This project explores the Southern white trash’s fraught relationship with difference through Grit Lit—literature by and about the white trash. In a historical moment where poor whites have been (sometimes rightfully) scapegoated as key cogs in Trump’s demagoguery characterized by hateful speech and reactionary rhetoric, Grit Lit is a coming-to-terms with its whiteness and trashiness. It is an ongoing search for a usable, unshameful identity amidst a centuries-old construction of the white trash as racially, economically, and regionally as waste people. As this project articulates, to reckon with an inherently liminal and marginalized community, one long associated with (again, sometimes rightfully) assumptions of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and misogyny, Grit Lit is only able to come to that identity through a sometimes painful acknowledgment of difference. One key way Grit Lit accomplishes this is through its experimentations with and reconceptualizations of genre. Beginning with Harry Crews and progressing chronologically to the present (through Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, and Tom Franklin, among others), foundational Grit Lit authors, are studied in relation to their generic choices (ranging from autobiographical realism and literary naturalism to revisionist westerns and detective fiction) and their impact on the literature’s identity politics (including race, gender, sexuality, and disability). As the “Rough South” aesthetic continues to expand beyond the South and into new mediums—comics, television, film—a theoretical basis for understanding white trash identity from the inside provides much-needed (and perhaps unlikely) allyship in a cultural moment marked by racial and social injustice.
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