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

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Evangelia Kindinger
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 419187393

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.”

• DFG Programme: Research Grants