Anthony Harkins
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195189506
- eISBN:
- 9780199788835
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195189506.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This book examines the evolution of one of the most pervasive and enduring American icons from the 18th-century to the present day. Spanning film, literature, and the entire expanse of American ...
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This book examines the evolution of one of the most pervasive and enduring American icons from the 18th-century to the present day. Spanning film, literature, and the entire expanse of American popular culture, from comics to country music to television and the Internet, the book argues that the longevity of the hillbilly stems from its ambiguity as a marker of both social derision and regional pride. Typically associated with Appalachia or the Ozarks, the “hillbilly” was viewed by mainstream Americans simultaneously as a violent degenerate who threatens the social order, and as a keeper of traditional values of family, home, and physical production. The character was therefore both a foil to an increasingly urbanizing and industrializing America and a symbol of a nostalgic past free of the problems of contemporary life. The book also argues that “hillbillies” have played a critical role in the construction of whiteness and modernity. Middle-class Americans imagined hillbillies, with their supposedly pure Anglo-Saxon or Scottish origins, as an exotic race, akin to blacks and Indians, but still native and white, as opposed to the growing influx of immigrants in the first half of the 20th century. At the same time, the image's whiteness allowed crude caricatures of Southern mountaineers to persist long after similar ethnic and racial stereotypes had become socially unacceptable.Less
This book examines the evolution of one of the most pervasive and enduring American icons from the 18th-century to the present day. Spanning film, literature, and the entire expanse of American popular culture, from comics to country music to television and the Internet, the book argues that the longevity of the hillbilly stems from its ambiguity as a marker of both social derision and regional pride. Typically associated with Appalachia or the Ozarks, the “hillbilly” was viewed by mainstream Americans simultaneously as a violent degenerate who threatens the social order, and as a keeper of traditional values of family, home, and physical production. The character was therefore both a foil to an increasingly urbanizing and industrializing America and a symbol of a nostalgic past free of the problems of contemporary life. The book also argues that “hillbillies” have played a critical role in the construction of whiteness and modernity. Middle-class Americans imagined hillbillies, with their supposedly pure Anglo-Saxon or Scottish origins, as an exotic race, akin to blacks and Indians, but still native and white, as opposed to the growing influx of immigrants in the first half of the 20th century. At the same time, the image's whiteness allowed crude caricatures of Southern mountaineers to persist long after similar ethnic and racial stereotypes had become socially unacceptable.
Kendra Marston
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474430296
- eISBN:
- 9781474453608
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474430296.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book is the first extended study into the politics of whiteness inherent within postfeminist popular cinema. It analyses a selection of Hollywood films dating from the turn of the millennium, ...
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This book is the first extended study into the politics of whiteness inherent within postfeminist popular cinema. It analyses a selection of Hollywood films dating from the turn of the millennium, arguing that the character of the ‘melancholic white woman’ operates as a trope through which to explore the excesses of late capitalism and a crisis of faith in the American dream. Melancholia can function as a form of social capital for these characters yet betrays its proximity to a gendered history of emotion and psychopathology. This figure is alternately idealised or scapegoated depending on how well she navigates the perils of postfeminist ideology. Furthermore, the book considers how performances of melancholia and mental distress can confer benefits for Hollywood actresses and female auteurs on the labour market, which in turn has contributed to the maintenance of white hegemony within the mainstream US film industry. Case studies in the book include Black Swan (Darren Aronofksy 2010), Gone Girl (David Fincher 2014) and Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton 2010).Less
This book is the first extended study into the politics of whiteness inherent within postfeminist popular cinema. It analyses a selection of Hollywood films dating from the turn of the millennium, arguing that the character of the ‘melancholic white woman’ operates as a trope through which to explore the excesses of late capitalism and a crisis of faith in the American dream. Melancholia can function as a form of social capital for these characters yet betrays its proximity to a gendered history of emotion and psychopathology. This figure is alternately idealised or scapegoated depending on how well she navigates the perils of postfeminist ideology. Furthermore, the book considers how performances of melancholia and mental distress can confer benefits for Hollywood actresses and female auteurs on the labour market, which in turn has contributed to the maintenance of white hegemony within the mainstream US film industry. Case studies in the book include Black Swan (Darren Aronofksy 2010), Gone Girl (David Fincher 2014) and Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton 2010).
Amy C. Steinbugler
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199743551
- eISBN:
- 9780199979370
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199743551.003.0006
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
To explore how interracial intimacy shapes individual racial identities, this chapter temporarily sets aside the sociological concept of racework and takes on a social-psychological perspective. It ...
