountiful benefits U.S. military children experience by living in bases throughout the world. Responding to the frame of the global village, one student, Alexis Sampson, writes a poem in which she proclaims, “The world is like a / village, only enlarged” (4). Kristine Marie, an eleventh-grader, writes, “Worldwide multi-culturalism broadens our interpersonal understanding and promotes further diversity. It is diversity that animates life, and the island of Enchantment is—on a smaller scale—an example of what we can look forward to as Earth metamorphoses into a global village” (9). Aimee Allan, a fifth-grader, writes, “If you think about it hard enough you can see that the world we live in is like a village and we must become people who care about each other and take care of each other” (13). The penultimate essay in the collection is by a seventh-grader, Michelle Welch: “The global village—what a concept! All the people on the planet living together with basically the same interests, the same goals: to live fully, caring for one another, communicating with one another, while caring for the planet as well. It’s an awesome idea” (127). And in the final essay of the collection, Lisa Wilson,

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a tenth-grader, asserts that we live in a “world community that is getting closer every day as communication and the need for unity continues to grow in importance. Truly, we are all ‘living in a global village’” (129). The global village presupposes and perpetuates a “singular, collective ‘we’” (Lee, “We Are” 316).7 This “we” is not a democratic, inclusive, multivocal community, but the economic elite speaking on behalf of the rest if the world: “The First World’s deployment of a global intimacy and a shared fate is the rendition of imperialist—that is, unidirectional— universalism” (316). Champions and celebrants of the global village participate in a form of cultural imperialism in which the “few . . . presume to speak for all” and for which a “particular” class position “presumes the status of the universal” (316). First World Villagers become situated as “universal” subjects, and their lifestyles, habitus, and ideologies assume a universal valence. In contrast, the individuals and communities most exploited and oppressed by global capitalism become symbolically erased. The global village imaginary mystifies the radical discontinuities, uneven geographies, competing cultural practices, conflicting class positions, clashing values, and violent histories that constitute globalization. Rather than attending to the specificity, materiality, heterogeneity, and complexity of local and regional experiences of globalization, the global village posits a singular, univocal, hegemonic, fixed, and flat imaginary. Moreover the global village imaginary insinuates a world where the nation-state is withering away. From the perspective of the global village, the United States is one nation-state among others rather than a nationstate with an “empire of bases” that spends more money on its military than the rest of the world combined, and an empire of capitalism that is central to shaping the conditions of globalization (Bacevich 29).

A Small-Town Paradigm for Globalization The architecture scholar Mark L. Gillem argues that the “American Empire” is a “new model” of imperialism that does not follow previous European models that practiced “assimilation” and “association.” Rather “the new American Empire practices avoidance” (263). Gillem’s book, which discusses U.S. military bases on foreign soil, is entitled America Town (2007). His thesis is that U.S. bases resemble and function like isolated American towns. The national editor of the Washington Post, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, verifies this thesis. In his description of the Green Zone, one of the central U.S. military bases in Iraq, he writes,

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“From inside the Green Zone, the real Baghdad—the check-points, the bombed-out buildings, the paralyzing traffic jams—could have been a world away. The horns, the gunshots, the muezzin’s call to prayer, never drifted over the walls. . . . On the inside, the calm sterility of an American subdivision prevailed” (21). Rather than a “subdivision,” the Green Zone resembles the ideological small town—a nation form that appears to be autonomous, contained, and disengaged from the outside world. “To those who got outside,” Chandrasekaran continues, “the Green Zone came to seem like a fantasyland” (28). The fantasy of the Green Zone is the fantasy of the dominant small town. The Green Zone is not alone in being a veritable American small town in the Middle East. The Washington Post describes the Balad Air Base as “a small American town smack in the middle of the most hostile part of Iraq.” According to officials, Balad will most likely be the last U.S. base in Iraq (Ricks). In The Shock Doctrine (2007), the journalist Naomi Klein reflects that the Green Zone is not a “phenomenon . . . unique to the war in Iraq.” Rather Klein recognizes the Green Zone as a paradigm that appears throughout the United States and throughout global capitalism. The Green Zone is a form of apartheid that separates “the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned” (523). In the United States, for example, this Green Zone paradigm and logic informed the response to Hurricane Katrina: “After the flood, an already divided city [New Orleans] turned into a battleground between gated green zones and raging red zones” (523). The gated green zones are privatized spaces that function as ideological islands that disregard larger public spaces and social relations outside of these small pockets of security. The Green Zone, like the dominant small town, is an ideological structure of autonomy and containment whose legibility is predicated on borders that separate an avowed inside from a disavowed outside. Bull Quigley, a lawyer and activist in New Orleans, situates his hometown as a microcosm of the United States—and the world more generally—under the aggressive regime of global privatization: “What is happening in New Orleans is just a more concentrated, more graphic version of what is going on all over our country. Every city in our country has some serious similarities to New Orleans. Every city has some abandoned neighborhoods. Every city in our country has abandoned some public education, public housing, healthcare, and criminal justice. Those who do not support public education, healthcare, and housing will continue to turn all of our country into the Lower Ninth Ward unless we stop them” (cited in Klein 532–533).8 The Lower Ninth Ward

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is a material reality and a paradigm for the preponderance of people in the United States who have been abandoned by global capitalism and abandoned by the U.S. government, a government that is willing to bail out transnational banks but unwilling to help create jobs and provide foundational social services for the nation-state’s most vulnerable and desperate citizens. The philosopher Alain Badiou provocatively claims, “Outside of the grand and petty bourgeoisie of the imperial cities, who proclaim themselves to be ‘civilization,’ you have nothing apart from the anonymous and excluded” (162). The majority of the world, the “anonymous and excluded,” are the laboring poor, the swelling army reserve labor, and the masses who have been abandoned by capitalism. This majority is “anonymous and excluded” because they do not have a symbolic position within “imperial cities,” and, I want to suggest, within the imperial small-town imaginary. At the conclusion of his canonical essay, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson articulates what remains one of the most pressing challenges to aesthetic producers and critics: to develop texts that can help subjects understand and narrate how their everyday, local lives and spaces are dialectically bound to and enabled by global relations.9 Similarly the geography theorist and scholar Doreen Massey emphasizes the need to develop a “global sense of place” (146– 156). This project of thinking about the complex imbrications between the local and the global is one of the more productive developments in literary and cultural studies. In his 2001 article “Glocal Knowledges,” the comparative literature scholar Robert Eric Livingston writes, “To grasp the scenarios of globalization requires resisting the impulse to set global and local into immediate opposition. Their intertwining may be made more helpfully understood [by means of the neologism ‘glocal,’ a concept that] . . . has the advantage not only of making visible the mutual articulation of our two spatial coordinates, but also of insisting, neologically, on the need for a more careful rereading of the means of articulation” (147). One of the most exciting interdisciplinary means for thinking about the relation between the local and the global is “critical regionalism.” The term, coined in the field of architecture in the early 1980s, challenges the dominant “fictions of globalization” (such as the global village) and instead uses local and regional sources to produce new narratives and geographic imaginaries by which to historicize and specify globalization.10 By attending to the local and the regional, we can see globalization not as a singular imaginary or community, but as a

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nuanced, complex, contradictory, and historically material process that is narrated and imagined differently depending on an individual’s—and a community’s—spatial location and position.11 In her important study, Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies (1996), the literary scholar Cheryl Temple Herr writes, “Critical-regionalist-cultural studies has great potential for producing a unified but highly adaptive analysis of international flows at the local-regional level, towards the end of a more heterogeneous and tolerant future” (18). Edward Watts, a scholar of American thought and language, writes that critical regionalism offers students a rich and robust methodology for thinking about globalization. Critical regionalism provides students with a “reading strategy that starts with the local, not the universal.” “We might,” Watts offers, “teach our students to consider a text’s geographic placement as providing a nexus between the specificities of that setting and the larger issues at stake” (867).12 The ideological small town forecloses this urgent project; instead it is deployed to underwrite a dominant discourse of U.S. and First World exceptionalism, a discourse that mystifies the extreme exploitation and oppression of the international working class, a discourse that mystifies how capitalism works by fetishizing consumption, and a discourse that mystifies U.S. imperialism by figuring the nation-state as an innocent island community. The revolt from the village, I contend, is far from over.

Notes

Introduction 1. The event was held in the House International Relations Committee hearing room on Capitol Hill on 15 May 2006. 2. For Glass, the fragments that constitute the nation must become a unified, coherent national whole. This narrative and national logic is deconstructed in Homi Bhabha’s “DissemiNation,” especially 294 and 317. Also see Bhabha’s edited anthology Nation and Narration, especially his introduction “Narrating the Nation.” 3. It should be noted that since this speech, the entrance space is now branded as a “public square” and not as a “town square” (“National Museum”). 4. Edward Said describes his work as committed to exploring the ideological complexities of what he calls “imaginative geography.” See “Invention, Memory, and Place”; Orientalism; Culture and Imperialism. Also see Gregory; Jarvis. 5. As many cultural scholars and geographers recognize, the American small town has become an idealized, imagined geography. John A. Jakle, for example, writes that the small town has become a “symbolic [and] idealized place” (“America’s Small Town” 2). Similarly Richard V. Francaviglia writes that Main Street has never been simply a material place and practice; rather it “has always embodied the essence of image building, and research on Main Street suggests that we as scholars and students of history, geography, sociology, and other disciplines should re-study the ‘real’ world in order to determine how ‘imaginary’ much of it is” (Main Street Revisited 158, emphasis in original). 6. Althusser claims that when something is recognized as “common sense,” it is a sign of ideology at work (“Ideology” 116). 7. I am making a distinction between small towns as real, material places and practices and the dominant small town, which is an ideological form. There are many excellent studies of real, material small towns. See, for example, Atheron; Amato; Davies; Francaviglia, Main Street Revisited; Jakle; Jakle et al.; Kostof; Lingeman, Small

168 / notes to pages 4–8 Town America; Longstreth; Maharidge; Mapes; Redding; Rifkind; Russo; F. W. Young. Most of these authors recognize that the small town has become an idealized form. Francaviglia, for example, insists that the small town must be “interpreted” as a “real” place and as a dominant cultural “myth” (Main Street Revisited xii). What distinguishes my work is my insistence that the dominant small town is an ideological, nation form that becomes refigured in a globalizing modernity. 8. It should be noted that the authors’ object of study is the midwestern small town. However, a close reading of their introduction makes clear that their focus continuously slides into the abstract category of the small town, a nation form that ideologically transcends regional and material specificity. Consider, for example, the following passage: “The small town is as dead as the entirety of the traditional Western European rural life and the peasantry. Indeed, future historical perspectives may conjoin their deaths, judging them victims of the annihilation of space and the accompanying destruction of local and rural life everywhere” (Davies et al. 4). 9. Raymond Williams illustrates that the trope of the rural in English literature and culture is always out of joint with the present. For example, George Sturt’s Change in the Village (1911) locates the end of the rural with the 1861 enclosures. However, Thomas Hardy’s novels, written between 1871 and 1896, locate the end of the rural in the 1830s. And if we take this moving escalator back to the 1830s, we find William Cobbett lamenting the loss of the rural and fondly looking back to the 1770s and 1780s as the age in which the rural last flourished. Williams rhetorically asks, “Where indeed shall we go, before the escalator stops?” (11). He argues that nostalgia for the pastoral often proves to be a historically specific form of critique, and he situates the pastoral—and geography more generally—as a site of class conflict. In contrast, I argue that nostalgia for the dominant American small town is not a progressive form of critique, but a deeply reactive, conservative cultural logic. 10. In the early twentieth century the Census Bureau recognized only two social spaces: the “urban” and the “rural.” The urban was defined as a space with a population exceeding 2,499 and the “rural” as a space with fewer than 2,499 (Miller 64; Noggle 153). Rural spaces, it goes without saying, are not synonymous with small towns. 11. See Lutz for an examination of how late twentieth-century fiction represents the small town. 12. Scott A. Lukas writes that a “themed space” uses a “theme to establish a unifying and often immutable idea throughout its space” (2). 13. For accounts of how fantasy underwrites the United States, see Berlant; Pease, The New American Exceptionalism. Žižek, following Lacan, elaborates how fantasy sustains “reality.” See Enjoy 5; Sublime 45. 14. Despite the connotative differences, I frequently use the terms “small town” and “village” interchangeably throughout this project, as do many literary and cultural producers and critics. 15. Emerson, for example, defined the American town as a “unit of the Republic” (cited in Rybczynski 20). 16. Also see Lois Kimball Mathews’s 1909 study, The Expansion of New England: The Spread of New England Settlement and Institutions to the Mississippi River 1620– 1865. Mathews similarly claims that the New England town replicates and repeats throughout the United States. She describes her project as follows: “The object of this study is to ascertain . . . how [New England] founded towns and institutions not only

