Styling sovereignty

The following essay takes account of Gertrude Stein's noted interwar affiliations with right-wing politics not by examining her connections to the Vichy Regime but by taking stock of her attitudes towards the New Deal and the American Indian sovereignty movement of the 1930s. Her Geographical History of America can be read as a new artistic constitution of the USA, establishing a nationalist counter-narrative amid the tribal and socially democratic reorganisations of the Indian New Deal. After flying over the American interior in 1935, Stein increasingly saw the absolute designs of the American nation state as an aesthetic masterpiece, to be restored and preserved by a high genius of her modernist writing. Comparing Stein's geography to National Geographic war stories, and placing her amid the technological upheaval of the twentieth century, this essay closely examines an alternative style of political history as constituted by one of America's most distinctive writers

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