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To explore how interracial intimacy shapes individual racial identities, this chapter temporarily sets aside the sociological concept of racework and takes on a social-psychological perspective. It analyzes partners’ experiences in terms of the concept of “identity,” the approach that psychologists and social psychologists have used to understand how individuals think of their own Whiteness and Blackness. The chapter begins by contextualizing White narratives within social-psychological research on Whiteness and then turns to an examination of the mixed impact that interracial intimacy has on White partners’ racial identities. It focuses the analysis on the racial identity of White partners in part because only Whites showed significant variation with respect to the influence of interracial intimacy on racial identity, and in part because that variability has significant potential consequences for theories that propose interracial contact as a means of gradually dissolving White racial prejudice. The narratives in this chapter offer an opportunity to examine that idea more carefully.Less
To explore how interracial intimacy shapes individual racial identities, this chapter temporarily sets aside the sociological concept of racework and takes on a social-psychological perspective. It analyzes partners’ experiences in terms of the concept of “identity,” the approach that psychologists and social psychologists have used to understand how individuals think of their own Whiteness and Blackness. The chapter begins by contextualizing White narratives within social-psychological research on Whiteness and then turns to an examination of the mixed impact that interracial intimacy has on White partners’ racial identities. It focuses the analysis on the racial identity of White partners in part because only Whites showed significant variation with respect to the influence of interracial intimacy on racial identity, and in part because that variability has significant potential consequences for theories that propose interracial contact as a means of gradually dissolving White racial prejudice. The narratives in this chapter offer an opportunity to examine that idea more carefully.
Veronica T. Watson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617038891
- eISBN:
- 9781621039808
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617038891.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
The Souls of White Folks: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness is the first study to consider the substantial body of African American writing that critiques Whiteness as social construction ...
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The Souls of White Folks: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness is the first study to consider the substantial body of African American writing that critiques Whiteness as social construction and racial identity. Arguing against the prevailing approach to these texts (which are generally known as “white life literature”) that says African American writers retreated from issues of “race” when they wrote about Whiteness, instead this body of literature is identified as an African American intellectual and literary tradition that is named here as “the literature of white estrangement.” In chapters that theorize white double consciousness (W.E.B. DuBois and Charles Chesnutt), white womanhood and class identity (Zora Neale Hurston and Frank Yerby), and the socio-spatial subjectivity of Southern Whites during the Civil Rights era (Melba Patillo Beals), the historically situated theories and analyses of Whiteness provided by the literature of white estrangement from the late 19th through the mid-twentieth centuries are explored. The author argues that these texts are best understood as part of a multi-pronged approach by African American writers to challenge and dismantle white supremacy in the U.S. and demonstrates that they have an important place in the growing field of critical whiteness studies. The Souls of White Folk utilizes interdisciplinary approaches to excavate the justifications and meanings of whiteness at various historical moments and is attentive to the ways that African American writers wrote against those mythologies and traditions of whiteness in pursuit of racial and social equality.Less
The Souls of White Folks: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness is the first study to consider the substantial body of African American writing that critiques Whiteness as social construction and racial identity. Arguing against the prevailing approach to these texts (which are generally known as “white life literature”) that says African American writers retreated from issues of “race” when they wrote about Whiteness, instead this body of literature is identified as an African American intellectual and literary tradition that is named here as “the literature of white estrangement.” In chapters that theorize white double consciousness (W.E.B. DuBois and Charles Chesnutt), white womanhood and class identity (Zora Neale Hurston and Frank Yerby), and the socio-spatial subjectivity of Southern Whites during the Civil Rights era (Melba Patillo Beals), the historically situated theories and analyses of Whiteness provided by the literature of white estrangement from the late 19th through the mid-twentieth centuries are explored. The author argues that these texts are best understood as part of a multi-pronged approach by African American writers to challenge and dismantle white supremacy in the U.S. and demonstrates that they have an important place in the growing field of critical whiteness studies. The Souls of White Folk utilizes interdisciplinary approaches to excavate the justifications and meanings of whiteness at various historical moments and is attentive to the ways that African American writers wrote against those mythologies and traditions of whiteness in pursuit of racial and social equality.
Katelyn E. Knox
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781781383094
- eISBN:
- 9781781384152
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781383094.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
In Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France Knox turns the tables France’s rhetoric of ‘internal otherness’, asking her reader not to spot those deemed France’s others but rather to ...
