TCG: Depictions of Addiction (ft. Christopher Garland)

Depictions of Addiction

A Strozier Faculty Lecture Series conversation with Dr. Christopher Garland

Another epidemic, beyond COVID-19, rages in America: opioid addiction. Dr. Christopher Garland, assistant professor of writing and linguistics, examines the visual rhetoric of this ongoing issue and the rural South through the documentary film The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. Join Dr. Garland and Leigh this week for a follow-up conversation to his Strozier faculty lecture, presented to the wider community as a WRUU and Georgia Southern University collaboration.

To skip the intro, fast forward to the 2:24 mark.

• Part of the Robert I. Strozier Faculty Lecture Series
• “The Visual Rhetoric of Opioid Addiction, Abjection, and White Trash”
• Christopher Garland
• Abstract Released in 2009 to wide acclaim, the documentary film The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia was hailed as an “outlaw celebration” of the White family’s willingness to “fuss and fight and party.” The film’s visual language incorporates a blend of handheld shots, high-speed editing, and depictions of dangerous behaviors — including the abuse of opioids. However, the film lacks any larger contextualization and, in this way, plays into stereotypes about poor, rural, white Southerners as a people apart: not only from whites who occupy a different socioeconomic status but from the ideal American imagined community. The White family is positioned as über-white trash: inevitably prone to violence, addicted to opioids, caught in an inescapable cycle of poverty, and tied to a place and history from which they cannot escape. Through a close reading of the film’s visual rhetoric, Dr. Christopher Garland, assistant professor of writing and linguistics, argues that, despite its aforementioned limitations, TWWWV is an important documentary as it marks a specific moment in a specific place at the beginning of the recent marked increase in opioid abuse and deaths from overdose. Moreover, the representations of addiction, abjection, and white trash in TWWWV invite dialogue about visual representations of blackness and black abjection during the crack epidemic.