Abstract
In Land, God, and Guns, Levi Gahman sets out to do in a book-length treatment what many of us have only done in the margins: he deconstructs the power dynamics of his hometown and the larger region in which it sits. As an insider to this culture, he displays empathy toward but also demands accountability from those he studies and does so by employing a broad range of antiracist, postcolonial, and feminist theories in a critical analysis of the discourses that naturalize and normalize white male settler perspectives and claims to authority.
Though Gahman claims that his theses are “simple,” this is clearly a provocation, since he believes that masculinity needs to be destroyed and “all colonial power, worldviews, and institutions (i.e., colonizers) must be abolished—along with their attendant hierarchies, economics, entitlements, states, statuses, social relations, cultural mores, land claims, holidays, narratives, and moves to innocence” (p. 31). What follows is not a roadmap for how this might be done, but an exposition of the meanings that shape white lives in the Heartland, particularly those that are working-class/working-poor and rural.
The first half of the book is devoted to the theoretical foundations that will allow the reader to understand the empirical evidence presented in the second half, an organization that I found less effective than an interweaving of theory and findings would have been. Nevertheless, once we begin to engage with Gahman’s interviewees, their vision of the world comes to life, and the author’s deployment of postcolonial theory shines, particularly when demonstrating how his respondents think about the indigenous populations that lived in the region prior to forced removal.
When pressed by Gahman to explain their community myths, current locals focus on the early Christians who came to “civilize the Indians,” and they time and again insist that those efforts were from good, moral settlers who were, as one person puts it “simply trying to save people” (p. 107). The earnestness of these explanations and how they obscure the violence and dispossession that followed early pioneers makes clear that whiteness and empire always require a range of actors—from ravaging capitalists and war makers to those who want simple lives and peace—and is normalized through, as Gahman terms them, “moves to innocence.” In this text, no matter their direct role in colonization, all whites (past and present) are “settlers,” and are thus implicated in a range of racialized injustices. The author’s emphasis on the importance of place and colonialism represents an important contribution to the study of whiteness and masculinity.
Gahman’s incisive analysis of discourse as power sits awkwardly alongside his discussion of guns in chapter five, where an otherwise sharp critique stalls. The author starts with an assertion of ambivalence about firearms, but then does little more than document what his respondents said and confirm the existing literature. In the chapter’s conclusion, he writes that what is needed is “a more comprehensive and critical interrogation in what lies at the roots of and reproduces, masculinity, neoliberal ideology, and colonial social relations, particularly with respect to power relations involving race, gender, and the gun” (p. 158). It is a missed opportunity that Gahman did not utilize the existing literature on these topics to do this work as his fluency in post-colonial theory would have been a welcome addition.
The final substantive chapter touches on the meanings of work and heterosexuality and includes one of the more fascinating moments in the book when one of Gahman’s respondents has a very different explanation for why his relationship ended when participating in a focus group than he did during an in-depth interview. It is a stunning moment that reminds the reader that findings are always a product of method and that specificity on the latter makes it much easier to understand the significance of the former.
In the end, Land, God, and Guns is Gahman’s attempt to save his hometown from itself. He wants other white people to be liberated from their destructive paths, to understand that neoliberalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc. do not actually serve them or their communities. And yet one question that I am left with after this global indictment is where do we expect white settler men to go, what should they do, when they discover that all they thought was true and right is wrong? Not everyone is responsible for answering such a question, but this may be one of the key contributions an insider could, and maybe even should make. As I finished the book and revisited Gahman’s theses, I wondered: What is left if everything that makes up a place and a people should be destroyed?