notes to pages 8–11 / 169 within her own borders, but far beyond the Hudson and the Alleghanies” (9). Page Smith calls Mathews’s study a “watershed in American historiography” (37). 17. This ideological transformation of a regionally specific village to a national small town is at the center of Donald Pease’s brilliant reading of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819). See Visionary Compacts 12–17. 18. This same insight informs Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland. Chapter 7 in Kiberd’s study shares the same title as Brennan’s essay, “The National Longing for Form.” Anthony D. Smith claims, “Nationalism . . . is a product of modernity, nothing less.” (46, emphasis in original). Similarly Eric Hobsbawm argues that the nation is a modern “invented tradition” (Nations; Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention). A nation form ideologically dissolves the “paradox” that the nation is a modern invention yet it appears “rooted in the remotest antiquity” (Hobsbawm, “The Nation” 76). 19. The phrase “empty, homogeneous time” is borrowed from Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 261. Dipesh Chakrabarty observes that “imagination” is an underdeveloped concept in Anderson’s theory (149). Chakrabarty’s project, in part, is to “breathe heterogeneity into the word ‘imagination,’” especially as it pertains to political formations such as the nation-state (149). 20. Similarly Hobsbawm writes that in modernity, the village imaginary gives way to a nation imaginary (Nations 15–16). 21. To be fair to Anderson, he writes that “perhaps” face-to-face communities need to be imagined as well (6). The qualifier “perhaps” signifies some ambivalence about the formula. 22. Habermas notes that in its Roman conception, natio exists in opposition to civitas (282). 23. For more on the concept of a “knowable community,” see R. Williams 165–181. Williams writes that as modernity progresses and capitalism globalizes, the idea of a knowable community becomes “harder and harder to sustain” (165). 24. The first line of the essay is, “The conceited villager believes the entire world to be his village” (Martí 111). 25. Marx also warned against romanticizing the rural. After describing the excessively exploitive and barbaric consequences of England introducing industrialization and a market logic into India, Marx beseeches us not to sentimentalize the villages being destroyed by the spread of capitalism: “We must not forget that the idyllic village communities, inoffensive as they may appear . . . restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies” (“On Imperialism” 658). 26. Many scholars and critics celebrate the city as a space of transformation in which emerging and alternative cultural practices can and do flourish. Bhabha, for example, claims, “It is [to] the city that the migrants, the minorities, the diasporic come to change . . . history” (“DissemiNation” 319–320). 27. Similarly Hobsbawm writes that the twentieth century will be remembered as the first time in human history when more people live in cities rather than in rural areas where people sustain themselves “by growing food and herding animals” (The Age 9). 28. The emergence and development of an urban nation is symptomatic, Marx and Engels write, of a capitalist modernity: “The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to

170 / notes to pages 12–16 the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural” (Manifesto 477). Similarly in The German Ideology, they write, “In place of naturally grown towns . . . [capitalism] created the modern large, industrial cities which have sprung up overnight” (78). In Capital Marx writes that England, then the most industrialized and urban nation-state, shows other nation-states their future. He explains that he concentrates on England because “it holds the foremost place in the world market” (802). The development of England under capitalism is the development of urbanization: “Except London, there was at the beginning of the nineteenth century no single town in England of more than 100,000 inhabitants. Only five had more than 50,000. Now there are twenty-eight towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants” (815). Marx writes in the preface to the first edition of Capital, “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future” (91). 29. There are many outstanding critiques and analyses of Disneyland. See, for example, Giroux and Pollock, The Mouse That Roared; S. Watts, The Magic Kingdom; Smooden’s edited collection; Klugman et al.; Byrne and McQuillan; Kunstler 217–228; Brannen. 30. Main Street, U.S.A., Francaviglia writes, is a composite of multiple towns, including Fort Collins, Colorado, the boyhood town of Harper Goff, the architect who was hired to help design Disney’s fictive small town (Main Street Revisited 147–151). 31. Steven F. Mills writes that Main Street, U.S.A. is the ideological center of Disneyland: “Main Street USA is a monument to an ‘era of good feeling,’ a born-again belief in the squeaky clean virtues of front-porch USA, and nostalgia for a supposedly uncomplicated, decent, hard-working, crime-free, rise up and salute the flag way of life that is the stuff of middle America’s dreams, an ersatz image of the past imposed within the here and now” (cited in Yoshimoto 184). In contrast, Francaviglia praises Disney for valuing American history during a period that worshipped the future and declared history “bunk.” Disney, Francaviglia argues, should be recognized as a “popular historian who stressed the continuity and validity of the past in an era that espoused progress and advocated the erasure of most history from the ‘real’ (or everyday) American landscape” (“History” 71). Francaviglia claims, “Public history owes a debt to Disney” (72). 32. Lerner observes, “There were few Presidents from Lincoln and Grant to Truman and Eisenhower who were not the products of small-town culture” (149). 33. Palin’s speech at the Republican National Convention (3 September 2008) is a paean to small-town America. In the speech she proclaims, “I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town” (“Palin’s Speech”). In 2009 General Colin Powell rigorously criticized the Republican Party for moving too far to the Right, and he took specific issue with Palin’s use of the small town: “[Governor] Palin, to some extent, pushed the party more to the right, and I think she had something of a polarizing effect when she talked about how small town values are good. Well, most of us don’t live in small towns. And I was raised in the South Bronx, and there’s nothing wrong with my value system from the South Bronx” (“Colin Powell Slams”). 34. See, for example, Bacevich; Chomsky; Hall; Harvey, New Imperialism; Jameson, “Notes on Globalization”; C. Johnson; Kiely; Lens; Mann; E. M. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism. 35. In contrast to the popular theory that globalization demarcates the weakening and withering of the nation-state, E. M. Wood writes, “The more universal capitalism

notes to pages 16–21 / 171 has become, the more it has needed an equally universal system of reliable local states” (Empire of Capital 152). As the continuous U.S. military interventions and wars from World War II to the war on terrorism exemplify, “globalization, the economic imperative of capital taken to its logical conclusion, has . . . required a new doctrine of extraeconomic, and especially military coercion” (164). The international politics scholar Ray Kiely similarly emphasizes the prominent position of the United States within the hierarchy of nation states. 36. The phrase “empire of bases” comes from Chalmers Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire. 37. Hall situates 1492 as the beginning of globalization and studies the growth of the U.S. empire as “unbroken cycles of colonization” against racialized subjects (xv). The “regime of racial and moral profiling” directed against Native Americans led to centuries of genocide, and this regime, Hall argues, has been “extended” to a range of racialized subjects including, but not limited to, “Aboriginal Hawaiians, indigenous Philippinos, nationalist Vietnamese, socialist Central and South Americans, revolutionary Cubans, and displaced Palestinians.” Hall continues, “Who knows how many groups on the next frontiers of American power in both the Arab-speaking and Muslim worlds will find themselves demonized because of the arbitrary judgments made by those in charge of an endless War on Terrorism?” (xiv). 38. Amy Kaplan’s 1993 essay “‘Left Alone with America’” delineates how American studies had been blind to the material history of U.S. imperialism. Since then a slew of studies have attempted to correct this ideological vacuum and to refigure American studies within an international context. To name just a few key contributions, see Kaplan and Pease; Dawson and Schueller; Pease and Wiegman. Also see Kaplan, Anarchy; Lomas; Rowe; Saldívar; Sánchez-Eppler. 39. Pease argues that American exceptionalism is, in large part, a fantasy of national innocence. See The New American Exceptionalism, especially the introduction, “The United States of Fantasy.” 40. In The Sorrows of Empire, Johnson also takes aim at Bush’s use of “homeland” to describe the nation. Johnson writes, “Our militarized empire is a physical reality with a distinct way of life but it is also a network of economic and political interests tied in a thousand different ways to American corporations, universities, and communities but kept separate from what passes for everyday life back in what has only recently come to be known as ‘the homeland’” (5). 41. In his provocative essay “Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English,” the literary scholar Paul Jay argues, “With the understanding that globalization is a long historical process, we can carefully complicate our nation-based approach to [literary and cultural studies] . . . not by dropping the nation-state paradigm but by foregrounding its history and its function for the nation-state” (107, emphasis in original).

1 / Sacred Islands in Modernity 1. For two recent and insightful examinations of the film, see Coats et al.; Collier. Collier argues that the film should be read as a political allegory for a post-9/11 U.S. empire. In his book-length analysis of violence, Žižek proclaims that The Village is an underrated film (Violence 24).

172 / notes to pages 23–28 2. Žižek, influenced by the work of Claude Lefort and Jacques Rancière, claims that forms are not static, but historical and “dynamic” (Violence 150). 3. Similarly in a 1976 interview, Foucault states that knowledge is always linked to power and to conceptions of space (“Questions” 69). 4. In The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade explains how a recognized sacred space establishes a “fixed point” that becomes “the center of the world” and “the central axis for all future orientation” (21, 22). 5. Henri Lefebvre argues that for Bachelard (as for Heidegger), space is conceptualized as “sacred” and “quasi-religious” (121). 6. In “Different Spaces,” Foucault lists multiple heterotopic sites, including trains (178), rest homes (180), psychiatric hospitals (180), prisons (180), retirement homes (180), cemeteries (180), theaters (181), cinemas (181), gardens (181), museums (182), libraries (182), fairs (182), and vacation villages (183). 7. See, for example, Balasopoulos; Edmond and Smith. 8. For the thesis that all literary and cultural texts have a utopian and an ideological dimension, see Jameson, The Political Unconscious, especially the concluding chapter, “The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology.” 9. See Dolan, especially chapter 1, “The Fiction of America.” 10. Inspired by Derrida, Dolan takes a deconstructionist approach and argues that Winthrop’s “self-identical” formation of the city upon a hill is constitutively contaminated (30). In contrast to this deconstructionist approach, I am more interested in how this ideological form circulates and functions in various literary, cultural, and political discourses. 11. That the small town ideologically functions as an exceptional community unique to the United States becomes clear when Page Smith compares the small town to other small communities across the world in his conclusion to As a City. 12. In 1902 the Princeton Historical Association published a three-volume collection, The Poems of Philip Freneau: Poet of the American Revolution. For a transnational contextualization of Freneau’s work, see Goudie, especially chapter 3, “Paracolonial Ambivalence in the Poetics of Philip Freneau.” Also see Elliott, chapter 4, “Philip Freneau: Poetry of Social Commitment.” 13. “The Deserted Village” specifically responds to the enclosure acts legislated by the British Parliament that began in the late eighteenth century and continued throughout the nineteenth century. The enclosure acts transformed common land into private property (illustrating that the state is a necessary apparatus for capital’s expansion). In an industrial capitalist regime committed to the process of privatization, individuals have little choice but to become wage laborers and to submit to capital’s cycle of exploitation, expropriation, and oppression. See E. M. Wood, The Origins of Capitalism, especially 108. Julia Patton writes that prior to the enclosure acts, English villages were represented as autonomous, contained worlds: “Every village raised its own food, made its own clothes and utensils, and conducted its own government, both temporal and spiritual, with very little call upon the outside world” (17). However, a rapidly developing capitalist modernity, and the enclosure acts in particular, rendered this self- sufficient village obsolete. 14. Later in the poem Goldsmith writes, “But times are alter’d; Trades unfeeling train / Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain” (ll. 63–64).

