FALL 2017
Center Welcomes Incoming Graduate Classes This fall, Southern Studies launches its new master of fine arts in documentary expression program. The goal of this new program is to teach students who already possess considerable skill and experience in documentary techniques and interdisciplinary scholarship to produce documentary films, photography, or audio projects of high quality. The background for this idea is that the Southern Studies MA program has graduated numerous students who, as they complete the program, say they wish they had the time and attention to apply their newly learned skills to a polished project. These MFA students join the Southern Studies MA students in classes such as Fieldwork and Oral History, Documenting the South in Film, Foodways and Southern Culture, Cultural Studies: The Blues Tradition, Studies in African American Diaspora, Studies in Southern Literature: The Queer South, and Documentary and Social Issues. Incoming MA and MFA students come to Southern
Incoming MFA graduate students, left to right, first row: Susie Penman, Chelsea Wright Loper, Mary Stanton Knight; second row: Chi Kalu, Jasmine Karlowski, Jonathan Smith; back row: Mary Blessey, Turry Flucker, and James G. Thomas, Jr.
Incoming MA graduate students, left to right, Hooper Schultz, Frances Barrett, Robert Panagiotopoulos, Keerthi Chandrashekar, and Frank Easterlin
Studies from a range of places and alma maters. This year’s MFA students include Mary Blessey (Millsaps College and University of Mississippi), Turry Flucker (Tougaloo College and University of Mississippi), Chi Kalu (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Jasmine Karlowski (Emory University), Mary Stanton Knight (University of Mississippi), Chelsea Wright Loper (Presbyterian College and University of Mississippi), Susie Penman (University of Mississippi), Jonathan Smith (East Carolina University), and James G. Thomas, Jr. (University of Mississippi). The incoming MA class includes Frances Barrett (University of North CarolinaChapel Hill), Keerthi Chandrashekar (NYU), Frank Easterlin (Young Harris), Robert Panagiotopoulos (University of Bedfordshire), and Hooper Schultz (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill). Southern Studies orientation for first-year students took place on Wednesday, August 16, with an informational meeting in Barnard Observatory followed by dinner with Center faculty, staff, and second-year MA students.
D I R E C T O R ’ S
C O L U M N
The Center for the Study of Southern Culture
turns forty this year. It was in 1977 that the Center had its first event, a conference about Eudora Welty and her work, with Welty and some of her friends in attendance. On September 22 and 23, a birthday party and reunion will feature alumni of the Southern Studies BA and MA programs. The event will offer plenty of time for alumni, faculty, staff, and everyone who has been involved in the Southern Studies program to see friends, compare experiences, and maybe make some new friends. If you are one of those friends, please consider this your invitation. The program for the birthday reunion will consist of several ways to discuss one question: how do people from the Southern Studies program do Southern Studies in the various parts of their lives? For some people that may be obvious. Some alums run or work in cultural institutions about southern history, or they teach, write, and edit work about the South. But the question of doing Southern Studies belongs to everybody with a Southern Studies background as they think about their work, their forms of creativity and activism, their neighborhoods and institutions they join or avoid, their reading, and their personal choices both big and small. Events on Saturday, September 23, will take place in Barnard Observatory. Everyone with a Southern Studies connection is invited, and we look forward to seeing friends from all moments in the program. One can make a good case that among academic programs that do interdisciplinary regional studies, reaching forty is a pretty good accomplishment. On many campuses, academic centers tend to come and go, changing focus, name, leadership, physical location, reliance on grant funding, relationships with institutional leaders, and reasons for existence. The question arises whether forty raises the same questions about institutions as it can for individuals—questions about the need to redefine priorities or to try some things that seem out of character. THE
SOUTHERN REGISTER
A Publication of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture
•
The University of Mississippi
OX FO R D, M ISSISSIP P I, U. S. A
• WINTER Published by The Center for the Study of Southern Culture The University of Mississippi Telephone: 662-915-5993 • Fax: 662-915-5814 E-mail: cssc@olemiss.edu • southernstudies.olemiss.edu
N E W S L E T T E R • P U B L I S H E D Q U A R T E R LY
Fall 2017 REGISTER STAFF Editor: James G. Thomas, Jr. Graphic Designer: Susan Bauer Lee
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As I’ve written in this column before, one of the many successful decisions our earliest organizers made was to make sure teaching was at the center of the Center. That decision made great sense as an administrative strategy, since universities appreciate it when units teach students. But more importantly, having students at the middle of the Center’s mission has also made great sense to making sure the Center’s academic life is open to change. Students help determine what Southern Studies teaches, what questions it considers meaningful, what technologies it needs, and how it relates to the world beyond academia. Students ask new questions and want new things, and it is an ongoing creative process to learn what to teach, how best to teach it, and, very often, how to learn from students and with them. The Southern Studies students who created the Southern Foodways Alliance and the William Winter Institute are among many clear examples of students who changed Southern Studies, like the students who asked for a documentary track and then an MFA degree and those who ask for new classes in specific topics. Students collaborate on all sorts of projects—from encyclopedia work to public history work to Living Blues internships to crucial film and photography work. More broadly, students raise questions. Why this book, this approach, this technology, this question? And in referring to Southern Studies as “the program,” I recall our late friend Chris Fullerton comically describing Southern Studies as a multistep program to address the addictive habits of students who were always raising questions. So, one part of the invitation to the birthday reunion is this: along with thinking about how you do Southern Studies now and in the future, alums should come prepared to think about what parts of Southern Studies seemed important to address or reject or to get started. I would ask which of the following seemed especially important during your time in the program: borders and boundaries, centers and decentering, cores and peripheries, distinctiveness and identity, defining the South and who gets to do the defining, studying power, resistance to power, and the power relations tied up in all sorts of things, thinking about how contemporary protests and politics changes what needs to be studied, studying myths and traditions and studying memory, debating which texts are canonical, who chooses, and why it might matter, studying the concept of race relations or racial construction and the process and politics of racializing, studying a biracial South, or a triracial South, or a multiethnic South while analyzing definitions
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of race and ethnicity, thinking about central themes and whether or not we should do that, thinking about burdens and crucibles and new or old versions of Jim Crow, thinking about continuity and change in religion and other topics, studying women’s history and literature or doing gender studies or queer studies or sexuality studies, studying cultural expression and creativity from music to foodways to visual arts by studying genres or individuals or labor or class issues or by studying cultural interventions and markets, studying tourism, including the tourists, studying stereotypes and stereotype-makers, studying multiple Souths and movable Souths, broadening the context and meanings of Southern Studies (and questioning all sorts of assumptions) through the concept of the Global South, studying the technologies, aesthetics, and the politics of documentary work old and new, thinking about how best to study physical senses, studying what you love without romanticizing, studying things outside your experience without exoticizing, studying as part of social justice work, and sometimes asking old questions to see if they are really obsolete or just old school and kind of classic. Part of why I like Southern Studies is that most alumni who just read the preceding very long sentence are likely, along with questioning its sentence structure, to ask why it leaves out their favorite parts of the program—or their least favorite. To return to the origins of the Center, I should make the point that faculty do not always take student suggestions. One undergraduate in SST 101, not interested in Delta Wedding, quietly told me, “Dude, you gotta ditch the Welty.” We have chosen not to do that. Ted Ownby
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Jamie Joyner Endowment Created to Assist Graduate Students in Southern Studies While fresh flowers or a night out to dinner might be a perfectly acceptable birthday present, Ernie Joyner of Tupelo, Mississippi, went one step further. His recent birthday surprise to his wife, Jamie, was the creation of the Jamie Joyner Endowment in Southern Studies to assist University of Mississippi graduate students. “I decided to create the endowment because of Jamie’s dedication to the Southern Studies program,” said Ernie Joyner. “I think Southern Studies is worth preserving and knowing about, and I think her enthusiasm for the program led me to believe it would be a good cause.” The annual income from the Joyner Endowment will assist graduate students pursuing either a master of arts or a master of fine arts in Southern Studies. Jamie Joyner, a member of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture advisory committee for twenty years, was first attracted to the Center through the founding director’s work. “I became interested in Southern Studies when I saw a film Bill Ferris produced about a man teaching his hogs to pray, called Hush Hoggies Hush,” said the native of Ingomar, Mississippi. “I, like Bill, had grown up in the country, and through this film I remembered so many events that happened on our farm. This led to my interest in rural Mississippi, followed by blues music and current Mississippi writers.” Ernie Joyner said his wife thoroughly enjoys her involvement with the Center and is passionate about its mission to investigate, document, interpret, and teach about the American South. Center Director Ted Ownby said the Joyner gift will help in the recruitment of top graduate students and he appreciates the chance to honor Joyner’s enthusiastic, thoughtful work on the board by annually naming a new Joyner Fellow. “This is a terrific gift because it allows us to increase what we can offer an incoming graduate student every year,” Ownby said. “The student to whom we offer the Joyner Fellow will have some additional funds as well as the honor of a named fellowship. Providing enough funding for graduate students is always a challenge, and it’s especially helpful to have resources that might contribute to students in the new MFA program.” Consisting of about two dozen friends of the Center, the Center’s advisory committee meets twice a year to hear reports and share suggestions about Southern Studies programs. Member Lynn Gammill of Hattiesburg suggested Joyner as a member, and she was thrilled to accept. “I enjoy the fellow committee members and seeing the program grow,” she said. “My involvement on this board gives me a chance to be part of the world of ideas.” Future Southern Studies students will be able to share Joyner’s devotion to the Center for years to come. To make a gift to the Center, contact Nikki Neely Davis, development director, nlneely@olemiss.edu or call 662-915-6678. Checks also can be mailed to the University of Mississippi Foundation-CSSC, 406 University Ave., Oxford, MS 38655; and gifts can be made online at www.umfoundation.com/makeagift. Rebecca Lauck Cleary
Fall 2017
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Center Events • Fall 2017 The Brown Bag Lecture Series takes place at noon in the Barnard Observatory lecture hall unless otherwise noted. To highlight the Center’s fortieth birthday, many of our events in 2017–18 will include Center faculty, staff, and alumni discussing their work. Other Center events will take place in Barnard Observatory, on the University of Mississippi campus, and elsewhere, as noted. August 30
September 27
November 1
Brown Bag Lecture
Brown Bag Lecture
Brown Bag Lecture
“Writing about Family Problems and the Twentieth-Century South” Ted Ownby
“El Sur Latino: Migration, Identity, and Incorporation” Simone Delerme
“A Discussion of Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition” Adam Gussow
September 6, 7:00 p.m.
September 29, 4:00 p.m.
Gilder-Jordan Lecture
Mississippi Encyclopedia Event
Mississippi Encyclopedia Event
“Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power, Then and Now” Rhonda Y. Williams Nutt Auditorium University of Mississippi
Book Mart and Cafe Starkville, Mississippi
Carolyn Vance Smith Natchez Literary Research Center Copiah-Lincoln Community College Wesson, Mississippi
September 7, 5:00 p.m.
“Introducing the Do Good Fund” David Wharton and Brooke White
November 8
October 5
“Bobbie Gentry’s Odes to Mississippi” Kristine McCusker Middle Tennessee State University
Mississippi Encyclopedia Event Delta Blues Museum Clarksdale, Mississippi September 11–12 SFA Grad Student Symposium: Foodways and Social Justice in the South University of Mississippi September 21 Brown Bag Lecture “Mississippi in the Work of Sherwood Bonner” Katie McKee J. D. Williams Library Archives and Special Collections September 22–23 Southern Studies Birthday Party and Reunion Barnard Observatory
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October 4 Brown Bag Lecture
Southern People, Southern Places: The Do Good Fund Exhibition David Wharton, Brooke White, Jerry Siegel, Jill Frank, and Alan Rothschild Barnard Observatory October 5–7 Southern Foodways Symposium “El Sur Latino” Oxford, Mississippi
November 2, 3:00 p.m.
Brown Bag Lecture
November 8, noon Mississippi Encyclopedia Event History Is Lunch Mississippi Department of Archives and History Jackson, Mississippi November 8 Mississippi Encyclopedia Event
October 19 Brown Bag Lecture A screening of An Outrage and conversation with filmmakers Hannah Ayers and Lance Warren
Margaret Walker Center Jackson State University Jackson, Mississippi November 15
October 25 Brown Bag Lecture “‘That’s for the White Folks’: Race, Culture, and (Un)Making Place in the Rural South” Brian Foster
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Brown Bag Lecture “Politics and Poetics: Writing about the Twentieth-Century Appalachian South” Jessie Wilkerson
The Southern Register
Living Blues News It seems fitting that the 250th issue of Living Blues celebrates the blues of Clarksdale, Mississippi—one of the true founts of the blues. For more than a hundred years the blues has spewed from Coahoma County, and for 250 issues Living Blues has done its best to capture the music coming from there and hundreds of other places where blues culture exists. The blues thrives in and around Clarksdale like almost no other place in the world. With a population of just sixteen thousand, Clarksdale has live blues music nearly every night of the year plus nearly a dozen annual blues festivals—the granddaddy of them all being the Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival, which is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year. For three decades Sunflower Fest has been a beautiful community event that has celebrated the blues of the Clarksdale area and the people who create it. It’s always free and always hot (!), but always a great time full of great music. If you have never been, you’ve been missing out. And for those of you who have been, there is something new at Sunflower Fest this year—air conditioning! That’s right, for the first time ever the festival will have six indoor stages with acoustic music going on all day, providing a great place to cool off from the oftenoppressive Mississippi Delta heat. We take a look at the history of this special festival. Our spotlight on Clarksdale also includes a look at some of its next generation of blues musicians and the music education programs that have spawned them. We explore two of the funkiest juke joints in the area, Big Red’s Place a.k.a. Red’s Lounge and Robert “Bilbo” Walker’s new club just outside of Clarksdale, the Wonder Light City, housed in an old, blue Quonset hut. Jim O’Neal details the evolution of the blues in Coahoma County in the first of a series of Clarksdale blues
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articles we plan to publish. (Truth be told, Jim was going to cover the whole history of Clarksdale blues in this one article, but when he hit ten pages and was only up to 1940 I knew we had to come up with a different plan!) As usual, in our location issues we also spotlight items of interest for blues fans, including festivals, clubs, music stores, blues gravesites, and, of course, all of the best local restaurants. This issue couldn’t have happened without the support of many in Clarksdale. Special thanks to Shelley Ritter, Kappi Allen, Roger Stolle, Judy Flowers (who supplied us with many of our historical photos from her 2016 book Clarksdale and Coahoma County: Images of America), Jim O’Neal, and Panny Mayfield, who supplied many of the festival photos from her collection. Panny’s book of photography, Live from the Mississippi Delta, was just released by the University Press of Mississippi. I want to welcome my new editorial assistant, second-year Southern Studies MA student Jacqui Sahagian, to LB, as well as first-time contributors Warren Hines and Alex McCarthy. Brett J. Bonner
Fall 2017
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Gammill Gallery Exhibition North Mississippi—2017 The photographs in this exhibition are from last spring’s Southern Studies seminar in documentary photography. The semester-long assignment was for students to construct a visual inquiry of life in North Mississippi, both as lived and as displayed by the built environment. In one sense, their task was to compile a photographic catalog of the region that might potentially be of use to future scholars. The students were encouraged to treat North Mississippi as 1) a physical place, 2) a cultural space reflecting local life and values, and 3) a site of human activity. They were also asked to value the ordinary and to concentrate on making pictures of everyday life rather than focusing
James G. Thomas, Jr., Cafe, Bruce
exclusively on the extraordinary. There were five students in the class: Nadia Alexis, Rebecca DeLuna, Anne Carter Stowe, Kristin Teston, and James G. Thomas, Jr. One advantage of it being such a small group was to give students the opportunity to contribute a sizable number of photographs in the final exhibit. Indeed, each of the five students has around fifteen photographs in the exhibition. David Wharton
Kristin Teston, Checkers, Holly Springs
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Nadia Alexis, Women, Oxford
Anne Carter Stowe, Red Dress, Holly Springs
Rebecca DeLuna, Butcher, Oxford
The Southern Register
Fall 2017
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SouthDocs Welcomes New Filmmaker John Rash John Rash is a filmmaker, photographer, and video artist from North Carolina who earned his MFA in experimental and documentary art from Duke University in 2014. He has worked as a freelance photographer and college instructor for more than fifteen years, teaching both photography and video production. Rash is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and comes to the Center after spending the past three years living in Shanghai, China. “Experiencing life in a culture where I was the minority has deepened my respect for those who struggle to find a life in America despite the advantages that benefit certain groups over others,” he said. “Living in China had a substantial influence
culture with fresh eyes. As I turn my lens to the stories and people in the American South, I am sure I will learn just as much about myself as I do those I am documenting.” His work often explores cultural outsiders and environmental topics through what he describes as “nontraditional narratives and visual storytelling.” John’s films have been invited to screen at many international film festivals, including Full Frame, Brooklyn Film Festival, Shanghai International Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Athens Film Festival, and the Green Film Festival of Seoul. Examples of John’s previous work can be viewed online at www .johnrash.com.
John Rash
on my approach to my creative work and my relationships with others. I’m excited to be involved with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the opportunity to look at my own country and my own
Center to Host Filmmakers for a Screening of Documentary on Lynching Filmmakers Hannah Ayers and Lance Warren
Hattie Lawson, a pastor and activist, leads the Moore’s Ford Movement, a group seeking justice for four lynchings that took place in 1946.
Forum, a four-day event featuring new directions in history cinema, cosponsored by the Smithsonian and the NEH. The filmmakers are distributing the film through a partnership with the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Law Center will acquire the film’s K-12 distribution rights, craft curriculum to support it, and make it available to its network of nearly five
Fall 2017
hundred thousand teachers starting this fall as part of a new racial history initiative aimed at transforming the teaching of slavery and its legacies. The Center is presenting the film in partnership with the University of Mississippi Department of History.
The Southern Register
HANNAH AYERS
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HANNAH AYERS
The Center will host a Brown Bag screening of An Outrage, a documentary film on lynching in the American South, at noon on Thursday, October 19, in Barnard Observatory. Filmmakers Hannah Ayers and Lance Warren will introduce the film and take questions. They will also attend Andy Harper’s Documenting the South in Film class following the screening. Filmed on location at lynching sites in Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee, and Virginia, the film includes the memories and perspectives of descendants, community activists, and scholars. This unusual historical documentary seeks to educate, even as it serves as a hub for action to remember and reflect upon a long-hidden past. The film premiered at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History on March 11, 2017, as part of the History Film
Ralph Eubanks to Teach Southern Studies, English Courses Author and journalist Ralph Eubanks returns to the University of Mississippi campus—this time as a visiting professor. He will teach courses in Southern Studies, English, and Honors. Eubanks is the author of Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past, which Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley named one of the best nonfiction books of 2003. Eubanks has been a contributor for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Preservation, and National Public Radio. He is a recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and has been a fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia, and last year he was the Eudora Welty Visiting Scholar in Southern Studies at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. His SST 598 Special Topics course will examine the American South through the visual art of photography as well as through the work of writers who have found their inspiration in photography. James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men will serve as a foundational work to examine the ways the visual record of the American South is tied to writing about the South, including novels, poetry, and journalism, particularly magazine journalism of the 1960s in illustrated magazines such as Life and Look. What connects the reading for this course—and will be the focus of class discussions—is how authors turn to photographs as a way to tie together the region’s visual and verbal traditions. Having long utilized of the work of Evans and Agee, Eubanks discussed them in a lecture in February 2016: “I spoke at the Center last year about
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the work of Walker Evans and James Agee and the impact it was having on my own writing about the Mississippi Delta,” he said. “At the time I was teaching a class on photography and literature at Millsaps College, but I realized at the end of the class that I spent a great deal of time focused on the South. So, when I was asked to teach at the University of Mississippi, I decided to adapt that class to focus exclusively on the South.” Eubanks hopes students will learn how history is imbedded in visual images, as well as how to read a photograph. “Photographs are time capsules of history and can tell us a great deal about the people and places captured in them,” he said. “Also, I hope they will see how photographs can be a testament to the relentless melting of time. As Susan Sontag said, all photographs are memento mori. A photograph captures another person’s—or a place’s—mortality, vulnerability, and mutability. I’d like my students to think about how the visual image of the South has evolved over time and reveals time’s impact on the landscape, as well as how visual images both crush and reinforce southern myths.”
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Second-year Southern Studies master’s student Holly Robinson enrolled in the course because she thought it would be a good way to brush up on her image-analysis skills ahead of her thesis research. “I’m a popular culturist, so I enjoy looking at visual imagery more than books because there’s a lot more to say about an image. Things aren’t as concrete, so you can be really speculative in your analysis, which always leads you to a more interesting ideaplace,” Robinson said. His class for the English department is Civil Rights and Activism in Literature, which is slightly different from a class that he also taught at Millsaps. It will examine works of literature that turn their focus on the image, life, and reality of black life during the civil rights movement, as well as in today’s second wave of activism. “One change this time is that I am teaching Richard Wright’s Native Son. I believe that Richard Wright’s work, particularly the social realism of his work, deserves a reexamination,” Eubanks said. Eubanks, who graduated from the University of Mississippi with a BA and the University of Michigan with an MA in English language and literature, is looking forward to spending an extended amount of time on the UM campus. “Although I spend a great deal of time in Oxford, there is a difference between being a resident of the university community and being a visitor,” he said. “I’m looking forward to being a part of the community for a while. Plus, this academic year is exactly forty years after my senior year at Ole Miss, which was the last time I spent an extended amount of time on campus. It’s good to come full circle.” Rebecca Lauck Cleary
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SFA Oral History Project Documents Charlotte’s Central Avenue Corridor PETER TAYLOR
Central Avenue in Charlotte, North Carolina, reveals the city’s shifting demographics, from working-class textile mill employees in the early twentieth century, to immigrants from Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean in the 1990s. These new southerners PETER TAYLOR
Nora Guerra of Guate-Linda, a Guatemalan restaurant
Izzat Freitekh of La Shish Kabob
PETER TAYLOR
PETER TAYLOR
Caroline Coke of Island Grocery and Caribbean Restaurant
Tacos El Nevado
PETER TAYLOR
Pastries from Las Delicias bakery, owned and operated by Zhenia Martinez
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revived strip malls and subdivisions to shape a new Charlotte. The Southern Foodways Alliance’s Central Avenue Corridor Oral History Project documents some of those voices. Seventeen interviews tell the stories of entrepreneurs and culinary professionals who craft and sell everything from tacos to hummus to banh mi to Ethiopian coffee. According to UNC-Charlotte’s Urban Institute and the
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Charlotte-Mecklenburg Opportunistic Task Force, many factors lured immigrants to Charlotte, including the booming banking industry in the 1990s. This led to a growing servicebased economy and a strong entrepreneurial culture. One in seven Mecklenburg County residents are immigrants (14 percent). Half of those arrived in Charlotte before 2000, and one-half of those arrived from Latin America. These new southerners brought their experiences and their food traditions and planted them along Central Avenue, a shifting New South corridor. Sara Wood
The Southern Register
Southern People, Southern Places:
The Do Good Fund to Exhibit Photographs in Gammill Gallery This Fall BRANDON THIBODEAUX
Photographs from the Do Good Fund’s photo collection will be exhibited at various venues in Mississippi during the fall of 2017. Those venues include the Gammill Gallery (Southern People, Southern Places) from late September through mid-December, the UM Art Department’s Gallery 130 (NOW: Contemporary Southern Photography) during October, as well as at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gallery of Art and Design (Portraits of Southerners) October 12–December 12. There are smaller exhibits scheduled in several Water Valley venues and possibly one in Sumner. JERRY SIEGEL
(above) Harry Hope, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 2010 (left) Shooter, Selma, Alabama, 2009 (below) St. Bernard Avenue (Sardine), 2014
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SOPHIE LVOFF
The Do Good Fund is a public charity based in Columbus, Georgia. Since its founding in 2012, the Fund has focused on building a museum-quality collection of photographs taken in the American South since World War II. The collection ranges from works by more than a dozen Guggenheim Fellows to images by less well-known emerging photographers working in the region. Do Good’s mission is to make its collection of more than four hundred images broadly accessible through regional museums, nonprofit galleries, and nontraditional venues, and to encourage complimentary, communitybased programming to accompany each exhibition. On October 4 Center director for documentary studies David Wharton and UM assistant professor of art Brooke White will introduce the Do Good Fund in a Brown Bag Lecture in the Tupelo Room in Barnard Observatory, and on October 5 there will be a late-afternoon panel, also in Barnard Observatory, with guest photographers Jerry Siegel and Jill Frank, as well as Brooke White and
David Wharton. All four photographers have work in the Do Good Fund’s photography collection. The panel will be moderated by Alan Rothschild, the organizer of the collection. Following the panel, there will be receptions at the two on-campus galleries.
Fall 2017
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Study the South Publishes Work on Iconic Southern Film On June 19, Study the South published a new essay by Isabel Machado, a Brazilian historian currently living in Monterrey, Mexico, while writing her PhD dissertation for the University of Memphis. Machado’s essay, “Revisiting Deliverance: The Sunbelt South, the 1970s Masculinity Crisis, and the Emergence of the Redneck Nightmare Genre” presents a new view of the iconic film. According to Machado, Deliverance “dialogues with past representations of underclass white southerners; reflects and questions the historical moment in which it was produced and consumed; and, to this day, affects the way the region and its inhabitants are perceived and depicted. It can be read as a reflection of the reconfiguration of southern identity during the rise of the Sunbelt, but also as an expression of the perceived masculinity crisis of the 1970s. In addition, although other, more positive images of working-class white southerners were also emerging in the 1970s, the ‘redneck nightmare’ trope popularized by Deliverance became iconic and enduring.”
Since its release, Deliverance has provoked passionate critiques, inspired different analyses, and has become a cult phenomenon. “The imagery, stereotypes, and symbols produced by the film still inform popular perceptions of the US South,” Machado writes, “even by those who have never actually watched it. Readings of Deliverance have tended to privilege one particular interpretation, failing to fully grasp its relevance. The movie is a rich cultural text that provides historians with multiple ways to analyze the South, particularly concepts such as southern identity and masculinity.” Isabel Machado’s two master degrees—in history (University of South Alabama) and film studies (University of Iowa)—provided her the interdisciplinary lens through which she approaches cultural history. Her current research uses Mardi Gras as a vehicle for understanding social and cultural changes in Mobile, Alabama, in the second half of the twentieth century.
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CALL FOR PAPERS Study the South A Center for the Study of Southern Culture Publication Study the South, a peer-reviewed, multimedia, open-access journal published by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, announces a general call for papers. Study the South exists to encourage interdisciplinary academic thought and discourse on the culture of the American South. Editors welcome submissions by faculty members, advanced graduate students, and professional scholars doing work in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, music, literature, documentary studies, gender studies, religion, geography, media studies, race studies, ethnicity, folklife, and art to submit article abstracts or complete manuscripts. Final manuscripts and projects must attempt to build upon and expand the understanding of the American South in order to be considered for publication. To submit an original paper for consideration, please e-mail James G. Thomas, Jr. at jgthomas@olemiss.edu. Submissions must be previously unpublished. For questions or additional information, please contact: James G. Thomas, Jr. at jgthomas@olemiss.edu, or at 662-915-3374. Study the South is available via the Center’s website at www.studythesouth.org.
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The Southern Register
Mississippi Stories Celebrates First Year Online
“A Story of the Poor People’s Campaign Mule Train” The Southern Christian Leadership Conference initiated the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968 to draw awareness to the impoverished conditions in which many Americans lived and to lobby the federal government for greater access to jobs and living wages. The demonstration consisted of an elaborately planned journey by bus and by mule train that began in Marks, Mississippi— chosen for its status as the poorest town in the poorest county of the poorest state in the nation—and ended in Washington, D.C., at a temporary campsite created on the National Mall called “Resurrection City.” Eddie Lee Webster Jr. was part of the mule train. This oral history
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WARREN K. LEFFLER
The Mississippi Stories website seeks to tell the complex story of Mississippi and Mississippians through multiple forms of documentary practice: film, photography, oral history, and sound. The website presents work by students, staff, faculty, and alumni of the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, including Center institutes and partners Living Blues magazine, the Southern Documentary Project, and the Southern Foodways Alliance. Mississippi Stories posts new stories periodically. Some of these are complete projects, and others are snapshots of works in progress or outtakes from larger projects. Some projects explore topics outside the state of Mississippi, but all the documentarians learn and practice at the Center. Mississippi Stories launched in July of 2016. In celebration, here are some stories so far for 2017.
The mule train at “Resurrection City” in Washington, D.C. Image from “A Story of the Poor People’s Campaign Mule Train”
with Webster by Chet Bush tells that story. The oral history was a class project in Jessie Wilkerson’s Contemporary US History class in the spring of 2016. “An Oral History with Liz Stagg of the Oxford Farmers’ Market Store” Southern Studies grad student Tori DeLeone interviewed Liz Stagg about the Farmer’s Market, a small store in Oxford, Mississippi, that offered local produce, meats, dairy, and other food items. Liz and her husband owned and operated the store for twelve years. Her husband passed away in 2015, and Liz closed the store in October 2016. Tori sought to understand how Liz saw her place in the community, and what drove her to open, and close, the store. This oral history was conducted as a final project for Catarina
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Passidomo’s class on southern foodways in the fall of 2016. Along with the transcript and the edited video, Tori wrote a short essay connecting the oral history to themes explored in class discussions and readings, such as immigration, the “New South” as a construct, and women as bearers of food culture. “The In•vis•i•ble Oxford Project” Assistant professor of Southern Studies and anthropology Simone Delerme and her students developed the In•vis•i•ble Oxford Project and website in Southern Studies 301 during the spring semesters in 2016 and 2017. The objective was to capture the stories of community members and the observations of students conducting fieldwork in order to create a historical record that documents place-identity, placeattachment, and the community of Oxford.
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FACULTY PROFILE
Adam Gussow Publishes New Book on the Devil in the Blues Interview by Scott Barretta
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Scott Barretta: What’s the significance of your title, and what is it that you are going “beyond”? Adam Gussow: People who know nothing else about the blues know about Robert Johnson and the crossroads, and they’ve heard that phrase “the devil’s music.” I wanted to understand that phrase and where it comes from, what it meant to people who use it. And when I looked at the full range of blues songs that evoke the devil and hell I found most of those are not about the
crossroads—there are songs that say “I am the devil.” There’s the devil showing up in a range of places that have nothing to do with selling your soul, and they’re not just southern places. SB: You also challenge prevailing conceptions of the devil in the blues. AG: One important thing I had to do was to figure out to what extent was the devil of the blues the Christian devil, to what extent it shifts from the slavery to the post-slavery period, and to what extent African source material is showing up in this blues devil. Contemporary scholars coming from an African American studies perspective such as Samuel Floyd, in a weird way they’re of a piece with the Robert Johnson scholars—they want the STEVEN W. LIKENS
Adam Gussow is an associate professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi whose latest book is Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil in the Blues Tradition (University Press of North Carolina), a survey that occupied seven years of research. Gussow has also grappled extensively with the devil in his parallel career as a professional blues musician—for over thirty years he’s recorded and toured internationally with Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee, a relationship he addressed in his memoir Mr. Satan’s Apprentice. In his new book Gussow explores a remarkably wide range of literature, addressing blues songs about the devil from the ’20s to the present, as well as expressions of the supernatural in West African cultures among enslaved African Americans in the decades between Emancipation and the birth of the blues. Much of Gussow’s previous work has been squarely in literacy criticism, but here he draws considerably from sociological community studies by scholars including Hortense Powdermaker, John Dollard, and Charles S. Johnson. They all addressed a growing cynicism among southern African American youth in the first half of the twentieth century—the cohort of Robert
Johnson—about older generations’ notions of the devil and hell. I asked Gussow about some of his most provocative arguments.
Adam Gussow
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blues devil to be Legba, something inherited from a particular [Yoruban] cultural region. I do make an argument that Legba shows up in some blues songs, but other songs are coming from a very different place. The devil is a shape shifter, and we should not be surprised that the devil shows up in a number of guises. SB: The stereotypical crossroads imagery is of a male in the countryside, but you argue that the notion of the devil in the blues was developed by women in urban settings during the roaring ’20s. AG: Victorians were looking down at these young people, the flappers, the lost generation in the aftermath of World War I and saying they’re going to hell. It’s a cynical thing—the devil is a figure that the younger generation takes not as something to be afraid of, but something to embrace, the devil as a kind of master of the revels. I talk about the very first devil’s blues, “Done Sold My Soul to the Devil,” by Clara Smith, a migrant from the South, in 1924: “I’ve got lots of gold, got it from the devil, but he won’t let me alone / I’m stubborn and I’m hateful, I’d die before I run / I drink carbolic acid, and I totes a Gatling gun / I’ve done sold my soul, sold it to the devil, and my heart done turned to stone.” What kind of lesson is here? What I argue is that it’s a kind of northern migrant version of the blues idea, that you can create an identity by going bad all the way. But it’s also positioned relative to a conversation about imperiled black female virtue, about what happens to young black migrant women from the South when they get to the big cities. And what’s important about the song is that, on the one hand, she’s voicing it with a kind of sadness, but on the other hand she’s proclaiming it.
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SB: Another use of the devil is political, a coded way of talking about the white man or the system of segregation. AG: I argue that this comes from slavery. If you go back and look at the spirituals, what struck me was the concreteness of the metaphors, how the devil was a figure who was chaining you, who was apprehending you in the woods, how these songs were a coded way of invoking the patrollers. And what interested me were the continuities between that and what goes on in the Jim Crow South—you had to maintain the code. I talk about plausible deniability. And I look at a couple of specific songs. For me the most resonant one is “Hell Ain’t But a Mile and a Quarter,” the Big Bill Broonzy song, which I talk about being a coded invocation of a black man’s voyage across the tracks, about what it’s like to go into a Jim Crow town—hell is right there, it’s just a mile and a quarter away. If you’re Big Bill Broonzy, you couldn’t say out loud, “The white man’s the devil.” And when Big Bill says “next thing I do, I want to marry the devil’s daughter”—in interviews he would say that the only way the southern black man could get back at the white man is to take the white woman. If I’m right, that’s a pretty provocative thing to say. SB: In the fourth chapter you address how the devil is evoked in response to the new freedoms experienced by African Americans in the wake of Emancipation. AG: I talk about the way that the devil ends up mediating postslavery romance. As Angela Davis says, travel and sexuality become very important themes in the blues, because after Emancipation African American men and women are free to travel and to choose one another. I say the reason the devil comes into
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the conversation is because you’ve got freedom. There’s a category of songs in which men are bemoaning their women’s faithlessness, they’re bemoaning other men coming in and trying to take their women, which is to say other men behaving like devils. And I talk about it from the women’s perspective, women complaining about their men. Bessie Smith’s “Devil’s Gonna Get You” is a good example of that. She says, “the devil’s gonna get you” when a man has disappointed her, when a man has been out playing around, spending time with other women. And she’s talking like a minister— “the devil’s gonna get you, just as sure as I am born.” SB: You took off your English professor hat and put on the investigative reporter hat to address blues tourism in Clarkdale, notably the genesis of “the crossroads” marker at the intersection of Highways 61 and 49. AG: I wanted to understand everything I could about that location called “the crossroads” in contemporary Clarksdale, to find out if there was any reason to think Robert Johnson had any connection to that location. And what started the ball rolling was the minutes of a meeting between the mayor and the board of commissioners in which the city attorney drafted a resolution that would lead eventually to a law in 1999, and it used the word devil twice—basically, “Be it resolved that Robert Johnson sold the soul at our crossroads.” I thought, when in American history has the devil been invoked favorably in official government documents? I said if it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen in Clarksdale in the late ’90s when they’re trying to save themselves using blues tourism and rebrand themselves as the devil’s home in the Bible Belt.
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ALUM PROFILE
In this issue of the Southern Register, we focus on Southern Studies alumna Amy Wood, who specializes in American cultural history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the history of the US South. She is the author of Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890– 1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), which examines visual representations of lynching and the construction of white supremacy in the Jim Crow era. Lynching and Spectacle won the Lillian Smith Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History. She was also the co-guest editor of an issue of Mississippi Quarterly on lynching, representation, and memory (2008) and the volume editor of the Violence volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Wood earned her BA in humanities from Wesleyan University, her MA in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi, and her PhD in American studies from Emory University. As a history professor at Illinois State University, she teaches a variety of classes—from the US history survey to methods classes for both undergraduates and graduate students to upper-level classes in American cultural and intellectual history. She also teaches a course on slavery and the Old South, a special topics course on the history of the US South from 1877 to the present, and is the graduate director for the department.
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EMMA HORATH
Alumna Amy Wood Honored with Prestigious Andrew Mellon Fellowship Amy Wood
She said her Southern Studies MA degree informs her teaching in several different ways. “One, I’m teaching in Illinois, the land of Lincoln. My students might think of themselves as midwesterners, but largely they don’t have a strong sense of regional identity,” Wood said. “I’m critically aware of regionalism, not only because of my Southern Studies background, but because I’m a New Englander who has lived for many years in other regions. I try to make my students aware of regional differences in my courses in broader US history. Two, most simply, I teach the two courses in southern history. Many of my students admit that they didn’t have that strong an interest in the South when they enrolled in the course, or they admit to coming in with all sorts
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of preconceptions. I like watching them discover the South in all its complexities over the course of the semester. And three, the interdisciplinary training that Southern Studies gave me shapes my teaching and my scholarship to this day. I was hired in my department to fill a position in US cultural and intellectual history, and so, by nature, my courses integrate literature, film, social science, et cetera into the study of history. But even in my US history survey courses or my courses in southern history, I use interdisciplinary sources.” Wood’s 1995 Southern Studies thesis was “The Fiery Cross Carved upon the Breast: Sacred Violence and the Ku Klux Klan, 1915–1930,” and said she enjoys her career in academia. “You live the life of the mind, and you get a degree of autonomy you don’t get in most other professions,” Wood said. “But the market is incredibly tight and competitive right now; tenure track jobs are scarce, so most people who
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get PhDs don’t get to have that kind of plum career. It’s even more difficult for people coming out of interdisciplinary programs. My PhD was in American Studies, but I was lucky to find a job in a history department. I had to have a foot firmly planted in the discipline of history to market myself as a historian.” In support of her research, she received a prestigious Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship to support her study of the nation’s evolving attitudes toward criminals and spent six weeks this summer at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. “I’m currently on a Mellon research fellowship at the Huntington Library in Southern California, where I’m studying the rise of criminology as a science and its impact on the prison reform movement, known as the ‘new penology,’ of the early twentieth century,” Wood said. “I’m interested in the ideas that bore upon both criminology and the new penology, such as heredity versus environment debates, the evolutionary ideas of Darwin and Spencer, eugenics, and ideas about race. They have a vast collection here of literature related to this topic. And, I’ve been looking at the papers of Jack London, who will be a key figure in my book. He was socialist and also a social Darwinist, and a former convict, who was interested in the prison reform movement and who, in his work, exposed prison atrocities. He was also deeply interested in our animal natures and its effect on crime.” Although this book project is not focused on the South, she is also coediting a book titled Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South, which is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. “Still, even in this current book, which is a national project, I am paying attention to regional difference, so my background as a ‘Southernist’ still shapes my work,” Wood said. “I’ve spent time in the archives in Texas and South Carolina so I can determine the impact of the prison reform movement in the South. And, of course, I’m also looking at the West (California), in addition to New York and Massachusetts. The regional differences are striking, yet it’s also fascinating to see how the same ideas percolate and take shape in distinct ways in different regions.”
Southern Studies Alum Named Acting Chairman of National Endowment for the Humanities On July 28, Southern Studies alumnus Jon Parrish Peede was named the acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Peede joined NEH in April and was the senior deputy chairman of the agency. Previously, he had been appointed to senior leadership Jon Parrish Peede roles at the National Endowment for the Arts. From 2003 to 2007 he served as counselor to NEA chairman Dana Gioia. From 2007 to 2011 he oversaw the NEA’s funding of literary organizations and fellowships to creative writers and translators. For seven years, he led writing workshops for US troops in Afghanistan, Bahrain, England, Italy, Kyrgyzstan, the Persian Gulf, and on domestic bases. His prior positions include publisher of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia, director of communications at Millsaps College, and editor at Mercer University Press with a focus on the humanities. He has served on the national council of the Margaret Walker Center for the Study of the African American Experience, Jackson State University; the advisory committee of the Virginia Festival of the Book, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities; and the poet laureate selection committee, state of Mississippi, office of the governor. Peede also holds a BA from Vanderbilt University and is the coeditor of Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction, published by Mercer University Press in 2007.
Rebecca Lauck Cleary
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Center for the Study of Southern Culture: A Short History of the First Forty Years Established in 1977 at the University of Mississippi with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Center for the Study of Southern Culture was initially proposed by history professor Robert Haws and philosophy professor Michael Harrington, who suggested creating a place where scholars would study the South’s literature, history, and music with a specific focus on race relations. The university’s vice chancellor for academic affairs, Art DeRosier, and chancellor, Porter L. Fortune Jr., supported the proposal, and folklorist William R. Ferris, a Vicksburg native, became the Center’s founding director, serving from 1978 to 1998. Charles Reagan Wilson followed Ferris, holding the position through 2007, and Ted Ownby became director the following year. The Center’s first program was
October 10, 1992: Bill Ferris sums up the Center’s mission during the dedication of the restored Barnard Observatory, flanked by (from left) the Honorable Frank Crosthwait; Chancellor R. Gerald Turner; Arthur B. Lewis, Dean Emeritus, College of Liberal Arts; and the Reverend Duncan Gray Jr.
The Center for the Study of Southern Culture Turns Forty, Hosts Weekend of Activities The Center for the Study of Southern Culture had its first event in 1977, so we’re planning a birthday event to celebrate forty years of Southern Studies. Save the date for the evening of Friday, September 22, through the afternoon of Saturday, September 23. There will be events in Barnard Observatory and in Oxford. All alumni, students, staff, faculty, and friends of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture are invited. Discussions on Saturday will begin with one question: How is Southern Studies part of our alumni’s teaching, writing and reading, editing, documentary work, art and music, activism, their work in law, business, religion, government, restaurants, farms, libraries, and their personal, family, and community lives? We hope Southern Studies alumni will have intriguing answers to the question. There will be a Friday evening gathering, at a time and setting to be announced, two Saturday panel discussions that involve everyone, and plenty of time for discussion. Saturday events in Barnard Observatory will include a student photography exhibition and some short films. Official events will end by late Saturday afternoon. The Center has reserved a block of rooms at the Inn at Ole Miss for Friday night. To receive the group rate, request the “Southern Studies Reunion” rate and make your reservation by August 21. Visit the Center’s website, follow the Center’s Facebook page, or contact Ted Ownby at hsownby@olemiss.edu for more information.
