Dangerous Innocence : White Men, Mass Culture, and the Southern Outsider's Appeal, 1960-2020 / William P. Murray.

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 2024.

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 0000

©2024.

1 online resource (218 pages).

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"William P. Murray's Dangerous Innocence analyzes pieces of popular mass culture, including novels and television shows, to uncover a pernicious process by which white southerners construct fantasies of themselves as outsiders set apart from the region's histories of systemic racial, class, and gender oppression. The fantasy of the outsider, Murray shows, thrives on the belief that identity is endlessly malleable and unattached to communal inheritances, allowing individuals to opt out of the systems they have inherited. This form of imagined white innocence constitutes a deeply dangerous fantasy, rooted in a strategy of avoidance and scapegoating, as southerners strive to avoid guilt by severing moral responsibility from their involvement in systems of power and exploitation. Murray begins by highlighting influential white southern male characters on television and traces their evolution as a vehicle of innocence. The first chapter focuses on TV shows from the 1960s through the 1990s to examine the white southern outsider's rise in the American imaginary. In The Andy Griffith Show (1960-1968), Murray finds the roots of the white southern outsider-a character whose sense of separation from traditional forms of southern community would come to dominate depictions of white innocence. From the 1970s through 1990s, shows such as The Waltons, Roots, Matlock, The Dukes of Hazzard, and In the Heat of the Night demonstrated how white southern outsiders could reject an image of themselves as part of a shared national body with a common history, building on a legacy of individualized innocence and exclusion from community. The second chapter shows the consequences of this rise by analyzing fiction by Eudora Welty, Wendell Berry, Walker Percy, and Barry Hannah, in which well-respected white, southern authors provide a philosophic lens through which white readers can separate themselves from the region's guilt. The third chapter interrupts white fantasies of innocence with discussions of Chester Himes, Ernest Gaines, and Yusef Komunyakaa, three writers who illustrate that Black southern identity remains a real and felt presence in the United States despite white southerners' attempts to imagine themselves as apart from the region's history of violence. Focusing on the years after 9/11, the fourth chapter chronicles the white southern outsider's return to community, as such figures model a new brand of American innocence, evidenced in the TV series The Walking Dead and fiction by Ron Rash and Pat Conroy. Murray shows that, despite the significant changes in the US over the fifty years that his book covers, white people remain largely consistent in embracing cultural logics that protect both their innocence and their power. The fifth chapter and the conclusion introduce potentially productive ways to approach white identity. Jason Aaron and Ron Garney's comic Men of Wrath (2015), Cormac McCarthy's postapocalyptic novel The Road (2006), and Natasha Trethewey's poem "Native Guard" (2006) establish that, in order for white people to participate truly in a radical and organized destruction of racial violence, there must first be a willingness to turn inward and to destroy the outsider's imagined innocence. By focusing on narratives promulgated across mass culture, Dangerous Innocence shows that reattaching white outsiders to a communal identity encourages an honest assessment about what whiteness represents and what it means to belong to a nation steeped in inherited commitments to white supremacy"-- Provided by publisher.

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April 10, 2024

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