notes to pages 29–35 / 173 15. For an astute analysis of “The Deserted Village” in relation to capitalism, see R. Williams, 74–79. 16. From 1577 to 1580 Drake circumnavigated the world in an imperial mission to raze Spanish settlements and destroy Spanish ships. See Bawlf. 17. These texts, Joseph argues, critique bureaucracy rather than capitalism (Against 8). She persuasively argues that a romanticized form of community “supplements” capitalism. See Against the Romance of Community, especially chapter 1, “The Supplementarity of Community with Capital.” 18. Later in the same essay Pease writes, “Democracy in America has endowed U.S. democratic culture with a framework of intelligibility. Its categories, roles, and concepts have provided the metalanguage in which issues get identified, recognized, parsed, construed, ordered, and concatenated” (“Tocqueville’s Democratic Thing” 33–34). 19. Miranda Joseph notes that Robert Bellah’s “ideal community is an all white middle-class town” (Against 7). 20. The United States, according to Arendt, revolutionized politics by recognizing the town as the foundational form of political life. Arendt, for example, highlights Thomas Jefferson’s plan for dividing the United States into townships (310–311). However, according to her historical narrative, the twentieth century demarcates the eclipse of the United States’ “revolutionary” foundation; in the twentieth century the age of autonomous towns with direct political participation were replaced by a centralized, bureaucratic system from which everyday subjects feel distant and removed. 21. Tocqueville specifies that democracy is realized in the United States because political power is dispersed throughout multiple towns and not concentrated in any single city: “America has not yet any great capital whose direct or indirect influence is felt through the length and breadth of the land, and I believe that this is one of the primary reasons why republican institutions are maintained in the United States” (1:278–279). In a footnote he distinguishes townships from “very large towns” such as Philadelphia and New York, which in 1830 had populations of 160,000 and 202,000, respectively (1:278n1). 22. Political participation was not open to all subjects living within a township’s boundaries; such participation and belonging were predicated on a range of social factors, including race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and class. 23. In contemporary U.S. discourses, the American small town and the American empire are frequently positioned as two opposing imaginaries. See, for example, Bill Kauffman’s 2003 essay, “Why I’m Not Ashamed to Be an American: My America vs. the Empire.” 24. This is an example of what Althusser critically identifies as “expressive causality,” which conceptualizes “the whole” not as a structure, but as a “spiritual” essence that is expressed in “each element” (Reading Capital 187). This logic of causality, Althusser writes, has its origins in Leibniz and “dominates all [of] Hegel’s thought” (186). However, this model of causality must be slightly modified in order to explain the small town’s relation to the United States; the geographic “elements” that “express” the nation’s essence are not all the elements within the nation-state, but only one: the small town. The idea of a nation having an essence is at the center of Ernest Renan’s analysis. Renan claims that the “nation is a soul, a spiritual principle” (19). 25. In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the U.S. ethos is

174 / notes to pages 38–39 inextricably linked to an ever-shifting frontier: “For nearly three centuries the dominant fact of American life has been expansion. With the settlement of the Pacific coast and the occupation of the free lands, this movement has come to a check” (219). Turner disagreed with the 1890 Census Bureau’s report that there was no longer a U.S. frontier and predicted (correctly) that the U.S. frontier would be pushed into the Pacific and beyond: “That . . . [the] energies of expansion will no longer operate would be a rash prediction; and the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries, are indications that the movement will continue” (219). The literary scholar Hsuan Hsu astutely observes that Turner “rescales the West from a U.S. region to a transnational expansive impulse, just as he often claims that the frontier is the definitive source of America’s national identity” (65n14, emphasis in original).

2 / An Unfinished Revolution 1. More than a decade removed from Main Street’s publication, the influential literary critic Ludwig Lewishon claimed that the novel rivals in impact and importance Uncle Tom’s Cabin (cited in Allen xiii). 2. For more on Main Street’s reception, see Lingeman, Sinclair Lewis 149–154. 3. Prior to Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, there were, of course, literary texts that critiqued the American small town, including Hamlin Garland’s Main-Traveled Roads (1891); Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1893–1894); and Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). However, it was not until 1915 “that the first expression of a definite and widely noticed revolutionary phase developed” (Herron, The Small Town 22). 4. When Carol first sees Gopher Prairie, she does so with “purely literary thought[s] of village charm” (Main Street 38). 5. In the only book-length study on the revolt from the village, Hilfer writes that while the literary movement remains an “accepted rubric of historical criticism,” it is a rubric that few literary scholars study anymore (3). Hilfer made this observation in 1969. In 1992 Irving Howe called the revolt from the village “stale and dated” and declared that this movement “has faded into history” (xi). A cursory search through the MLA databases seems to confirm this claim. 6. For a good overview and critique of the Bildungsroman, see Feng 1–49. The Bildungsroman, it should be noted, is a complex literary genre whose precise definition is the object of fierce debate and disagreement in literary scholarship and criticism. See, for example, James Hardin’s edited collection Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Marc Redfield provocatively argues that the genre of the Bildungsroman “is one of academic criticism’s most overwhelming successful inventions.” Few critical terms, he continues, “have achieved comparable dissemination in Western literary culture; and critics probably will go on talking about the Bildungsroman as long as the institutions of literary criticism as we know them survive.” The Bildungsroman, Redfield claims, “exemplifies the ideological construction of literature by criticism” (vii). 7. The literary scholar James Hardin suggests we need to think more carefully about the national traditions and genealogies that inform the Bildungsroman (xxiii–xxv).

notes to pages 40–45 / 175 8. See, for example, Moretti, The Way 11, 16. Many scholars identify Winesburg, Ohio as a Bildungsroman, including Rideout; Fussell; and Stouck. 9. Buckley’s influential analysis of the genre has come under trenchant criticism in recent decades for privileging white, male subjects. See, for example, Abel et al. 7; Feng 4–8. Hardin dismisses Buckley’s analysis as ahistorical and reductive (x, xxii). 10. This acceptance is usually symbolized by the protagonist marrying someone from his or her hometown at the Bildungsroman’s end (Moretti, The Way 7, 22–24). 11. See Moretti, The Way 6. Similarly Bakhtin writes that in the Bildungsroman, “man emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself” (Speech Genres 23). 12. Also see Bakhtin, Speech Genres 23. 13. In recent decades the Bildungsroman has been appropriated and reimagined by marginalized subjects. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland write that the Bildungsroman genre has been transformed by minoritized subjects who perhaps “for the first time find themselves in a world increasingly responsive to their needs” (13). Similarly Joseph R. Slaughter observes that “the last two decades have seen a surge in the Euro-American publication of Bildungsroman narrating the experiences of historically marginalized peoples (e.g., postcolonials, indigenous peoples, and diasporic and immigrant populations, as well as metropolitan racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual minorities)” (“Enabling” 1411). For astute studies of how the Bildungsroman has been refigured by marginalized subjects, see Feng; Foley; LeSeur. My critique of the Bildungsroman is cognate with Jameson’s “On Literary and Cultural Import-Substitution” and Slaughter’s “Enabling Fictions” and Human Rights, Inc. These latter studies emphasize the strong connection between the Bildungsroman genre and the bourgeois subject. 14. The word “adventure” repeats throughout the novel as a leitmotif. 15. For more on the “fictions” underwritten by liberalism, see Dillon. 16. In the previous story, “Sophistication,” George Willard doubts if he is indeed in control of his life, and he tellingly compares himself to a leaf: “With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun” (239). 17. In A Storyteller and a City, Kenny Williams argues that the city plays a complex and central role in Winesburg, Ohio. See especially the chapter “Songs of the City and Some Rooming House People.” 18. In 1920 a city was defined as a space with 2,500 or more people. Many scholars, it should be noted, caution not to overemphasize the importance of 1920. Nathan Miller, for example, reports that in 1920, 51.4 percent of Americans lived in incorporated towns of more than 2,500 people, compared to 48.6 percent in rural areas, and in 1930 33 percent of Americans still identified themselves as farmers (64). Also see Noggle 153. 19. Small, rural communities did not actually disappear in 1920; nor, as Richard Slotkin writes, did the frontier end in 1890: “As a purely material entity, the Frontier was far from closed. More public land would be taken up and brought into production between 1890 and 1920 than during the heyday of the western frontier in the decades that followed passage of the Homestead Act (1862)” (30–31). 20. The full title of Wiebe’s study is The Search for Order: 1877–1920.

176 / notes to pages 45–60 21. Suburban Nation is the title of Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck’s study. In 1970, for the first time in U.S. history, more Americans lived in suburban spaces than in either urban or rural spaces (Rybczynski 86). 22. See, for example, S. Anderson 23. 23. Park Dixon Goist writes that in his “portrait of Winesburg and its people, Anderson has sketched a town where community is completely lacking. There is no real social interaction among people, often not even basic human communication. . . . Each individual is isolated within his or her own personal shell” (From Main Street 23–24). 24. In its dominant literary reception, St. Petersburg has taken on the ideological guise of the small town—an ahistorical, benevolent geographic imaginary. Shelly Fisher Fishkin observes that upon reading Tom Sawyer, it is “fairly easy to forget . . . [that] Hannibal had been a slaveholder town” (vii). 25. For an astute critique of how It’s a Wonderful Life ideologically imagines capitalism, see Mamet. 26. For a different interpretation, see R. Wood. 27. Hilfer writes that the small town is “primarily a myth of community” (7). Similarly Lingeman writes that the small town signifies “community  .  .  .  to many Americans—a link to place, a sense of belonging, a network of personal, primary ties to others, homogeneity, shared values, a collective belief in each individual’s worth” (Small Town 475). Goist echoes these sentiments, claiming, “The essential function of the small town for the American imagination has been to symbolize the ideas of community” (From Main Street 13). 28. For an archive of Lake Wobegon stories, see http://prairiehome.publicradio. org/programs/ (25 June 2011). 29. Houston A. Baker writes that those in power have the ability to “fix” and stabilize cultural signifiers: “Fixity is a function of power. Those who maintain place, who decide what takes place and dictate what has taken place, are power brokers of the traditional.” In contrast, “the ‘placeless’ . . . are translators of the nontraditional. Rather than fixed in the order of cunning Grecian urns, their lineage is fluid, nomadic, transitional. Their appropriate mark is a crossing sign at the junction” (202).

3 / Mapping the Modern Small Town 1. See, for example, E. M. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism 108. For a contemporary reflection on the accelerated process of privatization, see Dawson. 2. Ray Lewis White notes that the opening map is “far too small” for a town of eighteen hundred people (27). White implicitly recognizes that the map represents an ideological fiction rather than the town described in Anderson’s composite novel. 3. Although Leo Marx highlights the disjunction between the pastoral ideal and modern American geography (“an intricately organized, urban, industrial, nucleararmed society”), the pastoral ideal, he claims, still persists (5). 4. However, as illustrated in the previous chapter, when George Willard leaves the small town, he reimagines his hometown as a pastoral space. 5. Similarly in The Long Twentieth Century, Giovanni Arrighi argues that “the history of the capitalist world-economy [consists of] . . . long periods of crisis, restructuring and reorganization.” Capitalism, Arrighi argues, is a history “of discontinuous change” (1).

notes to pages 60–69 / 177 6. In this passage Winesburg is becoming home to “new voices” from people throughout the world. 7. Marx and Engels write, “National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature” (Manifesto 477). 8. For more on Standard Oil’s national and international expansion, see Yergin 19–39. 9. Although the pastoral can be a reactionary ideological form, it can also be a complex mediation of and reflection upon history. Leo Marx argues that since its literary inception, demarcated with Virgil’s Eclogues (37 BCE), the pastoral genre should be recognized as a variation of historical fiction. The genre focuses on how the “pastoral ideal” experiences “history” as “an encroaching world of power and complexity” (24). 10. For an astute analysis of how the railroad challenged and refigured the American pastoral, see Stilgoe. 11. Ohio’s first railroad, the Mad River line, began operating in 1838 (Hurd 157–158). 12. Republicans controlled the presidency from 1896 to 1932, with a brief interlude by Woodrow Wilson. 13. Also see Von Drehle. 14. For a good introduction to neoliberalism, see Harvey, A Brief History. 15. See Tarbell, The Nationalizing of Business, especially the chapter “The Coming of the Panic of 1893”; for unemployment figures, see 262. 16. In 1860 the ratio of farm workers to factory workers was 4:1; by 1890 it was 2:1 (Gordon 264). 17. The 1890s highlights the fiction of laissez-faire economics. In order for capitalism to function and expand, it needs the state to control labor by any means necessary, including the use of state violence. 18. For more on Bryan’s canonical speech and his commitment to silver, see D. D. Anderson 59–71, 75–83. For a theoretically rich reading of how the economic conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century structured literary production, see Michaels. 19. For more on McKinley’s denial of class as a social category, see Leech 91. 20. James Garfield ran the first successful front-porch campaign in 1880. For an excellent study of front-porch campaigns, particularly the 1888 campaign, see Calhoun. 21. See Langer, “Peace,” especially 92–94. 22. For more on the Republican Party’s vociferous opposition to the United States joining Wilson’s proposed League of Nations, see Noggle 134–136. 23. For an overview of Harding’s presidential campaign, see Miller, chapter 3, “We’re All Real Proud of Wurr’n.” 24. Donald McCoy writes that for the election of 1920, “Harding’s goal was more to win the election by projecting an image than through discussions of the issues” (cited in Noggle 211). One of the central images projected by Harding was the small town. 25. Also see Noggle, chapter 5, “Jobs and Rails.” 26. After World War I the center of global trade shifted from Europe to the United States. Between 1913 and 1937 Europe’s global trading power dropped dramatically while the U.S. economy expanded rapidly (Buckman 9). 27. Upon the 1920 victory, the powerful Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge

178 / notes to pages 70–72 proclaimed, “We have torn up Wilsonism by the roots” (cited in Langer, “Peace” 94). Wilsonism was largely synonymous with internationalism.

