Between Nostalgia and History in the US South: Fictions of the Black Waiter on Film

Abstract

Abstract In this essay, I examine frictions between the past, present and future which, in the tension between them, generate fictions which conflate not only Southern nostalgia with history but undergird American exceptionalism more broadly. These fictions generated by the rubbing together of past and present are not only nostalgic for a past that never existed but actively anti-historical, supplanting discrete periods in the history of the U.S. South (such as slavery, the Jim Crow Era, and the present day) with an intentionally confounded “temporal estrangement”. To trace the fault-lines at which nostalgia and history chafe against each other, I focus on the figure of the black waiter. As to my choice of the word black instead of African-American: as this article focuses explicitly on racial divides in American Southern history, I have chosen to use the word black rather than African-American. I see this move as a way to emphasize the lived consequences of racial difference for black Americans in the time period I analyze here – effects which, like the murder of Booker Wright, do not live in the hybrid space of the hyphen. My primary case study is Paula Deen’s legal deposition, taken in Savannah in 2013 after almost three years of legal proceedings. But in order to situate Deen’s fictions more fully within and beyond the context of the U.S. South, I read this deposition through and against two films, one largely-forgotten documentary, Mississippi: An Inside Story and one blockbuster, Forrest Gump.