Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia

Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia Andrew Friedman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

Covert Capital is a fascinating transnational history of the postwar period that juxtaposes the local American middle-class suburban landscape and architecture with international space and empire in the decolonizing world. With Covert Capital, historian Andrew Friedman decenters the nation-state through landscape. Suburban Northern Virginia is the center for this innovative transnational history of US imperial activities in Vietnam, Iran, and Central America. In the shadow of Washington, the overt capital, the Dulles corridor of Northern Virginia established a "covert capital" of US imperialism and transnational connections. The government edifices of the CIA and the Pentagon, private contractor office buildings, imperial agents' homes, and Dulles International Airport constitute the fixed personal and geopolitical space of the nation-state's "covert capital." Friedman grounds US foreign policy domestically by exploring its human agents and their "imperial repatriation" to the "covert capital": US spies, co conspirator Vietnamese refuge etumed immigrants, Iranian exile immigrants, and Salvadorian migrants. According to Friedman, "the United States did not have just...