Abstract
Dog whistles are defined as covertly racialized discourse characteristic of right-wing populist speech, but do they also work in writing? Discovery of dog whistles in literary texts requires a mode of suspicious reading that is important in discursively toxic times, but may also risk circularity. This conundrum is tested in a comparative, suspicious reading of two Trump-era memoirs, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, revealing remarkable parallels between their politics and aesthetics. Vance’s populist narrative voice consistently dog whistles ‘race’ in the very act of disavowing it, suggesting his memoir may be parasitic on Coates’. Close reading contrasts Coates’ polysemous ‘thick’ signification with Vance’s incoherent double-voicedness. Ultimately however, a dog whistling relation between the two memoirs remains hypothetical.
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