Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict

by Phil A. Neel (Author)

Over the last forty years, the human landscape of the United States has been fundamentally transformed. The metamorphosis 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, populated by towering grain threshers and hunched farmworkers, where laborers drawn from every corner of the world crowd into factories and “fulfillment centers” and where cold storage trailers are filled with fentanyl-bloated corpses when the morgues cannot contain the dead.

Urgent and unsparing, this book opens our eyes to America’s new heart of darkness. Driven by an ever-expanding socioeconomic crisis, America’s class structure is recomposing itself in new geographies of race, poverty, and production. The center has fallen. Riots ricochet from city to city led by no one in particular. Anarchists smash financial centers as a resurgent far right builds power in the countryside. Drawing on his direct experience of recent popular unrest, from the Occupy movement to the wave of riots and blockades that began in Ferguson, Missouri, Phil A. Neel provides a close-up view of this landscape in all its grim but captivating detail. Inaugurating the new Field Notes series, published in association with the Brooklyn Rail, Neel’s book tells the intimate story of a life lived within America’s hinterland.

Review
“Imagine Patrick Leigh Fermor and Karl Marx on a road trip through the hubs and corridors, empty rural tracts and dreary outer suburbs of rust-belt America in search of a central authority to whom one could lodge a complaint, and find no one home—in fact, home itself gone. Neel takes us on a breathless tour of ‘economic geography’ . . . all the while asking where, under capitalism, the United States and the world is going. Ambitious, polemical, brilliant, this book reminds us of the very urgency of his question.”
(Arlie Hochschild, author of the National Book Award finalist "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right")

“Neel’s dazzling journeys through the burned-over landscapes of end-time capitalism . . . compel us to rethink what class conflict looks like not only in America, but around the world. The exhausted shibboleths of what’s left of the Left vaporize in the heat of his prose.”
(Steve Fraser, author of "The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power")

About the Author
Phil A. Neel was raised in a trailer in the Siskiyou Mountains on the California-Oregon border. He writes regularly on diverse topics, including global trends in riots and strikes, and currently lives in Seattle.