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the 1977 Eudora Welty Symposium, which featured the Mississippi author in person. An interdisciplinary program working with university departments and faculty, including anthropology and sociology, English, history, literature, art, and political science, the Center offers more than sixty courses covering life, culture, and heritage in the American South. Although it began with a focus on southern US culture and history as a microcosm of the American experience, the Center has broadened its scope to encompass the future of southern culture, the Global South, and challenges to long-held conceptions of what is southern. The Center found a physical home on the university campus in the historic Barnard Observatory, built in the late 1850s and renovated in 1989–91. One of the first regional centers in the nation, the Center, with an NEH grant, developed a bachelor of arts program in Southern Studies and a master of arts program that accommodates about thirty students
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JIM CLEVELAND
(left) From 1988: A poetry volume soon joined the fiction and nonfiction volume of the Mississippi Writers anthology shown here. Displaying the volumes (left to right) are Tom Wacaster, of the Phil Hardin Foundation; Dorothy Abbott, anthology editor; and Bill Ferris, then-Center director. (below) May 15, 1989: Charles Reagan Wilson holds the first copy of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture sent from UNC Press. BARBARA BLANSETT
from around the world. Awards are presented to students for excellence in research papers on the South, with special prizes for the best master’s theses and works on music and documentary media. The Gammill Gallery in Barnard Observatory displays the work of students and teachers as well as visiting collections from across the nation. Much of the Center’s research is housed in the Department of Special Collections and Archives at the university’s J. D.
Williams Library. The Center began the Southern Media Collection, now housed in the library’s visual archive, and the Blues Archive, the largest public blues collection in the world. The Center’s work led to the creation of several affiliated institutions, such as the Southern Foodways Alliance, which holds its annual Southern Foodways Symposium on the university campus each fall, and the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. The Center JAMES G. THOMAS, JR.
February 27, 2009: Living Blues staff, past and present, with Terry “Harmonica” Bean, at the Living Blues Trail marker unveiling ceremony: (left to right) Amy van Singel, David Nelson, Scott Barretta, Terry “Harmonica” Bean, Jim O’Neal, and Brett Bonner
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has also partnered with the university’s Southern Documentary Project and has published several periodicals, most successfully Living Blues, a magazine devoted to blues musicians and the culture that produced them, founded in 1983. The Center helped establish Highway 61, a blues program on Mississippi Public Radio, with Ferris as the first host. Wilson and Ferris edited the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), which won the Dartmouth Prize from the American Library Association as the year’s best reference work. From 2006 to 2013, the Center produced the twenty-four-volume New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Other Center publications include Dorothy Abbott’s multivolume Mississippi Writers (1985–91) and the online journal Study the South. The Center is recognized for its worldwide symposia and conferences, including a Richard Wright conference in Paris and a William
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DANIEL LEE SHERMAN
April 8, 2000: David Wharton signs copies of his new book, The Soul of a Small Texas Town during the Seventh Oxford Conference for the Book
Faulkner conference in Moscow. The University of Mississippi campus in Oxford has hosted most conferences, however, including the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, the Oxford Conference for the Book, the Southern Foodways Symposium, the Future of the South Conference, the Blues Today Symposium, and a weekly lecture series, among others. Funding for the Center’s projects has come from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Mississippi Humanities Council, the Ford Foundation, the Phil Hardin Foundation, and Friends of the Center. An advisory committee has assisted the Center’s work since its beginning. This short history can also be found, along with entries on Frederick A. P. Barnard, William Faulkner, William Ferris, Living Blues, and the University of Mississippi, in The Mississippi Encyclopedia, recently published by the University Press of Mississippi. Anna F. Kaplan
JAMES G. THOMAS, JR.
Barnard Observatory
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Eudora Welty Awards for Creative Writing Presented Each year the Center for the Study of Southern Culture presents the Eudora Welty Awards for Creative Writing to Mississippi high school students during the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. Established and endowed by the late Francis Patterson of Tupelo, the awards are given for creative writing in either prose or poem form. The prize for first place is $500 and the prize for second place is $250. In addition, each winner also received a copy of the newly published Mississippi Encyclopedia. This year’s first-place Welty Award went to Lilly Hunt from Northpoint Christian School in Southaven for her story “Bulletin Board Dragon.” Regarding the winning Eudora Welty Awards winner story, the judges said that Emma McNeel they appreciated it for its “clear, spare prose style of storytelling and rhythm, as well as the imaginative characters who were different from each other and the norm.” This year’s second-place Welty Award is Emma McNeel from St. Andrews Episcopal School in Jackson for her poem “Roots.” The judges of the awards stated that the poem successfully used experimentation with form. Its “engagement with the elemental forces of being human distinguished itself from the crowd of entries by having an unusual cadence.” Rebecca Lauck Cleary made the awards presentation in Nutt Auditorium on the University of Mississippi campus on Sunday, July 23. McNeel attended the ceremony with her family. Hunt was unable to attend. To see a list of past winners of the Eudora Welty Awards, visit the Center’s website. The Center congratulates the winners of this year’s awards.
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Twenty-Fifth Oxford Conference for the Book University of Mississippi • Oxford, Mississippi
March 21–23, 2018 The Twenty-Fifth Oxford Conference for the Book (OCB) is set for March 21–23, 2018, to bring together fiction and nonfiction writers, journalists, poets, publishers, teachers, and students for three stimulating days of readings, lectures, panels, workshops, and social events that celebrate the written word. Recent programs have included sessions on southern foodways, Appalachian studies, poetry, creative nonfiction, Mississippi and southern history, gender studies, biography, sports, comics, and photography, among numerous other topics. OCB partner Square Books will host several sessions of author readings and conversations. The slate of speakers has not been released, but the complete program will soon be posted on the Center’s website. The conference is open to the public without charge. Reservations and advance payment are required for the opening-night reception at the Isom Place on Wednesday, March 21. Thacker Mountain Radio will have a special OCB show on the Oxford Square at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 22. Square Books will host book signings each evening for the
authors presenting that day. The Wednesday and Friday signings will be at Off Square Books, and the Thursday signing will be before and after Thacker Mountain Radio. The Children’s Book Festival (CBF) will take place at the Ford Center for Performing Arts. The goal of the CBF is to give each area first- and fifth-grader a book of his or her own, which they will read along with classmates and their teacher. Committees made up of local school librarians, teachers, and representatives from the Lafayette County Literacy Council (sponsor of the first grade), Junior Auxiliary (sponsor of the fifth grade), and Square Books Jr. choose the books for each grade. During the OCB, the authors will present programs for the children at the Ford Center. We’ll announce the authors for the 2018 festival later this fall. The next Southern Register will have a detailed schedule, a complete list of authors, and more information about programs. For up-to-the-minute information, call 662-9153374, visit www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com, “like” the OCB on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ OxfordConferencefortheBook, or e-mail conference director James G. Thomas, Jr. at jgthomas@olemiss.edu.
CONTRIBUTORS Scott Barretta is an instructor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Mississippi, a writer-researcher for the Mississippi Blues Trail, and the former editor of Living Blues magazine. Brett J. Bonner is the editor of Living Blues magazine. Rebecca Lauck Cleary is the Center’s senior staff assistant and website administrator. She received a BA in journalism from the University of Mississippi and is currently at work on her MA in Southern Studies.
In Memoriam Clarence Mohr October 3, 1946– August 5, 2017 Anne Davis Percy January 1, 1940– August 21, 2017
Joan Wylie Hall is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Shirley Jackson: Studies in Short Fiction and the editor of Conversations with Audre Lorde and Conversations with Natasha Trethewey. Anna F. Kaplan is a PhD student in history at American University. Ted Ownby, director of the Center, holds a joint appointment in Southern Studies and history. Becca Walton is the Center’s associate director for projects. David Wharton is the Center’s director of documentary studies and assistant professor of Southern Studies. Sara Wood is an oral historian with the Southern Foodways Alliance.
