Meat, Guns, and God: Ruralscapes of the "Great American" Road

A trend exists in linguistic landscape research to examine urban spaces. Interest in urban spaces is a logical expression of ongoing migratory trends.  While such research is helpful in advancing scholarship, there remains a... [ view full abstract ]

A trend exists in linguistic landscape research to examine urban spaces. Interest in urban spaces is a logical expression of ongoing migratory trends.  While such research is helpful in advancing scholarship, there remains a need to examine how rural areas participate in the discursive construction of society. To address the recent urbanization of sociolinguistics, this paper examines how roadside billboards in rural areas of the United States discursively construct homeland messages.  Using discourse analysis and drawing from linguistic landscape scholarship, the study explores how roadside billboards draw from banal and sentimental homeland messages to forward a contentious issue, support a political candidate, and imagine a collective American identity.  These discourses feed into, and are a part of, a larger network of ideologies that fabricate authentic notions of nationhood.  The findings demonstrate that roadside billboards reflect a past time that flattens the cultural diversity of a nation into a static national image.