Southern Culture Research Articles

Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South

From the creation of the first New in the wake of Appomattox to the current struggles over the Confederate flag, Redefining Southern Culture surveys the remarkable story of southern identity and its persistence in the face of sweeping changes in the South's economy, society, and political structure. Rejecting the conventional continuity-versus-change framework, James C. Cobb instead illustrates how the evolution of southern culture synthesized these two forces in recent years. Throughout this lively and engaging volume, Cobb examines southern identity in its constantly changing forms, from history and literature to blues and country music to popular and consumer cultures. Cobb also presents the first detailed account of the efforts of African Americans in the South to reclaim their identity as southerners and to construct their own symbolic and substantive representations of what that identity means. The essays in Redefining Southern Culture reflect James C. Cobb's career-long interest in exploring southern cultural identity and the interaction of this identity with the economic, social, and political forces that have transformed the region. Written in a refreshingly straightforward and engaging style, this book promises thoughtful reading for anyone interested in the modern South and will be a valuable resource for courses in southern history and culture.

Kudzu: A Tale of Two Vines

City leaders in Tallahassee, Florida, recently started a program that uses sheep to graze on large, troublesome patches of kudzu within the city. Several summers ago, Greenville, South Carolina, hosted the filming and theatrical debut of Kudzula, the story of a ten-year-old boy who saves a town from over-development with the help of a forty-foot kudzu creature.(1) As these incidents suggest, the story of kudzu is a tale of two vines. Existing simultaneously in the realms of nature and culture, kudzu--like southern culture in general--is open to multiple interpretations and representations. In Tallahassee, kudzu is a pest. Like visiting relatives, the plant has overstayed its welcome. In Greenville, on the other hand, people not only pay $19 to watch a play about kudzu, but in that play, kudzu saves the day. Perhaps no other part of the natural environment is more closely identified with the South than this invasive and fast growing vine. Yet relatively few academics have examined kudzu and its place within southern culture and the larger American experience. And southerners both endure and embrace this pervasive part of life. Some wage an ecological battle against kudzu, while others use and market the vine in creative ways. Both southerners and nonsoutherners identify with kudzu as a symbol and incorporate the plant into daily cultural expression, including the language used to characterize and understand social and environmental change. As a national news wire reports, So aggressive is kudzu that the word has entered American English as shorthand for out-of-control growth.(2) In this respect, the plant illustrates the tremendous impact the American South has made, and continues to make, on national culture. While kudzu may seem native to the South, it is an exotic species alien to the region and the country. The plant was introduced to America from Japan in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and to the South in 1883 at the New Orleans Exposition. For the next few decades, kudzu served primarily as ornamental shade for homes, particularly porches. Later, despite early warnings about the vine's aggressive nature, the Department of Agriculture, the Soil Conservation Service, and other government agencies promoted kudzu as a public resource. Kudzu is comparable nutritionally to alfalfa and was first touted as a form of pasturage for feeding livestock--although cutting, handling, and baling the vine proved to be problematic. Kudzu reached the height of its popularity in the late 1930s as a tool in soil conservation, a means of replenishing nitrogen-poor soils and controlling erosion along fields and road banks. Historian Kurt Kinbacher has characterized the story of kudzu as tangled in the sense that the vine does not have just one historical role or identity in the region. Its value to humans has shifted with public opinion, advancements in science, and the changing demands of American agriculture.(3) Kudzu rose in status through the careful cultivation of its image by several important individuals and groups. Kudzu's first promoters, Charles and Lillie Pleas of Florida, experimented with using kudzu as forage for animals in the early 1900s and later sold kudzu plants and rootstock through a mail order business. A roadside historical marker on Highway 90 in Chipley, Florida, recognizes their efforts in developing kudzu for agricultural use.(4) Perhaps the most vocal and interesting of kudzu's supporters was Channing Cope of Covington, Georgia. Cope promoted the conversion of wasteland into kudzu pastures through his daily radio programs and articles in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. He is credited with starting the Kudzu Club of America in the early 1940s, which had a membership of twenty thousand by 1943. The club embraced the goal of planting 1 million acres of kudzu in Georgia and 8 million acres in the South overall. In his 1949 book tided Front Porch Farmer, Cope equated the planting of kudzu on heavily eroded land to a physician's using strong medicine to fight a disease. …

