A Nation of Outsiders
How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America
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- $36.99
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- $36.99
Publisher Description
At mid-century, Americans increasingly fell in love with characters like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye and Marlon Brando's Johnny in The Wild One, musicians like Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, and activists like the members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. These emotions enabled some middle-class whites to cut free of their own histories and identify with those who, while lacking economic, political, or social privilege, seemed to possess instead vital cultural resources and a depth of feeling not found in "grey flannel" America.
In this wide-ranging and vividly written cultural history, Grace Elizabeth Hale sheds light on why so many white middle-class Americans chose to re-imagine themselves as outsiders in the second half of the twentieth century and explains how this unprecedented shift changed American culture and society. Love for outsiders launched the politics of both the New Left and the New Right. From the mid-sixties through the eighties, it flourished in the hippie counterculture, the back-to-the-land movement, the Jesus People movement, and among fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christians working to position their traditional isolation and separatism as strengths. It changed the very meaning of "authenticity" and "community."
Ultimately, the romance of the outsider provided a creative resolution to an intractable mid-century cultural and political conflict-the struggle between the desire for self-determination and autonomy and the desire for a morally meaningful and authentic life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hale (Making Whiteness) explores the mainstreaming of outsider status in a sweeping, thought-provoking study of America's postwar political and cultural counterculture. Although Americans have a history of appropriating from minorities, from the 1950s on white Americans began identifying with them, imagining that "people living on the margins, without economic or political or social privilege, something vital, some essential quality that had somehow been lost from their own lives." Like Elvis Presley and Jack Kerouac, the white middle class borrowed the black and working class blues and critical stance toward the establishment. "Rebellion" went mainstream and lent romance, moral weight, and authenticity to movements as diverse as beat literature, rock and roll, the Jesus Freak movement, even prolife activism. Hale is able to explain, at least partially, the failure of so many 20th-century social movements: fantasies about the authenticity or purity of blacks or the poor became more persuasive than doing the "hard work of creating a system of economic justice." While sometimes slow-moving and too secure in the validity of its central argument, this polemic offers a refreshing take on recent cultural history.
