A01=William P. Murray
Andy Taylor
Author_William P. Murray
Category=ATJ
Category=ATY
Category=DSB
Category=JBCC1
community
Cotton Comes to Harlem
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
guilt
manhood
masculinity
Matlock
morality
Percy
postsouthern
savior myth
sixties TV
southern studies
US South
Walking Dead
Waltons
Welty
white identity
white supremacy
whiteness
Product details
- ISBN 9780807181553
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 03 Apr 2024
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
William P. Murray is assistant professor of English at Tennessee Wesleyan University.
