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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.

Deadly Virtue argues that the history of the French Calvinist attempt to colonize Florida in the 1560s is key to understanding the roots of American whiteness in sixteenth-century colonialism, science, and Protestantism. The book places the history of Fort Caroline, Florida, into the context of Protestant colonialism and understandings of the body, emotion, and identity held in common by travelers throughout the early Atlantic world. Protestants envisioned finding a rich and powerful Indigenous king, converting him to Christianity, and then establishing a Protestant-Indigenous alliance to build an empire under Indigenous leadership that would compete with European monarchies. However, when the colony was wiped out by the Spanish, these Protestants took this as a condemnation from their god for this plan of collaborating with Indigenous people and developed separatist strategies for future Protestant colonial projects. By introducing the reader to the humoral model of the body, this book shows how race, gender, sexuality, and Christian morality came to intersect in modern understandings of whiteness.

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).

Responding to work begun in the 2013 collection Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race that mined and deciphered the complexity of her responses to the Jim Crow South, the thirteen diverse voices of New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race deepen, reflect on, and respond to those seminal discussions. These essays freshly consider such topics as Welty’s treatment of African-American signifying in her short stories, and her attention to public street performances interacting with Jim Crow rules in her unpublished photographs. They consider her strategic adaptations of Gothic plots, black pastoral, civil war stories, haunted houses, and film noir. They frame Welty’s work with such subjects as Bob Dylan’s songwriting, the idea and history of the orphan in American, and standup comedy. They compare her handling of whiteness and race to that of other contemporary authors such as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Chester Himes, and Alice Walker. Additionally, several discussions bring her master-work The Golden Apples and her novel Losing Battles, under-represented in the earlier conversation, into new focus. The collection as a whole will help us to understand more clearly Welty’s artistic commentary on her time and place as well as the way her vision developed in a timespan moving America towards increased social awareness. Moreover, as a group, these essays provide insight into Welty as an innovative craftswoman and modernist technician, successfully altering literary form with her frequent pointed makeovers of familiar story patterns, plots, and genres. Together they show her as a remarkable writer idiosyncratically engaging and confidently altering literary history.

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 19^th 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.

The Politics of Division deconstructs antagonistic discourses that circulated in local Miami press between African-Americans, “white” Cubans, and “black” Cubans during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift and the 1994 Balsero Crisis. In its challenge to discourses which pit these groups against one another, the book examines the nuanced ways that identities such as “black,” “white,” and “Cuban” have been constructed and negotiated in the context of Miami’s historical multi-ethnic tensions. The book argues that dominant race-making ideologies of the white establishment regarding “worthy citizenship” shape inter-minority conflict as groups negotiate their precarious positioning within the nation. The book contends that the lived experiences of the African-Americans, white Cubans, and Afro-Cubans involved disrupt binary frames of worthy citizenship narratives, illuminating the greater complexity of racialized identities. Foregrounding the oft-neglected voices of Afro-Cubans, the book highlights how their specific racial positioning offers a challenge to white Cuban-American anti-blackness and complicates narratives that placed African-American “natives” in opposition to (white) Cuban “foreigners,” while revealing also how Afro-Cubans and other Afro-Latinos negotiate racial meanings in the United States. Focusing on the intricacy of interminority tensions in Miami, the book adds dimension to modern debates about race, blackness, immigration, interethnic relations, and national belonging.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.