The Monstrous Hospitality of Canonical Text Selections: The Need for a Hospitable Literacy Framework

Curriculum Violence via Texts

Coined by Ighodaro and Wiggan (2010), curriculum violence refers to “the deliberate manipulation of academic programming in a manner that ignores or compromises the intellectual and psychological wellbeing of learners” (p. 2). They explained that curriculum is often used to dictate which experiences and histories are worth knowing and which should be shunned due to their negligible importance in the overall trajectory of society. The expansive influence of the curriculum on learners results in the curriculum assuming the form of a “psychological discourse of power” where “the interests of dominant groups or power elites are stated and then served through a dominant curriculum” (p. 3). By positioning the knowledge and experiences of dominant groups at the forefront of the curricular experience, educators teach students who is and is not inferior, who is and is not intellectually dependent on others, who is and is not capable of thinking, and who is and is not worthy of cultural empowerment and social progress.

Although Ighodaro and Wiggan (2010) referred to curricular violence embedded in curriculum content, pedagogical processes, and educational assessments in the overall education system, Jones (2020) highlighted the violence of English and literacy classrooms, and she noted that intention, or deliberateness, is not required for curriculum violence to occur. Specifically, she argued that syllabi construction, assignment and assessment creation, standards prioritization, and even classroom rules can be violent for minoritized students. Curriculum violence, although sometimes influenced by larger political issues, can also be a result of individual educator's pedagogical decisions. While all aspects can be violent, Jones (2022) pinpointed text selection as particularly dire to students’ intellectual and psychological wellbeing:

If our text selection presents a blatant allegiance to characters from marginalized communities only if they remain marginalized and/or a White character is part of their redemption story, we are complicit in upholding a form of curriculum violence that is not inclusive of the full range of people's stories and histories. (pp. 4–5).

Critical Literacy and the Teaching of Canonical Texts

Recent scholarship on the teaching of canonical texts has acknowledged that these texts center “implicit and explicit narratives [of] Eurocentrism, conflict-resolution through violence, gender stereotypes, and racism,” but the research often focuses on how critical pedagogical and critical literacy approaches to these texts can “subvert the traditions, norms, [and] expectations” (Macaluso & Macaluso, 2019, p. x) of traditional literary analysis and pedagogical approaches. Dyches (2019), for example, cited research showing that students from nondominant groups feel marginalized and silenced by the disconnect between their own experiences and the narratives in canonical texts (Bissonette & Glazier, 2016; Schieble, 2014) and argued that students from dominant groups are also negatively impacted by reading these texts having their privilege reproduced and affirmed (Glazier & Seo, 2005). Still, she noted that teachers “continue to find generative ways to teach their canonical curricula using approaches that are critical, careful, and social-justice oriented” (Dyches, 2019, p. 36) by engaging students in “analysis of how texts and discourses work, where, with what consequences, and in whose interests” (Luke, 2012) across social, political, and cultural contexts.

Recent pedagogical articles that have examined canonical literature pedagogy focus on how teachers might mitigate curricular violence via canonical text selections by building robust text sets that bring forward multiple perspectives (Dallacqua & Sheahan, 2019; Johnson & Neville, 2019); by teaching canonical text using critical literacy frameworks (Borsheim-Black & Saragianides, 2019; Ebarvia, 2019; Ervin, 2022); by connecting thematic elements of the canon to popular culture or current events (Cook et al., 2019; Macaluso & Macaluso, 2019); and providing opportunities for youth to provide counternarratives or personal responses to canonical texts (Bissonette & Glazier, 2016; Falter & Schoonover, 2019). Jones (2022a) critiqued these attempted mitigations as inadequate responses to texts that construct and uphold dehumanizing constructions of identity, arguing instead for “space [in ELA classrooms] to let our darlings, in this case our outdated texts and pedagogies, die, and along with that, parts of ourselves that were nostalgic about how we taught familiar texts” (pp. 4–5). Certainly, teachers reported complex factors beyond nostalgia that limit their ability to teach non-canonical texts, including district and school approved reading lists, standardized curriculum and testing, and limited funding for new texts (Boyd & Darragh, 2017; Smith et al., 2018), but Jones challenged literacy researchers, policymakers, and teachers to reconsider whether curricular violence through text selection can be mitigated simply by adding additional voices, analyzing more critically, or building more current summative assessments.

