Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In her book ‘White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America’, Nancy Isenberg unfolds the history of exclusion that the Southern poor rural whites have undergone in the United States, from the 1700’s to the late twentieth century. The original meaning of the expression ‘white trash’ referred to “squatters, vagrants, and informal occupants of the land”: a social group characterized by their unstable and chaotic ways of inhabiting and transforming the built environment. Challenging the ideals of cleanness and productivity–consistently promoted for rural America–, it was their idleness and lack of morality, as perceived by the upper classes, what led them to live in shacks and junkyards that, in the words of Harper Lee, “looked like the playhouse of an insane child”. This paper studies the correlation between built space and social inequality, which has become intrinsic to the white poor in the rural American South. Rooted on Isenberg’s research on the history of white poverty from a class perspective, as well as on Michael Katz’s notion of the ‘undeserving poor’, it outlines the account of architectures built and inhabited by the Southern white underclass. I propose the interpretation of this history as a biopolitical confrontation arising from the subjugation of a group and their efforts to resist trough material practices that alter their physical environment. With that end, I analyze the idiosyncratic ways of using and transforming architectural space by the white rural poor, which in Trump’s America have acquired a new political significance.