Dangerous Innocence: White Men, Mass Culture, and the Southern Outsider's Appeal, 1960-2020 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780807181553)

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.

Author: William P. Murray
ISBN-10: 0807181552
ISBN-13: 9780807181553
Publisher: LSU Press
Language: English
Published: 04/03/2024
Pages: 218
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.94lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.63d