SEPARATION ANXIETIES - Lsu - Louisiana State University

discussing what a particular work represents as the central and oppressive power structure in its
version of America.
Likewise, the terms “separatism,” “separatist,” and “separatist community” will herein
refer to some fictional community or its members, who are isolated—often geographically, at
least philosophically—from that work’s dominant community. Each chapter examines certain
kinds of dominance as they are represented by an American artist or artists, what kind of
separatist community these writers and filmmakers imagine as responses to a given form of
dominance, and when and how these communities succeed and fail. Through this study, I hope to
demonstrate how some American writers and filmmakers reveal the increasing complexities of
traditionally simple concepts. By doing so, I hope to enhance existing scholarship on fictional
communities, on these particular works, and on the general concept of separatism. Examining
fictional conceptions of these real-world concerns is an important step in understanding the
changes sweeping through American literary and filmic art in the late 20 th century and beyond.
This task is important because these texts could function as attempts to understand certain kinds
of communities, to celebrate alternative forms of empowerment, and to explore the difficulties
inherent in achieving and maintaining new power structures.
Several projects in various academic and scientific fields have focused on different kinds
of communities, either actual or literary. Many of the ideas disseminated in these works are
useful when studying fictional separatist communities. One might wonder, for instance, why
artists might be interested in representing separatist communities in the first place. One possible
answer is that they are interested in the sweeping and global changes referenced above. Another
possibility is suggested by the make-up of the United States itself—a single country consisting of
individual states, with each state broken down into counties or parishes, cities, towns, and
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