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Red States examines how the recurrent use of Native American
history in southern cultural and literary texts produces ideas of
""feeling southern"" that have consequences for how present-day
conservative political discourses resonate across the United
States. Assembling a newly constituted archive that includes
theatrical and musical performances, pre-Civil War literatures, and
contemporary novels, Gina Caison argues that notions of Native
American identity in the U.S. South can be understood by tracing
how audiences in the region came to imagine indigeneity through
texts ranging from the nineteenth-century Cherokee Phoenix to the
Mardi Gras Indian narratives of Treme. Policy issues such as Indian
Removal, biracial segregation, land claim, and federal termination
frequently correlate to the audience consumption of such texts, and
therefore the reception histories of this archive can be tied to
shifts in the political claims of--and political possibilities
for--Native people of the U.S. South. This continual appeal to the
political issues of Indian Country ultimately generates what we see
as persistent discourses about southern exceptionality and
counternationalism.
Author William Bradford Huie was one of the most celebrated figures
of twentieth-century journalism. A pioneer of ""checkbook
journalism,"" he sought the truth in controversial stories when the
truth was hard to come by. In the case of James Earl Ray, Huie paid
Ray and his original attorneys $40,000 for cooperation in
explaining his movements in the months before Martin Luther King's
assassination and up to Ray's arrest weeks later in London. Huie
became a major figure in the investigation of King's assassination
and was one of the few persons able to communicate with Ray during
that time. Huie, a friend of King, writes that he went into his
investigation of Ray believing that a conspiracy was behind King's
murder. But after retracing Ray's movements through California,
Louisiana, Mexico, Canada, Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, and
London, Huie came to believe that James Earl Ray was a pathetic
petty criminal who hated African Americans and sought to make a
name for himself by murdering King. He Slew the Dreamer was
originally published in 1970 soon after Ray went to prison and was
republished in 1977, but was out of print until the 1997 edition,
published with the cooperation of Huie's widow. This new edition
features an essay by scholar Riche Richardson that provides fresh
insight, and it includes the 1977 prologue, which Huie wrote
countering charges by members of Congress, the King family, and
others who claimed the FBI had aided and abetted Ray. In 1970,
1977, 1997, and now, He Slew the Dreamer offers a remarkably
detailed examination of the available evidence at the time the
murder occurred and an invaluable resource to current debates over
the King assassination.
In Emancipation's Daughters, Riche Richardson examines iconic black
women leaders who have contested racial stereotypes and constructed
new national narratives of black womanhood in the United States.
Drawing on literary texts and cultural representations, Richardson
shows how five emblematic black women-Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa
Parks, Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Obama, and Beyonce-have
challenged white-centered definitions of American identity. By
using the rhetoric of motherhood and focusing on families and
children, these leaders have defied racist images of black women,
such as the mammy or the welfare queen, and rewritten scripts of
femininity designed to exclude black women from civic
participation. Richardson shows that these women's status as
national icons was central to reconstructing black womanhood in
ways that moved beyond dominant stereotypes. However, these
formulations are often premised on heteronormativity and exclude
black queer and trans women. Throughout Emancipation's Daughters,
Richardson reveals new possibilities for inclusive models of
blackness, national femininity, and democracy.
In Emancipation's Daughters, Riche Richardson examines iconic black
women leaders who have contested racial stereotypes and constructed
new national narratives of black womanhood in the United States.
Drawing on literary texts and cultural representations, Richardson
shows how five emblematic black women-Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa
Parks, Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Obama, and Beyonce-have
challenged white-centered definitions of American identity. By
using the rhetoric of motherhood and focusing on families and
children, these leaders have defied racist images of black women,
such as the mammy or the welfare queen, and rewritten scripts of
femininity designed to exclude black women from civic
participation. Richardson shows that these women's status as
national icons was central to reconstructing black womanhood in
ways that moved beyond dominant stereotypes. However, these
formulations are often premised on heteronormativity and exclude
black queer and trans women. Throughout Emancipation's Daughters,
Richardson reveals new possibilities for inclusive models of
blackness, national femininity, and democracy.
This edited volume qualifies black love on the basis of black
identity. Much of what is experienced of blackness as an identity
arises out of a juxtaposition to other races and identities,
particularly whiteness. The contributors in this volume resist the
idea of black love in reference to whiteness by exposing the hidden
toxicities that come with a focus on whiteness. They reflect on
intricate and intimate relationship dynamics that arise out of a
violent and challenging past between Black women and Black men.
Edgar Allan Poe's image and import shifted during the twentieth
century, and this shift is clearly connected to the work of three
writers from the Rio de la Plata region of South America-Uruguayan
Horacio Quiroga and Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio
Cortazar. In Borges's Poe, Emron Esplin focuses on the second
author in this trio and argues that Borges, through a sustained and
complex literary relationship with Poe's works, served as the
primary catalyst that changed Poe's image throughout Spanish
America from a poet-prophet to a timeless fiction writer. Most
scholarship that couples Poe and Borges focuses primarily on each
writer's detective stories, refers only occasionally to their
critical writings and the remainder of their fiction, and
deemphasizes the cultural context in which Borges interprets Poe.
In this book, Esplin explores Borges's and Poe's published works
and several previously untapped archival resources to reveal an
even more complex literary relationship between the two writers.
Emphasizing the spatial and temporal context in which Borges
interprets Poe-the Rio de la Plata region from the 1920s through
the 1980s-Borges's Poe underlines Poe's continual presence in
Borges's literary corpus. More important, it demonstrates how
Borges's literary criticism, his Poe translations, and his own
fiction create a disparate Poe who serves as a precursor to
Borges's own detective and fantastic stories and as an inspiration
to the so-called Latin American Boom. Seen through this more
expansive context, Borges's Poe shows that literary influence runs
both ways since Poe's writings visibly affect Borges the poet,
story writer, essayist, and thinker while Borges's analyses and
translations of Poe's work and his responses to Poe's texts in his
own fiction forever change how readers of Poe return to his
literary corpus.