4 / A New Machine in the Small-Town Garden 1. Similarly in Winesburg, Ohio Sherwood Anderson describes industrial capitalism as a singular modernity that culminates with the advent of the automobile: “In the last fifty years a vast change has taken place. . . . The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the building of the inter-urban car lines that weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses, and now in these later days the coming of the automobiles has worked a tremendous change in the lives and in the habits of thought of people in Mid-America” (56, emphasis mine). In Anderson’s account, the “coming of the automobile” is the latest chapter in capitalism’s perpetual revolution. 2. I analyze Our Town in greater depth in chapter 6. 3. In 1909 the United States produced eighty thousand automobiles. By 1923 that number had soared to four million (Lynd and Lynd 251). 4. Chapter 2 of Ling’s study is entitled “The End of the ‘Island’ Community.” 5. David Harvey defines Fordism as “[the] explicit recognition that mass production meant mass consumption, a new system of the reproduction of labor power, a new politics of labor control and management, a new aesthetics and psychology, in short, a new kind of rationalized, modernist, and populist democratic society” (Condition 125–126). 6. Edith Wharton, one of the novel’s first readers, proclaimed, “It is a masterpiece of tragic indictment of our ghastly age of Fordian culture” (cited in Murray 257). 7. In his essay “To the Puritan All Things Are Impure,” Huxley writes that Fordism “demands that we should sacrifice” the individual “not  .  .  .  to God, but to the Machine. . . . Of all the ascetic religions, Fordism is that which demands the cruelest mutilations of the human psyche and offers the smallest spiritual returns” (cited in Bowering 99). 8. Gramsci illustrates the popular conjoining of Fordism and Americanism by citing the modernist Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello: “Americanism is swamping us. I think that a new beacon of civilization has been lit over there. . . . The money that runs through the world is American, and behind the money runs the way of life and the culture” (316). Gramsci critiques this logic and delinks Fordism from Americanism. Capitalism, he argues, is constitutively transnational and cannot be reduced to any single nation-state. 9. In the novel Middlesex (2002), Jeffrey Eugenides writes, “Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year that Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds” (95). 10. Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936) brilliantly encapsulates and satirizes Fordism’s effect on workers.

notes to pages 72–85 / 179 11. Fordism offers higher wages than previous periods of capitalist production, but in exchange the worker must submit to a totalizing disciplinary regime. Hardt and Negri write, “The regime of high wages that characterizes Fordism . . . [was] realized only in fragmentary forms and for limited populations in the subordinated capitalist countries. All this, however, did not have to be realized; its promise served rather as the ideological carrot to ensure sufficient consensus for the modernizing project. The real substance of the effort, the real take-off toward modernity, which was in fact achieved, was the spread of the disciplinary regime throughout the social spheres of production and reproduction” (248). “A disciplinary society,” they conclude, “is thus a factory-society” (243, emphasis in original). For how Hardt and Negri distinguish their use of disciplinarity from Foucault’s use in Discipline and Punish, see 453n7. 12. The Magnificent Ambersons is the second novel of what has been widely recognized as Tarkington’s Growth trilogy. The first novel in the trilogy, The Turmoil (1915), centers on the changes catalyzed by industrialization, and the third novel, The Midlander (1924), is about a real estate developer. “Growth” in this series is coded as a negative, unwanted process. 13. Kunstler writes, “As the places where Americans dwell become evermore depressing and impossible, Disney World is where they escape to worship the nation in the abstract, a cartoon capital of a cartoon republic enshrining the falsehoods, half-truths, and delusions that prop up the squishy thing the national character has become—for instance, that we are a nation of families; that we care about our fellow citizens; that history matters; that there is a place called home” (217, emphasis in original). 14. Reflecting upon his hometown of Marceline, Missouri, Disney said, “I feel sorry for people who live in cities all their lives and . . . don’t have a little home town” (cited in S. Watts, Magic Kingdom 3). The historian Steven Watts acknowledges that Disney’s “small-town roots rang true to his character and his sentiments,” but he argues that they did not cohere with his actual childhood. Despite embracing Marceline as his hometown, Disney lived in the town for only three and a half years, between the ages of four and eight (3–4). According to Watts, “Disney’s obsession with small-town America simply highlighted the larger pattern of dislocation and urban flux” developing in the twentieth century (6). 15. For an analysis of how Tokyo Disneyland’s Main Street differs from the original Main Street, U.S.A., see Brannen. 16. Ford dismissed the notion that Greenfield Village was simply sentimental or nostalgic (S. Watts, People’s Tycoon 424). 17. Bryson continues, “Even in the midst of the most dreadful crises, when monster ants were at large in the streets or buildings were collapsing from some careless scientific experiment out of State U,” the small town remained stable and unchanging (38). 18. See http://www.saukcentre.govoffice2.com/ (25 June 2011). 19. Brown v. Board of Education is online at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/ getcase.pl?court=US&vol=347&invol=483 (24 May 2011). 20. See Rogers, chapter 3, “Desegregating New Orleans Schools: 1960–1961.” 21. On how the nation-state’s origins may be construed as constitutively racist, see Gellner; Goldberg, Racial State and his edited collection, Anatomy of Racism.

180 / notes to pages 87–93 5 / The Formation of a U.S. Fascist Aesthetics 1. For more on the “national symbolic,” see Berlant. 2. Lutz P. Koepnick similarly argues that a fascist aesthetics imagines a “cocoon of an organic, anticapitalist community” (62). Sarah Phillips Casteel elaborates: “Conventionally, the city has been widely perceived as the space of diversity and movement, while the country is negatively associated with homogeneity and containment. . . . Rural spaces connote conservative models of identity and belonging associated with repressive nationalisms and fascist movements, as well as racisms” (4). Casteel’s Second Arrivals brilliantly challenges this familiar trope. 3. A recent example of this genre is Philip Roth’s The Plot against America (2004). 4. The phrase “regime of the normal” comes from Warner’s The Trouble with Normal. 5. Jackson informed her friend Helen Feeley that “The Lottery” was about antiSemitism (Oppenheimer 130). Jackson’s novel The Road through the Wall (1948) displays a keen awareness of American anti-Semitism. Anecdotally, Shirley Jackson’s husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, was Jewish. For three alternative allegorical readings of “The Lottery,” see Kosenko; Oehlschlaeger; Whittier. 6. Toni Morrison identifies racism and fascism as “succubus twin[s]” (“Racism” 52). For more on the imbrications of nationalism and racism, see Balibar and Wallerstein. 7. One inhabitant of Friendship Village describes the community as a space of “togetherness” (cited in Lingeman, Small Town 343). 8. David Theo Goldberg argues that racism is not static, but a dynamic, “chameleonic” form (preface ix). For more on race and racism’s contingency, see Jacobson. Also see the collection edited by Goldberg, Anatomy of Racism, for a multidisciplinary, theoretically rich and historically specific study of racism. 9. For an analysis of how “othering” is central to Peyton Place’s legibility, see Jones. Ardis Cameron writes that Peyton Place is popularly assumed to be “the antithesis of the political”; instead the fictional small town operates as a “code” for salacious sexual vulgarity (xvii). For example, Cameron recounts, at the 1998 House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, U.S. Representative Lindsey Graham rhetorically asked, “Is this Watergate or Peyton Place?” (xvii). 10. Whiteness, of course, is a historically contingent category. When Tom Makris arrives in Peyton Place, the town responds, “A Greek?  .  .  .  For God’s sake, isn’t it enough that we’ve got a whole colony of Polacks and Canucks working in the mills without letting the Greeks in?” (Metalious 95). In this articulation, Greeks, Poles, and Canadians are considered outside the identity category of “whiteness.” 11. In discursively producing the small town as a white space, Smith also discursively produces the South as a “black” space. There are many outstanding studies of the South’s discursive construction. See, for example, Leigh Ann Duck’s Nation’s Region. 12. However, as Joseph persuasively argues, community and capitalism do not exist in a binary relation; rather community “supplements” capitalism. For a more elaborate articulation of the symbiotic relation between community and capitalism, see Joseph, “Community” 59; Against the Romance. For a study on the paradoxes of community as articulated in contemporary U.S. literature, see Lee, A Body of Individuals. 13. In the American context, David W. Noble elaborates on how several historians during the cold war criticized the pastoral ideal because it was a “vision of a

notes to pages 94–101 / 181 homogeneous people rooted in a national landscape [that] was too similar to fascist ideologies” (45). 14. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno critiques “identity” and defines dialectical thinking as thinking toward “nonidentity” (147–148, 149–150). Derrida critiques the “metaphysics of presence” as a denial of difference. I. M. Young succinctly summarizes Derrida’s position as follows: “For Derrida, the metaphysics of presence seeks to detemporalize and despatialize . . . [the] signifying process, inventing the illusion of pure present meaning which eliminates the referential relation” (236). 15. I. M. Young argues that a progressive form of politics needs to vigilantly critique this desire for community and instead embrace what she calls the “unoppressive city” (251). In contrast to this ideal of community that seeks “identity,” the city is figured as a space of “being-together” with “strangers.” This space, Young continues, is “defined as openness to unassimilated otherness” (252, 253). 16. All citations are from Igo 23–24. 17. Some of the famous Chicago School studies include The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man (1923), The Gang (1927), The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929), and The Taxi Dance Hall (1932) (Igo 29). 18. The Lynds went to Muncie in 1924, funded by the Institute for Social and Religious Research, one of the many nonprofit organizations founded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. 19. The celebrated U.S. philosopher John Dewey declared that Middletown is “Anytown” (cited in Igo 81). 20. Joseph observes, “The narrative of community as destroyed by capitalism and modernity . . . is one of the structuring narratives of sociology” (“Community” 58). 21. This same logic informs Page Smith’s study of the small town: “It was the city,” Smith writes, “which created classes, which divided neighbors along social and economic lines, which destroyed the simple equality of community life, and which nourished the principles of political democracy” (111). 22. Igo writes that Middletown “encourage[s] readers to associate the real America, the imagined national community, with white native midwesterners” (83). 23. In contrast to my project, which historicizes and analyzes the dominant small town, in “City Limits, Village Values: Concepts of the Neighborhood in Black Fiction,” Toni Morrison posits the village as a space where alternative practices and knowledge regimes can flourish, especially for African Americans. This thesis is explored and teased out in most, if not all, of her novels. 24. In the present, Pinsky describes the small town as in a state of deterioration, symbolized by the current condition of the Paramount Theater: “The Paramount today is a shuttered, near-derelict building, used as storage space for a paint business” (21). 25. Pinsky highlights that Dawson’s Landing’s idyllic island community is predicated on a slave economy. Twain’s novel, Pinsky argues, is an “allegory about false innocence” and an “allegory of blindness” (10, 12).