Monster Theory

Coined by Jeffrey Cohen (1996), monster theory is a critical philosophy that asks researchers to consider how monstrous bodies exist as cultural metaphors. Specifically, monster theory contends that literary monsters are “difference made flesh, come to dwell among us” (Cohen, 1996, p. 7), where “us” refers to dominant, traditional, hegemonic entities who classify the self as normal and any being promoting difference as Other. To mute or obliterate diversity, the monster/Other must be destroyed via murder, maiming, or banishment, and its removal is praised as a heroic endeavor. In fact, the monster/Others’ death or banishment is a warning: beware the pull of difference; beware the movement of normal bodies into monstrous spaces to avoid contamination; beware the desire to challenge normality, for you might become monstrous. Still, those who avoid the monster are jealous of its freedom, envious of how the monster can express itself in its exiled state. The monster is liberation made real, so people repressed by the restrictions of normalcy use the monster as a second body, one that can live out desires deemed improper. When the tourism of the monster's body ends, the being is killed, a ritual sacrifice to maintain the myth of tradition. Because the monster never dies, however, it always returns. When the monsters rise again, they present questions that so-called normal people cannot ignore. They “ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions … They ask us why we have created them” (p. 20).

Monster theorists are clear about who societal monsters tend to be, as literary monsters are often symbolically or blatantly represented by racial, gendered, sexual, and/or disabled Others. Stories about zombies and other undead creatures mirror implicit anxiety over race relations (Newitz, 2020). Narratives of creatures with perceived bodily oddities are “important elements in understanding the psychologies and the body-images of ‘normal’ subjects, attesting to what is and is not tolerable or incorporable into normality” (Grosz, 2020, p. 419). Speculative fiction (e.g., sci-fi, fantasy, and horror) includes aliens, futuristic beings, and monsters who mirror the existences and experiences of real-world Others marred by pernicious stereotypes (Weinstock, 2020). Any tale that includes “fantastic beasts, witches, zombies, vampires, dragons, manticores, shades, and the rest of the monstrous menagerie [are] analogous to those who are positioned as different in the real world” (Thomas, 2019, p. 20). Thus, monstrous bodies in texts are often an author's way of critiquing societal beliefs about the construction of the normal/abnormal, right/wrong, welcome/shunned. Difference in minoritized identity is exaggerated into monstrous aberration. In this way, the monster is a “[text] in need of interpretation” (Weinstock, 2020, p. 46). It is a metaphor for those considered monstrous in dominant society.

When interpretation occurs, however, what do we learn? For many researchers, it is enough to note the parallels between monster and Other, detailing how minoritized people are consistently situated as villains, enemies, monsters (Thomas, 2019). But other scholars have noted that this positioning communicates something to readers about the people who are made monstrous. Explicitly, scholars have argued that readers are taught who can and who cannot be welcomed into the home. Halberstam (2020) suggested that the monster often destroys the sanctity of the home, so even if they have an invitation to visit, they are not allowed to stay for long. Beal (2020) argued that the monster is a representation of Freud's conception of the unheimlich, the unhomely or uncanny. He stated that monsters destabilize one's sense of security, health, and wellbeing: “They make one feel not at home at home. They are figures of chaos and disorientation within order and orientation, revealing deep insecurities in one's faith in oneself, one's society, and one's world” (p. 453). These destabilizing creatures, figures of chaos, beings-that-are-not encroach upon normal society's feelings of at-homeness, safety, balance. The traditional folk cannot give these creatures a place in their homes, for their very existence feels parasitic, as if the foreign being is feeding off the host. In this way, hospitality toward the Other means a loss of the self. Thus, literary monsters teach readers who is and is not deserving of hospitality, who does and does not warrant space in the home, who we are and are not responsible for.

