Other fun pop culture research projects I’ve done.
Zombieland
An analytical paper looking at the scene in the movie Zombieland, where the characters destroy a Native American gift shop. Through their destruction of this, they recreate the violence of the white American empire, reinforcing its identity as a settler-colonial state.
“The presence of the zombies has destroyed white families, and to get it back, they must assert their whiteness and their power of American empire over those who are foreign in a domestic sense.”
Night of the Living Dead
A paper arguing that this classic movie which is so often claimed to be anti-racist, is in fact a deeply racist movie that affirms white fears about Black Americans.
“From the very beginning this movie is invoking the idea of a white woman versus an Other. This is an American historical trope, and the group of people who have most often been a victim of this anxiety have been Black men. Therefore, this racial opposition is immediately present in the understanding of the story. Who exactly is coming for her is never stated, but in the 1960s, the who that white Americans felt threatened by was Black Americans.”
White People Food
A foodways project where I created a magazine exploring what white people food is and where it came from.
“The story of white food is intimately connected with an American history of whiteness, and food itself gets to the heart of what it meant to be an American.
Cookbooks played an important role in creating homogenized whiteness as the standard for what was considered American food, because the entire cooking industry also included definitions of proper white womanhood.”
Good Whitekeeping
A paper and presentation analyzing women’s magazines from the 1950s and how they positioned the white woman consumer at the center of the domesticity movement.
“The fight over integration in domestic spaces being so intense is logical when whiteness is rightly seen as an identity just as much as Blackness or Italianness. Identity is how people are seen, or want to be seen, and choosing to be white instead of their ethnic heritage was a choice that millions of people made in the 1950s, because giving up a past history was a way to grasp a more powerful future. For power to reproduce itself, it must indoctrinate the next generation who will rise to claim it. For whiteness to continue to define what it means to be American, it must raise a generation of white supremacists. And for capitalism to remain superior to Communism, it must create a generation of consumers.”
