Maimed Souls

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-152
Author(s):  
Justin Mellette
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Physical Disability ◽  
Southern Literature ◽  
Whiteness Studies ◽  
Southern Studies ◽  
White Trash ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
American Authors

The conclusion gestures toward hope for the future of studies regarding poor whites and white trash, noting that work remains to be done, especially in the way that mental or physical disability is often presented as a form of inferior whiteness. Flannery O'Connor's work, for example, gestures toward the importance of these issues. In the closing pages, the conclusion also expresses hope that new avenues of southern literature, such as the rise of Asian American authors writing about the South, receives increased attention. Finally, the conclusion considers the 2016 election and the attention paid to the rural and urban divide and its relationship to how contemporary discourse considers poor whites as a racial other. It closes by noting that the idea that prejudice against poor whites is strictly a southern phenomenon has been complicated in recent years, and that both southern studies and whiteness studies are continually evolving fields of inquiry.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Justin Mellette
Keyword(s):  
Whiteness Studies ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Southern Studies ◽  
Complete Understanding ◽  
White Trash ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Erskine Caldwell ◽  
Current State ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
History Of

The introduction contextualizes the current state of whiteness studies and southern literary studies and argues that considering these lines of criticism alongside one another results in a more complete understanding of the underlying assumptions that have been made about poor whites and those deemed 'white trash.' In addition to analysing the history of the term, the introduction considers recent developments in southern studies scholarship, especially ways in which scholars have sought to expand recent definitions of the term “South.” The chapter also discusses the history of whiteness studies and argues that increased attention to the attitudes that middle- and upper-class whites have had toward poor whites is a fruitful line of scholarship. Finally, the introduction provides an early focus on the works of Erskine Caldwell and Flannery O'Connor as representative authors who complicate ideas that whiteness is homogeneous and universal.

Peculiar Whiteness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Mellette
Keyword(s):  
Southern Literature ◽  
White Trash ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Thomas Dixon ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Disparate Treatment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poor White ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Fear And Anxiety

Peculiar Whiteness argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against people of color in America, individuals regarded as ‘white trash’ have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as grotesque and anxiety-inducing, especially when they are aligned in close proximity to blacks or with other troubling conditions such as physical difference. Thus, as a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various iterations of the label (e.g., ‘white trash,’ tenant farmers, or even people with a little less money than average) have been subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear, and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies, both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor, the book analyzes how we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their status, often by finding ways to re-categorize and marginalize people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the auspices or boundaries of ‘white trash.’

From “The Rise of Southern Redneck and White Trash Writers”1

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Bledsoe
Keyword(s):  
Southern Literature ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Men ◽  
Southern Writers ◽  
White Trash ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Poor White ◽  
Almost All ◽  
New Generation

This chapter discusses the emergence of a new generation of southern writers who are giving voice to a different group of southerners, forcing their readers to reexamine long-held stereotypes and beliefs while challenging the literary roles traditionally assigned poor whites. According to Linda Tate, “traditionally, southern literature has been understood to be that written by white men and, on rare occasions, by white women—and, in almost all cases, by and about white southerners of the upper middle class.” This chapter looks at three new voices who write about the Rough South and the southern poor whites from within the class: Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Timothy Reese McLaurin. The term “Rough South” refers to as the world of the redneck or white trash. The terms “redneck,” “white trash,” “cracker,” and “poor white” have all been used to describe certain white southerners.

Elevated above the Real: The Poor White Southerner in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Southern Literature ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Southern Writers ◽  
White Trash ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor White ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Child Of God ◽  
White Southerner

This chapter discusses the work of Cormac McCarthy, whose early novels depicted the poor white southerner. In The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Robert Benson praises McCarthy for his vivid and honest portrayal of east Tennessee and its people—the lower classes in particular. Benson accurately characterizes McCarthy's work as a critical shift in the representation of lower-class characters in southern literature. McCarthy's focus on exploring and illuminating the lives of those often called “white trash” suggests a direct and important link between his work of the 1960s and early 1970s and the work of later southern writers invested in recovering the poor white southerner from the margins of literary representation. And yet, for several reasons, McCarthy's connection to later Rough South writers is decidedly complex. Furthermore, not all critics have been as quick as Benson to praise McCarthy's portrayal of southern poor whites. This chapter examines McCarthy's first three novels: The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark (1968), and Child of God (1973).