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In Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France Knox turns the tables France’s rhetoric of ‘internal otherness’, asking her reader not to spot those deemed France’s others but rather to deconstruct the very gazes that produce them. Weaving together a vast corpus of colonial French children’s comics, Francophone novels, and African popular music, fashion, and dance, Knox traces how the ways colonial ‘human zoos’ invited their French spectators to gaze on their colonized others still inform the frameworks through which racial and ethnic minorities are made—and make themselves—visible in contemporary France. In addition to analyzing how literature and music depicting immigration, immigrants and their descendants in France make race and ethnicity visible, Knox also illustrates how the works she analyzes self-reflexively ask whether they, as commodities sold within wider cultural marketplaces, perpetuate the culture of exoticism they seek to contest. Finally, Knox contends that to take seriously the way the texts interrogate the relationship between power, privilege, and the gaze also requires reconsidering the visions of normalcy from which racial and ethnic minorities supposedly depart. She thus concludes by exposing a critical ‘blind spot’ in French and Francophone cultural studies—whiteness—before subjecting it to the same scrutiny France’s ‘visible minorities’ face.Less
In Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France Knox turns the tables France’s rhetoric of ‘internal otherness’, asking her reader not to spot those deemed France’s others but rather to deconstruct the very gazes that produce them. Weaving together a vast corpus of colonial French children’s comics, Francophone novels, and African popular music, fashion, and dance, Knox traces how the ways colonial ‘human zoos’ invited their French spectators to gaze on their colonized others still inform the frameworks through which racial and ethnic minorities are made—and make themselves—visible in contemporary France. In addition to analyzing how literature and music depicting immigration, immigrants and their descendants in France make race and ethnicity visible, Knox also illustrates how the works she analyzes self-reflexively ask whether they, as commodities sold within wider cultural marketplaces, perpetuate the culture of exoticism they seek to contest. Finally, Knox contends that to take seriously the way the texts interrogate the relationship between power, privilege, and the gaze also requires reconsidering the visions of normalcy from which racial and ethnic minorities supposedly depart. She thus concludes by exposing a critical ‘blind spot’ in French and Francophone cultural studies—whiteness—before subjecting it to the same scrutiny France’s ‘visible minorities’ face.
TERESA HUBEL
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780198075981
- eISBN:
- 9780199081523
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198075981.003.0017
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter comments on the relative insignificance of whiteness to Hindi film narratives, with white characters turning up, when they do, often as peripheral figures to create the effect of ...
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This chapter comments on the relative insignificance of whiteness to Hindi film narratives, with white characters turning up, when they do, often as peripheral figures to create the effect of historical accuracy. It argues that in Hindi cinema, whiteness cannot function as it does in the West, where the legacy of imperialism has made it an unmarked category, whose invisibility allows it to function as a norm against which the aberration of racial others may be measured. In Indian films, whiteness is marked; and it is, increasingly, markedly white—to be resisted, or desired, or dismissed.Less
This chapter comments on the relative insignificance of whiteness to Hindi film narratives, with white characters turning up, when they do, often as peripheral figures to create the effect of historical accuracy. It argues that in Hindi cinema, whiteness cannot function as it does in the West, where the legacy of imperialism has made it an unmarked category, whose invisibility allows it to function as a norm against which the aberration of racial others may be measured. In Indian films, whiteness is marked; and it is, increasingly, markedly white—to be resisted, or desired, or dismissed.
Will Jackson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780719088896
- eISBN:
- 9781781705827
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719088896.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Imperialism and Colonialism
Kenya Colony, for the British at least, has customarily been imagined as a place of wealthy settler-farmers, sun-lit panoramas and the adventure of safari. Yet for the majority of Europeans who went ...
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Kenya Colony, for the British at least, has customarily been imagined as a place of wealthy settler-farmers, sun-lit panoramas and the adventure of safari. Yet for the majority of Europeans who went there life was very different. This book offers an unprecedented new account of what was - supposedly - the most picturesque of Britain's colonies overseas. While Kenya's romantic reputation has served to perpetuate the notion that Europeans enjoyed untroubled command, what the lives of Kenya's white insane powerfully describe are stories of conflict, immiseration, estrangement and despair. Crucially, Europeans who became impoverished in Kenya or who transgressed the boundary lines separating colonizer from colonized subverted the myth that Europeans enjoyed a natural right to rule. Because a deviation from the settler ideal was politically problematic, therefore, Europeans who failed to conform to the collective self-image were customarily absented, from the colony itself in the first instance and latterly from both popular and scholarly historical accounts. Bringing into view the lives of Kenya's white insane makes for an imaginative and intellectual engagement with realms of human history that, so colonial ideologies would have us believe, simply were not there. Tracing the pathways that led an individual to the hospital gates, meanwhile, shows up the complex interplay between madness and marginality in a society for which deviance was never intended to be managed but comprehensively denied.Less
Kenya Colony, for the British at least, has customarily been imagined as a place of wealthy settler-farmers, sun-lit panoramas and the adventure of safari. Yet for the majority of Europeans who went there life was very different. This book offers an unprecedented new account of what was - supposedly - the most picturesque of Britain's colonies overseas. While Kenya's romantic reputation has served to perpetuate the notion that Europeans enjoyed untroubled command, what the lives of Kenya's white insane powerfully describe are stories of conflict, immiseration, estrangement and despair. Crucially, Europeans who became impoverished in Kenya or who transgressed the boundary lines separating colonizer from colonized subverted the myth that Europeans enjoyed a natural right to rule. Because a deviation from the settler ideal was politically problematic, therefore, Europeans who failed to conform to the collective self-image were customarily absented, from the colony itself in the first instance and latterly from both popular and scholarly historical accounts. Bringing into view the lives of Kenya's white insane makes for an imaginative and intellectual engagement with realms of human history that, so colonial ideologies would have us believe, simply were not there. Tracing the pathways that led an individual to the hospital gates, meanwhile, shows up the complex interplay between madness and marginality in a society for which deviance was never intended to be managed but comprehensively denied.
