Land, God and Guns

- Blurb -

This book is an antidote to the formsof American nationalism, masculinity, exceptionalism, and self-anointed prowessthat are currently being flexed on the global stage.Through a fascinating combination of ethnographic researchacross seven US states and the application of postcolonial, anti-racist,feminist and poststructuralist theories, Land, God, and Guns revealshow time-honoured rites of passage associated with taken-for-granted notions ofmanhood in the American Heartland are constitutive of a constellation ofcolonial worldviews, capitalist logics, gender essentialisms, ethnocentricreligious beliefs, jingoistic populism, racial animus, and embodied violence. A constellation that, within the US, upholds a heteropatriarchaland racist ordering of life that both privileges and ultimately damages itsmain proliferators - white settler men. This is a detailed work that at once unravels rural whitesettler masculinity and the US state at their roots, whilst demonstrating whyany analysis of the cultural production and social practice of masculinity inthe United States must take into account the country's historical trajectoriesof imperialism, land dispossession, nation-state building, enslavement,extractive accumulation and valorisation of masculinist assertions ofdominance.