Poor White, Redneck, Trash: The Working Class in American Culture
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Presidential evocations of American identity have presupposed a
nation that despite its ethnic, regional and class diversity is unified in terms of its intrinsic opposition to an anti-American threat. Such homogeneity is nonetheless threatened, as it has always been, by heterogeneous figure of the poor white. Such a figure may be seen to articulate simultaneously both the foundational ideals of American democracy (as the pioneer, the backwoodsman) and the nations failure, at the hands of corporate capitalism, to live up to its exceptionalist promise (as inbred mountain mutant or urban trailer trash).
The proposed collection sets out to explore the politically problematic status of the white working class through representation of that group across a range of media: film and television, literature and film, music and dance. It aims to explore, moreover, a largely neglected minoritarian American consciousness that remains (for all its economic marginalization) white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.
Papers are thus invited from specialists in all aspects of the humanities; including, perhaps, consideration of: – the representational genealogy of the WASP working class in American culture from the C17 to the present / – the white working class /- the European left and nativist populism/ – the subversive potential of white working class culture/ – the white working class in mass culture: social opiate and demonised scapegoat / – minority status: the white working class and ethnicity / – desiring in, of and by the white working class /- queering the white working class / – white working class women / – the aesthetics of white working class culture / – class consciousness and a sense of place/ – the white working class family.
Abstracts, of around 300 words should be emailed to l.blake@mmu.ac.uk by 1 November. Any queries to the same address please.
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