Eating Ivy

2006 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-24
Author(s):  
lisa harper
Keyword(s):  
High Culture ◽  
White Trash ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Special Events ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Good Taste ◽  
The World ◽  
Catfish Fillets ◽  
Sour Cream ◽  
Valentine's Day

This essay is both celebration and portrait of the late Barton Rouse and his influential career as chef at the Terrace Club of Princeton University during the writer's undergraduate career. In the late 1980s and early 1990's Barton Rouse transformed a dilapidated building into a culinary mecca. He planned inventive daily menus (chrysanthemum soup; broiled tuna with morel sauce; White Trash Night) and hosted extravagant special events: an anti-Valentine's day dinner, for instance, which featured Blackened Rib Steaks and Catfish Fillets, Black fettuccine with sour cream and lox sauce and red and black caviar, bleeding hearts of beet salad, brandied cherry ambrosia, and mocha espresso cheesecake. The man and his food broke boundaries between high culture and low, good taste and bad, east and west, rural and urban, adult and child. In the process of cooking for his members, Rouse taught hundreds of young people how to eat, but also that cooking was a labor of love and a genuine aesthetic pursuit. His humor, whimsy, and inventive extravagance left a legacy which links inextricably food and politics to our fundamental way of being in the world.

Future Souths, Speculative Souths, and Southern Potentialities

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-192
Author(s):  
Larose Davis
Keyword(s):  
Southern Literature ◽  
South Atlantic ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
Southern Studies ◽  
The South ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Duke University

This is a moment for relentless forward gazing, an impulse already evident, for example, at two conferences in 2013: race in space, a gathering at Duke University, where Mae Jemison spoke about her project 100 Year Starship, and the meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, with the theme of making meaning in networked worlds. In several ways, the path that I want to propose for southern studies and particularly the study of southern literature is inflected by the conversations at these conferences. It is also informed by my tangential interest in speculative fictions—not necessarily of the literary variety—and by a desire to see more scholarship that goes beyond underscoring the tensions and anxieties of various Souths, scholarship attuned to the generative possibilities and (I, perhaps naively, suggest) the hopes that might emerge from the sites that we call Souths.

“A Whitegirl Helped Me”: Locating Poor Whites in Literature

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-112
Author(s):  
Sarah Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
Southern Literature ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Barbara Kingsolver ◽  
Structures Of Feeling ◽  
The 2008 Financial Crisis ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Impact

This chapter interrogates the definitions of Grit Lit and Rough South and moves away from both categories to consider, via Raymond Williams and David Harvey, amongst others, the structures of feeling that emerge in contemporary southern literature to reveal the wider shift to liquidity in the form of financial capital and its socio-economic ramifications on poor whites. The chapter focuses on works by Toni Morrison, John Biguenet, Colson Whitehead, Barbara Kingsolver, and Tim McLaurin, and explores the ways these writers represent the impact of various political, economic and environmental changes and disasters including Reaganomics, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial crisis. It considers communalism and the alternatives that appear in these literary works for measuring time and worth beyond monetary values.

The Rough South of Ron Rash

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Ærvold Bjerre
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Family Background ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
White Trash ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
The People ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Violent Conflicts ◽  
North And South

This chapter discusses the fiction of Ron Rash, who sets almost all of his work—poems, short stories, and novels—in the Carolinas and focuses on the people who live or have lived there. Rash was born in Chester, South Carolina, in 1953, and grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. While not a direct heir to the “Southern Redneck and White Trash” tradition, Rash fills his work with characters firmly embedded in the Rough South—mostly lower-class whites from Appalachian North and South Carolina. Rash's work illustrates his concern with working-class characters and their struggles, with poor whites and their violent conflicts. His interest in the working class reflects his own family background. Rash published his first collection of poetry, Eureka Mill, in 1998. He also wrote novels that depict violence, such as One Foot in Eden, The World Made Straight, and Serena.

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