Derridean Hospitality

The notion of Derridean deconstruction explores our responsibility to the Other, with the understanding that the Other historically includes women, children, non-Europeans, and other formal identities. Rather than arguing that identities are irrelevant, Derrida deconstructed the subject with the goal of “improv[ing] the concept of the human subject” (Derrida, 2000, p. 179) so those currently defined as Other can be recognized as “the subject of his or her own experience, life, activity, responsibilities and so on” (Montefiore, 2001, p. 177). In the context of education, this means that teachers, students, administration, staff, and community members must deconstruct personal ideas and fears about the Other to see each person as an individual subject, each being as someone worthy of expressing life on their own terms. Categorical identifications are important, but for Derrida, they cannot determine the gamut of humanity. Parts of people do not constitute their whole of being.

Absolute hospitality “requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner … but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come” (Derrida, 1997/2000, p. 25). While classrooms in the United States are mandated—often after protracted legislative and judicial battles (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education, Title IV, Title IX, The Americans with Disabilities Act)—to allow the Other entry, there is a fundamental difference between allowing entry and giving place to all young people. In fact, Derrida would claim that our historical understanding of hospitality is deficient due to the numerous restrictions people place on unlimited welcome. For example, students of color and students with diverse gender and sexual identities can physically enter the classroom, but books by, for, and about them cannot, due to teacher censorship and/or state mandate (Boyd et al., 2021; Moeller & Becnel, 2020). Educators increasingly bring youth literature into classrooms around the United States, but the texts are often judged based on their ability to align with canonical texts or state standards, rather than how they might provide students a place to dream and exist in the literature classroom (Dallacqua & Sheahan, 2020; Rybakova & Roccanti, 2016). Canonical texts are taught to ensure commensurability and promote a shared cultural heritage (Coles, 2013), but the texts often uplift White, cisgendered, able-bodied, wealthy American men as the only beings whose cultural heritage is of worth (Toliver & Hadley, 2021a; Miller & Worlds, 2021). Thus, students and their stories can enter, but they may not be given place in the classroom, curriculum, or school.

The only one who can give place is the “master at home” (Derrida, 1997/2000, p. 53), the host who has the power to receive or refuse the Other as they wish. As classroom hosts, teachers, in the moment of arrival, must immediately decide if the Other deserves hospitality or if they are wholly other, a parasite or a “being that is not” (Derrida, 1997/2000, p. 5). They must decide which classroom texts and assignments to include, determine which students are deserving of care and representation, and choose which students are wholly Other. The connection between host and visitor, teacher and student is a necessary one. Derrida maintained that a key factor in determining who is worthy of hospitality and who is a “being that is not” (p. 5) is whether the host perceives the other as threatening:

Anyone who encroaches on my “at home,” … on my power of hospitality, on my sovereignty as host, I start to regard as an undesirable foreigner, and virtually as an enemy. This other becomes a hostile subject, and I risk becoming their hostage. (p. 55).

Text Selection

In a previous article, we discussed the list of books we compiled from the English Education Autobiography assignment and highlighted arguments the PSTs made in defense of the canonical texts present on that list (Toliver & Hadley, 2021b). In that article, we showcased the vast array of texts the PSTs were assigned in secondary school (n = 220); we also revealed how little overlap they had in their ELA classes (only 16 books were read by at least one-third of students across class sections) and highlighted the arguments PSTs made in defense of the canon (e.g., canonical texts are the highest quality; are necessary to understand literary allusions; and are able to teach overarching themes better than other books). Rather than just centralizing PST arguments, the article also challenged common arguments for canonical texts that we heard in our teaching contexts.

For this study, we first wanted to examine the 16 texts most assigned to the PSTs to consider what was being communicated in those narratives, but we noticed extensive differences in the texts. For instance, the sociohistorical context of Shakespearean plays like Romeo and Juliet are vastly different from novels like The Great Gatsby and TKAM. To account for this difference, we narrowed the texts based on setting. First, we limited our analysis to narratives set in the past 100 years (1922–2022 at the time of this study). This eliminated eight books and created historical commonality across the texts. We then eliminated texts in which the protagonists were not U.S. citizens. This constriction highlighted the geographical, political, and social context of one specific location which was essential because different spatial contexts are faced with sociopolitical issues bounded by geographical demarcations. After narrowing the texts, we were left with five books: The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925); Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury, 1953); To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee, 1960); The Outsiders (Hinton, 1967); and The Things They Carried (O’Brien, 2009).

