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.

In the American imagination, the South is a place both sexually open and closed, outwardly chaste and inwardly sultry. Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture demonstrates that there is no central theme that encompasses sex in the U.S. South, but rather a rich variety of manifestations and embodiments influenced by race, gender, history, and social and political forces. The twelve essays in this volume shine a particularly bright light on the significance of race in shaping the history of southern sexuality, primarily in the period since World War II. Francesca Gamber discusses the politics of interracial sex during the national civil rights movement, while Katherine Henninger and Riché Richardson each consider the intersections of race and sexuality in the blaxploitation film Mandingo and the comedy of Steve Harvey, respectively. Political and religious regulation of sexual behavior also receives attention in Claire Strom's essay on venereal disease treatment in wartime Florida, Stephanie M. Chalifoux's examination of prostitution networks in Alabama, Krystal Humphreys's piece on purity culture in modern Christianity, and Whitney Strub's essay delving into the sexual politics of the Memphis Deep Throat trials. Specific places in the South figure prominently in Jerry Watkins's essay on queer sex in the Redneck Riviera of northern Florida, Richard Hourigan's exploration of bachelor parties in Myrtle Beach, and Matt Miller's piece on African American spring break celebrations in Atlanta. Finally, Abigail Parsons and Trent Brown investigate southern portrayals of gender and sexuality in the fiction of Fannie Flagg and Larry Brown. Above all, Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture demonstrates that sex has been a fluid and resilient force operating across multiple discourses and practices in the contemporary South, and remains a vital component in the perception of a culturally complex region.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Edgar Allan Poe's image and import in Spanish America shifted during the twentieth century, and this shift is clearly connected to the work of three writers from the Rio de la Plata region-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.

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was one of the most influential southern writers, widely considered to rival his contemporary, William Faulkner who believed Wolfe to be one of the greatest talents of their generation. His novels including Look Homeward, Angel (1929);Of Time and the River (1935); and the posthumously published The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940) remain touchstones of U.S. literature. In Look Abroad, Angel, Jedidiah Evans uncovers the "global Wolfe," reconfiguring Wolfe's supposedly intractable homesickness for the American South as a form of longing that is instead indeterminate and expansive. Instead of promoting and reinforcing a narrow and cloistered formulation of the writer as merely southern or Appalachian, Evans places Wolfe in transnational contexts, examining Wolfe's impact and influence throughout Europe. In doing so, he de-territorializes the response to Wolfe's work, revealing the writer as a fundamentally global presence within American literature.