Split Screen Nation proposes that our visions of the American West and the American South must be thought in relation to each other if we are to fully understand the marks both have left on popular ways of imagining the United States. Analyzing an eclectic range of films and related screen media from the decades following World War II, the book argues that conflicted sentiments about the nation’s most paradoxical narratives—namely, “land of the free”/land of slavery, conquest, and segregation—were mediated by an implicit, at times explicit, opposition between the screen West and the screen Sou ... More

Split Screen Nation proposes that our visions of the American West and the American South must be thought in relation to each other if we are to fully understand the marks both have left on popular ways of imagining the United States. Analyzing an eclectic range of films and related screen media from the decades following World War II, the book argues that conflicted sentiments about the nation’s most paradoxical narratives—namely, “land of the free”/land of slavery, conquest, and segregation—were mediated by an implicit, at times explicit, opposition between the screen West and the screen South. If one of these imagined places, we know, was a wildly popular space of possibility for a triumphant breed of national heroes (even when that breed was in doubt), the other appeared simultaneously as a remote place of category crisis that sought to contain the most perversely deviant of (national) subjects. At the same time, the book reveals that this opposition was unstable, dynamic, and dramatically shifting in the postwar era, and in ways that have marked popular ways of knowing and feeling the United States ever since. To understand this history, the book also argues, we need to consider appearances of the West and the South across a diverse field of US screen culture—a field that in the 1950s included not only Hollywood cinema and television, but also educational and corporate films, home movies, and military and civil defense films featuring “tests” of the atomic bomb in the desert West.