Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Dangerous Innocence: White Men, Mass Culture, and the Southern Outsider's Appeal, 1960-2020

Dangerous Innocence: White Men, Mass Culture, and the Southern Outsider's Appeal, 1960-2020

Romine, Scott
Murray, William P.

Hardcover

Series: Southern Literary Studies

Literary CriticismTelevisionGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 0807181552
ISBN13: 9780807181553
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: Apr 3 2024
Pages: 218
Weight: 0.94
Height: 0.63 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

Dangerous Innocence investigates how prevailing constructions of white masculinity in the U.S. South help feed and reinforce systems of racial inequity. Tracing the rise of the southern outsider in literature and on television from 1960 to 2020, William P. Murray probes white Americans' enduring desire to assert their own blamelessness even though such acts of self-justification facilitate continued violence against historically oppressed populations. Dangerous Innocence courses from popular television such as The Andy Griffith Show and The Waltons through influential fiction by Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other prominent southern authors--alongside forceful challenges voiced by Black writers including Chester Himes and Ernest Gaines--before turning to works created after the September 11 attacks that reinscribe cultural logics predicated on protecting white innocence and power.

Concluding on a note of praxis, Dangerous Innocence argues that reattaching southern outsiders to a communal identity encourages an honest assessment about what whiteness represents and what it means to belong to a nation steeped in commitments to white supremacy.

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