Split Screen Nation
Moving Images of the American West and South
Susan Courtney
Reviews and Awards
Winner of the 2018 Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book Award
"Split Screen Nation is a model of rigorous historical scholarship committed to critiquing racist ideology and practices." -- Jennifer Peterson, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies
"Split Screen Nation explores the crucial ideological gains and risks that arise from the imaginary splitting of the nation into West and South, into the screen's realizations of 'national promise' in one landscape and of 'national disgrace' in the other. Susan Courtney brings together varied cultural documents, reading each with subtlety and finesse; along with her expert analyses of key Westerns and Southerns, she studies the filmed record of atomic bomb tests, maps, photographs, advertisements, found footage, and TV. This is a rich, smart, and original interdisciplinary work." -- Steven Cohan, author of Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties and Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical
"This book delivers a genuinely original and insightful rethinking of how a multilayered mediascape shaped the ways in which Americans thought about and imagined the nation's defining regions, identities, and landscapes. Courtney's study of mid-twentieth-century culture takes full advantage of the new tools of twenty-first century historiography. Split Screen Nation reaches broadly to synthesize an impressive variety of cinematic and televisual source material. It deftly demonstrates how popular Hollywood films must be seen as works ever in dialogue with their far more numerous contemporaries--amateur films, home movies, government films, newsreels, local television, sponsored films, and other productions only now being intellectually mapped." -- Dan Streible, New York University