Hinterland: America's New Landscape of Class and Conflict

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An exploration of America's declining heartland, the Hinterland.

Over the last forty years, the landscape of the USA has been fundamentally transformed. It is partially visible in the ascendance of glittering coastal hubs for finance, infotech and the so-called `creative class'. But this is only the tip of an economic iceberg, the bulk of which lies in the darkness of the declining heartland or on the dimly lit fringe of sprawling cities. This is America's hinterland. Drawing on his direct experience of recent popular unrest, Phil A. Neel provides a close-up and intimate view of this landscape in all its grim but captivating detail.

'Imagine Patrick Leigh Fermor and Karl Marx on a road trip through the hubs and corridors of rust-belt America...Ambitious, polemical, brilliant.' Arlie Hochschild, author ofStrangers in Their Own

Reviews

"Tired of hearing from the so-called creative class Frustrated with the complete failure of liberal elites to even comprehend what the problem is Me too. This country, this world, is now utterly shaped by crisis and full of people living on margins--social, economic, and geographic--people who need not romantic elegies, hillbilly or otherwise, but studied attention by those able to understand history and its flows, who can report on the fine-grained life texture and large-scale patterns of populations both excluded from the economy and yet brutally integral to it. Globally, those who suffer most amount to a magnificent and terrible multitude. What is the logic of this crowd Can they revolt against a social order that makes their lives expendable and cheap Neel, in Hinterland, reports from far-flung places where people are forced to make do: a train full of migrant workers in southern China; Ferguson, Missouri; Jail Cell, USA. Neel writes in a visceral and stunning style of the slow apocalypse he everywhere finds, and he applies to these encounters a most unusual rigor. Hinterland is the geography lesson I've been looking for all year."--Rachel Kushner, author of "The Mars Room" "Bookforum, "Best Books of the Year""
"This provocative book is a complicated study of life in deindustrialized zones across the country, with implications for similar areas around the globe. By examining the human and geographical byproducts of an economic order in which 'dispossession occurs across decades, ' Neel elaborates on the reasons why hinterland populations resist (and resent) global systems of power. As a result, Hinterland offers a way of thinking about regional life and culture that is not beholden to traditional boundaries."-- "Middle West Review"
"Neel draws on his personal experience of precarious, low-wage labor to highlight the new economic and social geography that global capitalism is shaping. A new entry in the Reaktion Books series Field Notes, which examines 'today's global turmoil as it unfolds, ' Neel's Hinterland analyzes the increasing agglomeration of wealth and opportunity in a few key urban centers, the resulting hollowing out of rural areas, and the political consequences and opportunities these changes present, chiefly in the United States. Against the decades of global economic restructuring under neoliberalism, with its massive upward redistributions of wealth and widening inequality, something has to give. Neel emphasizes the anger and violence roiling beneath the surface of our daily lives. Whether the pending rebellion can be harnessed to create a more just order or will fuel reactionary, ethnonationalist ends remains to be seen. What seems obvious to Neel, however, is that the center cannot hold."-- "H-Socialisms"

Author Bio

Phil A. Neel was raised in a mobile home in the Siskiyou Mountains, on the border of California and Oregon. He writes regularly on diverse topics and currently lives in Seattle.