Corey Dolgon

God is in the House, Nick Cave’s lyric investigation of the small town landscape etched out by a gentry’s collective memory of big city fears, was a steady compliment to my reading of Corey Dolgon’s The End of the Hamptons. Cave, a songwriter, allows himself the poetic imagery and a collective first-person “we” to make some of the points given more ample and sophisticated argumentation in Dolgon’s specific scenes from the Hamptons. For Cave: “We’ve bred all our kittens white / so you can see them in the night” clearly referencing the obscure but glaring location of white supremacy in the gentry’s memory. For Dolgon it’s a well developed analysis that spans many stories of conquest on the East End of Long Island by white conquerors through many generations of colonizers. Cave and Dolgon tell a similar story, illuminating how the politics of social memory enable a race or class to assert their legitimacy for inscribing physical marks of power and domination on the land that, right or wrong, is a home to lots of different cultural folk that are always coming and sometimes going. This politics of memory is not engaged through the nefarious manufacture of opinion in textbooks and corporate media. Sure and obvious as that exists, Dolgon (and for that matter, Cave) don’t ultimately locate the power of memory in that tired construction. Instead, it is in the nuanced remembrance of the land itself for that which it is not: an unlocatable nostalgia for, among other things, a “quality of life” allowing scenic views during leisurely strolls to the mailbox and ruralized glitz at polo games. A desire to be surrounded small-town identification and charm. It is in the relationship settlers have to their homesteads and their sense of identity as the legitimate residential citizenry of a very special place. It results in new generation Hamptoneers speaking and demanding their own history, sometimes ignoble to the hard facts buried in the soil of the East Island. End of the Hamptons is about trailing a social history-in-the-making that constantly (re)creates very identifiable effects on the Hamptons. And it is about how strong-arm power and the soft batting eyelashes of city-planned aesthetics determine whose Hamptons is allowed to survive in the milieu of human relationships that make up its small society.



The “whose Hamptons” question for Dolgon is largely mediated by ethnicity and class with other forms of privilege and power receiving scant attention. One, for instance, won’t find much on “whose gender” the Hamptons is or “whose sexual-preference” the Hamptons is (though we may be rest assured that it is the hetero-man’s version of the Hamptons that prevails in the political economy). Still, the ethnicity and class questions provide enough substance to drive an important close reading. In End of the Hamptons we learn how groups, often relying on a strident line of ethnicity and class, form identities related to the use and possession of space. Shall we invest in a polo field for white upper-class prestige or a soccer field for Latino poverty-class community? Shall we endure the truly native population empowering themselves by building a casino or shall we listen more closely to their needs only to prevent its construction? Running through all the scenes of class struggle we see the contradictions of the urban-riche wanting to place the rural (or perhaps the “anti-urban”). The rural and “quality of life” become aestheticized for the urban conquerors who politically and culturally want to make the Hamptons into a particular form of beauty that is ultimately for the gentry and at the expense of the others.



At its best, for many white homeowners, the “small town” has most recently become a place to puke up the façade of white Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post faux-populism from the refused digestion of the uncertainty-saturated landscapes of the city. The small town is a place where white folk can go and feel comfortable as a white bourgeois community. According to Dolgon, the Hamptons has always promised the conqueror the respite he desired from the corporate battlefields of New York urbanity. From Whitman, to bohemian, to the latest ladies and gentlemen, all have bestowed glory on the natural “anti-urban” beauty of the area but not without first changing what nature meant and then demanding the right to determine how the land, and also the people, would be used to construct that meaning. The conqueror has never wanted a place-to-get-away without a latte, or landscaping, or the excess largess of life that white US American economic mobility offers. In the most recent generation of Hamptoneers—those setting up McMansions for permanent residence—the people themselves become accents to the landscape. The polo game merely provides the occasion for celebrity stars and cultural commodities in the VIP audience tent to blind out the athletic talent on the polo field. The baymen fisherman, a dying species of human livelihood, cease being human beings and instead become the lampshades that accent the furniture of the Hamptons’ small-town historical feel. The Latino day laborers, whom the new colonizers depend on for accoutrement pretty lawns, fresh cups of coffee, and smooth concrete, themselves become the nuisance insofar as they have a socialized impact on the community. So it goes that a white-upper-class Hamptons attempts to command the political and cultural landscape through their racialized fears and consumptive desires. But of course not completely. The disenfranchised grow louder and Dolgon’s book picks up where Cave’s song leaves off. Dolgon too tells the story of the victorious and not victorious struggles of human beings trying to live with community and dignity, not to mention housing and food amid the grandeur of a ruralizing white cosmopolitan regality that will never be open to them. These stories involve victories in union struggles as well as victories in building an immigrant soccer society where people can recognize their own celebrities for identification instead of relying on a VIP audience. Dolgon shows that, despite the conspicuous spectacle of the Hamptons, the power of paradise isn’t really there and complex relationships will continue to exist and struggles within these relationships will not easily be put to an end. The Hamptons aren’t what they’re remembered to be either now or in their past. Cave reaches the same conclusion in a vacantly theocratic end to his song. God winds up not being in the house at all. All that remains is a vestige of corrupted feel-good memory and the gentry’s very pathetic and fearful insistence “Oh we wish He would come out”. In the case of the Hamptons, as the kings move to the country, Dolgon refuses to allow them to forget their selective memory’s violent relationship to human history.… (más)