Writing whiteness: Contemporary Southern literature in black and white (Walker Percy, Ernest J. Gaines, Josephine Humphreys, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker)

Race is, and always has been, central to American experience. And in American, whiteness is normative. Whiteness is the signifier by which the extent of one's “Americanness” is measured. Inherent in the assumption of America as intrinsically white is a profound denial of the constructed nature of whiteness. Ruth Frankenberg, in her landmark 1993 study, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness , argues that “[w]hiteness is a location of structural advantage, of race privilege…[I]t is a ‘standpoint,’ a place from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society…[W]hiteness refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed” (1) Drawing upon Toni Morrison's model for exploring the construction of whiteness she lays out in playing in the dark, the purpose of this study is to examine, mark, and name the cultural practices of whiteness in contemporary literature of the American South, specifically in the works of Walker Percy, Josephine Humphreys, Ernest Gaines, and Alice Walker.; Chapter I explores the evolution of southern literary criticism and the role the Agrarians and the New Criticism played in establishing southern literature as a white institution. Chapter II examines the novels of Walker Percy and his attempts to break from the Agrarian tradition by rendering the destructive nature of normative whiteness on both blacks and whites in the New South. Chapter III focuses on the novels of Josephine Humphreys and her attempts to challenge normative whiteness by discrediting notions of a collective, objective southern history.; The next two chapters focus on the work of southern African-American writers. Chapter IV examines the fiction of Ernest Gaines and his explorations of black manhood. When black males assert themselves in ways that defy the norms that whiteness has established, they become respected as men and can build strong black communities. Chapter V is centered on the works of Alice Walker and her assertion that southern literature, if it is to survive, must begin to complicate notions of race and whiteness. The conclusion provides a model for the future of a diverse southern literature.