6 / Staging and Archiving the Nation 1. The planning, preparation, and production of Wilder’s play at Dominguez High School is captured in the documentary OT: Our Town.

182 / notes to pages 102–104 2. Borek calls Our Town an “important play” with “important messages” that speaks to “any culture” (cited in “OT: Our Town”). Similarly the film’s director, Scott Hamilton Kennedy, calls Our Town “universal” (Our Town: Masterpiece Theater). The press kit for OT explains, “With no budget and no stage, Ms. Borek chooses ‘Our Town’ for its universal and timeless themes of community, family, love and loss, life and death.” A multitude of essays and reviews repeat this position. A 2006 Iowa State University production of Our Town was described as a play with “universal themes” (Zantow), and Rebecca McClanahan’s essay “Our Towns” (2003), posits Wilder’s script as the master script for all of our lives. 3. Our Town continues to succeed despite academia’s dismissal of the play in the late twentieth century. Christopher J. Wheatley observes, “In large anthologies of modern and contemporary drama . . . Wilder is no longer included.” Yet, Wheatley continues, even “if academic critics continue to ignore Wilder’s work, Wilder’s plays will continue to do just fine, because the theater community continues to produce them and does so with remarkable frequency and success” (21, 27). 4. For more on Brecht’s pedagogical theater (also known as “epic theater”), see Brecht. For a good overview of epic theater, see Subiotto; Jameson, Brecht and Method. For more on the similarities and differences between Wilder’s and Brecht’s respective pedagogical theaters, see Lifton 69–110. Lifton writes that both playwrights are “didactic,” but their pedagogical messages differ radically: “Brecht is preaching revolution, whereas Wilder is concerned with acceptance and appreciation of everyday life and familiar things—that is to say, with acceptance and praise of what is” (Lifton 96, 97, emphasis in original). Whereas Brecht wants to change the existing material conditions, Wilder wants to maintain and perpetuate the dominant material conditions. The recognition of Wilder as an educator is at the center of Francis Fergusson’s 1956 essay, “Three Allegorists: Brecht, Wilder, and Eliot.” Fergusson argues that Wilder’s plays should be studied for their pedagogical value. However, in contrast to my historical approach, Fergusson reads Wilder’s work as an allegory of “religious Platonism” (553). 5. Judith Butler, for example, writes that the police officer hailing an individual “is clearly a disciplinary [act]; the policeman’s call is an effort to bring someone back in line” (95). 6. Althusser writes, “[ISAs] must not be confused with the (repressive) State apparatuses” (“Ideology” 96). Of course, as Althusser notes, the two forms of state power are inextricably linked, but what is important is their appearance as separate entities in the dominant culture. An RSA “functions massively and predominately by repression (including physical repression), while functioning secondarily as ideology” (97, emphasis in original). 7. Butler reads Althusser through Foucault and claims that interpellation “works by failing . . . [for the process does not] determine such a subject exhaustively” (197). Following Foucault, Butler argues that wherever power operates (in this case, the act of interpellation), so too does resistance. 8. Our Town was written and first produced in the midst of the Great Depression, a capitalist calamity that witnessed the collapse of banks, industries, and jobs across the United States. Curiously, in contrast to the play’s historical context in which banks dissolved overnight and people could not withdraw their savings, the play posits a

notes to pages 105–107 / 183 newly constructed bank as the safest place to deposit an archive. For a good introduction to the Great Depression, see Rauchway, The Great Depression. 9. Intiman Theater’s website explains that it employed a “multicultural cast” in order to create “a production that looked and felt like our world today” (The Intiman Theater). 10. Rex Burbank argues that Wilder’s play offers an “American perspective” (63–81). 11. Steven Nissenbaum writes, Thornton Wilder “was able to use the imaginary New Hampshire community of Grover’s Corners as a symbol of the heart of the nation, giving it the universalizing title Our Town” (38–39). 12. Reproducibility is a gendered concept in Our Town. At the beginning of Act II the Stage Manager proclaims, “I don’t have to point out to the women in my audience that those ladies they see before them . . . cooked three meals a day . . . and [took] no summer vacation. . . . They brought up two children apiece, washed, cleaned the house,—and never a nervous breakdown” (49, emphasis in original). The reproduction of the small-town everyday is possible because of the material and ideological confining of women to a form of unpaid, highly exploitive labor. 13. In “Whose Town Is It, Anyway?,” Bert Cardullo critiques Our Town’s isolationist imaginary. Many scholars criticize Wilder’s play for its reactionary politics. For an examination of the play in relation to whiteness studies and the logic of racialization, see J. Turner; Ketels. 14. This ostensible absence of history has led scholars such as Richard Lingeman to call the play the “peak of nostalgia.” Our Town, Lingeman claims, renders “war, politics and depressions . . . irrelevant” and instead presents a community “where nothing ever happen[s]—except the really basic, timeless, fundamental things—birth, love and death” (Small Town 259–260). This reading is echoed by Hilfer, who writes that Our Town offers “a simplified and idealized small town, a not too spacious womb in which the realities of time, history, and death can be evaded” (17). 15. Jameson defines modernity as a narrative category (A Singular Modernity 40–41). 16. This insight informs many popular analyses of globalization. For example, Joseph Stiglitz argues that what is “new” about globalization in the early twenty-first century is that “developed countries have recognized globalization as a historical period” (Globalization 3). Similarly Edward Soja writes, “What is distinctive about the contemporary era . . . is not globalization per se but its intensification in popular (and intellectual) consciousness and in the scope and scale of globalized social, economic, political, and cultural relations” (191). What is new about globalization, as both Stiglitz and Soja suggest, is that the First World now recognizes and narrates modernity as a globalizing modernity. 17. Bourgeois theater, Brecht writes, “emphasizes the timelessness of its objects. Its representation of people is bound by the ‘eternally human.’ Its story is arranged in such a way to create ‘universal’ situations that allow Man with a capital M to express himself: man of every period and colour” (cited in Lifton 108–109). Paul Lifton comments, “Brecht condemns the bourgeois theater for being ‘unhistorical,’ an adjective that admirably fits Wilder’s drama and that he would doubtlessly be pleased to see applied to it” (109). 18. For an astute, concise summary of Jameson’s complex term “political unconscious,” see Martin 125–126.

184 / notes to pages 107–116 19. Said specifies Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) as exemplifying this culture of American innocence (Culture 8–9). 20. For more on the Republican position during the New Deal, see Weed. 21. Bryan also ran for president in 1908, but his public support and popularity had greatly waned by then. For an overview of Bryan’s political career, see D. D. Anderson; Koenig; Springen; W. C. Williams. 22. In 1902 A. J. Hobson wrote that “Cuba, the Philippines, and Hawaii were but the hors d’oeuvre to whet an appetite for an ampler banquet” (cited in R. J. C. Young 42). 23. Of course, the notion that the United States was just becoming an imperial nation-state is a symptom of historical amnesia. 24. Many prominent U.S. authors at the turn of the twentieth century critiqued U.S. imperialist activities, , including Mark Twain in “The War Poem” (1905) and William Dean Howells in “Editha” (1905). 25. For more on the Louisiana Purchase, see S. Levinson and Sparrow; Kastor. 26. Gertrude Murphy writes, “In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Monroe Doctrine provided the most common terms through which Americans in the United States imagined and articulated their nation’s diplomatic and military place in the world” (vii). Also see Perkins. 27. For an early critique of Roosevelt’s imperialism, see Rossiter. 28. Derrida argues that refusing the “other” perpetuates a “given homogeneity” that forecloses “the future” (35). 29. Dr. Gibbs travels outside of Grover’s Corners only to visit “the battlefields of the Civil War” (22). The only history that interests him is American history, which reinforces the play’s logic that small-town subjects are national subjects. 30. This observation is made by Konkle, Thornton Wilder 138. 31. Ernest Mandel describes the Bretton Woods meeting as follows: “At Bretton Woods the victorious imperialist powers of World War Two established a global monetary system. . . . Since the supply of gold was increasing too slowly and was distributed too unequally to solve the problem of international liquidity, a system was created which elevated a specific paper currency to the rank of world money alongside gold; the concrete historical situation at the end of the Second World War was such, of course, that only the dollar could play the role.” Similarly Harvey writes that Bretton Woods tied the world economy “firmly into U.S. fiscal and monetary policy” (Condition 137).

7 / “One Happy World” 1. Postcolonial scholars frequently use the tropes of “anachronism” and the “archaic” to make visible the contradictions, conflicts, and ambiguities that constitute the dominant Western imaginary. For example, see Bhabha’s Location of Culture, especially chapter 7, “Articulating the Archaic: Cultural Difference and Colonial Nonsense.” In chapter 8, “Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” Bhabha writes that to disrupt the nation’s hegemony “demands that we articulate the archaic ambivalence that informs the time of modernity” (142, emphasis in original). For similar postcolonial uses of these tropes to undermine the West’s dominant narratives, see Said, Beginnings; Aravamudan. 2. Eisenhower’s 1953 inaugural speech, for example, stressed that one of the foundational differences between the United States and the Soviet Union was that the former,

notes to pages 116–121 / 185 in contrast to the latter, disavowed “imperialism” (“First Inaugural Address”). Similarly Chalmers Johnson writes, “During the almost fifty years of superpower standoff, the United States denied that its activities constituted a form of imperialism” (2). There is a considerable amount of scholarship on the ideology of U.S. containment during the cold war. For a capacious study of cold war ideology and U.S. narrative production, see Nadel. 3. McCaffery’s Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide, for example, contains an entry for Dick (332–334). In the same volume, Everman situates science fiction as a postmodern genre, and Dick as a central author of this genre (23–38, 32–34). For the importance of science fiction to literary studies and critical theory, see the special issue of PMLA, Science Fiction and Literary Studies (May 2004); Freedman. 4. For the importance of Dick’s writing (and science fiction more generally) to Jameson’s theorizing of postmodernity, see Wegner; A. M. Butler (especially 141–142); Csicsert-Ronary (especially 121). For a good overview of the intersections of science fiction and postmodernism, see Jorgensen. 5. Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, for example, frequently subverts the iconic, pastoral small town. This critical project is evident from the series’ first episode, “Where Is Everybody?” (1959) to later episodes, such as “Walking Distance” (1959), “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (1960), “A Stop at Willoughby” (1960), “It’s a Good Life” (1961), “In His Image” (1963), “Valley of the Shadow” (1963), “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville” (1963), “The Old Man in the Cave” (1963), “Ring-a-Ding Girl” (1963), and “Stopover in a Quiet Town” (1964). 6. This appearance is a mystification. In Time Out of Joint, the small town proves central to One Happy World. The global empire is in the midst of a war with a political faction that identifies itself as the “Lunatics.” On a daily basis, the Lunatics assault the global empire with a barrage of missiles launched from the Moon. The game that Gumm plays daily—and which he believes to be an innocuous ritual—is actually a disguised form of reconnaissance. When Gumm guesses the location of the little green man, he actually guesses the potential location of the next missile launch. 7. “Chronotope” linguistically conjoins the Greek word for “time,” chronos, with the Greek word for “space,” topos. For a good introduction to the concept and to Bakhtin’s life and work, see Holquist; Emerson and Morson. 8. Bakhtin was inspired by Einstein’s discovery that time and space are intimately conjoined and relative to each other (“Forms” 84). 9. For more on reading literature using a methodology of multiple geographic scales, see Dimock. 10. Holquist identifies Bakhtin’s study of chronotopes as a “historical poetics” (116). 11. To illustrate this literary theme, Bakhtin turns to Oliver Goldsmith’s 1770 poem, “The Deserted Village.” 12. For a historical, material analysis of the Book-of-the-Month Club, see Radway. 13. Peyton Place immediately subverts the small town’s reified image of sexual conservatism in its famous opening sentences: “Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay” (Metalious 1). 14. For an outstanding critique of U.S. ideology concerning sex and the family during the cold war, see Coontz. 15. Popularly referred to as “K-Day,” 20 August 1953 was the first day that magazines and newspapers were allowed to publish the results of Kinsey’s long-awaited