Camille Walsh
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781469638942
- eISBN:
- 9781469638959
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469638942.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
In the United States, it is quite common to lay claim to the benefits of society by appealing to “taxpayer citizenship”--the idea that, as taxpayers, we deserve access to certain social services like ...
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In the United States, it is quite common to lay claim to the benefits of society by appealing to “taxpayer citizenship”--the idea that, as taxpayers, we deserve access to certain social services like a public education. Tracing the genealogy of this concept, this book shows how tax policy and taxpayer identity were built on the foundations of white supremacy and intertwined with ideas of whiteness in civil rights law and constitutional law. From the origins of unequal public school funding after the Civil War and the history of African American families resisting segregated taxation through school desegregation cases from Brown v. Board of Education to San Antonio v. Rodriguez in the 1970s, this study spans over a century of racial injustice, dramatic courtroom clashes, and white supremacist backlash to collective justice claims.
Incorporating letters from everyday individuals as well as the private notes of Supreme Court justices as they deliberated, this legal history reveals how the idea of a “taxpayer” identity contributed to the contemporary crises of public education, racial disparity, and income inequality.Less
In the United States, it is quite common to lay claim to the benefits of society by appealing to “taxpayer citizenship”--the idea that, as taxpayers, we deserve access to certain social services like a public education. Tracing the genealogy of this concept, this book shows how tax policy and taxpayer identity were built on the foundations of white supremacy and intertwined with ideas of whiteness in civil rights law and constitutional law. From the origins of unequal public school funding after the Civil War and the history of African American families resisting segregated taxation through school desegregation cases from Brown v. Board of Education to San Antonio v. Rodriguez in the 1970s, this study spans over a century of racial injustice, dramatic courtroom clashes, and white supremacist backlash to collective justice claims.
Incorporating letters from everyday individuals as well as the private notes of Supreme Court justices as they deliberated, this legal history reveals how the idea of a “taxpayer” identity contributed to the contemporary crises of public education, racial disparity, and income inequality.
Brett L. Shadle
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719095344
- eISBN:
- 9781781708910
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719095344.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History
Kenya’s white settlers have long captivated observers. They are alternately celebrated and condemned, painted as romantic pioneers or hedonistic bed-hoppers or crude racists. If we wish to better ...
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Kenya’s white settlers have long captivated observers. They are alternately celebrated and condemned, painted as romantic pioneers or hedonistic bed-hoppers or crude racists. If we wish to better understand Kenya’s tortured history, however, we must examine settlers not as caricatures, but as people inhabiting a unique historical moment. We must ask, what animated their lives? What comforted them and what unnerved them, to whom did they direct love, and to whom violence? The Souls of White Folk takes seriously – though not uncritically – what settlers said, how they viewed themselves and their world. It argues that the settler soul was composed of a series of interlaced ideas: settlers equated civilization with a (hard to define) whiteness; they were emotionally enriched through claims to paternalism and trusteeship over Africans; they felt themselves constantly threatened by Africans, by the state, and by the moral failures of other settlers; and they daily enacted their claims to supremacy through rituals of prestige, deference, humiliation, and violence. The book explains how settlers could proclaim real affection for their African servants, tend to them with intimate medical procedures, as well as whip, punch and kick them – for these were central to the joy of settlement, and the preservation of settlement. It explains why settlers could be as equally alarmed by an African man with a fine hat, Russian Jews, and a black policeman, as by white drunkards, adulterers, and judges – all posed dangers to white prestige.Less
Kenya’s white settlers have long captivated observers. They are alternately celebrated and condemned, painted as romantic pioneers or hedonistic bed-hoppers or crude racists. If we wish to better understand Kenya’s tortured history, however, we must examine settlers not as caricatures, but as people inhabiting a unique historical moment. We must ask, what animated their lives? What comforted them and what unnerved them, to whom did they direct love, and to whom violence? The Souls of White Folk takes seriously – though not uncritically – what settlers said, how they viewed themselves and their world. It argues that the settler soul was composed of a series of interlaced ideas: settlers equated civilization with a (hard to define) whiteness; they were emotionally enriched through claims to paternalism and trusteeship over Africans; they felt themselves constantly threatened by Africans, by the state, and by the moral failures of other settlers; and they daily enacted their claims to supremacy through rituals of prestige, deference, humiliation, and violence. The book explains how settlers could proclaim real affection for their African servants, tend to them with intimate medical procedures, as well as whip, punch and kick them – for these were central to the joy of settlement, and the preservation of settlement. It explains why settlers could be as equally alarmed by an African man with a fine hat, Russian Jews, and a black policeman, as by white drunkards, adulterers, and judges – all posed dangers to white prestige.
Angelina E. Castagno
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816681631
- eISBN:
- 9781452948645
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681631.001.0001
- Subject:
- Education, Secondary Education
Educators across the nation are engaged in well-meaning efforts to address diversity in schools given the current context of NCLB, Race to the Top, and the associated pressures of standardization and ...