Data Analysis: Reflexive Critical Content Analysis

To engage in this research, we combined critical content analysis (CCA) (Johnson et al., 2016) with reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) (Braun & Clarke, 2019). CCA is a flexible method that positions critical paradigms as the frame for textual analysis (Short & World of Words Community, 2017). RTA is also a flexible method that prioritizes theming and coding to analyze research data. A key criterion for RTA is that researchers must continually question their assumptions, consider how their positionalities influence data analysis, reflect on how they engage with the data, and acknowledge that data interpretation can never be separated from the researcher (Braun & Clarke, 2022; Trainor & Bundon, 2021). Combining CCA with RTA enabled us to attend to all the steps required for the former while acknowledging how the researcher is embedded in the whole of the process. We called our process reflexive critical content analysis (RCCA).

To engage in RCCA, we employed several distinct steps over the course of 6 months. First, although CCA begins with research purpose and questions, we began with our positionality. Heidi is a White cis-hetero woman who works with both Derridean post-structural conceptions of responsibility to the Other and critical theories that reckon with the role of gender, sexuality, race, and other identity categories in personal and institutional settings. Her identity and the privilege it affords has required a great deal of unlearning in her past and present considerations of self as a reader, person, public high school English teacher, and teacher educator. Alternatively, Stephanie is a Black cis-hetero woman whose work centralizes Black youth, speculative fiction, and social justice in the context of education. She often thinks about her experiences as a Black girl in public schools and her position as a former public high school English teacher. Her identity as a Black girl and woman was often at odds with her identity as a student and teacher; this conflict has required her to explore the difficulties of teaching for equity and justice in schools steeped in Whiteness. In discussing our positionalities, we clarified the contrast in our racialized sociopolitical, historical, and theoretical locations, and we noticed how, even though there was resonance in our gender and teaching identities, our life experiences and analytic attunements greatly contrasted when race was discussed. Thus, we agreed that even as theory would guide our analysis of text, race would be a central feature of our collective work.

After an initial discussion of our positionalities, we followed CCA by deciding on a research purpose, creating research questions, and selecting research texts. As we engaged in each component, we kept our positionalities in mind. For example, because we knew race would be a salient feature of our analysis, we created research questions centering race as a major focus of the investigation. Once these selections were complete, we followed CCA guidelines and read deeply within our theoretical frames to select tenets relevant to our research purpose. By first reading theory, rather than beginning with a familiarization of data as RTA would require, we knew our analysis would follow a deductive approach.

For the deductive analytical process, we set a schedule in which we read one book per month. We individually read and took notes on each book with theories of hospitality and monstrosity in mind. Although we left room for in vivo coding, we theoretically coded the texts using these broad categories: hospitality, welcome/shunned, monstrous, Other, whiteness/white supremacy, racism, us/them, giving place, normal/not normal, outsider/insider. At the end of the month, we collectively discussed our readings alongside our research questions and theories. During these meetings, we reviewed our coded sections and took detailed notes to create a record of salient codes and passages. We discussed not only the elements connected to our readings, but we also explored our pre-existing knowledge and social positions in relation to the texts.

To illustrate, we followed CCA by creating collaborative theoretical memos for each book. In our notes from January 3, 2022, after the reading of The Outsiders, we wrote:

Every group has its Others - Greasers see the Socs as monsters, so it allows them to kill them and brutalize them without remorse and vice versa. Every group has monsters—

Essentially, we engaged in the steps of CCA by reading the texts with theory in mind and attending to structures of power, but we also engaged in RTA through discussions of our sociohistorical experiences and how they affected our reading and analysis. We questioned our assumptions about who could be classified as monsters (i.e., White and poor people can also be monstrous in the case of the Greasers); considered positionality and its influence on our data analysis (i.e., how our racial backgrounds affected our understanding and investigation of textual allusions); and reflected on how data interpretation was entwined with our identities (i.e., how analysis would change if we had a different writing partnership).

