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The Art and Science of Literary Geography: Practical Criticism in "America's Wasteland"

A few years ago, while John Beck was analyzing the literature of the military’s dark acts in the American desert (including the internment of Japanese American citizens, the confiscation of tribal lands for military use, and the toxic landscapes created by nuclear testing), geographer Trevor Paglen was tracking the mysterious comings and goings of unmarked planes to secret military sites in the Southwest from a hotel room overlooking Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport. A literary scholar, Beck sought to create a “counterhistory” to the mythic history of the American West as a vast open land of American freedom (7). Beck sought to tell the “erased” stories of people who have been the targets of America’s “dirty wars” (that is, “not fought by the rules”; the often illegal covert acts of violence by the US) that have turned the American West into a perpetual battleground (13). For his part, Paglen sought to create what we might call a counter-geography to reveal that covert world. Indeed, such efforts by Paglen and others helped to expose the CIA-backed “rendition” flights from Southwest military bases that moved captives to remote prisons around the world (Blank Spots 33–46). Beck and Paglen were studying two sides of the same fence, as it were: life inside and outside the cordoned off areas that protect the huge, secret, military bases that cover over 30 million acres in California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico (Beck 34– 35). In books published in the same year, 2009, both Beck and Paglen argue that those sites have come to define the modern US. Of particular interest to each is the flagrant secrecy that has