Innocence by association: Civil rights in the white literary imagination.
Item
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Title
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Innocence by association: Civil rights in the white literary imagination.
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Identifier
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AAI3213269
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identifier
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3213269
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Creator
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Gray, Jonathan W.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Robert Reid-Pharr
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Date
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2006
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | American Studies | Black Studies | Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies
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Abstract
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This study investigates how the modern civil rights movement (1954-68) shaped the literary production of four white writers, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty and William Styron. It begins by situating their literary output in the longstanding interracial tradition of writers who linked the status of America's democratic experiment with the fate of Black Americans. If, beginning with Phyllis Wheatley, Black people in America began to assert intellectual parity with whites by producing sophisticated and politicized texts, then whites writing in support of these emancipatory narratives demonstrate their innocence, i.e. their expansive and catholic morality, by identifying with the oppressed group. I call this dual practice of politicized Black writing and white endorsement of it the Black textual tradition. Placing Mailer, Welty, Warren and Styron's post-WWII texts into this larger historical tradition permits insights into the notions of social justice that pertained in supposedly liberal post-War America, because these writers found engaging the Black textual tradition problematic. Although all four writers eventually crafted texts that declared their sympathy with the goals of the Black textual tradition, like many liberal white Americans in the post-WWII moment these authors did not want their earlier silence interpreted as an assent to the repressive racial politics that were the norm across the nation. The texts they contribute to the national conversation on race negotiate these concerns by conveying their studied approval of the goals of Martin Luther King, SNCC, and the NAACP while displaying their insights into the reluctance of many of their white countrymen to support reform. Invariably, this kind of balancing act reveals much about the conflicted psyches of these four post-war liberals and the consensus driven middle class morality their writing represented. Their reluctance to embrace, indeed their fear of, the rapidly evolving expectations of the Black textual tradition helps explain why explorations of race and democracy in white literary fiction effectively cease for thirty years after Styron's acrimonious confrontation with Black critics of his work, and reveal why the liberal embrace of progressive politics in the 1960s proved to be so fleeting.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
