Jolene Hubbs, Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature

Jolene Hubbs's first book is a study of how and why the representation of poor whites in Southern US fiction has fitfully evolved.She traces clichés about white trashiness-a mix of laziness, despair, and energetic addictions to vulgarity-that have persisted over 200 years.She offers a convincing explanation for why middle-class readers continue to be reassured by "culture of poverty" narratives blaming poor people for their condition rather than economic and social structures benefiting the middle class and elites.Hubbs also offers good reasons for reading writers who resisted such clichés.Backstory: "culture of poverty" is a term popularized by Oscar Lewis in the 1950s; it influenced Daniel Moynihan's notorious 1965 report on the problem with Black families.Hubbs, however, shows that the concept's premises were developed earlier, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in response to persistent worries about poor whites degenerating the racial stock.But concern with whites' bad behavior goes back even earlier-to Jefferson and the Puritans before him.Hubbs's work is in sync with contemporary US poverty studies-including Matthew Desmond's Poverty, By America (2023)-that explore discriminatory social structures as the real culprit.A "culture of poverty" is those structures' tragic aftermath or symptom.Desmond proves that capitalism evolved many ways of preying on the impoverished, while "respectable" classes of people, including politicians, look the other way.In the 1960s, for instance, Dixiecrats allied with Republicans to delete or dilute most of the proposed anti-poverty initiatives.We shouldn't be asking why poverty persists, but rather why it is cultivated by capitalism and politically driven policies creating outcomes that many other nations have made illegal.Hubbs develops a different but congruent analysis of poverty by focusing on the role cultural representations play.Her readings of literary texts highlight five authors who, at least in part, directly challenged rather than simply reinforced white trash stereotypes.