“What I Am Here for Is to Claim My Life”: Life-Writing and Reclaiming the Poor White Self

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-88
Author(s):  
Sarah Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Dorothy Allison ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor White

This chapters examines the work of several poor white life-writers, including Jeanette Walls, Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg and Barbara Robinette Moss. It raises questions about nostalgia, romanticization, and neo-agrarianism as it critically interrogates ideas of the southern community and regional foodways. Through new historicist and postcolonial lenses, it argues that these works often share a counter-historical approach as they seek to talk back against dominant misperceptions about lives shaped by poverty. As it considers representations of welfare and war, it turns to J.D. Vance’s bestselling Hillbilly Elegy to critically interrogate its neoliberal agenda and its place within the poor white sub-genre of life-writing.

Photo-Narratives and the Poor White Self since the FSA

2019 ◽  
pp. 25-62
Author(s):  
Sarah Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Dorothy Allison ◽  
Farm Security Administration ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
Poor White ◽  
The Relationship

After briefly outlining the work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers and writers during the Great Depression, the chapter turns to rephotography projects, namely that of Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, to explore the FSA’s legacy. The chapter interrogates the relationship and tension between aesthetics and activism as it examines several contemporary photo-narratives focused on Appalachia. In addition to critically discussing the work of Appalshop, it questions the representation of the poor in photo-narratives by, amongst others, Shelby Lee Adams, Tim Barnwell and Susan Lipper. The chapter focuses on questions of counter-visuality as it presents contemporary life-writing by writers such as Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, Barbara Robinette Moss and Janisse Ray, as a vehicle for producing counter-visual legacies.

Mobility Stopped in Its Tracks

Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 87-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catharine Coleborne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Medical Institutions ◽  
Poor White ◽  
White Immigrants ◽  
The Many ◽  
Interpretive Framework

This article examines the interpretive framework of “mobility” and how it might usefully be extended to the study of the Australasian colonial world of the nineteenth century, suggesting that social institutions reveal glimpses of (im)mobility. As the colonies became destinations for the many thousands of immigrants on the move, different forms of mobility were desired, including migration itself, or loathed, such as the itinerant lifestyles of vagrants. Specifically, the article examines mobility through brief accounts of the curtailed lives of the poor white immigrants of the period. The meanings of mobility were produced by immigrants' insanity, vagrancy, wandering, and their casual movement between, and reliance on, welfare and medical institutions. The regulation of these forms of mobility tells us more about the contemporary paradox of the co-constitution of mobility and stasis, as well as providing a more fluid understanding of mobility as a set of transfers between places and people.

scholarly journals Levinas, Social Vulnerability, and the Logic of South African Racism

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-101
Author(s):  
Robert Bernasconi
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Vulnerability ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor White ◽  
The Way

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was at the forefront of the promotion of the idea of vulnerability in philosophy. For Levinas, my primary vulnerability concerns not my pain, but my pain at the other’s pain. Vulnerablity also has an ambiguous character in so far as it is not easily separated from my self-absorption in enjoyment. In this paper I show how Levinas’s account can illuminate the way that the idea of vulnerability sometimes operates within racist societies to maintain existing divisions. In particular I focus on the Carnegie Commission’s 1932 study The Poor White Problem in South Africa where concern for the vulnerability of poor whites concealed a tendency to naturalize the vulnerability of South African Blacks. Keywords: Carnegie commission, poor whites, racism, vulnerability, Emmanuel Levinas,South Africa

Boats That Fly

1922 ◽  
Vol 26 (135) ◽  
pp. 108-114
Author(s):  
D. C. M. Hume
Keyword(s):  
Flat Surface ◽  
Lewis Carroll ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor White ◽  
Looking Glass

You all know those jolly words from “ Alice's Adventures through the Looking Glass,” and in a measure we are about to push our way through the melting mirror of hearsay to the strange world of wonderful facts, where boats fly, and men think nothing of the sort of ascent that blew the breath out of the poor White King when he received his first dusting in the air. We will talk, you and I, of shoes for aircraft—ships that fly and sealing wax that guards the secrets that have made the British seaplane the greatest example of its kind in all the wide world.First of all you would like to find out, I know, how aircraft manage to fly at all.You can find that out easily. Take a large box lid or other flat surface, hold it up vertically before you and run across the room with it.“ The time has come, ” the Walrus said,“ To talk of many things ;Of shoes and ships and sealing wax,Of cabbages and kings. ”Lewis Carroll

Poverty, Sterilization, and Eugenics in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road

2002 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAREN A. KEELY
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Behavior ◽  
Family Study ◽  
Rural Poverty ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
White Family ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Erskine Caldwell ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Family ◽  
Poor White

Two primary manifestations of the eugenics movement in America were the involuntary sterilization of certain classes of people, including the mentally ill and disabled and some types of criminals, and the “family study,” genealogical reports that traced criminal behavior, immorality, and mental problems throughout family trees to determine whether the characteristics are inheritable. Both family studies and sterilization proved to be important fodder for American literary authors, who made significant use of the rhetoric of family and propagation. Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road is particularly interesting to read with eugenics in mind, for the 1932 novel is intrinsically bound up with issues of breeding, heredity, and degeneration. Caldwell's text, which he characterized as literary realism, relies not only on the genre of family study in general but more particularly on a study conducted by Caldwell's father in 1928 and published two years later in the journal Eugenics; Ira Caldwell had attempted to rescue a poor white family from what he saw as the conditions of their ongoing degeneracy but was rejected completely by the family, leading to his renunciation of many of his social reform ideals in favor of sterilization programs. Erskine Caldwell drew heavily on his father's failed attempt at reform, and Tobacco Road ultimately argues for the sterilization of Georgia's poor whites, but with the pessimistic caveat that the problems of degeneracy and rural poverty have no final solution. Caldwell's manipulation of his audience, his observation of his father's eugenics experimentation, and his use of extended metaphors, both mechanical and agricultural, for family all create a deeply cynical novel that condemns America's economic modus operandi for the living conditions of the poor but also condemns those poor as being permanently beyond help. In the end, Caldwell argues that the poor – in both money and breeding – will be always with us and that we are doomed to witness the full horror of their degradation without the possibility of either relieving their plight or eradicating them.

scholarly journals Et Tu, Atticus!: The Hero of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and the Cold War

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Akiyoshi Suzuki
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
American South ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
The Poor ◽  
To Kill A Mockingbird ◽  
Poor White ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Cold War

Against the background of the Cold War, this article rethinks the novel (1960) and film (1962) To Kill a Mockingbird, more specifically Atticus Finch’s characterization as the courageous, unblemished defender of an unjustly accused black man in the American South. Because of Atticus’s unrelenting efforts to exonerate Tom Robinson, he has been proclaimed the 20th century’s greatest American movie hero. At a closer look, however, it turns out that, while Atticus fights hard for Tom, he nevertheless, and as a matter of course, abandons the investigation into the stabbing death of Bob Ewell, a poor white man and Tom’s accuser. The New Yorker magazine noted this conflict in the movie. So, it begs the question: from what social attitudes does this broad-spectrum admiration for Atticus emerge? This article proposes an answer: it originates in identity-centrism, an attitude that underlies United States ideology during the Cold War era and results, specifically, in a total disregard for the poor. In other words, To Kill a Mockingbird is not a closed-ended novel of good versus evil, but an open-ended work that raises a troubling question about diversity.

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