In contrast to other literary genres, drama has received little attention in southern studies, and women playwrights in general receive less recognition than their male counterparts. In Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender, author Casey Kayser addresses these gaps by examining the work of southern women playwrights, making the argument that representations of the American South on stage are complicated by difficulties of identity, genre, and region. Through analysis of the dramatic texts, the rhetoric of reviews of productions, as well as what the playwrights themselves have said about their plays and productions, Kayser delineates these challenges and argues that playwrights draw on various conscious strategies in response. These strategies, evident in the work of such playwrights as Pearl Cleage, Sandra Deer, Lillian Hellman, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Shay Youngblood, provide them with the opportunity to lead audiences to reconsider monolithic understandings of northern and southern regions and, ultimately, create new visions of the South.

This innovative book examines how African Americans in the South made sense of the devastating loss of life unleashed by the Civil War and emancipation. During and after the war, African Americans died in vast numbers from battle, disease, and racial violence. While freedom was a momentous event for the formerly enslaved, it was also deadly. Through an investigation into how African Americans reacted to and coped with the passing away of loved ones and community members, Ashley Towle argues that freedpeople gave credence to their free status through their experiences with mortality. African Americans harnessed the power of death in a variety of arenas, including within the walls of national and private civilian cemeteries, in applications for widows' pensions, in the pulpits of black churches, around seance tables, on the witness stand at congressional hearings, and in the columns of African American newspapers. In the process of mourning the demise of kith and kin, black people reconstituted their families, forged communal bonds, and staked claims to citizenship, civil rights, and racial justice from the federal government. In a society upended by civil war and emancipation, death was political.

In Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, author Stefanie K. Dunning considers both popular and literary texts that range from Beyonce's Lemonade to Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones. These key works restage Black women in relation to nature. Dunning argues that depictions of protagonists who return to pastoral settings contest the violent and racist history that incentivized Black disavowal of the natural world. Dunning offers an original theoretical paradigm for thinking through race and nature by showing that diverse constructions of nature in these texts are deployed as a means of rescrambling the teleology of the Western progress narrative. In a series of fascinating close readings of contemporary Black texts, she reveals how a range of artists evoke nature to suggest that interbeing with nature signals a call for what Jared Sexton calls ""the dream of Black Studies""-abolition. Black to Nature thus offers nuanced readings that advance an emerging body of critical and creative work at the nexus of Blackness, gender, and nature. Written in a clear, approachable, and multilayered style that aims to be as poignant as nature itself, the volume offers a unique combination of theoretical breadth, narrative beauty, and broader perspective that suggests it will be a foundational text in a new critical turn towards framing nature within a cultural studies context.

As American Indian communities face the new century, they look to the future armed with confidence in the indigenous perspectives that have kept them together thus far. Now five premier scholars in American Indian history, along with a tribal leader who has placed an indelible mark on the history of her people, show how understanding the past is the key to solving problems facing Indians today.Edited by Albert L. Hurtado and introduced by Wilma Mankiller, this book includes the insights of Colin G. Calloway, R. David Edmunds, Laurence M. Hauptman, Peter Iverson, and Brenda J. Child - scholars who have helped shape the way an entire generation thinks about American Indian history. Writing broadly about twentieth-century Native history, they focus on themes that drive this field of study: Indian identity, tribal acknowledgment, sovereignty, oral tradition, and cultural adaptation. Drawn from the Wilma Mankiller Symposium on American History, these thoughtful essays show how history continues to influence contemporary Native life. The authors carve a broad geographic swath - from the Oneidas' interpretation of the past, to the perseverance of the jingle dress tradition among the Ojibwes, to community persistence in the Southwest. Wilma Mankiller's essay on contemporary tribal government adds a personal perspective to understanding the situation of Indian people today.