Ambivalence and Resistance in Contemporary Imaginations of US Capitalist Hinterlands

Although conventionally imagined through the registers of the frontier, this chapter asks how the notion of the hinterland facilitates a different political understanding of the rural US West as affected by capitalism. While Phil Neel’s 2018 Hinterland makes the rural visible as an essential node in the infrastructure of global capitalism, this chapter explores how it also marks the rural US West as ruined and vacated of meaningful political resistance. Chloé Zhao’s film Nomadland, through an interlocution of the hinterland with the western and the road movie, imagines resistance in more ambivalent ways that emphasize capitalism’s interwovenness with heteronormativity and settler colonialism. Nevertheless, the affective economies at play in both representations reaffirm a settler colonial logic that erases Indigenous Americans as active political subjects.