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"Group identity -- Southern States"
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Shadow and Shelter
To early European colonists the swamp was a place linked with sin and impurity; to the plantation elite, it was a practical obstacle to agricultural development. For the many excluded from the white southern aristocracy--African Americans, Native Americans, Acadians, and poor, rural whites--the swamp meant something very different, providing shelter and sustenance and offering separation and protection from the dominant plantation culture.
Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Cultureexplores the interplay of contradictory but equally pre-vailing metaphors: first, the swamp as the underside of the myth of pastoral Eden that defined the antebellum South; and second, the swamp as the last pure vestige of undominated southern eco-culture. As the South gives in to strip malls and suburban sprawl, its wooded wetlands have come to embody the last part of the region that will always be beyond cultural domination.
Examining the southern swamp from a perspective informed by ecocriticism, literary studies, and ecological history,Shadow and Shelterconsiders the many repre-sentations of the swamp and its evolving role in an increasingly multicultural South.
Anthony Wilson is assistant professor of English at LaGrange College. His work has been published in theSouthern Literary Journaland the Chronicle of Higher Education's online edition.
eBook
Flashes of a Southern Spirit
Flashes of a Southern Spirit explores meanings of the spirit in the American South, including religious ecstasy and celebrations of regional character and distinctiveness. Charles Reagan Wilson sees ideas of the spirit as central to understanding southern identity. The South nurtured a patriotic spirit expressed in the high emotions of Confederates going off to war, but the region also was the setting for a spiritual outpouring of prayer and song during the civil rights movement. Arguing for a spiritual grounding to southern identity, Wilson shows how identifications of the spirit are crucial to understanding what makes southerners invest so much meaning in their regional identity. From the late nineteenth-century invention of southern tradition to early twenty-first-century folk artistic creativity, Wilson examines a wide range of cultural expression, including music, literature, folk art, media representations, and religious imagery. He finds new meanings in the works of such creative giants as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Elvis Presley, while at the same time closely examining little-studied figures such as the artist/revivalist McKendree Long. Wilson proposes that southern spirituality is a neglected category of analysis in the recent flourishing of interdisciplinary studies on the South-one that opens up the cultural interaction of blacks and whites in the region.
eBook
Southern heritage on display : public ritual and ethnic diversity within southern regionalism
This provocative collection draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to shed light on the role that public ceremonies play in affirming or debunking cultural identities associated with the South. W. J. Cash's 1941 observation that there are many Souths and many cultural traditions among them is certainly validated by this book. Although the Civil War and its lost cause tradition continues to serve as a cultural root paradigm in celebrations, both uniting and dividing loyalties, southerners also embrace a panoply of public rituals—parades, cook-offs, kinship homecom-ings, church assemblies, music spectacles, and material culture exhibitions—that affirm other identities. From the Appalachian uplands to the Mississippi Delta, from Kentucky bluegrass to Carolina piedmont, southerners celebrate in festivals that showcase their diverse cultural backgrounds and their mythic beliefs about themselves. The ten essays of this cohesive, interdisciplinary collection present event-centered research from various fields of study—anthropology, geography, history, and literature—to establish a rich, complex picture of the stereotypically Solid South. Topics include the Mardi Gras Indian song cycle as a means of expressing African-American identity in New Orleans; powwow performances and Native American traditions in southeast North Carolina; religious healings in southern Appalachian communities; Mexican Independence Day festivals in central Florida; and, in eastern Tennessee, bonding ceremonies of melungeons who share Indian, Scots Irish, Mediterranean, and African ancestry. Seen together, these public heritage displays reveal a rich creole of cultures that have always been a part of southern life and that continue to affirm a flourishing regionalism. This book will be valuable to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, American studies, and southern history; academic and public libraries; and general readers interested in the American South. It contributes a vibrant, colorful layer of understanding to the continuously emerging picture of complexity in this region historically depicted by simple stereotypes.
Celeste Ray is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, and author of Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South.
eBook
Enduring Legacy
Explores the crucial role of rhetoric and oratory in
creating and propagating a “Lost Cause” public memory
of the American South
Enduring Legacy explores the vital place of ceremonial
oratory in the oral tradition in the South and analyses how
rituals such as Confederate Memorial Day, Confederate veteran
reunions, and dedication of Confederate monuments have
contributed to creating and sustaining a Lost Cause paradigm for
Southern identity. Towns studies in detail secessionist and Civil
War speeches and how they laid the groundwork for future
generations, including Southern responses to the civil rights
movement, and beyond. The Lost Cause orators that came after the
Civil War, Towns argues, helped to shape a lasting mythology of
the brave Confederate martyr, and the Southern positions for why
the Confederacy lost and who was to blame. Innumerable words were
spent—in commemorative speeches, newspaper editorials, and
statehouse oratory—condemning the evils of Reconstruction,
redemption, reconciliation, and the new and future South. Towns
concludes with an analysis of how Lost Cause myths still
influence Southern and national perceptions of the region today,
as evidenced in debates over the continued deployment of the
Confederate flag and the popularity of Civil War
reenactments.
eBook
Sisters and rebels : a struggle for the soul of America
\"Three sisters from the South wrestle with orthodoxies of race, sexuality, and privilege. Born in late nineteenth-century Georgia, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. Their father was a member of the KKK; the older girls performed at rallies celebrating the 'Lost Cause.' While Elizabeth remained in the South, Grace and Katharine, moved by liberal Christianity and emboldened by the YWCA, became impassioned activists for social justice and groundbreaking progressive writers. In bohemian Greenwich Village and not-so-bluestocking Northampton, Massachusetts, they helped to forge a tradition of left-leaning, antiracist, and feminist dissent, while powerfully asserting their identity as Southern women. Distinguished historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall places these ordinary yet extraordinary women in the center of American intellectual history, and explores how each sister came to different understandings of race, gender, and the South; committed, albeit in radically different ways, to remaking the region as a place they could continue to call home\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Grounded Globalism
The world is flat? Maybe not, says this paradigm-shifting study of globalism's impact on a region legendarily resistant to change. The U.S. South, long defined in terms of its differences with the U.S. North, is moving out of this national and oppositional frame of reference into one that is more international and integrative. Likewise, as the South (home to UPS, CNN, KFC, and other international brands) goes global, people are emigrating there from countries like India, Mexico, and Vietnam--and becoming southerners. Much has been made of the demographic and economic aspects of this shift. Until now, though, no one has systematically shown what globalism means to the southern sense of self. Anthropologist James L. Peacock looks at the South of both the present and the past to develop the idea of \"grounded globalism,\" in which global forces and local cultures rooted in history, tradition, and place reverberate against each other in mutually sustaining and energizing ways. Peacock's focus is on a particular part of the world; however, his model is widely relevant: \"Some kind of grounding in locale is necessary to human beings.\" Grounded Globalism draws on perspectives from fields as diverse as ecology, anthropology, religion, and history to move us beyond the model, advanced by such scholars as C. Vann Woodward, that depicts the South as a region paralyzed by the burden of its past. Peacock notes that, while globalism may lift old burdens, it may at the same time impose new ones. He also maintains that earlier regional identities have not been replaced by the rootless cosmopolitanism of cyberspace or other abstracted systems. Attachments to place remain, even as worldwide markets erase boundaries and flatten out differences and distinctions among nations. Those attachments exert their own pressures back on globalism, says Peacock, with subtle strengths we should not discount.
eBook