Overview

Dangerous Innocence investigates how prevailing constructions of white masculinity in the U.S. South help feed and reinforce systems of racial inequity. Tracing the rise of the ""southern outsider"" in literature and on television from 1960 to 2020, William P. Murray probes white Americans' enduring desire to assert their own blamelessness even though such acts of self-justification facilitate continued violence against historically oppressed populations. Dangerous Innocence courses from popular television such as The Andy Griffith Show and The Waltons through influential fiction by Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other prominent southern authors—alongside forceful challenges voiced by Black writers including Chester Himes and Ernest Gaines—before turning to works created after the September 11 attacks that reinscribe cultural logics predicated on protecting white innocence and power. Concluding on a note of praxis, Dangerous Innocence argues that reattaching southern outsiders to a communal identity encourages an honest assessment about what whiteness represents and what it means to belong to a nation steeped in commitments to white supremacy.

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9780807181553

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Reviews

"Drawing on a diverse range of texts, William P. Murray brilliantly examines the U.S. South as a space key to licensing and sustaining national fantasies of white innocence. In analyzing the 'southern outsider' figure, Dangerous Innocence offers a relevant and compelling case for how region mediates individual and collective understandings of history, race, and power."" - Lisa Hinrichsen, author of Possessing the Past: Trauma, Imagination, and Memory in Post-Plantation Southern Literature ""Murray's analysis and historicization of southern literature and television deftly maps the trajectory that deployments of white innocence carved through the past six decades. An incredibly timely and immensely necessary contribution to southern studies, literary studies, critical race and whiteness studies, and more."" - Ryan Sharp, assistant professor of English, Baylor University ""The vast archive of this book—from seemingly banal midcentury television to post-9/11 prestige literature—demonstrates a curious continuity in the fictive conversation about race in America: a promised reckoning that never quite arrives. Murray refuses that deferral, effectively staging the conversation through accessible, generous prose."" - Jennie Lightweis-Goff, author of Blood at the Root: Lynching as American Cultural Nucleus"

Author Information

William P. Murray is assistant professor of English at Tennessee Wesleyan University.

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