186 / notes to pages 121–126 sequel to Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). On 24 August 1953 Kinsey appeared on the cover of Time magazine (Kinsey). 16. Lichtman argues that psychology has become “the prism through which the reality of society is transformed into the mythology of individualism. . . . Isolation, estrangement and loneliness are codified as autonomy, independence and selfreliance. . . . Psychology is not historically possible as an independent discipline until capitalism sunders individuals from their traditional social ties and reconstructs them as privatized monads confronting an opaque reality. Then it becomes necessary” (113). 17. I want to make clear that I am not making a grand claim against psychoanalysis. In fact my own thinking is greatly indebted to the work of thinkers and scholars informed by psychoanalysis, including Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Lauren Berlant, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Donald Pease, Jacqueline Rose, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kaja Silverman, and Slavoj Žižek. And, of course, the work of Sigmund Freud. 18. Similarly when Bill Black questions his “wife” about Ragle Gumm’s whereabouts, she retorts, “I know you have your evil suspicions, but they only reflect projections of your own warped psyche. Freud showed how neurotic people do that all the time” (Dick 79). 19. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is such an extended critique of psychoanalysis. 20. In Homo Sacer Agamben famously argues that the concentration camp is the preeminent symbol of modernity. 21. McHale argues that every theorist of the postmodern has his or her own competing version of postmodernism: “Thus, there is John Barth’s postmodernism, the literature of replenishment; Charles Newman’s postmodernism, the literature of an inflationary economy; Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodernism, a general condition of knowledge in the contemporary informational régime; Ihab Hassan’s postmodernism, a stage onto the road to the spiritual unification of humankind; and so on” (4). 22. Hutcheon argues that postmodernism is guided by a “concern  .  .  .  to denaturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that those entities that we unthinkingly experience as ‘natural’ (they might even include capitalism, patriarchy, liberal humanism), are in fact ‘cultural’; made by us, not given to us. Even nature, postmodernism might point out, doesn’t grow on trees” (2). However, as this section argues, the dominant postmodern culture may also naturalize social relations. For an astute analysis of postmodernism, see Best and Kellner. 23. Jameson writes that the small town is an ideological form that discursively produces and reproduces “normalcy” and the “nondeviant everyday life” (Postmodernism 280). 24. The small town, Jameson writes, only thrives in a “preindustrial” mode of production (Marxism and Form 165). 25. I examine how Walmart ideologically deploys the small town in my final chapter. 26. Even if small towns are understood as nostalgic forms, Jameson recognizes that in postmodernity, nostalgia “colonizes the present.” See Postmodernism, especially chapter 9, “Nostalgia for the Present.” In his 2005 study of science fiction, Jameson identifies the ideological small town as a nostalgic, reactionary form (Archaeologies 60). The same argument is made in Harvey, Condition 271, 272. Baudrillard observes a similar connection between nostalgia and the small town in postmodern culture. He

notes to pages 127–138 / 187 famously claims that we are living in an age of simulation, an age when it is impossible to distinguish signs from their referents, reality from ideology, fiction from history. Like Jameson, Baudrillard emphasis the emergence of nostalgic films in the age of simulation, and the film he focuses on is Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) (45). The movie, produced two years before American Graffiti, is set in a small town. 27. Jameson’s periodization is indebted to Ernest Mandel (Postmodernism 4). For an excellent critique of Jameson’s use and misuse of Mandel, see Norton. One of Norton’s chief critiques is that Jameson, in contrast to Mandel, “enfolds subjectivity within the capitalist totality,” which, in effect, forecloses the proletariat’s capacity to revolt (64). 28. Jameson emphasizes that it is exceedingly “difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp” capitalism’s “decentered global network” (Postmodernism 38). For a rich analysis of competing postmodern maps that challenge the dominant capitalist culture, see Jarvis, especially chapter 5, “Mapping on the Left: Jameson, Harvey, Soja, Davis.” 29. Global space, Jameson proclaims, is “fundamental” to postmodernity (Postmodernism 54; also see 6, 16, 49–54). He also calls this new space “hyperspace” (43) and “world space” (54). For more on the importance of space to Jameson’s conceptualization of postmodernity, see Postmodernism, 364–376. For an astute analysis of Jameson’s conception of “postmodern hyperspace,” see Hartley 218–226. 30. For a nuanced, insightful analysis of a postmodern chronotope, see Heise. 31. Americans descend onto Mars like “locusts” blanketing the sky. This simile, which also serves as the chapter’s title, alludes to the Book of Exodus, where God shocks and awes the Egyptians by making locusts hail upon an imperial empire. In Bradbury’s reworking of this trope, the locusts become a metaphor for an imperial power, more specifically a metaphor for the United States. 32. Captain Black also spends time with his brother Edward, who died in 1939 (Bradbury 43). 33. Similarly in “Notes on Globalization” Jameson insists, “The United States is not just one country, or one culture, among others, any more than English is just one language among others. . . . There is a fundamental dissymmetry in the relationship between the United States and every other country in the world” (58).

8 / Global Belonging 1. According to the website Netplaces, Disneyland removes thirty tons of trash every day from its theme park. See http://www.netplaces.com/family-guide-to-disneyland/disneylands-parades-shows-special-events-and-fireworks/disneyland-shows. htm (5 July 2011). 2. Francaviglia writes that Main Street, U.S.A. is the product of “total social engineering and control” (Main Street Revisited 164). In Inside the Mouse, the literary scholar Susan Willis argues that the theme park offers a community of consumption (Klugman et al. 39–44). 3. http://hongkongdisneytalk.blogspot.com/2006/11/main-street-usa-overview. html (4 February 2011). 4. All numbers and figures come from the film. 5. See Homer for an astute analysis of The Truman Show in relation to the ideological production of the “everyday.”

188 / notes to pages 138–148 6. This same logic also informs Gary Ross’s Pleasantville (1998). 7. The inextricable intertwining of economics and culture in late capitalism is one of Jameson’s great insights (see Postmodernism). 8. In his analysis of The Truman Show, the film and cultural studies scholar Jonathan Rayner writes, “The consumption of the artifacts implies the assumption of the lifestyle” (253). 9. My analysis parts ways with literary scholar Robert Beuka, who reads The Truman Show as a suburban film within the long trend of American literature and film that depicts suburbia as a “landscape of imprisonment and control” (“‘Cue the Sun’”). In the national culture, suburbia is frequently imagined as a place of alienation, reification, and boredom (see Beuka’s Suburbia Nation). In contrast, I read Seahaven as exemplifying the dominant small town. Seahaven’s chief appeal, I contend, is its promise of belonging and community, central attributes of the small town. 10. This point is central to Hardt and Negri’s Empire. 11. The movement has caused a great deal of debate in the fields of architecture, geography, and cultural and American studies. For a particularly scathing review of New Urbanism, see Harvey, “The New Urbanism.” For a more balanced view, see Fulton. 12. Duany et al. write, “Suburban sprawl is cancerous growth rather than healthy growth, and it is destroying our civic life” (“The Second Coming” 20). 13. The literary scholar Catherine Jurca’s important study, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel, persuasively argues that the experience of boredom is a privileged affect inextricably linked to the racial politics of whiteness. 14. The architecture scholar Brian Lonsway explores how the figure of the small towns has shaped modern hospitals and medical clinics. The precedent of this movement, Lonsway argues, is “the Disney theme park ‘Main Street’” (240). The Disney Institute in Orlando teaches its philosophy of theme branding to multiple industries, including Lifestyle Enhancement Centers. Not surprisingly, the hospital in Celebration, Florida, is a Lifestyle Enhancement Center: Celebration Health (Lonsway 240). 15. The first residents moved to Celebration two years later, in 1996. 16. Francaviglia writes that Main Street has never been simply a material place and practice. Rather Main Street is an “image” that communities must produce, advertise, and widely disseminate in order to attract outside capital in an increasingly competitive, destabilizing capitalist modernity (Main Street Revisited 158). For more on the small town’s image, see Fazio and Preshaw; Jakle, The American Small Town. 17. Jane Jacobs, an urban planning scholar, calls Celebration a “theme park of a town,” and the political theorist Benjamin Barber calls the town a “simulation” (cited in Ross 329). 18. Clemens was actually born in Florida, Missouri, where he lived until he was four. 19. At the novel’s end, Judge Thatcher promises to direct Tom’s career and to help Tom gain entrance into the “National Military Academy and afterward trained in the best law school in the country” (211). Despite his adolescent misbehavior, Tom Sawyer will become a model small-town and national subject. 20. Morris is not alone in foregrounding the fictional quality of the small town

notes to pages 150–160 / 189 image used by Reagan. The first two parts of Gary Wills’s biography, Reagan’s America, are entitled “Huck Finn’s World” and “Pap Finn’s World.” Also see Rogin. 21. There are many excellent studies that document what Charles Fishman calls the “Wal-Mart Effect.” See Fishman; Lichtenstein. 22. These numbers and figures are taken from Walmart’s Corporate website, http:// walmartstores.com/AboutUs/ (11 June 2011). 23. This is even truer today; Lichtenstein’s edited collection appeared two years prior to the global recession that began in 2008. 24. The exploitation of workers occurs not only abroad, but also at home. Researchers at UC-Berkeley revealed that employee wages at Walmart are, on average, 31 percent lower than at other large retail stores, which makes it necessary for workers to depend on public programs such as food stamps, Medicare, and subsidized housing to simply stay afloat. In Georgia the children of Walmart employees are the greatest benefactors of Peach-Care, the state’s medical plan for children in poverty (Lichtenstein 30). Corporations such as Walmart are able to pay such low wages with little to no benefits because the state subsidizes workers in a range of social services, from health care to food stamps. 25. http://walmartstores.com/aboutus/287.aspx (11 June 2011). 26. For more information, see http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/arts/design/ alice-walton-on-her-crystal-bridges-museum-of-american-art.html?pagewanted=all (20 September 2011). 27. This is the title of Marchand’s study. 28. Elsewhere Harvey writes, “There are abundant signs that localism and nationalism have become stronger precisely because of the quest for security that place always offers in the midst of all the shifting that flexible accumulation implies” (Condition 306). 29. Bakan calls the corporation an “externalizing machine” (see 60–84).

Afterword 1. The ride initially appeared in the 1964–1965 World’s Fair in New York City. Pepsi Cola, working with UNICEF (the United Nation’s children’s agency), contacted Walt Disney about creating an exhibit for the World’s Fair. Disney consented and constructed “It’s a Small World.” The ride proved a tremendous success, and in 1966 Disney relocated the ride to Disneyland (S. Watts, Magic Kingdom 416–417). 2. The history and anthropology scholar Arif Dirlik writes that in the dominant culture, “the recognition of cultural diversity takes place on the common grounds of a globalized capitalism” (63). 3. The global village imaginary also underwrites the World Showcase at EPCOT Center. The literature and cultural studies scholars Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock write that the World Showcase attempts to domesticate globalization “by offering guests an innocuous simulation of cultural exchange that merely encouraged further insularity rather than tolerance of cultural difference” (The Mouse That Roared 182). 4. Katz and Smith analyze how Althusser and Foucault uncritically employ spatial metaphorics (71–74). 5. See, for example, McLuhan and Powers, The Global Village.