Letters to the Editor: Not Your Oxford American

Each year we marshal the troops for another subscription drive in order to bring Southern Cultures to a larger audience, and often during these efforts we encounter the war stories of subscribers who have been burned before when they've tried out a new read. Ed Talley from Arkansas wrote just after signing up with us that Southern Cultures "had better not be like The Oxford American. When it came time to renew, the address was some place in Beverly Hills. Not in Dixie!" For good measure, he then added that "John Grisham [famed author and major Oxford American underwriter] sold out the South just like Hillary and Bill Clinton did!" We won't go nearly that far in our assessment of Mr. Grisham (or of The Oxford American, which we like), but we do confess to having a dust jacket photo of the novelist hanging in our office. Under his friendly visage, someone has penned a few words: "Wanted, for bankrolling the competition."

Crossroads of Southern Culture and Narrative

The Narrative Forms of Southern Community, by Scott Romine. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999. xi + 226 pp. $49.95.

Cultures in Conflict: The American Civil War, by Steven E. Wood-worth

Cultures in Conflict: The American Civil War, by Steven E. Woodworth. Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 2000. xx, 220 pp. $45.00 U.S. Steven E. Woodworth notes that concept of Culture Wars so aptly used by presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan at 1992 Republican National Convention, was neither new nor unique 1990s. According Woodworth, profoundly deep divisions that drive people to drastic action and fundamental change are always at least partly (p. xi). Citing American Civil War as one prominent example, Woodworth proposes help us understand cultural currents that caused and shaped that conflict through writings of actual participants and eye-witnesses. Following a three-page preface outlining his intent and methodology, Woodworth divides his book into three sections. Part I includes Key Events ... 1860-1865, an Overview chapter of war, and a chapter outlining Northern and Southern Ways of Life over two centuries. Part II contains four chapters of documents covering war years. A concluding part III considers Ideas Exploration, identifying links between various themes and specific documents, inferring its use discussion or research papers. The organization and approach thus suggests a book aimed at a student and non-specialist audience. The price ($45.00 U.S.) and book's structure may limit those uses. The documents include some thirty excerpts from letters, diaries and memoirs show mundane daily experiences of ordinary people (soldiers, nurses, teachers, a plantation mistress, farmers) both sides of conflict. Woodworth's sources are often imaginative. Wartime Southern culture is shown by Mary Todd Lincoln's half-sister in Kentucky, a family of Arkansas Unionists, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Georgian cousin, Braxton Bragg's wife, and a Union officer's wife in Nashville. More traditional civilian and soldier correspondence discuss Northern rural and small town communities with Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, and Indiana heavily represented. Larger cities and eastern seaboard receive proportionately less attention. This fair representation is intended demonstrate intersection of military and civilian life and offer modern readers a chance know those who participated in war on a personal basis. Woodworth admits limits of this approach; illiterate persons, which includes most slaves are not included for obvious reasons and can only be represented in the accounts of others (p. xii). Surprisingly a book apparently aimed at students, he never explains why such non-traditional sources as slave narratives, songs, and oral tradition are excluded. …

Circling Dixie: contemporary southern culture through a transatlantic lens

We all knew the British were fascinated with the tragic, gothic American South. This remarkable book not only documents the degree of that fascination, but also demonstrates the deep interconnectedness of two cultures. Here is an irresistable new case study for those interested in the form and function of hybridity.--Jane Gaines, program in film and video, Duke University author's research on the way Southern themes and icons have slipped into everyday life across the Atlantic is impressive. There is no doubt that Circling Dixie will find a sophisticated audience both in the United States and in Europe.--Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family For Europeans looking across the Atlantic, American culture is often the site of desire, fascination, and envy. In Britain, the rich culture of the American South has made a particularly strong impact. Helen Taylor explores the ways in which contemporary Southern culture has been enthusiastically produced and reproduced in a British context. Taylor examines some of the South's most significant cultural exports in discussions that range across literature, music, film, television, theater, advertising, and tourism to focus on how and why Southern themes and icons have become so deeply embedded in British cultural life. The enduring legacy of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind can be seen today in the popularity of sequels, revisions, and reworkings of the novel. The conversation between cultures is further explored in British responses to Alex Hayley's Roots, the British theater's special affection for Tennessee Williams's plays, and the marketing of New Orleans as a preferred destination for European tourists. The transformation of Southern culture--itself a hybrid of European, African, and American--as it circulates back across the Atlantic suggests not only new views of the history, racial politics, music, and art of both Britain and the American South, but also an enhanced understanding of the dynamic flow of culture itself. Helen Taylor is a professor and head of the School of English at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Scarlett's Women adn coeditor of Dixie Debates.

