The Two Faces of American Freedom

Afterword: Medium America and the grounds of a transnational history of farm media

“…In all, the history of US agriculture is another name for the rugged, even ruthless development, creation, and shaping of surplus stores of landed calories, fuel, and life: to that end, perhaps, the United States may yet acknowledge that freedom, perhaps, its most contested and communicated value globally, was first given meaning by Black Americans once enslaved in the name of extracting profit from the soil of sugar and cotton. The story of American progress traces its roots to the lives of rural Black Americans such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Fannie Lou Hamer, and so many other authors of American freedom began their lives working fields as enslaved people or sharecroppers (Baptist, 2014;Berry, 2017;Johnson, 2013;Rana, 2014)-and the Filipino farm workers championed by Cezar Chavez and Mexican National Farmworkers Association in California sharpens questions for whom, exactly, American freedom tolls. Now, we arrive at what this afterword dubs the transnational problems of "medium America" in agricultural media studies: by "medium America," we mean to identify a territory of no less than 40% of non-coastal North American landmass bounded by the Rockies and Appalachian mountains running from central Canada through the center of the United States into central Mexico (and beyond), and dub this vague geographic swath "medium" in reference both to its central status between coasts and its curious doubled role in media and communication, where its media contributions are at once routinely sidelined and highly generative.…”

Systemic Hypocrisy in United States Foreign Policy

“…This arbitrary application of ethics in US foreign policy did not suddenly appear in recent decades, as shown by the Bush administration's war on terror or the intensified drone warfare during the Obama era. Rather, as a constitutive feature of systemic hypocrisy, the arbitrary application of ethics in foreign policy can be traced as early as the founding of the American nation and even up to the ascent of the United States as a global power in the mid-twentieth century (Rana, 2014). It is illustrated by the transatlantic slavery vis-à-vis the crucial role of southern slaveholders during the early years of United States foreign policy (Karp, 2016) and the violent conquest of the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the early nineteenth century (Juan, 2007;Rodriguez, 2009).…”

Whitman’s Undemocratic Vistas: Mortal Anxiety, National Glory, White Supremacy

“…Democratic Vistas makes no mention of the fact that such expansion routinely entailed Indigenous death and displacement. Nowhere do we find accounts of the public and private settler violence, the spread of Euro-American disease, and the decimation of economically essential wildlife (Blackhawk 2006;Frymer 2017;Rana 2010).…”