States of Salvation: Wise Blood and the Rise of the Neoliberal Right

Abstract

Situating Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood in the changing racial geographies of post-World War II Atlanta, this essay argues that Hazel Motes's religious journey toward embracing Jesus as his Savior allegorizes a recuperative fantasy of the white Southern subject's journey from Jim Crowto white flight. Through this journey, Wise Blood offers an astute vision of the racial struggles over Atlanta, out of which neoliberalism emerged in the 1970s and 1980s; thus, we might reconsider O'Connor as a central participant in the aesthetic and political struggles over the making of postwar urban space and politics.