"The First National Obnoxious People Survey"

From time to time our readers send us pleasant reminders that there's no reason for this publication to take itself at all seriously. For instance, we thought that the forum we've been offering in our "Letters to the Editors" might lend itself to thoughtful discussions of essays we've printed. And sometimes it does. But we also continue to receive a number of letters that seem to have lighter motives and include extra little tidbits of information. Like recipes. While we enjoy receiving recipes (and our cooking has improved), they really don't have much to do with anything Southern Cultures has published in the last, well, three years or so.

The civil war--with a small "c": The Battlefield of Southern Scholarship

Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South. By James C. Cobb. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1999. x + 251 pp. $40.00

1001 More Things Everyone Should Know about the South

As a fiction writer, I used to complain that sociology was the academic discipline most opposite, in some cases even most inimical, to literature. After all, the average sociologist seemed to conduct boring surveys that led to obvious conclusions from which he could generalize about huge numbers of human beings--all of them imbedded in, rendered anonymous by, some undefined society. That society so molded them that even choice was only one more constraint imposed from outside by a social institution. Determinism ruled. By contrast, we novelists only hinted our tentative conclusions about human nature after depicting singular human beings in particular circumstances. Their free choices spilled out all over the page. Deductive vs. inductive? In any case, my average sociologist, even if he had an interesting generalization to share, often obscured it in heavy prose, thick with jargon. This oversimplification occurred before that straw-man sociologist was replaced on my writer's black list by Professor Doctrinaire Literary Theorist, whose prose was even worse. And it also occurred before I had redefined sociology after meeting--and reading--John Shelton Reed, who is not average in anything. Reed is a writer himself, not merely a compiler of that type of self-evident data all individualists, especially southern individualists, can't wait to dispute. In one of his books, Reed pleads with fellow-sociologists to stop trying to sound scientific and instead summarize what they have learned in clear prose made accessible to the general reader. This same editorial approach is used at Southern Cultures, where the most erudite specialists are steadily encouraged to write in what Randall Jarrell once called plain American that even dogs and cats can read. Perhaps verbal skill was transmitted in the Reed genes. His sister is Lisa Alther, a Wellesley graduate who has written five novels and who, herself, has been pushing against rigid categories ever since in a fourth grade play she had to portray Miss Noun who was married by the preacher to Mr. Verb. This experience gave her a rebellious and immediate preference for stream-of-consciousness writing, just as her brother has steadily turned away from dry and pedantic prose to celebrating with clarity and wit the very characters who naturally interest us storytellers. Aiming at a general audience, Reed and Alther once teamed up on the lecture circuit to present the American South as seen across two desks--that of the professor and that of the professional novelist. It proved to be the same fascinating and amusing South, where the usual regional social types (see Reed's Southern Folk, Plain and Fancy) exceeded media stereotypes--sometimes by choosing to mock and play games with the easy assumptions of outsiders. After all, one reason for painting your roadside sign to read BOILED PEENUTS is so travelers will stop their fast cars to correct your spelling and end up buying some, though they can barely conceal their smirks over the local usage of poke for brown paper bag. Nobody enjoys extending his tongue far into his cheek more than Reed, and few have such a reach; but one difference has been that he laughs with his southern neighbors more than at them. Though he grew up in east Tennessee, as an undergraduate at MIT Reed first found himself called upon to define how the South was distinctive, then to defend it. There, and later while earning his doctorate at Columbia, he looked back on his home region in a mood more akin to that of the Agrarians than Quentin Compson, but wittier than either. Even his titles reject the academic style with its obligatory colon--Kicking Back, Whistling Dixie, Tears Spoiled My Aim. In thirteen books Reed has, for instance, complained that northern menus give him indigestion, that he really dislikes eating above the Rolaid line. One scholar noted that his sociology might be considered old-fashioned because it included social criticism. …