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Educators across the nation are engaged in well-meaning efforts to address diversity in schools given the current context of NCLB, Race to the Top, and the associated pressures of standardization and accountability. Through rich ethnographic accounts of teachers in two demographically different secondary schools in the same urban district, this book investigates how whiteness operates in ways that thwart (and sometimes co-opt) even the best intentions and common sense—thus resulting in educational policies and practices that reinforce the status quo and protect whiteness rather than working towards greater equity. Whereas most discussions of the education of diverse students focus on the students and families themselves, the emphasis in this book is on structural and ideological mechanisms of whiteness. Whiteness maintains dominance and inequity by perpetuating and legitimating the status quo while simultaneously maintaining a veneer of neutrality, equality, and compassion. Framed by Critical Race Theory and Whiteness Studies, this book employs concepts like interest convergence, a critique of liberalism, and the possessive investment in whiteness to better understand diversity-related educational policy and practice. Although in theory most diversity-related educational policies and practices promise to bring about greater equity, too often in practice they actually maintain, legitimate, and thus perpetuate whiteness. This book not only sheds light on this disconnect between the promises and practices of diversity-related initiatives, but also provides some understanding of why the disconnect persists.Less
Educators across the nation are engaged in well-meaning efforts to address diversity in schools given the current context of NCLB, Race to the Top, and the associated pressures of standardization and accountability. Through rich ethnographic accounts of teachers in two demographically different secondary schools in the same urban district, this book investigates how whiteness operates in ways that thwart (and sometimes co-opt) even the best intentions and common sense—thus resulting in educational policies and practices that reinforce the status quo and protect whiteness rather than working towards greater equity. Whereas most discussions of the education of diverse students focus on the students and families themselves, the emphasis in this book is on structural and ideological mechanisms of whiteness. Whiteness maintains dominance and inequity by perpetuating and legitimating the status quo while simultaneously maintaining a veneer of neutrality, equality, and compassion. Framed by Critical Race Theory and Whiteness Studies, this book employs concepts like interest convergence, a critique of liberalism, and the possessive investment in whiteness to better understand diversity-related educational policy and practice. Although in theory most diversity-related educational policies and practices promise to bring about greater equity, too often in practice they actually maintain, legitimate, and thus perpetuate whiteness. This book not only sheds light on this disconnect between the promises and practices of diversity-related initiatives, but also provides some understanding of why the disconnect persists.
Melanie Williams
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474405638
- eISBN:
- 9781474434843
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474405638.003.0008
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This concluding chapter goes back over the time period covered by the book’s preceeding chapters and thinks about the exclusisons from the category of star which have operated in British cinema, with ...
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This concluding chapter goes back over the time period covered by the book’s preceeding chapters and thinks about the exclusisons from the category of star which have operated in British cinema, with particular emphasis on the whiteness of the ‘English Rose’ ideal which still dominates British female stardom in spite of some inroads towards a greater BAME presence and greater ethnic diversity. The exclusionary middle-class and heteronormative dimensions to idealised visions of British femininity are also assessed.Less
This concluding chapter goes back over the time period covered by the book’s preceeding chapters and thinks about the exclusisons from the category of star which have operated in British cinema, with particular emphasis on the whiteness of the ‘English Rose’ ideal which still dominates British female stardom in spite of some inroads towards a greater BAME presence and greater ethnic diversity. The exclusionary middle-class and heteronormative dimensions to idealised visions of British femininity are also assessed.
Shana Walton and Alexandra Jaffe
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199795437
- eISBN:
- 9780199919321
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199795437.003.0010
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Sociolinguistics / Anthropological Linguistics
This chapter analyzes the humorous blog Stuff White People Like, examining both the stances towards Whiteness taken by the author as well as the stances taken up by readers in online commentaries. ...
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This chapter analyzes the humorous blog Stuff White People Like, examining both the stances towards Whiteness taken by the author as well as the stances taken up by readers in online commentaries. The new media forum allows people who come to the site firstly to overtly display and “perform” the underlying concepts introduced but submerged by the author in his blogs; and secondly to reveal the deeply racialized discourse that permeates American society. While these activities in some ways challenge White privilege, the analysis shows that more often, using a racialized stance allows the author and readers to simultaneously parody a privileged class habitus, and participate in and benefit from it. The chapter argues that reflexivity with respect to race and class privilege is one of the central forms of cultural capital (along with esthetics) that this site offers to its readers and online discussion participants.Less
This chapter analyzes the humorous blog Stuff White People Like, examining both the stances towards Whiteness taken by the author as well as the stances taken up by readers in online commentaries. The new media forum allows people who come to the site firstly to overtly display and “perform” the underlying concepts introduced but submerged by the author in his blogs; and secondly to reveal the deeply racialized discourse that permeates American society. While these activities in some ways challenge White privilege, the analysis shows that more often, using a racialized stance allows the author and readers to simultaneously parody a privileged class habitus, and participate in and benefit from it. The chapter argues that reflexivity with respect to race and class privilege is one of the central forms of cultural capital (along with esthetics) that this site offers to its readers and online discussion participants.
