Liminal Whiteness: Southern Rednecks, Hillbillies and Crackers in American Culture

自从第一批欧洲移民抵达新大陆以来，“白人”在美国一直是一个高度争议和具有传染性的领域。这是一种无形而强大的规范，它构建了社会，并将其划分为有权享有白人特权的人和无权享有白人特权的人。有色人种被系统地排除在这些特权之外。那些被认为未能实现美国梦的承诺，即成功和富裕的美国白人，也不属于“白人”的范畴。“阈限白人”旨在调查19世纪产生的一种特定的美国白人，并从那时起流传开来：“乡巴佬”，“乡巴佬”和“cracker”。这些南方白人的刻板印象，因为它们与贫困和地区归属密切相关，意味着一种被污染的白人，在白人特权和社会文化剥夺之间占据了一个有限的位置。这种界限性很有趣，因为它同时支持和颠覆了白人的霸权。它在流行文化中表现得尤为突出，流行文化是这种白色的主要舞台。“阈限白人”想要追溯19世纪以来“乡巴佬”、“乡巴佬”和“cracker”的多种发展，以展示这些刻板印象是如何在国家危机时期被用来重新谈判白人的。该项目将有助于美国研究，南方研究，特别是关键白人研究（CWS）的种族研究。这个项目的创新方法是交叉性，试图分析白人与其他类别，如性别、性、种族、年龄和残疾/能力（仅举几例）的交叉。一种交叉的方法将为白人在美国文化中的作用提供有意义的见解，并补充和推进目前主要关注白人及其特权的主流CWS话语。通过话语分析和对典型文本（小说、生活写作、电影和电视）的仔细阅读，该项目将展示白色的交叉性，并认为如果要解构白色的危险影响，就需要特别注意它。“乡巴佬”、“乡巴佬”和“土包子”等刻板印象是白人过去和现在作为霸权类别表现出来的典范。正如这个项目想要展示的那样，它们被用来强调白色的排他性。在大众文化中，通过他者化和主流化的并行过程，这些刻板印象在国家耻辱和国家象征之间摇摆不定。该项目认为，每一个时期都在编造“乡巴佬”、“乡巴佬”或“土包子”，以支持“美国白人”这一国家项目。

Ever since the first European settlers arrived in the New World, “whiteness” has been a highly contested and contagious terrain in the United States. It is an invisible and powerful norm that structures society and divides it into those who have access to the privileges of whiteness, and those who have not. People of color have systematically been excluded from these privileges. White Americans who have supposedly failed to comply with the promises of the American Dream, namely success and affluence, also fall outside the category “whiteness.”“Liminal Whiteness” aims to investigate a specific kind of American whiteness that was created in the nineteenth century, and that is circulated since then: ‘redneck,’ ‘hillbilly’ and ‘cracker.’ These white, Southern stereotypes, because they are so closely related to poverty and regional belonging, connote a tainted whiteness that occupies a liminal position between white privilege and socio-cultural disenfranchisement. This liminality is intriguing, because it simultaneously supports and subverts the hegemonic power of whiteness. It is especially played out in popular culture, the main site of the staging of this kind of whiteness. “Liminal Whiteness” wants to trace the manifold developments of ‘redneck,’ ‘hillbilly’ and ‘cracker’ since the nineteenth century in order to demonstrate how these stereotypes have been and are instrumentalized to re-negotiate whiteness in times of national crises. This project will contribute to the study of race in American Studies, Southern Studies, and particularly Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS). The innovative approach of this project is intersectionality, the attempt to analyze whiteness as intersecting with other categories such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age, and dis/ability (to name a few). An intersectional approach will offer meaningful insights into the workings of whiteness in American culture and complement and advance current dominant discourses of CWS that have mostly been concerned with making whiteness and its privileges visible. Through discourse analyses and close readings of exemplary texts (fiction, life writing, film and television), this project will demonstrate the intersectionality of whiteness and argue that whiteness needs to be made particular if its precarious effects are to be deconstructed. The stereotypes ‘redneck,’ ‘hillbilly’ and ‘cracker’ are exemplary for the ways in which whiteness has been and still is manifested as a hegemonic category. As this project intends to show, they are utilized and (ab)used to stress the exclusivity of whiteness. Through concurrent processes of othering and mainstreaming in popular culture, these stereotypes oscillate between being a national disgrace and national icons. Every period, this project argues, fabricates the ‘redneck,’ ‘hillbilly’ or ‘cracker’ it needs to either support the national project that is “American whiteness.”