The Twenty Most Influential Southerners of the Twentieth Century

Back in 1998, with Y2K bearing down on us, Mike Burg, president of Edge Marketing in Charlotte, North Carolina, asked me to develop a list of the twenty most influential of the just about to end. He thought he might want to put together some sort of television package. Everybody else was making end-of-the-century lists; why not southerners? I agreed to do it and, to make a long story short, thirteen distinguished southerners helped me choose our list. The panel was composed of men and women who had written or thought about the South, chosen to be broadly representative of professional fields and subregions. Many of them will be familiar to readers of this magazine, and we provide short bios for each at the end of this South Polls. Not to keep you in suspense, here's the list: THE TWENTY MOST INFLUENTIAL SOUTHERNERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 1. Martin Luther King 2. William Faulkner 3. Elvis Presley 4. Billy Graham 5. Jimmy Carter 6. Louis Armstrong 7. Margaret Mitchell 8. Lyndon Johnson 9. George Wallace 10. Woodrow Wilson 11. Muhammad Ali 12. Hank Williams 13. Sam Walton 14. Bill Clinton 15. Tennessee Williams 16. Ted Turner 17. Huey Long 18. Booker T. Washington 19. Rosa Parks 20. Michael Jordan Surely every name on this list will be known to every Southern Cultures reader, and that's partly the point. We had to deal with a number of problems of definition, starting with the meaning of influence--obviously, it's not the same as greatness, or even goodness. Martin Luther King and George Wallace were both influential, for instance, but surely few admirers of one would argue that the other was a man. By all accounts, even Governor Wallace suspected toward the end of his life that his influence hadn't been a good one. Just so, Sam Walton was influential: Wal-Mart has certainly changed small-town American life. But for the better? I think the jury's still out on that one. It works the other way around, too. Someone can be saintly great in the sense that really matters--without being influential. In my opinion, James McBride Dabbs was great, as were a number of other white southerners who took an early and unpopular stand against racial injustice. Thank God for whatever influence their witness had, but for the most part they were voices crying in the wilderness, not candidates for the century's most influential. Obviously and unavoidably, influence--at least as we measured it--has something to do with fame. Ray Wilson Scott has been even more important for competitive bass fishing than Michael Jordan has been for basketball and endorsements, but Scott's famous only in a fairly limited circle: he didn't even come close to making the list. Similarly, presidents of the United States, even mediocre ones, are influential more or less by definition. (Notice that all the southern presidents --even that ambiguous southerner, Woodrow Wilson--make the list, probably ex officio, so to speak. So does Huey Long, a serious contender who influenced national politics by his presence and threat.) But Ella Baker, an unsung heroine of the Civil Rights movement, didn't make the list. Never heard of her? That's my point: she's unsung. Unknown saints will have to get their reward in heaven, as usual. While we're at it, who's a southerner? Louisville's Muhammad Ali made the list, but Joe Louis, born in Alabama, did not. (Louis moved to Detroit when he was twelve.) Colonel Harland Sanders didn't make the short list, but he finished strong: I don't think anyone held it against him that he came from Indiana. Thurgood Marshall was influential, no doubt about it, but the panel eventually concluded that someone born in Baltimore and educated in Pennsylvania and D.C. and who spent his working life in New York and Washington wasn't a southerner. Even the twentieth century turned out to be a problem. Our panel eventually decided that Mark Twain, who lived until 1910, was really a nineteenth-century figure, while Booker T. …

The Southern Cross

Jesus' first disciple, before becoming Saint, Andrew went to preach at Patras in 62 And angered the Roman governor by converting His brother and wife. Aegeatus had Andrew tortured And crucified on a Greek X at Andrew s request-- Where he hung upsidedown, still preaching, Until he died two days later, no mean feat For a man of 90 years. He didn't feel worthy of his Master's Roman cross, that one whose burning was to light The way for Koons, Kikes and Katholics into the bosom Of Southern culture.

Defining Chu: Image and Reality in Ancient China

Scholars agree that the southern culture of China, roughly identifiable with the state of during the period between 700 and 200 BC, is of great importance in the subsequent development Chinese culture. This book attempts a broad and in-depth analysis of this state, tracing the evolution of the from a vassal state of Zhou to its rise and fall as a great hegemonic kingdom in the Warring States period and its eventual resurgence in the early Han dynasty. A translation of the Chu Silk Manuscript, a document that has intrigued scholars since its discovery in Chansha, is appended.

Redefining Southern Culture: Mind & Identity in the Modern South (review)

Redefining Southern Culture: Mind & Identity in the Modern South (review)

The Dead Mule Rides Again

Among many interesting things in Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin' (1998) is the revelation that Bragg's Uncle Jimbo once won a twenty-dollar bet by eating a bologna sandwich while sitting on a dead (xviii).(1) I believe I understand -- at least in a literary sort of way -- how Uncle Jimbo must have felt. My affiliation with dead mules in southern literature started close to forty years ago, when I was in graduate school up north in Massachusetts, working in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature and coming vaguely to realize that the culture I was studying was no less distant from me, in terms of much that I felt instinctively or by prior cultural absorption, than the one in which I was currently paying rent. To counter these feelings of nervousness and disorientation (I don't think people used the word alienation as loosely then as they do now), I took the more or less obvious solution of reading about what I'd left behind me, for a while, in the South. Not in any systematic or disciplined way -- I never took a course in the subject -- but in whatever spare time I could find, I read the fiction of southern authors I'd always known about but had never really looked into much during the years I was growing up and going to college in North Carolina. Did I find comfort, warmth, solace, and the confidence of knowing that I was part of something very richly textured? Some of each, of course; but mostly what I found was dead mules, an image that recurred with noticeable frequency in the novels and short stories I was reading. After the fourth or fifth one I started keeping a list -- mainly just authors and dries, page numbers if I remembered to; sometimes a hand-transcription of the relevant passage, if it was short. I lost these materials several times, but was able to recall most of them when I started a new list. After I returned to North Carolina to teach courses in the English Renaissance, I kept up my collection, which over the years took the form of jottings on scraps of paper stuffed into a manila folder. Sometime in the late 1980s I mentioned all this to Southern Cultures editor John Shelton Reed in one of the conversations we used to have about North/South cultural contrasts, and he began to encourage me to write my observations into an essay. I thought he was pulling my leg, but as years went by, other people lent support. The results finally reached print as an essay titled Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature of the Twentieth Century, in The Southern Literary Journal, 29 (Fall 1996): 2-17. As it turned out, more people wanted to know about dead mules than I had imagined. Jane Stancil described the essay in a Raleigh newspaper, and then Peter Applebome did a story in the New York Times, and Harper's magazine printed an excerpt last November. And now John Reed has invited me to provide an augmented and updated version, which I dutifully offer herewith, through the gracious permission of Fred Hobson and Kimball King, editors of The Southern Literary Journal. I have added to my original text such examples of the subject as have turned up since the first version was written--some I missed before, others referred to me by friends, still others simply stumbled upon as I continued to read southern fiction. My commentary is also expanded, especially in the endnotes. I like to think that my study is more or less innocent of theory, but nobody believes me. I often get some version or other of three questions: Are these passages real? Is the essay serious? Is it a satire? The first is easy to answer: yes, the passages are real, and you can locate them (barring typos in my references) just where I say they are in the books I cite. The second question is a little more difficult and requires a more subjective response, one that suggests how a dead mule may be more or less serious according to where it's found. A good illustration of this principle is in a story told by the late Beaufort County, North Carolina, humorist Edmund H. …

