Dirty Wars

Since World War II, the American West has become the nation’s military arsenal, proving ground, and disposal site. Through a wide-ranging discussion of recent literature produced in and about the West, Dirty Wars explores how the region’s iconic landscapes, invested with myths of national virtue, have obscured the West’s crucial role in a post–World War II age of “permanent war.” In readings of western—particularly southwestern—literature, John Beck provides a historically informed account of how the military-industrial economy, established to protect the United States after Pearl Harbor, has instead produced western waste lands and “waste populations” as the enemies and collateral casualties of a permanent state of emergency. Beck offers new readings of writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Don DeLillo, Rebecca Solnit, Julie Otsuka, and Terry Tempest Williams. He also draws on a variety of sources in history, political theory, philosophy, environmental studies, and other fields. Throughout Dirty Wars, he identifies resonances between different experiences and representations of the West that allow us to think about internment policies, the manufacture of atomic weapons, the culture of Cold War security, border policing, and toxic pollution as part of a broader program of a sustained and invasive management of western space.

"This meticulous, well-informed study should prove valuable to multiple fields, including American and western American literatures, American studies, and ecocriticism."—S. K. Bernardin, CHOICE, "Dirty Wars is a profoundly ambitious book showcasing John Beck's considerable scholarly and critical abilities."—Bill D. Toth, Western American Literature, "Dirty Wars should be of interest to readers in a variety of specialties, not only contemporary American literature but also environmental history, military history, Western history, cultural studies, and, of course, American studies."—Michael L. Johnson, American Studies

John Beck is a senior lecturer in American literature at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. He is the coeditor, with David Holloway, of American Visual Cultures and the author of Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics.