In southern graveyards through the first decades of the
twentieth century, the Confederate South was commemorated by
tombstones and memorials, in Confederate flags, and in Memorial Day
speeches and burial rituals. Cemeteries spoke the language of
southern memory, and identity was displayed in ritualistic
form--inscribed on tombs, in texts, and in bodily memories and
messages. Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray
wove sites of regional memory, particularly Confederate burial
sites, into their autobiographies as a way of emphasizing how
segregation divided more than just southern landscapes and
people.
Darlene O'Dell here considers the southern graveyard as one of
three sites of memory--the other two being the southern body and
southern memoir--upon which the region's catastrophic race
relations are inscribed. O'Dell shows how Lumpkin, Smith, and
Murray, all witnesses to commemorations of the Confederacy and
efforts to maintain the social order of the New South, contended
through their autobiographies against Lost Cause versions of
southern identity. Sites of Southern Memory elucidates the ways in
which these three writers joined in the dialogue on regional memory
by placing the dead southern body as a site of memory within their
texts.
In this unique study of three women whose literary and personal
lives were vitally concerned with southern race relations and the
struggle for social justice, O'Dell provides a telling portrait of
the troubled intellectual, literary, cultural, and social history
of the American South.
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