From Storyville brothels and narratives of turn-of-the-century New Orleans to plantation tours, Bette Davis films, Elvis memorials, Willa Cather's fiction, and the annual prison rodeo held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Jessica Adams considers spatial and ideological evolutions of southern plantations after slavery. In Wounds of Returning, Adams shows that the slave past returns to inhabit plantation landscapes that have been radically transformed by tourism, consumer culture, and modern modes of punishment--even those landscapes from which slavery has supposedly been...
From Storyville brothels and narratives of turn-of-the-century New Orleans to plantation tours, Bette Davis films, Elvis memorials, Willa Cather's fic...
Proposing a new way to map intersections of photography and American literature, Katherine Henninger demonstrates the importance of pinpointing specific cultural and subcultural history. Ordering the Facade traces the visual and literary cultures of southern womanhood that have ordered the image of "the South" from its plantation past to its "postsouthern" present. Assessed in light of these visual legacies, contemporary writing by southern women emerges vividly in Henninger's analysis as both shaped by and shaping these continuously powerful representations.
Typically...
Proposing a new way to map intersections of photography and American literature, Katherine Henninger demonstrates the importance of pinpointing specif...
Lynch mobs in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America exacted horrifying public torture and mutilation on their victims. In Lynching and Spectacle, Amy Wood explains what it meant for white Americans to perform and witness these sadistic spectacles and how lynching played a role in establishing and affirming white supremacy. Lynching, Wood argues, overlapped with a variety of cultural practices and performances, both traditional and modern, including public executions, religious rituals, photography, and cinema, all which encouraged the horrific violence and gave it social...
Lynch mobs in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America exacted horrifying public torture and mutilation on their victims. In Lynching a...
By the 1920s, the sectional reconciliation that had seemed achievable after Reconstruction was foundering, and the South was increasingly perceived and portrayed as impoverished, uneducated, and backward. In this interdisciplinary study, Angie Maxwell examines and connects three key twentieth-century moments in which the South was exposed to intense public criticism, identifying in white southerners' responses a pattern of defensiveness that shaped the region's political and cultural conservatism.
Maxwell exposes the way the perception of regional inferiority confronted all types of...
By the 1920s, the sectional reconciliation that had seemed achievable after Reconstruction was foundering, and the South was increasingly perceived an...
When Zandria Robinson returned home to interview African Americans in Memphis, she was often greeted with some version of the caution "I hope you know this ain't Chicago." In this important new work, Robinson critiques ideas of black identity constructed through a northern lens and situates African Americans as central shapers of contemporary southern culture. Analytically separating black southerners from their migrating cousins, fictive kin, and white counterparts, Robinson demonstrates how place intersects with race, class, gender, and regional identities and differences.
Robinson...
When Zandria Robinson returned home to interview African Americans in Memphis, she was often greeted with some version of the caution "I hope you know...
In this innovative approach to southern literary cultures, Thadious Davis analyzes how black southern writers use their spatial location to articulate the vexed connections between society and environment, particularly under segregation and its legacies.
Basing her analysis on texts by Ernest Gaines, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Natasha Trethewey, Olympia Vernon, Brenda Marie Osbey, Sybil Kein, and others, Davis reveals how these writers reconstitute racial exclusion as creative black space, rather than a site of trauma and resistance. Utilizing the social and political separation...
In this innovative approach to southern literary cultures, Thadious Davis analyzes how black southern writers use their spatial location to articulate...
In this far-reaching literary history, John Wharton Lowe remakes the map of American culture by revealing the deep, persistent connections between the ideas and works produced by writers of the American South and the Caribbean. Lowe demonstrates that a tendency to separate literary canons by national and regional boundaries has led critics to ignore deep ties across highly permeable borders. Focusing on writers and literatures from the Deep South and Gulf states in relation to places including Mexico, Haiti, and Cuba, Lowe reconfigures the geography of southern literature as encompassing the...
In this far-reaching literary history, John Wharton Lowe remakes the map of American culture by revealing the deep, persistent connections between the...
In his captivating study of faith and class, John Hayes examines the ways folk religion in the early twentieth century allowed the South's poor--both white and black--to listen, borrow, and learn from each other about what it meant to live as Christians in a world of severe struggle. Beneath the well-documented religious forms of the New South, people caught in the region's poverty crafted a distinct folk Christianity that spoke from the margins of capitalist development, giving voice to modern phenomena like alienation and disenchantment. Through haunting songs of death, mystical tales of...
In his captivating study of faith and class, John Hayes examines the ways folk religion in the early twentieth century allowed the South's poor--both ...