As we moved toward the writing of themes, we reviewed our codes across all the texts and grouped them into larger categories foregrounding our theoretical frames. As we did so, we found that even as we selected passages reflecting our theoretical tenets, our positionalities affected which passages made it into the final paper and which passages did not. Namely, as race was an essential component to our discussions, we realized that although there were multiple passages we could have included to address the monsterization or welcome of characters based on gender, ethnicity, ability, or sexuality, we consistently selected passages that illustrated Otherness based on race as examples of hospitality and monstrosity. This forced us to narrow our research purpose to more closely align with the findings from our analytic process.

Ultimately, we utilized RCCA to ensure that even as we followed the flexible, yet comprehensive steps for CCA in our exploration and study of the data, we also attended to the fact that we were responsible for interpretation and representation of the theory, context, and data. Thus, we were able to construct several interpretive stories about the texts that were grounded in our theoretical assumptions, linked to our analytic resources and skills, and connected to who we are as researchers and people.

Hospitality to the Monstrous

In every book, there were characters who acted monstrously—they committed murder; treated other characters in degrading and dehumanizing ways; and espoused racist, homophobic, or misogynistic views—yet, because of the white racial identities they carried, they were offered hospitality. For instance, Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby is the fictional embodiment of white supremacy culture (Okun, 2022), and his monstrosity and brutality are carefully cataloged throughout the novel. As examples, Tom broke his mistress' nose because she mentioned his wife's name, promoting fear through aggression. He engaged in paternalism when he hesitantly identified Daisy, his wife, as White, showcasing his perceived power to bestow whiteness upon others. He believed white people must hoard power or else “the other races will [one day] have control of things” (p.14). Tom is a character capable of both thoughtless and purposeful monstrosities because of his white supremacist beliefs.

However, Tom is always offered hospitality by those around him, no matter how monstrously he behaves. When Tom compared Daisy's affair with Gatsby to “intermarriage between black and White,” Jordan murmured, “We're all White here” (p. 137), welcoming Tom's negative description of interracial marriage and his description of Backness as inferior. After Gatsby mentioned the word “uncivilized” during conversation, Tom began a rant about civilization, of Whiteness, “going to pieces,” and if they don’t “look out, the White race will be—utterly submerged” (p. 14). Daisy affirmed Tom by saying, “We’ve got to beat them down” (p. 15) even though she said this with a wink. Nick internally stated that Tom's outburst was pathetic, but he never responded aloud. No one corrected or challenged Tom during his rant. No one left the room. Essentially, Tom's behaviors are excused because the combination of wealth and whiteness made his monstrosity tolerable, securing his limitless welcome in every setting.

White wealth also played a role in TKAM. Near the end of the novel, a group of White, well-to-do, religious, and mostly racist ladies of Maycomb gathered for their customary missionary circle. In attendance was Miss Maudie who asserted herself as one of “the handful of people in this town who say that fair play is not marked White Only” (Lee, 1960, p. 270). Still, when the civilly monstrous White women began lamenting the sullenness of their cooks and field hands after the murder of Tom Robinson, a Black man, Miss Maudie was silent. When one of the ladies stated, “there's nothing more distracting than a sulky darky” (p. 264) and another discussed that no amount of education or Christian doctrine will save White women from Black male sexual deviance, Miss Maudie did not object. Of course, Miss Maudie was a guest who had a responsibility to wholly welcome others in someone else's home whether she agreed with their politics or not; however, it is worth noting who was and was not excluded from that unconditional welcome. In this instance, Miss Maudie welcomed the White women and their racist views through her silence. Calpurnia, the Black housekeeper, can enter the room to serve the nice White women, but she existed only to offer hospitality, never to receive it. Even Miss Maudie did not provide welcome. Ultimately, as the monstrous missionaries positioned Calpurnia and the other Black residents of Maycomb as wholly Other, Miss Maudie also refused to give place to Calupurnia through her silence.

