By Andrew Friedman
The capital of the U.S. Empire after global conflict II used to be now not a urban. It was once an American suburb. during this cutting edge and well timed background, Andrew Friedman chronicles how the CIA and different nationwide protection associations created a U.S. imperial domestic entrance within the suburbs of Northern Virginia. during this covert capital, the suburban panorama supplied a canopy for the workings of U.S. imperial strength, which formed household suburban existence. The Pentagon and the CIA outfitted of the biggest place of work structures within the state there in the course of and after the warfare that anchored a brand new imperial tradition and social international.
As the U.S. increased its energy in another country via constructing roads, embassies, and villages, its topics additionally arrived within the covert capital as actual property brokers, householders, developers, and landscapers who developed areas and residing monuments that either nurtured and critiqued postwar U.S. international coverage. Tracing the relationships between American brokers and the migrants from Vietnam, El Salvador, Iran, and in different places who settled within the southwestern suburbs of D.C., Friedman tells the tale of a spot that recasts rules approximately U.S. immigration, citizenship, nationalism, worldwide interconnection, and moral accountability from the post-WW2 interval to the current. commencing a brand new window onto the intertwined background of the yank suburbs and U.S. overseas coverage, Covert Capital also will supply readers a vast interdisciplinary and infrequently superb figuring out of the way U.S. family and worldwide histories intersect in lots of contexts and at many scales.
Listen to Friedman speak about Covert Capital at the KPFA (Berkeley, CA) express Against the Grain
“Loaded with attractive insights and engaging revelations a couple of wooded swath of land simply outdoor the nation's capital, Covert Capital is a version of interdisciplinary scholarship, unearthing the startling connections among panorama, empire and conspiracy.” —Eric Avila, writer of Popular tradition within the Age of White Flight: worry and fable in Suburban Los Angeles
“Brilliantly charting the myriad corridors stretching among Northern Virginia and the far-flung corners of U. S. intervention, Andrew Friedman’s Covert Capital introduces readers to a few of mid-to-late twentieth-century suburbia’s open secrets and techniques: autocratic allies ensconced in leafy cul-de-sacs, different nations’ futures labored out at poolside, cocktail chatter crossing CIA resources with actual property resources. In problematizing the bounds among the international and the family, and the political and the private, and in its sophisticated, interdisciplinary readings of spatial perform and architectural shape, Covert Capital is vital interpreting for students trying to interpret the landscapes of yank worldwide power.” —Paul A. Kramer, writer of The Blood of presidency: Race, Empire, the U.S. and the Philippines
“In this hugely cutting edge heritage of the U.S. empire, Andrew Friedman rigorously delineates the suburban structure that formed while it camouflaged America's worldwide achieve. In tracing the emergence of Northern Virginia because the nation's ‘covert capital,’ he relocates the international within the household, displaying the neighborhood resources of imperial strength and the quotidian making of its multi-cultural brokers. Ever aware of the ironies of empire, Friedman deepens our figuring out of yank strength by means of revealing the fabric designs of its problematic disavowals.” —Vicente L. Rafael, writer of The Promise of the overseas: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation within the Spanish Philippines
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Extra resources for Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia
Example text
Imperialism in Vietnam back to 1950, I then follow the projects wrought by the well-known CIA operative Edward Lansdale and members of his team over the next two and a half decades, which brought Northern Virginia into a deep transnational intimacy, to use a conceptual field explored by Ann Laura Stoler,76 with Vietnam. S. shadowed transnationalism, underwritten by empire, that literally took place locally between South Vietnam and Northern Virginia in houses, offices, leisure landscapes, and other social spaces.
Almost immediately, political DC followed her. As if to lure them, the swimming pool was completed and used first. Eleanor hired young modernist architect Nicholas Satterlee for the house because she “expected to have a lot to say about the design,” and had balked at the expertise of Jackson Place architect Gertrude Sawyer, who had designed her house in the city. Undoubtedly influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright and modernist American architecture interpenetrated by nature, she wanted the house “embracing” the pool, creating a social flow between the two spaces.
It wasn’t that there was no free will. ” In its etymological relationship to habitation, the habitus had a distinctive spatial component. . ”70 Seeing the Northern Virginia landscape, or the stretched-out safe house that is the landscape, as a habitus for the agents of the covert capital offers a powerful model with which to study the repetitions of behavior, explanatory 22 • I n t roduc t ion mechanisms, thought processes, intimate relationships, and spatial choices of these agents alongside the built environments they produced in Northern Virginia.