The Naturalized Redneck
67
Notes
1 See Chris Willman’s Rednecks and Bluenecks for a more detailed explanation o f these
songs and their function in country music’s patriotic reaction to 9/11.
2 As the faces o f the American South continue to change and continue to become more
global— a reality commented on by many scholars working within the “New Southern
Studies”— Jimmy Wang Yang might be contrasted to Southern immigrant fiction like
Roberto Gonzalez’s Holy Radishes or, more directly, Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, which
itself explores the Southern reality o f Vietnamese immigrants brought to the U.S. after
the war. In the face o f a growing foreign-bom population in the South, it seems notable
that the WWE adopted an Asian redneck as its new symbol o f the normalized American.
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Literary Theory: An
Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Madden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing. 693-702.
Cao, Lan. Monkey Bridge. New York: Penguin, 1998.
Gonzalez, Roberto. Holy Radishes. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1995.
Jarosz, Lucy and Victoria Lawson. “Sophisticated People Versus Rednecks: Economic
Restructuring and Class Difference in America’s West.” Antipode 34.1 (Jan
2002): 8-27.
Jimmy Wang Yang. 2007. World Wrestling Entertainment. 17 June 2007
.
Shut Up and Sing. Dirs. Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck. Cabin Creek Films, 2006.
Willman, Chris. Rednecks and Bluenecks: the Politics o f Country Music. New York: New
Press, 2005.