Imagining the Heartland

"The heartland isn’t a region. It’s a race. That’s the urgent lesson of Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno’s Imagining the Heartland. The stories we tell about the Midwest––stories of blandness, averageness, of life in Lake Wobegon––inform who is seen as virtuous, normal, and American. In a time of sensational acts of white entitlement, Halvorson and Reno have written an absorbing book about how images of boring white folks secure white dominance." ––Joseph Darda, author of How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America

"A wonderful interdisciplinary trek. Halvorson and Reno unpack the performative aspects of the Midwest not just to explore how the Midwest is represented in various genres and cultural works but to delve into what is being 'done' by the strategic invention of the Midwest as a quintessential White American landscape."—Sujey Vega, author of Latino Heartland: Of Borders and Belonging in the Midwest