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NEW FACULTY / STAFF PUBLICATIONS
Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a US Region Edited by Michele Grigsby Coffey and Jodi Skipper. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. 288 pages, $64.95 cloth, $64.95 ebook. Reshaping Southern Studies through scholarly collaboration and fresh perspectives The work of considering, imagining, and theorizing the US South in regional, national, and global contexts is an intellectual project that has been going on for some time. Scholars in history, literature, and other disciplines have developed an advanced understanding of the historical, social, and cultural forces that have helped to shape the US South. However, most of the debates on these subjects have taken place within specific academic disciplines, with few attempts to cross-engage. Navigating Souths broadens these
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exchanges by facilitating transdisciplinary conversations about Southern Studies scholarship. The fourteen original essays in Navigating Souths articulate questions about the significances of the South as a theoretical and literal “home� base for social science and humanities researchers. They also examine challenges faced by researchers who identify as Southern Studies scholars, as well as by those who live and work in the regional South, and show how researchers have responded to these challenges. In doing so, this book seeks to reframe the field of Southern Studies as it is currently being practiced by social science and humanities scholars and thus reshape historical and cultural conceptualizations of the region. The volume is edited by Michele Grigsby Coffey, instructor of history at the University of Memphis, and Jodi Skipper, assistant professor of anthropology and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi.
The Business Turn in American Religious History Edited by Amanda Porterfield, Darren Grem, and John Corrigan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 264 pages, $99.00 cloth, $35 paperback. A holistic treatment of the influence of American business practice on religion Business has received little attention in American religious history, although it has profound implications for understanding the sustained popularity and ongoing transformation of religion in the United States. This volume offers a wide-ranging exploration of the business aspects of American religious
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organizations. The authors analyze the financing, production, marketing, and distribution of religious goods and services and the role of wealth and economic organization in sustaining and even shaping worship, charity, philanthropy, institutional growth, and missionary work. Treating religion and business holistically, their essays show that American religious life has always been informed by business practices. Laying the groundwork for further investigation, the authors show how American business has functioned as a domain for achieving religious goals. Indeed they find that religion has historically been more powerful when interwoven with business. Chapters on Mormon enterprise, Jewish philanthropy, Hindu gurus, Native American casinos, and the wedding of business wealth to conservative Catholic social teaching demonstrate the range of new studies stimulated by the business turn in American religious history. Other chapters show how evangelicals joined neo-liberal economic practice and right-wing politics to religious fundamentalism to consolidate wealth and power, and how they developed marketing campaigns and
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organizational strategies that transformed the American religious landscape. Included are essays exposing the moral compromises religious organizations have made to succeed as centers of wealth and influence, and the religious beliefs that rationalize and justify these compromises. Still others examine the application of business practices as a means of sustaining religious institutions and expanding their reach, and look at controversies over business practices within religious organizations, and the adjustments such organizations have made in response. Together, the essays collected here offer new ways of conceptualizing the interdependence of religion and business in the United States, establishing multiple paths for further study of their intertwined historical development. The book is edited by Amanda Porterfield, the Robert A. Spivey Professor of Religion and History at Florida State University; John Corrigan, the Lucius Moody Bristol Distinguished Professor of Religion and professor of history at Florida State University; and Darren Grem, assistant professor of history and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi.
Faulkner and Print Culture Edited by Jay Watson, Jaime Harker, and James G. Thomas, Jr. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. 241 pages, $65.00 printed casebinding. A fascinating survey of Faulkner’s publishing history with periodicals and publishing houses The new volume in the Faulkner
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and Yoknapatawpha Series, Faulkner and Print Culture, surveys various aspects of William Faulkner’s publishing history in print cultures and publishing houses across his career as writer. His ventures into print culture began far from the world of “little magazines” such as the Double Dealer in New Orleans or highbrow New York publishing houses such as Boni & Liveright and Random House—publishers with which he would later maintain a long and fruitful publishing relationship. With this diverse publishing history in mind, Faulkner and Print Culture explores Faulkner’s multifaceted engagements, as writer and reader, with the United States and international print cultures of his era, along with how these cultures have mediated his relationship with various twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury audiences. These essays, originally presented as papers at the 2015 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in Oxford, address the place of Faulkner and his writings in the creation, design, publishing, marketing, reception, and collecting of books, in the culture
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of twentieth-century magazines, journals, newspapers, and other periodicals (from pulp to avantgarde), in the history of modern readers and readerships, and in the construction and cultural politics of literary authorship. Several contributors focus on Faulkner’s sensational 1931 novel Sanctuary to illustrate the author’s multifaceted relationship to the print ecology of his time, tracing the novel’s path from the wellsprings of Faulkner’s artistic vision to the novel’s reception among reviewers, tastemakers, intellectuals, and other readers of the early 1930s. Other essayists discuss Faulkner’s early notices, the Saturday Review of Literature, Saturday Evening Post, men’s magazines of the 1950s, and Cold War modernism. The volume is edited by Jay Watson, Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies and professor of English at the University of Mississippi; Jaime Harker, University of Mississippi professor of literature and director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies; and James G. Thomas, Jr., associate director at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
NEW! From the University Press of Mississippi and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture
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READING THE SOUTH Book Reviews and Notes by Faculty, Staff, Students, and Friends of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture
A Literary History of Mississippi Edited by Lorie Watkins. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. 309 pages. $40.00 cloth. Published in this bicentennial year, A Literary History of Mississippi provides the first extensive study of the state’s literature. An ambitious undertaking by editor Lorie Watkins and seventeen essayists, much of the volume follows a chronological course, from the beginnings up to the present. In standard southern literature textbooks, these beginnings are identified as works by historians, politicians, and practitioners of the plantation school of fiction. Unexpectedly and refreshingly, the first essay in A Literary History of Mississippi is Greg O’Brien’s “Indigenous Mississippi Literature.” Remarking that “literature in Mississippi was preserved” for “thousands of years” in the oral stories of Native Americans, O’Brien emphasizes tales of origin, migration, and agriculture by the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Natchez. The chapter concludes with several paragraphs on nineteenth- through twenty-firstcentury poets and fiction writers of Mississippi Indian descent, including LeAnne Howe, a former Grisham writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi. Appropriately, O’Brien prefaces his essay with an epigraph from the story “Yazoo Dusk” by ChoctawCherokee author Louis Owens: “Those teachers never knew anything about the real stories, the ones my grandmother, my apokni, told me.” Comic trickster tales described by O’Brien have Caucasian parallels in the volume’s second essay, “Old Southwest Humor” by Ed Piacentino. From 1833 to 1861, Mississippians supplied a single newspaper, the Spirit of the Times, with 462 pieces about hunters, conmen, itinerant lawyers, preachers, and other frontier characters—more southwestern humor than any other state contributed to the New York sporting journal. Piacentino discusses five of the most popular Mississippi humorists,
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including Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, an early chancellor of the University of Mississippi. The genre, says Piacentino, “paved the way for a more realistic kind of American writing, emphasizing the vernacular idiom of southern folk and a transgressive subject matter that deviated from the polite and proper standards of the early nineteenth century.” Ellen Weinauer’s “Literature of the Civil War: Mississippi Writes the Confederate Nation” describes the responses of many “educated white Mississippians” to the harsh reality of war. In diaries, poetry, and fiction, women like Sarah Dorsey and men like Samuel Berryhill worked “to bolster support for the Confederate cause and to make sense of themselves as citizens of a new nation,” rather than citizens of a single state. Weinauer lists less-known Mississippi contemporaries of Dorsey and Berryhill to set “the groundwork for future research and writing.” Following in sharp contrast is the volume’s fourth essay, “Many Thousands Gone: The Mississippi Slave Narratives” by Lorie Watkins and Claude Pruitt. Readers of fugitive slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs will be intrigued to learn of an 1848 narrative by Henry Watson, a Mississippi slave who escaped by ship in New Orleans. Despite problems of transmission and memory, the hundreds of Works Progress Administration interviews conducted between 1936 and 1938 with former Mississippi slaves present a “multivocal narrative” that tells “the same story viewed from many perspectives.” Thomas J. Richardson speculates that Mississippi’s “special history of slavery, racism, poverty, violence, and defeat” influenced the perception that the turn of the century was a low point for the arts. His essay, “Reading the Bozart in the Sahara: Mississippi Literature and Culture, 1890–1920,” counters the popular escapist genre of “historical costume romance” with the period’s much more substantial works by suffragist Belle Kearney and antilynching activist Ida B. Wells, who was born a slave. Emphasizing the cotton economy in a chapter entitled