Lisa Uddin
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816679119
- eISBN:
- 9781452950587
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816679119.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Ethical Issues and Debates
Why do we feel bad at the zoo? In a fascinating counterhistory of American zoos in the 1960s and 1970s, Lisa Uddin revisits the familiar narrative of zoo reform, from naked cages to more naturalistic ...
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Why do we feel bad at the zoo? In a fascinating counterhistory of American zoos in the 1960s and 1970s, Lisa Uddin revisits the familiar narrative of zoo reform, from naked cages to more naturalistic enclosures. She argues that reform belongs to the story of cities and feelings toward many of their human inhabitants. In Zoo Renewal, Uddin demonstrates how efforts to make the zoo more natural and a haven for particular species reflected white fears about the American city—and, pointedly, how the shame many visitors felt in observing confined animals drew on broader anxieties about race and urban life. Examining the campaign against cages, renovations at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. and the San Diego Zoo, and the cases of a rare female white Bengal tiger and a collection of southern white rhinoceroses, Uddin unpacks episodes that challenge assumptions that zoos are about other worlds and other creatures and expand the history of U.S. urbanism. Uddin shows how the drive to protect endangered species and to ensure larger, safer zoos was shaped by struggles over urban decay, suburban growth, and the dilemmas of postwar American whiteness. In so doing, Zoo Renewal ultimately reveals how feeling bad, or good, at the zoo is connected to our feelings about American cities and their residents.Less
Why do we feel bad at the zoo? In a fascinating counterhistory of American zoos in the 1960s and 1970s, Lisa Uddin revisits the familiar narrative of zoo reform, from naked cages to more naturalistic enclosures. She argues that reform belongs to the story of cities and feelings toward many of their human inhabitants. In Zoo Renewal, Uddin demonstrates how efforts to make the zoo more natural and a haven for particular species reflected white fears about the American city—and, pointedly, how the shame many visitors felt in observing confined animals drew on broader anxieties about race and urban life. Examining the campaign against cages, renovations at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. and the San Diego Zoo, and the cases of a rare female white Bengal tiger and a collection of southern white rhinoceroses, Uddin unpacks episodes that challenge assumptions that zoos are about other worlds and other creatures and expand the history of U.S. urbanism. Uddin shows how the drive to protect endangered species and to ensure larger, safer zoos was shaped by struggles over urban decay, suburban growth, and the dilemmas of postwar American whiteness. In so doing, Zoo Renewal ultimately reveals how feeling bad, or good, at the zoo is connected to our feelings about American cities and their residents.
Julie M. Weise
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469624969
- eISBN:
- 9781469624983
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469624969.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
Chapter One reconstructs the lives of the roughly 2,000 Mexican immigrants who lived for a time in New Orleans as refugees or economic migrants from Revolution-era Mexico. The chapter argues that ...
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Chapter One reconstructs the lives of the roughly 2,000 Mexican immigrants who lived for a time in New Orleans as refugees or economic migrants from Revolution-era Mexico. The chapter argues that nearly all of them—even those who hailed from working class backgrounds and had darker skin—eventually assimilated into white society. Though biological, blood-based ideas of race were at their height in the United States during this period, Mexicanos used culture to wedge their way into white New Orleans. They secured their white status in large part by ignoring the elements of Mexican nationalism that valorized their nation’s self-proclaimed identity of mestizaje, or “mixed” biological inheritance. Thus, their stories also illuminate the powerful influence of U.S. white supremacy on other nations’ projects of self-definition, in this case Mexico’s. Interwar New Orleans is the first case historians have yet uncovered in which Mexicans’ racial trajectory paralleled that of European immigrants much more closely than that of their Mexican counterparts elsewhere in the United States.Less
Chapter One reconstructs the lives of the roughly 2,000 Mexican immigrants who lived for a time in New Orleans as refugees or economic migrants from Revolution-era Mexico. The chapter argues that nearly all of them—even those who hailed from working class backgrounds and had darker skin—eventually assimilated into white society. Though biological, blood-based ideas of race were at their height in the United States during this period, Mexicanos used culture to wedge their way into white New Orleans. They secured their white status in large part by ignoring the elements of Mexican nationalism that valorized their nation’s self-proclaimed identity of mestizaje, or “mixed” biological inheritance. Thus, their stories also illuminate the powerful influence of U.S. white supremacy on other nations’ projects of self-definition, in this case Mexico’s. Interwar New Orleans is the first case historians have yet uncovered in which Mexicans’ racial trajectory paralleled that of European immigrants much more closely than that of their Mexican counterparts elsewhere in the United States.
Julie M. Weise
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469624969
- eISBN:
- 9781469624983
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469624969.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
Chapter Two shows that from the 1910s through the 1930s, tens of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who initially lived in Texas moved on to the rural black-white South. Of these, the ...
