Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940Making Whiteness is a profoundly important work that explains how and why whiteness came to be such a crucial, embattled--and distorting--component of twentieth-century American identity. In intricately textured detail and with passionately mastered analysis, Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the active citizenship of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white southerners re-established their dominance through a cultural system based on violence and physical separation. And in a bold and transformative analysis of the meaning of segregation for the nation as a whole, she explains how white southerners' creation of modern "whiteness" was, beginning in the 1920s, taken up by the rest of the nation as a way of enforcing a new social hierarchy while at the same time creating the illusion of a national, egalitarian, consumerist democracy. By showing the very recent historical "making" of contemporary American whiteness and by examining how the culture of segregation, in all its murderous contradictions, was lived, Hale makes it possible to imagine a future outside it. Her vision holds out the difficult promise of a truly democratic American identity whose possibilities are no longer limited and disfigured by race. |
Contents
No Easy Place or Time | 13 |
Lost Causes and Reclaimed Spaces | 43 |
Domestic Reconstruction | 85 |
Copyright | |
15 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 Grace Elizabeth Hale Limited preview - 2010 |
Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 Grace Elizabeth Hale No preview available - 1999 |
Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 Grace Elizabeth Hale No preview available - 1998 |
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advertising African American Afro-Americana antebellum Athens Atlanta Aunt Jemima Baton Rouge became Black Mammy blackface Chapel Hill Chicago City Collection color line Confederate Veteran consumption country stores culture of segregation despite ex-slave Faulkner Felton gender History increasingly Jim Crow Joel Chandler Harris John Johnson Journal labor Lillian Smith Louisiana State University Lumpkin Magazine Margaret Mitchell middle-class minstrel Mitchell's modern NAACP narrative Neal Negro NMAH North Carolina Press northern novel numbers Old South Oxford University Press photographs plantation Politics quote Race Relations racial identity racial order railroad Rebecca Latimer Felton Reconstruction region Reprint rural Rutherford Scarlett slave Slavery social southern blacks southern whites spaces spectacle lynchings Stone Mountain story tion town trade card twentieth century Uncle Remus University of Georgia University of North violence W. E. B. Du Bois Waco Warshaw Washington white and black white southern white supremacy white women woman York