The Outsiders also makes clear that Derrida's “moment of arrival” or Beal's determination of the unheimlich is deeply tied to socially constructed considerations of racial similarity or alterity. Once again, wealthy White women (or girls) are symbols of generosity and hospitality, as when Ponyboy and Dally (White Greasers) first met Cherry and Marcia (White Socs) at the drive-in. When Johnny joined the group, Cherry “looked at him, sizing him up as she had me. Then she smiled softly, and I knew she had sized him up right” (Hinton, 1967, p. 24), meaning she had determined he was an Other worthy of her hospitality. The Greasers were offered hospitality by the Soc girls because, although they were poor, they still have shared identity categories like whiteness and shared concepts of identity performance like traditional masculinity and femininity. Even when members of the Greasers killed, robbed, fought, and engaged in other violent behaviors, they could be humanized in ways that the nameless Mexican, who got knifed in a fight was not. Even the verbal digs that the boys and girls gave each other—“wild Indians” (p. 106), “sq**ws” (p. 107), “Arabian slavetraders” (p. 28)—made clear what identities the characters viewed as “beings that are not.” (Derrida, p. 5).

In The Things They Carried, the story of one soldier's attractive and bubbly girlfriend, Mary Anne, who showed up in Vietnam to be near him, is one of the more striking examples of how White femininity is equated with hospitality and comfort. She was “good for morale” (O’Brien, 2009, p. 100) because “she made you think about those girls back home, how pure and innocent they all are” (p. 115). She danced to music, played volleyball, and flirted with her boyfriend's friends, and “the men genuinely liked her” (p. 100). In short, Mary Anne's youth, whiteness, friendliness, and beauty reminded the soldiers of their own (lost) humanity and hospitality.

However, by the end of Mary Anne's story, she is portrayed as monstrous through her association with the land and people of Vietnam. As Mary Anne's curiosity and fascination with the land grew, she was transformed: “Vietnam made her glow in the dark. She wanted more, she wanted to penetrate deeper into the mystery of herself, and after a time the wanting became needing, which turned then to craving” (pp. 115–116). Her transformation into the monstrous is clearest in the description of her jewelry: a grotesque necklace “elongated and narrow, like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were threaded along a length of copper wire, one tongue overlapping the next, the tips curled upward as if caught in a final shrill syllable” (pp. 112–113). The text suggests that Mary Anne's monstrosity is directly connected to the land of Vietnam: “She was part of the land…She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill” (p. 118). Thus, Mary Anne becomes a cautionary tale about how dangerous the Other can be—so dangerous that even a bringer of hospitality can be corrupted. The fundamental problem is that Mary Anne, in the moment of arrival, chose to see the Other as quaint and wonderful instead of as beings unworthy of hospitality. Her inability to make the correct decision meant that she became monstrous. Even as a monster, however, Mary Anne's whiteness carried weight: When she finally left the compound to become one with the land, the soldiers conducted a week-long air search and brought in the military police to bring her back. They never found her, but if they did, she would be welcomed with open arms, tongue necklace, and all.

Across the text set, the consistent double standard of hospitality in these texts—where only a white racialized identity makes “inviolable immunity” (Derrida, 1997/2000, p. 51), a characteristic of hospitality highlights these texts’ failure to “improve the concept of the human subject” (Derrida, 2000, p. 179) in determining who deserves hospitality.

Monstrosity That Precludes Hospitality

As some monstrous characters were granted hospitality due to their proximity to whiteness, other characters were described as more beast or object than human, relegated to the outskirts of humanity and described as dead or ghostly rather than living human beings. As an example, Black characters in The Great Gatsby are scarce, their presence only referenced twice throughout the text. In one of these instances, the narrator described his encounter with Black people in the following way: “a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry” (Fitzgerald, 1925, p. 73). The term Black buck was often used to classify Black men who refused to bend to the will of Whiteness and whose supposed violent and sexual natures wreaked havoc on White citizens. These unnamed Black men are problems, monsters prone to viciousness and lasciviousness who refused law and order. The racial slur is one way to dictate the men's monstrosity, but Nick's description of their eyes also situates the characters as lurid beings. The Black people did not just look at the White men. Instead, the yolks of their eyes rolled toward them, a garish sight. These “haughty” individuals lived on the outskirts, away from civilized society. They may be dressed nicely, and have the outer trappings of wealth, but they were still inhuman, which is why Nick says, “anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” […] “anything at all … ” (p. 73). Said another way: even monsters wear nice clothes and ride in limousines in a land of beasts and brutes.

