Mythologies of the American Mid/Southwest in The Outsiders (2024)

The 2024 musical adaptation of S. E. Hinton’s classic novel The Outsiders (1967) drops its audiences into a version of Tulsa, Oklahoma that is unrecognizable to anyone more familiar with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 pastoral Oklahoma! However, this article builds on Raymond Knapp’s scholarship (2005) to argue that both of these musicals use rural working-class Oklahoman communities to stage national anxieties about the moral character and sociopolitical standing of the United States, especially with regard to anti-Black racism. By incorporating a broad range of musical genres broadly connected to Americana and country, the creative team of The Outsiders aimed to invoke an American ‘melting pot’ of cultures and communities within the score. Close attention to how genres rooted in Black musical traditions are incorporated into The Outsiders – especially in relation to the newly racialized character of Dallas – reveals how white racial frameworks nevertheless persist in the production. In its attempt to both honour a canonical novel and feel relevant to contemporary conversations about race, The Outsiders provides an opportunity for a historically informed assessment of racial politics on Broadway and in the United States at large.