190 / notes to pages 160–165 6. On his official website, Friedman has somewhat softened his definition of globalization as a global village. “Globalization,” he writes, is “the integration of capital, technology, and information across national borders, in a way that is creating a single global market and, to some degree, a global village.” Nevertheless Friedman still uses the global village metaphor (see http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/bookshelf/thelexus-and-the-olive-tree [4 June 2011]). Although to be fair, Friedman is not always celebratory of this global village. See, for example, his column “Global Village Idiocy” (12 May 2002) on how the democratization of technology (the Internet in particular) produces and exacerbates cultures of misunderstanding and hate. 7. Sue-Im Lee reads Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange (1997) as a “strong denunciation of global village universalism” (323). 8. Naomi Klein verifies Quigley’s powerful observation by turning to the newly incorporated city of Sandy Springs in suburban Atlanta. Sandy Springs became the first “contract city,” a model for a new geography of apartheid (533–534). 9. Jameson writes that “a pedagogical political culture” should forge a new “aesthetic of cognitive mapping” that will provide a “new heightened sense of . . . place in the global system” (Postmodernism 54). 10. The phrase “‘fictions’ of globalization” comes from O’Brien and Szeman 604. The literary scholar José Eduardo Limón writes that critical regionalism thinks about the local and the regional “not in any isolated sense, but rather within yet in tension with globalization” (167, emphasis in original). 11. In “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” Jameson states, “The dialectics of globalization” is a matter “of positions and locations” (74). Also see Appadurai, especially part 3, “Postnational Locations.” 12. For an excellent overview of recent critical regionalist scholarship, see Herring, “Micro.”

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 94, 181n14, 186n17 aesthetics and production of place, 87–88, 158, 164, 180n2, 190n9 Althusser, Louis, 102–103, 124, 167n6, 173n24, 182n6 Anderson, Benedict, 8–9, 169nn19–21 Anderson, Sherwood (Winesburg, Ohio), 38–40, 42–47, 68, 176n23, 177n6, 178n1; mapping Winesburg, 56–63, 57f, 176n2; new American Bildungsroman, 47, 175n14, 175n16 Arendt, Hannah, 31–32, 89, 173n20 automobile, 70–81, 178n1, 178n3 automodernity, 178–179nn1–11; definition, 71 Bachelard, Gaston, 24 Bakan, Joel, 156–157, 158, 189n30 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 41–42, 51, 118, 185nn7– 8, 185nn10–11 Balad Air Base, 163 Baldwin, James, 10–11 Balibar, Etienne, 8, 91 Baudrillard, Jean, 77, 186n26 Bellamann, Henry (King’s Row), 120 belonging, 9, 12, 41, 47, 50–51, 56, 75, 91, 104, 132, 137, 139, 173n22, 176n27, 180n2, 188n9 Benjamin, Walter, 88, 106, 169n19 Bentonville, Arkansas, 153, 155–156 Bhabha, Homi, 167n2, 169n26, 184n1

Bildungsroman, 40–52, 175n14, 175n16, 176n29; definition, 42, 174–175nn6–13. See also modernity Bogdanovich, Peter (The Last Picture Show), 4, 186n26 Bradbury, Ray (The Martian Chronicles), 128–130, 187nn31–32 Brecht, Bertolt, 102, 182n4, 183n17 Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, 114, 181n31 Britain, village and empire, 6–7, 15–16, 28–31, 35, 54–55, 107, 111, 172n13 Brown v. Board of Education, 84–86 Bryan, William Jennings, 64–66, 108–109, 184n21 Bryson, Bill (The Lost Continent), 79–81, 179n17 Bush, George W., 17–18, 64–65 Butler, Judith, 103, 182n5, 182n7 Campbell, Elizabeth, 97–98 capitalism: economics and culture, 139, 188n7; as revolution and destabilization, 60, 71, 143, 176n5; as rootless and un-American, 81–82; small town as, 115–125, 137–140, 149, 179n13; small town as escape from, 51, 68–69, 77–78, 87–88, 93, 105–106, 108. See also globalization; U.S. empire

218 / index Capra, Frank (It’s a Wonderful Life), 3–4, 13, 47–50, 140, 149 Celebration, Florida, 15, 142–144, 188nn14–15, 188n17 Census Bureau, 35, 45, 168n10, 173n25 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 115, 169n19 Chandrasekaran, Rajiv, 162–163 chronotope of small town, 118–125, 185nn7–8, 185n10 close reading versus distant reading, 53–56 cold war culture, 116–117, 121, 124, 125–126, 184n2 colonial town, 26 community: and automodernity, 73–75; and capitalist modernity, 180n12, 181n21; and national narrative, 50–51, 176n27; through consumerism, 139– 140, 144–149; and tradition, 89–90. See also covenanted community; island communities, small towns as consumer of fictive small town, 132–137, 138–140, 144–149, 187n2, 188n8, 188n16 corporate soul, 157 covenanted community, 27, 92, 172n11 critical regionalism, 164–165, 190nn10–11. See also localism Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 156 “cumulative“ small town, 26 death of the small town, 3–5, 10–15, 168n8–9. See also revolt from the village democracy (U.S.), 31–34, 173nn20–22 Derrida, Jacques, 94, 181n14, 184n28 Dick, Philip K. (Time Out of Joint), 115– 125, 139, 185n4, 185n6 Disney. See Celebration, Florida; “It’s a Small World”; Main Street, U.S.A. diversity, 1, 45, 88, 94, 159–161, 180n2, 189n2 Dixon, Illinois, 13–14, 147–149, 150f Dolan, Frederick M., 27, 172n10 dominant small town: an imaginary, 103; symbol of the past, 11–13; terminology, 3–5, 6, 8–9, 167n7, 168n10, 168nn14–15. See also ideological forms; island communities, small towns as; nation forms Duany, Andres, and Elizabeth PlaterZyberk, 141–142, 188n12

Du Bois, W.E.B., 85, 90 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 11, 18 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 7, 62–63 enclosures, 54, 168n9, 172n13, EPCOT Center, World Showcase, 189n3 fascism, 86–88, 88–90, 91–94, 99, 180n2, 180n7, 180–181nn13–15, 183n13 Ford, Henry, and Fordism, 71–73, 75–78, 86, 150–151, 178–179nn5–11; My Life and Work, 72. See also Greenfield Village, Dearborn Fortune magazine, 150–151, 153, 155 Foucault, Michel, 23–24, 172n3, 172n6 Francaviglia, Richard V., 2, 77, 144–145, 167n5, 167n7, 170n30, 170n31, 187n2, 188n16 Freneau, Philip (“The American Village”), 28–31 Freud, Sigmund, 21, 24, 121–122 Friedman, Thomas, 160, 190n6 Gale, Zona: “Dream,” 90–92, 137, 180n7; Miss Lulu Bett, 38 Gillem, Mark L., 162–163 Glass, Brent D., 1–2, 167n2 globalization: and aesthetic production of place, 87–88, 136; and the city, 45, 60; commodification, 44, 136, 139–140, 155; and critical theory, 4, 10, 16–17; historical context, 106, 114, 177n26; ideologies of, 5, 159–162, 164; locality in, 10–11, 53, 177n6; new era of, 4; pastoral opposing, 58–59; postmodernism, 126–127, 187n28; violence of, 22, 99, 110, 133–134, 144, 146, 149, 158, 189n30. See also capitalism; island communities, small towns as; U.S. empire global village, 160–162, 189n3, 190nn6–7 Goist, Park Dixon, 26, 93, 176n23, 176n27 Goldsmith, Oliver (“The Deserted Village”), 28–31, 54, 172nn13–14, 185n11 Goodall, Hurley, 97–98 Gramsci, Antonio, 72, 178n8 Greenfield Village, Dearborn, 76–78, 79–81, 86, 179n16. See also Ford, Henry, and Fordism; museums Green Zone (Iraq), 162–163 Guangzhou, China, 151–152

index / 219 Hall, Anthony, 17, 171n37 Hanna, Mark, 63–67 Hannibal, MO, 146–147, 147f, 148f, 176n24 Harding, Warren G., 13, 56, 67–69, 76, 177n24, 177n27 Hardt, Michael, 72, 179n11 Harvey, David, 87, 93, 138, 145, 157–158, 189n29 Herron, Ima Honaker, 6–7, 29, 174n2 Hilfer, Anthony Channell, 2, 6, 7, 174n5, 176n27, 183n14 Hobsbawm, Eric, 169n18, 169n20, 169n27 “homeland,” 17–18, 171n40 Hurricane Katrina, 163 Hutcheon, Linda, 125, 186n22 Huxley, Aldous (Brave New World), 72, 178nn6–7

island communities, small towns as: capitalism destroys, 41, 45, 53, 62–63, 70, 71; deracinated, 29–31; fabricated, 21–22, 116, 118–120, 122, 135–136, 138, 140, 142–144; as form of apartheid, 163; ideological, 54–56, 58–61, 173n19; independent, 32–33; innocent, 31, 96, 106, 110, 113, 147, 165; museums, 76–77, 79–81, 83; political fiction, 66–69; premodern, 13; reactionary and fascist, 86–88, 91–94, 99, 180n7, 180–181nn13– 15, 183n13; U.S. exceptionalism, 3, 5, 27; utopias as, 25, 52, 132–133. See also community; dominant small town; imagined geographies; nation forms “It’s a Small World” (Disney), 159–160, 189n1

ideological forms: as changing, 23, 172n2; of community and fascism, 94; contradictory roles of, 5, 8, 10–15; of corporation as a person, 156–157; global village as, 160–162; of history, 75, 77–78, 122; of “inside” and “outside,” 123; Main Street as, 15; of Our Town, 111; of self-contained small town, 117, 185n6; of small town in postmodernism, 126–127; U.S. as global center of, 138, 140; of U.S. imperialism, 22–23, 129–130, 162–163; of Walmart’s small-town culture, 154, 156. See also dominant small town; island communities, small towns as; nation forms Igo, Sarah E., 95, 96–97, 181n22 imagined geographies: ideology of, 167nn4– 5; imaginative geographies, 167n4; imagined community, 8–9, 169nn19–21; mapping, 53–56; in politics, 87 (see also presidential candidates’ campaigns); romanticized rural, 10–11, 169n25; village versus small town, 6–7. See also ideological forms; island communities, small towns as; nation forms imperialism. See Britain, village and empire; U.S. empire industrialization in global capitalism, 26, 60–61, 65, 71, 95, 152–153, 169n25, 169–170n28, 172n13, 176n3, 177n16, 178n1; assembly-line work, 72, 152, 178–179nn9–11 Intiman Theater, Seattle, 104–105, 183n9

Jackson, Shirley (“The Lottery”), 13, 89–90, 180n5 Jameson, Fredric, 25, 116, 117, 125–127, 164, 183n15, 186nn23–24, 186– 187nn26–29, 187n33, 188n7, 190n9, 190n11 Johnson, Chalmers, 17, 171n40, 184n2 Joseph, Miranda, 31, 93, 173n17, 173n19, 180n12 Kaplan, Amy, 18, 171n38 Karon, Jan (Mitford series), 50–51 Kasdan, Lawrence (Body Heat), 126 Kauffman, Bill (Country Towns of New York), 81 Keillor, Garrison (“News from Lake Wobegon”), 50 Kinsey, Alfred, 120–121, 185n15 Kissimmee, Florida, 143–144 Klein, Naomi, 163, 190n8 Kunstler, James Howard, 77, 78, 179n13 League of Nations, 67, 69 Leave It to Beaver, 146 Lee, Sue-Im, 160, 190nn6–7 Lerner, Max, 5, 31 Levy, Emanuel, 2–3, 4, 70 Lewis, Sinclair (Main Street): and the automobile, 71; compared to It Can’t Happen Here, 88–89; deracinated small town, 37, 38; fantasy of capitalism, 132–134, 135–137; literary geography of small town, 131–134; Nobel Prize, 52; reception of, 13, 38, 83–84, 174n1; revolt