That Black people are removed from true civilization to protect a town's innocence is represented in both The Outsiders and TKAM. In Hinton's text, Black people do not exist and representations of people of color are limited even though the novel is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a city historically filled with Black people. Indigenous people are only referred to using racial slurs, and the only Latine person is a Mexican hitchhiker who attempts to stab someone. People of color haunt the narrative, existing on the periphery of civilization, unwelcome into the Greasers’ or the Soc's world. Another example was shown through Tom Robinson in TKAM. Tom is prominent in the narrative, but he is mostly a specter that haunts the daily conversations of White characters with little dialogue to position himself human. Atticus called Tom a “quiet, respectable, humble Negro” (Lee, 1960, p. 232) who had the gall to feel empathy for a White woman. Scout described his manners as aligned with those of Atticus. The pastor called Robinson's family “clean-living folks” (p. 219). Even during his defense, Tom is a shadow, lurking behind Atticus as the lawyer defended him. Thus, Tom is a respectable negro because he was allowed entrance into civilization, but he existed as an ephemeral being/not being who did not speak for fear that well-meaning townspeople would murder him for existing.

Beyond metaphorical monstrosity, explicit descriptions of Tom’s body showcase how he was made monstrous in the town. Scout described Tom as a “black-velvet negro, not shiny, but soft black velvet” (Lee, 1960, p. 218). Mr. Ewell said Tom, alongside the rest of the Black community, lived in a “n***er nest” (p. 198) and the proximity of the “nest” to Mr. Ewell's house lessened the value of his property. Atticus argued that the belief that all Black people were immoral and untrustworthy was “a lie as black as Tom Robinson's skin” (p. 232). In narrating Tom's presence in the courtroom, Scout said that despite Tom's powerful look, his left arm was rubber-like, “fully twelve inches shorter than his right, and hung dead at his side. It ended in a small shriveled hand, and from as far away as the balcony I could see that it was no use to him” (p. 211). These images of Tom focus on his body as an oddity: he is closer to fabric than human. He resides in a monster nest, of which his very existence devalued the existence of other, White residents. He is deemed a monstrous Other, lurking in the metaphorical and physical shadows.

Although Tom Robinson was symbolically constructed as a ghost, the Vietnamese people in The Things They Carried represented a direct ghostly classification. In the text, the narrator portrayed the Vietnamese people in the following way:

We called the enemy ghosts …The land was haunted. We were fighting forces that did not obey the laws of twentieth-century science. Late at night, on guard, it seemed that all of Vietnam was alive and shimmering—odd shapes swaying in the paddies, boogiemen in sandals, spirits dancing in old pagodas. It was ghost country, and Charlie Cong was the main ghost. The way he came out at night. How you never really saw him, just thought you did. Almost magical—appearing, disappearing. He could blend with the land, changing form, becoming trees and grass … He was scary. (O’Brien, 2009, pp. 213–214).

Descriptions of monstrosity are not relegated to otherworldly presence, as minoritized peoples were also deemed monsters because of their distance from whiteness. For instance, in Fahrenheit 45 l, Beatty, the antagonist of the story, complained that increased minoritized people resulted in the sordid state of the country—book burnings, lack of social connection, an ignorant populace, fear-based politics. He says,

Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico… The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. (Bradbury, 1979, pp. 55–56).

Ultimately, minoritized characters in each text were deemed monstrous solely because of the racialized identities they occupied. Their Blackness was grotesque; their Brown and Asianness otherworldly; their distance from Whiteness horrifying and hideous. They are positioned as the monsters who destroy the sanctity of the home, the beings that destabilize the ideals of safety and integrity. They bring chaos and disorientation to the world, and thus, they must be put down like Tom Robinson and the Vietnamese people, removed from society like the people of color erased from The Outsiders, and viewed with disdain like those in The Great Gatsby and Fahrenheit 451. Their treatment suggests that those who refuse to cater to whiteness or to dominant ideologies are those who are not deserving of hospitality or welcome.