White Trash Anxiety: Class, Race, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Gordon Pym

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-142
Author(s):  
Janie Hinds
Keyword(s):  
PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. Iaccino ◽  
Jennifer Dondero

Author(s):  
Dale Hudson

This chapter explores whiteness’s purported expansion through multiculturalism after Civil Rights and the Immigration Act of 1965. By yoking the inclusivity of multiculturalism and exclusivity of whiteness, multicultural whiteness sustains white privilege without acknowledging it, granting conditional or provisional inclusion to select nonwhite groups. It becomes a performative category (“white-identified-ness”) questioned in films like Blacula (1972), Ganja and Hess (1973), Martin (1976), Fright Night (1985), The Lost Boys (1987), Near Dark (1987), Interview with the Vampire (1994), and The Addiction (1995). Classical Hollywood whiteness is transformed by greater emphasis on so-called national values—individualism, consumerism, patriotism, secularism, and willful amnesia—that sustain foundational myths of a nation of immigrants, land of opportunity, and beacon of democracy. Within the proliferation of representations of a multicultural United States, films question limitations on political representation for anyone not identifying—or being identified—with whiteness, including so-called white trash.


Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Kenneth Nichols
Keyword(s):  

Every era has had its scourge, contagion, pestilence, or plague. And every age has had to deal with those problems in the best way it could at the time. Edgar Allan Poe creates for us a leader whose method of “dealing” was, at best, ill-considered.


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