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“Modernism in Mississippi,” David A. Davis relates such social factors as ruralism and segregation to the state’s slow modernization. “Paradoxically,” says Davis, “experiences of poverty and oppression” led to “riveting cultural products,” both in blues music and in the “blues-inflected modernism” of writers like William Faulkner, Richard Wright, George Washington Lee, and Robert Rylee. As if to illustrate Davis’s insight, five major authors of the midcentury are the subjects of individual essays at the physical center of A Literary History of Mississippi: “William Faulkner’s Mississippi-Writing” by Theresa M. Towner, “Eudora Welty: Mississippi Cosmopolite” by Suzanne Marrs, “‘The Seeds of Devilment’: Figuring the South in Richard Wright’s Black Boy” by Donald M. Shaffer Jr., “Thomas Lanier ‘Tennessee’ Williams” by Robert Bray, and “Margaret Walker: A Prophet for Her People” by Patsy J. Daniels. Writers of the next generation were shaped by this literary legacy, as Ed Croom’s cover photograph of Faulkner’s typewriter implies. But authors of the past half-century were also formed by the racial, political, and natural crises suggested in Taylor Hagood’s essay “Civil Rights, Vietnam, Hurricanes, and Postmodern Blues: Contemporary Mississippi Fiction Writers.” From Walker Percy and Elizabeth Spencer to Jesmyn Ward and Brad Watson, Hagood surveys a striking variety of authors and works. Terrence T. Tucker’s essay title— “Humor, Fantasy, and Myth: Dramatic Marginalized Voices and Mississippi’s America”—is similarly wideranging, and his references to modern and contemporary theatre encompass Tennessee Williams, Alfred Uhry’s Broadway adaptation of Welty’s Robber Bridegroom, and James Franco’s recent film adaptations of Faulkner novels. His focus, however, is dramatist Beth Henley’s “unflinching, nonromanticized portrait of violence and despair and loneliness in the South,” particularly in Crimes of the Heart. Twentieth through twenty-firstcentury poets are the subject of Daniel Cross Turner’s essay on “Lyric Mississippi: Modern and Contemporary Poetries.” Although he mentions many writers, from Sterling Plumpp to current Mississippi poet laureate and University of Mississippi professor Beth Ann Fennelly, Turner elaborates on six other poets, most notably the African American author Natasha Trethewey, a Pulitzer Prize winner who served recent terms as poet laureate for both the nation and the state. Nonfiction literature is the topic for Lisa Hinrichsen in “The Situated Self: Regional Belonging and the Autobiographical Impulse” and for Ted Ownby in “J. F. H. Claiborne and Dunbar Rowland: Reading Their Surveys of Mississippi History.” Hinrichsen cites the power of autobiography in “illuminating the impact of differences of class, gender, race, and ethnicity on identity development and complicating narratives of the communal past with the specificity of individual memories”—from Civil War accounts of Mississippi battles to the “contemporary boom in memoirs,” among them
The Southern Register
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI
Live from the Mississippi Delta
Panny Flautt Mayfield A treasure trove of photographs of musicians in the cradle of the blues
Black Boys Burning
The 1959 Fire at the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School
Grif Stockley The devastating, tragic consequences of structural and institutional racism in a segregated boys’ prison work farm
Emmett Till
The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement
Devery S. Anderson Foreword by Julian Bond A gripping reexamination of the abduction and murder that galvanized the civil rights movement
High Cotton
Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta
Gerard Helferich A paean to the vanishing family cotton farm
ALSO AVAILABLE AS EBOOKS
www.upress.state.ms.us 800-737-7788
SouthernRegisterFall2017.indd 1
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8/10/17 8:45 AM
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Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss by Frederick and Steven Barthelme and On Fire by Oxford writerfireman Larry Brown. Ownby, director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, contrasts Claiborne’s Reconstruction-era fear of both anarchy and tyranny with Rowland’s emphasis on progress throughout Mississippi’s history in his 1925 study. In the volume’s closing essay, “Literary Mississippi and the New Southern Studies,” Ted Atkinson, too, points to “multiple Souths”: a “global South,” a South that recognizes diversity in ethnicities and sexualities, a South skeptical of “master narratives of history, place, and identity,” a South that “replaces the stock southern narrative of loss and decline with one of perpetual regional regeneration.” Atkinson believes that such a “paradigm shift in Southern Studies” can suggest ways of “remapping” literary Mississippi. Contributors to A Literary History of Mississippi are cartographers in this enterprise. Joan Wylie Hall
Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray By Rosalind Rosenberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 512 pages. $29.95 cloth. I first encountered Pauli Murray in college, while writing a paper on her friend Lillian Smith. The women admired each other’s work, together challenging the racism and sexism of American society in the early and mid-20th century. For both, family history of the enslaving and segregated South permeated their contemporary struggles for social justice. Rosalind Rosenberg’s Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray is a highly readable account of Murray’s intense and life-long battle to confront social issues bound up in the entangled threads of race, sexuality, gender, and class. Rosenberg captures Murray’s inexhaustible drive to tear down what she experienced as unjust social barriers that said little about the true complexity of human life. Her narrative has an immediacy that seamlessly connects Murray’s personal and public lives. Murray was born in 1910 in Baltimore to a nurse and teacher. Her mother died when she was three, and her father, abusive and severely mentally ill, died while institutionalized in 1923. Murray’s Aunt Pauline,
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a teacher, raised her in Durham, North Carolina. Under her aunt’s influence, Murray was sensitive to the injustice of Jim Crow from a young age and pledged to leave the South for her education. She attended Hunter College in New York, frequently penniless and always working, with jobs at the Harlem YWCA, as a waitress, and as a switchboard operator. After several years working as a teacher and typist following graduation, Murray applied to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for graduate school in 1932. The university denied her admission on the grounds of race. Always outspoken about injustice, Murray and a friend were arrested in Virginia for refusing to move to the back of a Greyhound bus. This incident and her work to reverse the unjust death sentence of a black man strengthened her resolve to go to law school. Her time at the largely male Howard School of Law formed the basis for her concept of “Jane Crow,” the intersectional experience of discrimination that drove her life’s work. Denied admission to Harvard for graduate school in law because of her gender, Murray worked as a journalist in the black press before attending University of California, Berkeley’s law school. While there, Murray continued the scholarship she began at Howard, arguing that Plessy v. Ferguson be challenged on the grounds of the 13th and 14th Amendments. Her argument, dismissed by many at the time, became a key element in the NAACP attorneys’ strategy in the 1954 Brown case. Murray, after a failed attempt at private legal practice, shifted her focus to writing, working on what would become Proud Shoes, a chronicle of the lives of her maternal grandparents, while resident (and neighbor to James Baldwin) at the MacDowell Colony. After Murray published the book, she began work as one of the first women lawyers at a law firm with a notably diverse staff, followed by a year teaching at the Ghana School of Law. Leaving because of the country’s increasing authoritarianism, Murray returned to enroll in Yale Law School, finally achieving her goal of earning a doctorate in legal studies. Beginning with correspondence in the 1940s, Murray became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, who appointed her to the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1961. Murray contributed to the commission’s work on employment law by arguing that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection applied to gender as well as race. Murray, whose work on equal rights in employment impressed Betty Friedan, was a charter member of NOW. Rosenberg provides a particularly compelling discussion of Murray’s “confused world of uncertain
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boundaries.” Descended from slaves, slave owners, and Cherokee Indians, Murray faced poverty while knowing she was destined to receive an education and be successful. She also believed that she was truly male and sought hormone treatment long before the movement for transgender rights made transition possible. From a personal experience of “in betweenness,” Murray was well situated to attack social boundaries that she knew were not absolute. In Rosenberg’s words, she was “a bridge, between black and white, male and female, northerner and southerner, left handed and right handed, old and young—an example of diversity in one body, on its way toward mutuality and reconciliation in a better world.” After the death of Renee Barlow, her partner of sixteen years, Murray was devastated and looked to her lifelong experience in the Episcopal Church for solace. This spiritual journey led Murray to discern a call to ordained priesthood, which was at the time barred to women. Following seminary, Murray broke another barrier, becoming the first African American woman, and one of the first women, to be ordained in the Episcopal Church. Murray’s ordination completed a life devoted to advocacy for the least among us. Becca Walton
‘Walking Into Clarksdale’
tTh
Borrowing the title from an album by Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, this unique tour promises an exciting introduction to Clarksdale as part of the 25th Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival and Mississippi’s Bicentennial celebration. From live drama by Blanche DuBois in The Grange Cemetery, history lessons from the Civil Rights Era in historic adjoining churches to ragtime, jazz, & blues in The New World District, & scenes performed in the actual settings of the great Delta plays created by Tennessee Williams, this will be a day to remember.
Save the Date: Oct. 13, 2017 - Its’s Free Thanks to grants from Coahoma Community College, Mississippi Arts Commission, Mississippi Humanities Council, Visit Mississippi, & Visit Clarksdale. 662-627-6149 Visit: www.coahomacc.edu/twilliams
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