South in Black & White Race Sex & Literature in the 1940s

If the nation as a whole during the 1940s was halfway between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the postwar prosperity of the 1950s, the South found itself struggling through an additional transition, one bound up in an often violent reworking of its own sense of history and regional identity. Examining the changing nature of racial politics in the 1940s, McKay Jenkins measures its impact on white Southern literature, history, and culture.

Jenkins focuses on four white Southern writers—W. J. Cash, William Alexander Percy, Lillian Smith, and Carson McCullers—to show how they constructed images of race and race relations within works that professed to have little, if anything, to do with race. Sexual isolation further complicated these authors' struggles with issues of identity and repression, he argues, allowing them to occupy a space between the privilege of whiteness and the alienation of blackness. Although their views on race varied tremendously, these Southern writers' uneasy relationship with their own dominant racial group belies the idea that "whiteness" was an unchallenged, monolithic racial identity in the region.

[This book] should be bought, discussed, argued about, and taught.

Journal of Southern History

He shows how issues of race are never that far from the surface in American books, and Southern ones in particular.

Times Literary Supplement

This thoroughly researched book enters the contemporary literary and cultural discussion in an up-to-date, highly relevant fashion.

Virginia Quarterly Review

Especially refreshing is the complexity of Jenkins's arguments, with their resistance to doctrinaire theoretical positions.

Louise Westling, University of Oregon

Discusses the changing nature of racial politics in the 1940s South as revealed in the works of four white writers who themselves had uneasy relationships with their own white culture: W. J. Cash, William Alexander Percy, Lillian Smith, and Carson McCullers.

An intelligent discussion of the way the subject of race has dominated white southern expression.

The Journal of American History [This book] should be bought, discussed, argued about, and taught.

Journal of Southern History He shows how issues of race are never that far from the surface in American books, and Southern ones in particular.

Times Literary Supplement This thoroughly researched book enters the contemporary literary and cultural discussion in an up-to-date, highly relevant fashion.

Virginia Quarterly Review Especially refreshing is the complexity of Jenkins's arguments, with their resistance to doctrinaire theoretical positions.

Louise Westling, University of Oregon

Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-212) and index.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Whatever Else the True American Is, He Is Also Somehow Black

Chapter 1. Moving among the Living as Ghosts: A Historical Overview

Chapter 2. Private Violence Desirable: Race, Sex, and Sadism in Wilbur J. Cash's The Mind of the South

Chapter 3. Men of Honor and Pygmy Tribes: Metaphors of Race and Cultural Decline in William Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee

Chapter 4. I Know the Fears by Heart: Segregation as Metaphor in the Work of Lillian Smith

Chapter 5. The Sadness Made Her Feel Queer: Race, Gender, and the Grotesque in the Early Writings of Carson McCullers

Conclusion: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Whiteness

Notes

Bibliography

Index