Southern Scenes: Original Photographs

PHOTO ESSAY Southern Scenes Original Photographs taken by Dan Sears I 0 3 Former ap and ?pi photographer Dan Sears says that his "Southern Scenes" is "an on-going personal project to document vistas and sights that are disappearing from the South." For Sears, photography is preservation. So far he has "logged over 1 300 miles" in the course of his project, and he has found some of the most artfully crafted images we've ever published (like this picture above, taken near Bunn, North Carolina). Photography aficionados will appreciate that the "Scenes" were shot in Hasselblad medium format on Fujicolor 400 film and then scanned and converted into black and white images. The rest ofus can only appreciate the mixture ofthe magical and the ordinary that these photos capture, the consideration they provoke, and the sense ofwonder they leave with us. 29 NearSouthport, North Carolina, 2000. NearBunn, North Carolina, 2000. 30 southern cultures, Fall2000: Dan Sears NearBunn, North Carolina, 1999. Near Bunn, North Carolina, 1999. Southern Scenes 3 1 Near Clinton, North Carolina, 1999. 32 southern cultures, Fall2000 : Dan Sears Near Clinton, North Carolina, 1999. Southern Scenes 3 3 Near Bunn, North Carolina, 2000. Near Bath, North Carolina, 2000. 34 southern cultures, Fall2000 : Dan Sears NearBunn, North Carolina, 2000. NearBath, North Carolina, 2000. Southern Scenes 3 5 ...

"Peeping Toms on History": Barry Hannah's Never Die as Postmodern Western

In his thoughtful essay Home by Way of California: The Southerner as the Last European, Lewis P. Simpson explores what seem to him basic differences between the mind of the South and its western other. The latter, contends Simpson, has corollaries in the artistic vision of northeasterners--Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, and the father of the popular western, Owen Wister--who create fictions in which a hero transcends history amid the pristine, naturally democratic vistas of the American landscape. In contrast, the former extends a tragic European outlook that sees the individual as a creature trapped, the hapless victim of history. Simpson's paradigm has been very influential in southern studies, and one can indeed see how the tragic ethos he identifies informs to grand effect the body of southern writing produced during the fabled Renascence, a literature acutely concerned with the past in the present (to paraphrase Allen Tate's famous formulation) and the doomed yet heroic efforts to cope with or survive history, not escape it--reflected in Faulkner's famous proclamation in the Nobel speech that humanity will not merely endure, but prevail. Yet this South-versus-West theory tells only part of the story, for the West has, since the early nineteenth century, occupied a special place in the southern imagination. Historian Richard Slotkin notes in particular how southerners have mythologiz[ed] ... the Frontier ... as a new Garden of Eden; he locates this mythos in a Jeffersonian agrarianism in which the frontier ... promises complete felicity, the satisfaction of all demands and the reconciliation of all contradictions (69-70). No less a canonical southern text than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)--identified by both Tate and Louis D. Rubin as the first modern southern novel--bears out this representation, as Simpson himself tacitly admits. Huck's account shows that life is satisfying only when marked by a pastoral plenitude beyond the artificial and hypocritical constraints of southern (read eastern) culture, a realization that ultimately impels him to light out for the of the western frontier. Twain's story may lack the gunplay of the novels that were already beginning to gain popularity in the 1880s, but in its fusion of the southern pastoral and the unadulterated frontier, it is in many ways the prototypical western. Its influence continues as contemporary southern fictionists, including Charles Portis, Richard Ford, Ishmael Reed, and Cormac McCarthy, stake out territory west of the Mississippi. The popularity of McCarthy's The Border Trilogy confirms most decisively how alluring the West remains for southern writers and readers alike. Such recent authors, however, offer a more complicated version of the western than does Twain. Whereas the modern (or proto-modern) Huckleberry Finn helped establish the cultural authority of a mythologized West, its successors have done much to question that authority. In this respect, they might be called postmodern. The western's role as a totalizing construction that organizes history into a coherent, satisfying set of that essentialize American identity marks it as an example of what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls metanarrative.(1) For Lyotard and other noted theorists, postmodern art exhibits a thoroughgoing incredulity toward metanarratives and usually strives to undermine these overarching stories from within. Linda Hutcheon has shown that postmodern novels about the West, in particular, exhibit a contradictory attraction/repulsion to structure and patterns that uses and abuses the western as a genre, ultimately destabilizing the historical, political, and personal fantasies it tries to fulfill (133). One of the most well-known novels by a southerner to do this is McCarthy's prelude to The Border Trilogy, Blood Meridian (1985). This fascinating account of exploitation and violence parodies Huckleberry Finn and later westerns. …