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Chapter Two shows that from the 1910s through the 1930s, tens of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who initially lived in Texas moved on to the rural black-white South. Of these, the largest group picked the cotton in the Mississippi Delta. From the start, Mexicanos in Mississippi tasted the brutality and exclusion that the region’s white planters had long used to segregate, terrorize, and control African Americans. Mexicanos responded by fighting back in their daily lives, fleeing to new places, and pursuing a political strategy that engaged the cross-border and cross-class nationalism of the Mexican government and its consulate in New Orleans rather than the institutions, lawyers, and liberal discourses of U.S. citizenship. They battled most intensely from 1925 through 1930, the period when many envisioned a future in the Delta. And though most left the area during the Depression, those who remained at long last reaped the fruits of these labors: they forced local officials to admit them to the privileges of whiteness, decisively separating their futures from those of the region’s African Americans and paving the way for their families’ advancement into the white middle class.Less
Chapter Two shows that from the 1910s through the 1930s, tens of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who initially lived in Texas moved on to the rural black-white South. Of these, the largest group picked the cotton in the Mississippi Delta. From the start, Mexicanos in Mississippi tasted the brutality and exclusion that the region’s white planters had long used to segregate, terrorize, and control African Americans. Mexicanos responded by fighting back in their daily lives, fleeing to new places, and pursuing a political strategy that engaged the cross-border and cross-class nationalism of the Mexican government and its consulate in New Orleans rather than the institutions, lawyers, and liberal discourses of U.S. citizenship. They battled most intensely from 1925 through 1930, the period when many envisioned a future in the Delta. And though most left the area during the Depression, those who remained at long last reaped the fruits of these labors: they forced local officials to admit them to the privileges of whiteness, decisively separating their futures from those of the region’s African Americans and paving the way for their families’ advancement into the white middle class.
Brooke N. Newman
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780300225556
- eISBN:
- 9780300240979
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300225556.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History
Focusing on the 1730s through the 1750s, chapter 2 considers the relationship between notions of hereditary blood status and the legal redefinition of whiteness and British racial identity in ...
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Focusing on the 1730s through the 1750s, chapter 2 considers the relationship between notions of hereditary blood status and the legal redefinition of whiteness and British racial identity in Jamaica. It shows how demographic crises and ongoing conflicts with the Maroons prompted Jamaican colonial authorities to turn to free blacks, Jews, and persons of mixed ancestry for compulsory assistance. While free blacks and men of mixed ancestry were required to offer military service, and Jews were burdened with extraordinary taxation, a select handful of men and women of mixed ancestry aided the colonial regime by assisting in the legal “whitening” of Jamaica.Less
Focusing on the 1730s through the 1750s, chapter 2 considers the relationship between notions of hereditary blood status and the legal redefinition of whiteness and British racial identity in Jamaica. It shows how demographic crises and ongoing conflicts with the Maroons prompted Jamaican colonial authorities to turn to free blacks, Jews, and persons of mixed ancestry for compulsory assistance. While free blacks and men of mixed ancestry were required to offer military service, and Jews were burdened with extraordinary taxation, a select handful of men and women of mixed ancestry aided the colonial regime by assisting in the legal “whitening” of Jamaica.
Brooke N. Newman
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780300225556
- eISBN:
- 9780300240979
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300225556.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History
Exploring the aftermath of Tacky’s Revolt in 1760, chapter 3 demonstrates that whiteness was a powerful yet nonetheless malleable social and legal category in late eighteenth-century Jamaica. It ...
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Exploring the aftermath of Tacky’s Revolt in 1760, chapter 3 demonstrates that whiteness was a powerful yet nonetheless malleable social and legal category in late eighteenth-century Jamaica. It traces the evolution of racial classifications at the local level by analyzing colonial legislation and political debates and by following particular mixed-race individuals as they moved through Jamaica’s social and economic hierarchy, in Kingston specifically. This chapter reveals how redefinitions of whiteness in Jamaica dovetailed with larger cultural concerns in metropolitan Britain regarding colonial security, Creole gender identity, and the uncertain future of British Atlantic slave societies.Less
Exploring the aftermath of Tacky’s Revolt in 1760, chapter 3 demonstrates that whiteness was a powerful yet nonetheless malleable social and legal category in late eighteenth-century Jamaica. It traces the evolution of racial classifications at the local level by analyzing colonial legislation and political debates and by following particular mixed-race individuals as they moved through Jamaica’s social and economic hierarchy, in Kingston specifically. This chapter reveals how redefinitions of whiteness in Jamaica dovetailed with larger cultural concerns in metropolitan Britain regarding colonial security, Creole gender identity, and the uncertain future of British Atlantic slave societies.
Brooke N. Newman
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780300225556
- eISBN:
- 9780300240979
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300225556.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History
Chapter 6 draws together the major strands of proslavery thought articulated during the eras of abolition and amelioration, from roughly the 1780s through the 1820s. It argues that abolitionist ...
