Chapter 19 - Race and Cultural Difference

Summary

Overtly concerned with philosophical questions of human nature and deep time, the works of Cormac McCarthy nonetheless reflect historically contingent issues of race and cultural difference endemic to American culture in the post-civil rights era. While race and ethnicity are rarely in the foreground in his fiction, the tensions that arise from intercultural contact remain central to his narrative conflicts and to his vision of late capitalist modernity in the contested borderlands of Appalachia and the American Southwest. McCarthy’s depiction of African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexicans have drawn criticism for their reliance of stereotypes and familiar tropes of Otherness, even as these depictions inform his revisionist critique of hegemonic ideologies of imperialism, progress, and civilization. Likewise, his exploration of the mythological foundations of white Appalachian identity aligns with a consistent examination of the capacity for brutality and savagery in all humankind.