White Working-Class Identity and US Nationalism in Twenty-First-Century Popular Texts

This chapter addresses recent portrayals of the US South in popular texts of the 2010s. Through the reality television program Duck Dynasty and J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy (2017), it demonstrates how Cold War intellectuals’ and authors’ influence on discourse around the term “southern” has thoroughly permeated the imagination and political sentiments of Americans. The analysis and close reading of Duck Dynasty shows how popular culture perpetuates ideas associated with southern exceptionalism into the twenty-first-century. In the fractured political climate since the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, these portrayals of southern dialect, imagery, and values become not only a shibboleth for American, democratic values of liberty, tradition, and honor, but also are coded language for white nationalism and resistance to progressive social values.