Hospitality as a cultural trait has been associated with the South
for well over two centuries, but the origins of this association
and the reasons for its perseverance of ten seem unclear. Anthony
Szczesiul looks at how and why we have taken something so
particular as the social habit of hospitality-which is exercised
among diverse individuals and is widely varied in its particular
practices-and so generalized it as to make it a cultural trait of
an entire region of the country. Historians have offered a variety
of explanations of the origins and cultural practices of
hospitality in the antebellum South. Economic historians have at
times portrayed southern hospitality as evidence of conspicuous
consumption and competition among wealthy planters, while cultural
historians have treated it peripherally as a symptomatic expression
of the southern code of honor. Although historians have offered
different theories, they generally agree that the mythic dimensions
of southern hospitality eventually outstripped its actual
practices. Szczesiul examines why we have chosen to remember and
valorize this particular aspect of the South, and he raises
fundamental ethical questions that underlie both the concept of
hospitality and the cultural work of American memory, particularly
in light of the region's historical legacy of slavery and
segregation.
A bold book, built of close readings, striking in its range and
depth, The Signifying Eye shows Faulkner's art take shape in
sweeping arcs of social, labor, and aesthetic history. Beginning
with long-unpublished works (his childhood sketches and his
hand-drawn and hand-illustrated play The Marionettes) and early
novels (Mosquitoes and Sartoris), working through many major works
(The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in
August, and Absalom, Absalom!), and including more popular fictions
(The Wild Palms and The Unvanquished) and late novels (notably
Intruder in the Dust and The Town), The Signifying Eye reveals
Faulkner's visual obsessions with artistic creation as his work is
read next to Wharton, Cather, Toomer, and-in a tour de force
intervention-Willem de Kooning. After coloring in southern
literature as a "reverse slave narrative," Waid's Eye locates
Faulkner's fiction as the "feminist hinge" in a crucial parable of
art that seeks abstraction through the burial of the race-defined
mother. Race is seen through gender and sexuality while social fall
is exposed (in Waid's phrase) as a "coloring of class." Locating
"visual language" that constitutes a "pictorial vocabulary," The
Signifying Eye delights in literacy as the oral meets the written
and the abstract opens as a site to see narrative. Steeped in
history, this book locates a heightened reality that goes beyond
representation to bring Faulkner's novels, stories, and drawings
into visible form through Whistler, Beardsley, Gorky, and de
Kooning. Visionary and revisionist, Waid has painted the proverbial
big picture, changing the fundamental way that both the making of
modernism and the avant-garde will be seen.
This pathbreaking study of region, race, and gender reveals how we
underestimate the South's influence on the formation of black
masculinity at the national level. Many negative stereotypes of
black men - often contradictory ones - have emerged from the
ongoing historical traumas initiated by slavery. Are black men
emasculated and submissive or hypersexed and violent? Nostalgic
representations of black men have arisen as well: think of the
philosophical, hardworking sharecropper or the abiding, upright
preacher. To complicate matters, says Riche Richardson, blacks
themselves appropriate these images for purposes never intended by
their (mostly) white progenitors. Starting with such well-known
caricatures as the Uncle Tom and the black rapist, Richardson
investigates a range of pathologies of black masculinity that
derive ideological force from their associations with the South.
Military policy, black-liberation discourse, and contemporary rap,
she argues, are just some of the instruments by which egregious
pathologies of black masculinity in southern history have been
sustained. Richardson's sources are eclectic and provocative,
including Ralph Ellison's fiction, Charles Fuller's plays, Spike
Lee's films, Huey Newton's and Malcolm X's political rhetoric, the
O.J. Simpson discourse, and the music production of Master P, the
Cash Money Millionaires, and other Dirty South rappers. Filled with
new insights into the region's role in producing hierarchies of
race and gender in and beyond their African American contexts, this
new study points the way toward more epistemological frameworks for
southern literature, southern studies, and gender studies.
Author William Bradford Huie was one of the most celebrated figures
of twentieth-century journalism. A pioneer of ""checkbook
journalism,"" he sought the truth in controversial stories when the
truth was hard to come by. In the case of James Earl Ray, Huie paid
Ray and his original attorneys $40,000 for cooperation in
explaining his movements in the months before Martin Luther King's
assassination and up to Ray's arrest weeks later in London. Huie
became a major figure in the investigation of King's assassination
and was one of the few persons able to communicate with Ray during
that time. Huie, a friend of King, writes that he went into his
investigation of Ray believing that a conspiracy was behind King's
murder. But after retracing Ray's movements through California,
Louisiana, Mexico, Canada, Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, and
London, Huie came to believe that James Earl Ray was a pathetic
petty criminal who hated African Americans and sought to make a
name for himself by murdering King. He Slew the Dreamer was
originally published in 1970 soon after Ray went to prison and was
republished in 1977, but was out of print until the 1997 edition,
published with the cooperation of Huie's widow. This new edition
features an essay by scholar Riche Richardson that provides fresh
insight, and it includes the 1977 prologue, which Huie wrote
countering charges by members of Congress, the King family, and
others who claimed the FBI had aided and abetted Ray. In 1970,
1977, 1997, and now, He Slew the Dreamer offers a remarkably
detailed examination of the available evidence at the time the
murder occurred and an invaluable resource to current debates over
the King assassination.
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