A Consuming Fire The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (review)

enee to black pianists ofthe time, said, "They use die piano exacdy like a banjo." The tango, all the rage along with ragtime, led to a new "tango" banjo, based on the mandolin, which had no fifth string and was played by pick. This tenor banjo eclipsed the five-string banjo in popularity, as it was more suited to the fast chording demanded by die new music oftheJazz Age, and Gura and Bollman leave off their story as the five-string banjo's rise to popularity ends. In the Appalachians, diough, the five-string remained central to that population's social music, but it didn't attain national prominence again until the 1940s saw the introduction of bluegrass music. "It has been the banjo's long journey from the southern plantation to the Victorian parlor that has remained shrouded," Gura and Bollman conclude, "in part because ofthe scarcity ofsource materials through which such a history could be assembled . . ." The sheer volume and incredible condition of the authors' source material brings one back to this very fine book again and again, for in these images we can see into the nineteenth century, and with the informative text we are given not only the rich history of the banjo but also a remarkable study of the American marketplace. A Consuming Fire The Fall ofthe Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South By Eugene Genovese University of Georgia Press, 1999 169 pp. Cloth $24.95 Reviewed by Annette Laing, assistant professor of colonial and revolutionary American history at Georgia Southern University, whose recent work includes a book about the relationship between Anglican missionaries and popular religious culture in British America. Poor God. He must find it thoroughly tiresome to be constandy called upon to endorse all sorts ofpeculiar causes. Surely, few causes for which His blessing has ever been solicited (and assumed to be granted) were more peculiar than the "Peculiar Institution" itself, slavery in the antebellum South. After all of the Biblical justifications presented on its behalf, not to mention the supposed patronage of the Almighty, it is easy to imagine how devastating the South's defeat in the Civil 84 southern cultures, Fall2000 : Reviews War was for many of slavery's defenders. Yet not everyone was unprepared for this disaster. Southern Christian intellectuals had already sounded jeremiads in which they warned that the South was doomed unless it reformed slavery in accordance with Christian ideas. Eugene Genovese examines the antebellum Christian call to reform slavery— and the consequences of its failure—in A Consuming Fire, the published version of his Lamar Memorial Lectures given at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. Although the subtide promises that the book deals with "The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind ofthe White Christian South," its scope extends beyond this promise. It emerges as a broad assessment ofthe efforts ofsouthern intellectuals to reconcile first slavery, and dien postwar racial segregation, with Christianity. A Consuming Fire focuses on the southern theorists who argued that God had indeed entrusted white southerners with slavery, but that he also required them to render it humane. Genovese discusses the reformers' arguments and assesses whether slaveowners were plagued by guilt over slavery. His conclusion, implied in the subtide, is that slaveowners and reformists shared a single view, and that dierefore slaveowners agreed with die theorists: They felt no guilt about slavery perse or about the exploitation oflabor that it involved, since God had apparendy approved the arrangement. They were, however, troubled by its concomitant impact on families. The question ofslaveowners' views is an intriguing one, and itis commendable diat Genovese regards slaveowners as real people who were products of their time, rather than as Legree-esque devils incarnate. However, this little volume raises more questions than it answers for those who wish to understand some of the conflicted personalities behind the facade of the plantation legend. Perhaps this is a result of the inevitable constraints of a volume of this sort, and most especially die limitations of the lecture format. For whatever reason, most slaveowners remain shadowy figures in this book. The majority ofthe voices we hearin support ofreform are those ofthe clergy, for the intellectuals whom Genovese cites...

