Writing Race, Class, and Social Mobility in Post-Slavery America

Abstract: The White Trash Menace excavates a transnational Americas archive of twentieth-century fiction that grapples with the tense and tenuous ties between class privilege and whiteness that are endemic in post-slavery societies. Linking the writings of William Faulkner with a broad and diverse array of authors working across the American hemisphere, Soto-Crespo identifies a literary tradition that moves across the US nation's southern-most boundary and into the West Indies, the Caribbean coasts of South and Central America, and beyond in order to delineate the mutually imbricated histories of race and class that these regions share.