On February 25, 2025, Dr. Michael Gallaway presented his ongoing research into the co-production of whiteness in country music. With the Invention Lab (SAC 202) full of students, staff, and faculty alike—and even more attending via Zoom—Dr. Gallaway’s presentation was an insightful and illuminating picture of racial production in contemporary rhetoric. I caught up with Dr. Gallaway the following week to discuss his work in further depth and to shine a spotlight on this important area of research. Read on to hear what we discussed and get inspired to see and hear the world in new ways.
Dr. Gallaway’s Goal
The discussion with Dr. Gallaway began with an overview of his main goal in performing this research, which he plans on getting published. Expanding on his dissertation work, which examined ecologies of whiteness, Dr. Gallaway’s sought to apply principles from critical race theory (CRT) and theories from scholars of color to explore how whiteness is co-produced. Inspired by Latour, Haraway, and Ahmed, whose research pertains to the generative nature of the physical environment, Dr. Gallaway expanded to think about race as a generative feature of the environment as well. Connecting with Harris’ idea of whiteness as property and Ore’s work on lynching, Dr. Gallaway began thinking about how community formation is created through discourse and specifically through circulation. He explained that the circulation of discourse reinforces the physical environment; as the physical environment speaks through people, it works through a continuous loop of co-production. Dr. Gallaway’s goal was to pinpoint exactly how this co-production happens.
What is Co-Production?
Co-production is what happens when discourse creates subjects and subjects create discourses in a cyclical manner. Rather than the cycle being fixed and stagnant, it is more like a planetary orbit; just as a planet orbits the sun while both move through space, co-production is a dynamic process—continuously evolving rather than remaining static.
Dr. Gallaway expanded this concept to think about whiteness in society. Thinking about the physical manifestation of the border between the U.S. and Mexico, Dr. Gallaway explained that this border creates a discourse of invasion, separation, and dysfunction. Therefore, people who are interpolated into the system of whiteness are affectively moved by the body of a migrant. In other words, discourses are translated and imposed onto particular people. This means that the border is a mobile place—it’s everywhere wherever someone sees a brown person. People whose affects are moved by this sight then can go on to be moved to action such as by supporting policies like building a wall, criminalizing migrants, or even being part of minutemen groups who stand at the border with guns.
Dr. Gallaway explains that rhetoric is uniquely positioned to address and explain this phenomenon. He notes that rhetoric cannot predict the phenomenon in a mechanistic way but rather can help people understand and therefore disrupt the material environment as it currently exists.
Country Music and Rural Fears
Country music is just one manifestation of this phenomenon, Dr. Gallaway explains. Populist country music, which highlights the hyper-patriot Christian nationalist bent that seems to be becoming more common, exacerbates the co-production of whiteness. The idea of invasion and corruption of the national character present in this music begets rural small town communities’ protective instincts, leading to the exclusion of perceived deviations from traditional norms. Dr. Gallaway says, “even though this particular manifestation of country music is unique, the seeds of it have been there for a long time.”
Since people begin to take part in the idea of the sovereign, or the act of giving their autonomy to someone else (such as politicians or even just an overall idea of America) who can speak for them, this phenomenon has emerged on a broader scale. Dr. Gallaway explains that the share of the American Dream that rural people are receiving is starting to diminish, both through lesser subsidies from the government and through the physical land of the country disappearing through development. Rural people feel both the material loss of land and subsidies, and a perceived cultural loss of the changing identity of rural America. Due to these struggles, rural people have begun to feel a sense of erasure, or their homes being so changed they’re not the same anymore, causing fearful and helpless feelings to exacerbate their anger. He explains that when people perceive to be threatened in this way, they retreat to their fears—their space of comfort.
New vs. Old Country Music
While country music has always addressed loss, such as losing a wife or a house, in earlier decades there was still the physical environment that rural people could go back to—like their hometown. However, now there is not only light and noise pollution, but small-scale farmers who were able to do well due to Roosevelt-era reforms are no longer doing so well. So, though in the past country music was an admiration of what they had, now the music reflects on what rural communities no longer have.
The shift in themes also intersects with race, as the genre continues to enforce boundaries around who is considered an authentic country artist. Black mainstream artists who are breaking into the country music domain are being pushed out nowadays. Artists like Lil Nas X and Beyoncé, when making country music, are told that their music is not really country. Dr. Gallaway explains that mainstream country still has whiteness run as its through line, which is what causes backlash towards Black musicians trying to break into the genre.
Final Thoughts
Dr. Gallaway shared that as his publications move forward, he will be addressing even more topics, such as disinformation. He continued on to say that one of the most important frontiers for this is looking at how the generative nature of the environment will help people understand why things are so violent. He intends to look at violence not through the lens of state-violence, but through the lens of violence in a decentralized way. Dr. Gallaway wonders where our bonds, as tenuous as they are, break. He hopes that the most important takeaway from his work is that by naming these things, we can work towards stopping them.
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