220 / index from the village, 38–39, 174n4; small town symbolism, 87 Lichtenstein, Nelson, 150–154, 189n23 Lindbergh, Charles, 104, 106 literature, discourse of small town, 2–3; American modern nation form, 6–9, 34, 37; death of small town, 3–5, 168n8–9; examples of texts and genres, 19; Freneau, 28–31; global village, 160–161; invoking Tocqueville, 31–34, 173n17, 173n18; literary geography of small town, 131–134; literary village, 55–56; in postmodern science fiction, 116, 186n26; reception of Main Street (Lewis), 37–38, 52; revolt from the village, 38–39, 174n3; for a small-town chronotope, 120–121. See also media; popular culture Living in a Global Village (Department of Defense), 161–162 localism, 10–11, 32–34, 108, 164, 189n29. See also critical regionalism Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 7, 75 Louisiana Purchase, 109–110 Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, 163–164 Lucas, George (American Graffiti), 126 Lynd, Robert and Helen (Middletown), 94–98, 181nn18–19 Main Street, U.S.A. (Disney): capitalist fantasy materialized, 135–137; compared to Greenfield Village, 77–78; and corporate souls, 157; domestic tourism, 79–81; global locations, 136; image of order, 135, 187n1; and Marceline, MI, 78, 179n14; national identity, 6, 168n12; and New Urbanism, 141–146; as space of community, 50, 179n13; symbol of the past, 12–13, 170nn30–31; The Truman Show as, 139–140; village imaginary, 76; and Wall Street binary, 14–15, 87; Walmart as, 152–154. See also museums Manuel Dominguez High School, Compton, California, 101, 105, 181–182nn1–2 mapping, 53–56, 56–63, 57f, 176n2, 187n28 Marceline, Missouri, 78, 179n14 Marchand, Roland, 156–157 Marion, Ohio, 13, 68 Marshall, Alex, 143–144

Martí, José, 10, 169n24 Marx, Karl, 21, 53, 169n25, 170n28; and Friedrich Engels, 21, 26, 53, 60–61, 71, 169n25, 169n28, 177n7 Marx, Leo, 58, 62, 176n3, 177n9 Massey, Doreen, 164 Masters, Edgar Lee (Spoon River Anthology), 38, 39 McCain, John, 14 McHale, Brian, 125, 186n21 McKinley, William, 56, 63–67, 76, 108 McMurtry, Larry (The Last Picture Show), 4 media: on Seaside, FL, 142; on death of small town, 4–5; examples of 1950s small town imaginary in, 117; on McKinley 1896 election, 64; reception of Middletown, 94–95; reception of Our Town, 102, 105; small-town film genre, 126; texts and genre resources, 19; use of Main Street– Wall Street binary, 15; Walmart in, 150– 151, 153, 155; in Wilson–Harding 1920 campaigns, 67–68. See also literature, discourse of small town; popular culture Metalious, Grace (Peyton Place), 7, 13, 92, 117, 120–121, 125, 180nn9–10, 185n13 Mitford, Mary (Our Village), 54–55 modernism, 39, 59, 127 modernity: and anachronism, 115, 119; and commodity village, 78–79; and concentration camp, 186n20; death of small town in, 5, 28–31, 95–97, 168n9; definition, 183n15; island forms in, 53–56; Main Street modernity, 75; Our Town and globalization, 106–107, 108–111, 112, 183n16; proliferation of small town, 13; small town central to, 36; urban role, 11, 169n28; violence of, 22 (see also violence). See also automodernity; Bildungsroman; capitalism; postmodernism Monroe Doctrine, 109–110, 184n26 More, Thomas (Utopia), 25 Moreton, Bethany E., 150–151, 153–154, 156 Moretti, Franco, 40–41, 51, 53–56 Morris, Edmund (Dutch), 148–149, 188n20 Morrison, Toni, 98, 180n6, 181n23 Muncie, Indiana, 94, 181n18 museums, 1–2, 4, 76, 81, 135, 155, 156, 167n3, 179n16. See also Greenfield Village, Dearborn; Main Street, U.S.A. (Disney)

index / 221 National Main Street Program, 144–149 national narratives: of car trip, 79; “colonial town” (Smith), 26–27; common space of, 2, 50–51, 167n2; death of the small town, 3–5, 168n8–9; definitions of “nation,” 9; empire versus Main Street, 16–18; in fictional village, 77–79; Our Town (Wilder), 111, 112–113; of small town losing identity, 95–97; in Wilson–Harding 1920 campaigns, 67–69. See also nation forms nation forms: anachronistic, 10–15; form over content, 21; modern nation’s need for, 169n18; Our Town (Wilder), 102, 104–105, 183nn10–11; small town America, 6–9, 34, 37–38, 94–98, 99, 173n24; small town as, 169n22; suburbia, 45, 176n21; in Tocqueville, 32–34; of U.S. imperialism, 27, 35–36. See also island communities, small towns as; national narratives Negri, Antonio, 72, 179n11 New England village, 7–8, 27, 82–83, 168n16 New Orleans, Louisiana, 163–164 New Urbanism, 141–144, 188n11 normalcy (norms), 16, 46, 50, 68, 89, 95, 103, 105, 117, 121, 125, 136, 138, 147, 186n23 nostalgia for dominant small town, 99, 126, 168n9, 183n14, 186n26. See also dominant small town Obama, Barack, 14 Operation Main Street (Walmart), 156 Orlando, Florida, 142, 144 Palin, Sarah, 14, 170n33 pastoral (trope), 58–59, 62–63, 68, 79–81, 100, 176nn3–4, 177n9, 180n13, 185n5 Pease, Donald, 17, 18, 31, 169n17, 171n39, 173n18 Peyton Place. See Metalious, Grace Pinsky, Robert, 98–100, 181nn24–25 popular culture: Hollywood films, 4, 13, 79, 98, 99, 120, 149, 181n24, 186n26; Kinsey Report, 120–121; National Main Street Program, 145–149; Our Town productions, 101–102, 104–105; smalltown literary genre, 13, 98, 120–121; on

suburbia, 141; and Walmart, 153, 154. See also literature, discourse of small town; media postmodernism, 47–48, 116, 126–127, 186n24; definition, 125, 186nn21–22. See also modernity presidential candidates’ campaigns, 13–14, 56, 63–69, 76, 108–109, 170nn32–33, 177n12, 177n17, 177n20, 177n24, 184n21 psychoanalysis, 121–122, 186nn16–19 Pullman Strike (1894), 65 Quigley, Bill, 163, 190n8 race and racism: and fascism, 88–89, 90, 180n6; in global village, 162; in Middletown study, 97–98, 181n22; narrative of social purity, 74–75, 90– 92, 180n11; neo-racism, 91, 180n8; in Our Town productions, 101, 105; and production of whiteness, 98, 180n10, 183n13, 188n13; repressed history of, 99–100; in Seahaven (Weir), 137; in suburbia, 188n13; in Travels with Charley (Steinbeck), 84–86 railroads, 58–59, 62–63, 177n11 Reagan, Ronald, 13–14, 76, 120, 147–149, 188n20 revolt from the village, 38, 39–40, 58, 66– 67, 90–92, 126, 132, 165, 174n3, 174n5, 175n19. See also death of the small town; urban versus small town Ross, Andrew, 15–16, 142 Rove, Karl, 64–65 rural versus small town, 168n10. See also urban and rural divisions Rushdie, Salman, 51–52 Rybczynksi, Witold, 2, 142 sacred spaces, 23–27, 38, 172nn4–6. See also island communities, small towns as Said, Edward, 23, 107–108, 167n4, 184n19 Salinas, California, 83–84, 86 Sauk Centre, Minnesota, 83–84 Schmitt, Carl, 123 Schneider, Mary Jo, 153–154 Seaside, Florida, 141–144 Serling, Rod (The Twilight Zone), 185n5 shopping malls, 136–137, 149–158

222 / index Shyamalan, M. Night (The Village), 21–22, 171n1 small town–big city binary, 3–4, 14–15, 49–50. See also urban versus small town small towns: terminology, 6, 167n7, 168n10, 168nn14–15. See also dominant small town; island communities, small towns as Smith, Neil, 16, 107, 160 Smith, Page, 11–12, 25–27, 28, 92–93, 172n11, 180n11, 181n21 Smithsonian National Museum of American History, 1–2, 167n3 Spain, 10, 22–23, 88, 173n16 Spivak, Gayatri, 160 Spoon River. See Masters, Edgar Lee Standard Oil, 61 Steinbeck, John (Travels with Charley), 81–86 Stowe, Harriet Beecher (“Uncle Lot”), 7, 8 studies of U.S. small towns: historical, 25–27, 92–93, 180n11, 181n21; New Urbanism, 142–143; sociological, 94–98 suburbia, 45, 50, 141, 188n9, 188nn12–13 Tarkington, Booth (The Magnificent Ambersons), 73–75, 179n12 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 31–34, 112, 173n18, 173n21 tourist fictional small towns, 79–81; Celebration, FL, 143–144; National Main Street Program, 144–149; Sauk Centre, MN, 83–84; in a white nation, 86. See also Greenfield Village, Dearborn; Main Street, U.S.A. (Disney) travel guides and travelogues, 79–86 Turner, Frederick, 35, 173n25 Twain, Mark, 188n18; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 48, 146–147; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 7, 14, 48, 148, 176n24, 188n19; Pudd’nhead Wilson, 100, 181n24; “The War Poem,” 184n24 urban and rural divisions, 11, 58–61, 169n28 urban versus small town: and automodernity, 73–75; city as symbol of the future, 11, 169nn26–27; in film, 70, 73–75; population, 6, 45, 168n10,

175n18, 177n16; rural versus small town, 168n10; in Winesburg, Ohio (S. Anderson), 40–47, 175nn16–17. See also revolt from the village; small town–big city binary U.S. empire: abandoned by, 163–164, 190n8; Americans in denial of, 107, 111, 113–114, 124–125, 128, 184n2, 184n19, 184n23; and anti-imperialism, 108–109, 184n24; avoidance practices of, 162–163; capitalism’s role, 170n35; and Fordism, 72–73, 178n8; as global, 127, 187n33; in global village imaginary, 162; ideological history, 22–23; innocent island community, 3, 31, 165; internal and external imperialism, 109–110, 184nn22–23; in The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury), 128–130, 187n31; and national identity, 15–17, 171nn37–41; Our Town and globalization, 102, 107–108, 108–111; small town central to, 27, 116; small town chronotope, 119; in Time Out of Joint (Dick), 115–125; in The Truman Show (Weir), 138–140; versus U.S. small town, 173n23; village’s role in history of, 34–36, 173n25. See also capitalism; globalization; island communities, small towns as U.S. exceptionalism, 3, 5, 6, 16, 17, 23, 26, 27, 28, 31, 34, 51, 88, 110, 165 utopias, 24, 25, 30, 52, 99, 135; and distopias, 72 Van Doren, Carl, 38 Veblen, Thorstein, 10, 132–133 village versus small town, 6–7, 16, 28–31, 54–55, 172n13; terminology, 168n14 violence: of empire, 110; erased and externalized, 146, 158, 189n30; of modernity, 22; repressed in small town, 99, 133–134, 149; in utopias, 25 Wall Street and Main Street binary, 3–4, 14–15, 87 Walmart, 149–158, 189nn21–27 Walton, Sam, 151, 153–154, 155 Watts, Steven, 76, 135, 179n14 Wayside Inn, Sudbury, 75–76 Weir, Peter (The Truman Show), 137–140, 149, 188nn8–9

index / 223 Wilder, Thornton (Our Town): as an educator, 182n4; archive in Grover’s Corners, 104–108, 110–111, 182n8; historicized, 107, 108, 113, 114, 181n29, 183n14, 183n17; ideological success of play, 6, 111–114; most produced play, 13, 101–102, 104–105, 182nn2–3; as “our nation,” 8; pre-automobile, 70; in Reagan’s biography, 149; social reproduction in, 105, 183n12; space of community, 50; and U.S. imperialism, 108–111 Williams, Raymond, 5, 9, 168n9, 169n23 Wilson, Woodrow, 34–35, 37, 67–69

Winthrop, John, 27, 172n10 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 16, 170n35 world literature, 61, 177n7 World War I, 56, 60, 67–69, 75, 91, 104– 106, 113, 177n26 World War II, 19, 114, 141, 157, 170n35, 184n31 Wright, Richard (Black Boy), 39 xenophobia, 74–75, 93 Young, Iris Marion, 94, 181nn14–15 Žižek, Slavoj, 22, 93–94, 171n1, 172n2

About the Author

Ryan Poll teaches in the English Department at Northeastern Illinois University. His next project, entitled Narrating Oil, collects and analyzes literary and cultural texts from multiple geographies, including the United States, Mexico, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, to make visible the hidden, transnational pipelines that connect and enable the narratives, values, and knowledge regimes of the “long petromodernity.”