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Chapter 6 draws together the major strands of proslavery thought articulated during the eras of abolition and amelioration, from roughly the 1780s through the 1820s. It argues that abolitionist agitation in metropolitan Britain, as well as the revolution in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, triggered a broader defense of hereditary racial slavery rooted in notions of blood inheritance and the English constitutional birthright. At the same time, the circulation of pro-slavery arguments in Britain, coupled with repressive state responses in colonial Jamaica, inspired collective action on the part of free people seeking equal rights with white imperial subjects.Less
Chapter 6 draws together the major strands of proslavery thought articulated during the eras of abolition and amelioration, from roughly the 1780s through the 1820s. It argues that abolitionist agitation in metropolitan Britain, as well as the revolution in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, triggered a broader defense of hereditary racial slavery rooted in notions of blood inheritance and the English constitutional birthright. At the same time, the circulation of pro-slavery arguments in Britain, coupled with repressive state responses in colonial Jamaica, inspired collective action on the part of free people seeking equal rights with white imperial subjects.
Max Krochmal
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780813037950
- eISBN:
- 9780813043111
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813037950.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
Focusing on two ordinary Chicano workers who became prominent labor, civil rights, and political organizers, this chapter demonstrates that workplace struggles and multiracial alliances with whites ...
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Focusing on two ordinary Chicano workers who became prominent labor, civil rights, and political organizers, this chapter demonstrates that workplace struggles and multiracial alliances with whites and African Americans stood at the center of the broader Mexican American and Chicano movements. The two union organizers, Francisco F. “Pancho” Medrano of Dallas and Arnold Flores of San Antonio, fought discrimination at work and in their unions as well as in the cities in which they lived. They joined and transformed local chapters of well-known ethnic Mexican civil rights organizations, actively supported the African American freedom struggle, and became driving forces in building powerful multiracial coalitions. Their life stories transcend the whiteness arguments and generational framework that have dominated Chicano historiography.Less
Focusing on two ordinary Chicano workers who became prominent labor, civil rights, and political organizers, this chapter demonstrates that workplace struggles and multiracial alliances with whites and African Americans stood at the center of the broader Mexican American and Chicano movements. The two union organizers, Francisco F. “Pancho” Medrano of Dallas and Arnold Flores of San Antonio, fought discrimination at work and in their unions as well as in the cities in which they lived. They joined and transformed local chapters of well-known ethnic Mexican civil rights organizations, actively supported the African American freedom struggle, and became driving forces in building powerful multiracial coalitions. Their life stories transcend the whiteness arguments and generational framework that have dominated Chicano historiography.
Gregory S. Jay
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190687229
- eISBN:
- 9780190687250
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190687229.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
White liberal race fiction has been an enduringly popular genre in American literary history. It includes widely read and taught works such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird along with ...
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White liberal race fiction has been an enduringly popular genre in American literary history. It includes widely read and taught works such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird along with period bestsellers now sometimes forgotten. Hollywood regularly adapted them into blockbusters, reinforcing their cultural influence. These novels and films protest slavery, confront stereotypes, dramatize social and legal injustices, engage the political controversies of their time, and try to move readers emotionally toward taking action. The literary forms and arguments of these books derive from the cultural work they intend to do in educating the minds and hearts, and propelling the actions, of those who think they are white—indeed, in making the social construction of that whiteness readable and thus more susceptible of reform. The white writers of these fictions struggle with their own place in systems of oppression and privilege while asking their readers to do the same. The predominance of women among this tradition’s authors leads to exploring how their critiques of gender and race norms often reinforced each other. Each chapter provides a case study combining biography, historical analysis, close reading, and literary theory to map the significance of this genre and its ongoing relevance. This tradition remains vital because every generation must relearn the lessons of antiracism and formulate effective cultural narratives for passing on the intellectual and emotional tools useful in fighting injustice.Less
White liberal race fiction has been an enduringly popular genre in American literary history. It includes widely read and taught works such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird along with period bestsellers now sometimes forgotten. Hollywood regularly adapted them into blockbusters, reinforcing their cultural influence. These novels and films protest slavery, confront stereotypes, dramatize social and legal injustices, engage the political controversies of their time, and try to move readers emotionally toward taking action. The literary forms and arguments of these books derive from the cultural work they intend to do in educating the minds and hearts, and propelling the actions, of those who think they are white—indeed, in making the social construction of that whiteness readable and thus more susceptible of reform. The white writers of these fictions struggle with their own place in systems of oppression and privilege while asking their readers to do the same. The predominance of women among this tradition’s authors leads to exploring how their critiques of gender and race norms often reinforced each other. Each chapter provides a case study combining biography, historical analysis, close reading, and literary theory to map the significance of this genre and its ongoing relevance. This tradition remains vital because every generation must relearn the lessons of antiracism and formulate effective cultural narratives for passing on the intellectual and emotional tools useful in fighting injustice.