Resisting Unlawful Arrest in Mississippi: Resisting the Modern Trend

The national trend, during the past forty years, has been to do away with the common law right to resist an unlawful arrest. The right has been abrogated by judicial decree as well as legislative enactment. Elimination of the right is based on several factors, including the development of modern criminal procedure, the ability of criminal defendants to seek redress via other means, and the improvement of jail conditions. In the rush to eliminate a right perceived as against contemporary public policy, the courts have paid little attention to the original justification for the rule - that an illegal arrest is an affront to the dignity and sense of justice of the arrestee - and instead have focused on the alternatives to forcible resistance that have been developed, such as civil suits and the writ of habeas corpus. Mississippi is one of a dozen states that still permit a person to resist an unlawful arrest. Almost all of these states are located in the South. The question this geographical anomaly raises is why has the right to resist arrest survived in the South, and Mississippi in particular? This article suggests that a possible explanation may be the influence of uniquely Southern conceptions of honor and the right to use deadly force in self-defense. Historians have long acknowledged that Southern culture strongly supports the importance of personal honor and condones a subculture of violence. This article examines the development and history of the right to resist an unlawful arrest at common law and in the United States, scholarly criticism of the common law rule, and the current status of the rule in the United States, the Southern subculture of violence and how that relates to cases involving resisting arrest in Mississippi. All Mississippi cases involving claims of a right to resist unlawful arrest are examined. The language of the Mississippi cases provides support for the argument that the right to resist arrest has remained entrenched in Southern law, and helps to explain why Southern states generally and Mississippi in particular have chosen to retain a common law rule which has fallen into disrepute in other regions of the country.

Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture.

Grounded in Charles Joyner's unique blend of rigorous scholarship and genuine curiosity, these thoughtful and incisive essays by the eminent southern historian and folklorist explore the South's extraordinary amalgam of cultural traditions. By examining the mutual influence of history and folk culture, Shared Traditions reveals the essence of southern culture in the complex and dynamic interactions of descendants of Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans. The book covers a broad spectrum of southern folk groups, folklore expressions, and major themes of southern history, including antebellum society, slavery, the coming of the Civil War, economic modernization in the Appalachians and the Sea Islands, immigration, the civil rights movement, and the effects of cultural tourism. Joyner addresses the convergence of African and European elements in the Old South and explores how specific environmental and demographic features shaped the acculturation process. He discusses divergent practices in worship services, funeral and burial services, and other religious ceremonies. He examines links between speech patterns and cultural patterns, the influence of Irish folk culture in the American South, and the southern Jewish experience. He also investigates points of intersection between history and legend and relations between the new social history and folklore. Ranging from rites of power and resistance on the slave plantation to the creolization of language to the musical brew of blues, country, jazz, and rock, Shared Traditions reveals the distinctive culture born of a sharing by black and white southerners of their deep-rooted and diverse traditions.

Signs of the South: Original and Archival Photographs

Original and Archival Photographs What could former fashion photographer possibly have to offer Southern Cultures? A tour of past and present. Charlie Curtis says that it was deep love for preservation that led to this collection of archival photography of Dorothea Lange and Marion Post, along with his own original pictures of signs that he has encountered during his daily travels through Virginia and North Carolina countryside. He spent his youth on Virginia farm, which he says gave him a real soft spot for small towns off highways and dirt roads. For him these places and their signs have become friendly beacons, reminders of stories and culture hidden to speeding passersby: barn-shaped garage and Barker's Snack Shop in Semora; Mildred's Kitchen, Elk's Home, and Hope of Glory Apostolic Church in Eden; electric fence and rusted Coca-Cola signs in Caswell County; stained-glass window in Danville. Even Prepare to Meet God warning, which today still demands attention of even most lighthearted travelers, soon became welcome part of landscape. Charlie Curtis has uncovered invitations, advertisements, admonishment, revelation, and history in his own photos and those images frozen sixty years ago by Lange and Post. Storefronts, billboards, stained-glass windows, spare tires, barn doors, stoops, eating holes--all, he says, hold messages that are truly valuable record, that have something to show us, that are bridges both to past and future. These photos reveal some of mystery that modern world accelerates by without considering. Did 1939's North Carolinians choose to consult old signpost or new one beside it at crossroads outside Stem? Was plaque outside Caswell County Courthouse an attempt at reconciliation? Was it, as Charlie Curtis wonders, the admission within community of its difficult secrets? Or was it merely intended to declare an enduring KKK presence? And what did Klan make of W. M. Mallory and his southern version of Harlem barber shop? Charlie Curtis has slowed down car, pulled us off onto shoulder to think it all over. The Elks Home Midway Lodge, Semora, North Carolina, August 1999, photographed by Charlie Curtis. Harlem Barber Shop, Granville County, North Carolina, November 1939, photographed by Marion Post. Courtesy of Odum Photo Study, Southern Historical Collection, Library of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prepare to Meet God, Eden, North Carolina, July 1999, photographed by Charlie Curtis. …