Southern Heritage Research Articles

PRIDE OR PREJUDICE?

AbstractDebates about the meaning of Southern symbols such as the Confederate battle emblem are sweeping the nation. These debates typically revolve around the question of whether such symbols represent “heritage or hatred:” racially innocuous Southern pride or White prejudice against Blacks. In order to assess these competing claims, we first examine the historical reintroduction of the Confederate flag in the Deep South in the 1950s and 1960s; next, we analyze three survey datasets, including one nationally representative dataset and two probability samples of White Georgians and White South Carolinians, in order to build and assess a stronger theoretical account of the racial motivations underlying such symbols than currently exists. While our findings yield strong support for the hypothesis that prejudice against Blacks bolsters White support for Southern symbols, support for the Southern heritage hypothesis is decidedly mixed. Despite widespread denials that Southern symbols reflect racism, racial prejudice is strongly associated with support for such symbols.

The Bildungsroman After Individualism: Ellen Glasgow's Communitarian Alternative

This essay argues that Ellen Glasgow's 1925 novel Barren Ground is an attempt to adapt literary realism, perennially viewed as the handmaiden of liberal individualism, to an age in which individualism was being replaced by more corporate and associational paradigms. To do so, Glasgow modifies the bildungsroman, one of the most pervasive permutations of the realist novel, to narrate two revolutionary histories: the story of its heroine's development of a communitarian outlook and sense of herself and the story of the realist novel shedding its individualism-inflected past. The essay contends that Barren Ground's three parts—“Broomsedge,” “Pine,” and “Life-Everlasting”—correspond both to different stages in the heroine's development and to different phases in the history of the Anglo-American novel. Through examining Glasgow's novel in relation to her other writings, contemporary trends in literature and philosophy, and, more briefly, more recent debates in political philosophy, the essay demonstrates that Glasgow was much more cosmopolitan and historically minded than former treatments of her work (which stress her southern heritage) have led us to believe. Finally, the essay suggests that Barren Ground offers an approach to artistic innovation that differs significantly from the aggressive, iconoclastic experimentation characteristic of the generation of writers just coming into their own at the time of Barren Ground's publication, the modernists.

Taking Down the Flag Is Just a Start: Toward the Memory-Work of Racial Reconciliation in White Supremacist America

Taking Down the Flag Is Just a StartToward the Memory-Work of Racial Reconciliation in White Supremacist America Joshua F.J. Inwood (bio) and Derek Alderman (bio) On 17 June 2015 Dylann Roof, a self-avowed white supremacist, walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and sat down for a Bible study. After spending forty-five minutes attending the service, he pulled a Glock 41 .45 caliber handgun from his backpack and opened fire, killing nine people. Roof then fled and was ultimately arrested twenty-four hours later in North Carolina. Of the nine killed the oldest was 87 year old Susie Jackson, and the youngest was 26 year old Tywanza Sanders. After his arrest Roof claimed that he assassinated the members of Emanuel AME Church in the hopes of igniting a broader race war. Indeed, photographs later emerged and went viral of Roof engaged in racist exhibitions and hate speech in the past, in particular the flying of the controversial and insensitive Confederate battle flag. In the aftermath of the Charleston massacre, we saw renewed efforts to remove Confederate symbols from across the South’s public spaces, with South Carolina legislators finally voting to remove the flag from the state capitol grounds. In addition, the nation witnessed the grace of survivors in forgiving Roof. These were meaningful and symbolic steps that, thankfully, had the opposite effect than the one the white supremacist shooter had intended. While it is undeniably tragic that nine innocent people had to die before political leaders realized what many African Americans have known and lived with for generations, it is also indicative of a nation that whitewashes the connections between the material realities of white supremacy and its grounding in historical memory. The Confederate flag is a highly charged reminder of legacies of racism that have long been employed by racists to intimidate the black community and to oppose those struggling for racial equality. The banner of the secessionist, pro-slavery southern government had largely faded from memory and sight in the years after the Civil War, but it reappeared not coincidentally after World War II as a symbol of [End Page 9] conservative white resistance to what was then the nascent Civil Rights Movement. African Americans who famously protested segregated bussing in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 have vivid memories of being pelted with balloons filled with urine, which were thrown from cars and trucks decorated with Confederate flags. In 1959, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, school officials in Fairfax, Virginia named and opened a new high school after Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart (Shapiro 2015). Many communities carried out similar not-so-subtle strategies of defending white supremacy under the guise of southern heritage and pride. The landscape has retained major traces of these racist symbols and, as a result of the Charleston Massacre, these symbols are being challenged well beyond the removal of the Confederate flag. As activists and others from across the United States recognize, challenging the legitimacy of publicly displaying Confederate flags and other symbols that legitimize the defense of slavery and white supremacy is certainly the right thing to do. Yet these calls should not be mistaken for a solution to structural inequality. In particular, while state legislators from across the South should be applauded for taking down Confederate symbols, that is not the same thing as addressing the deeply entrenched social and spatial conditions that allow white supremacy to permeate not just the Charleston AME church but wider swaths of American life. This contradictory reality—addressing the symbols of a racist heritage without challenging the foundational histories and geographies of racism—raises questions about the relationship between violence, race and memory (Tyner et al. 2014). These questions are seldom discussed in our post-Charleston Nine social world. Recently, Karen Till has argued that progressive change requires a direct engagement with the trauma of “memory work” in which “individuals and groups may confront and take responsibility for the failures of the democratic state and its violences” (Till 2012, pg. 7). In particular, she highlights the place-based practices of local citizens, activists, educators, artists, and even performers in carrying out the physical, political, and...

League of the South's Internet Rhetoric: Neo-Confederate Community-Building Online

A nationwide backlash against the Confederate flag and other Confederatesymbols occurred after the deadly June 17, 2015, church shootings inCharleston, South Carolina, when images of the alleged gunman displayinga Confederate flag surfaced. This backlash sparked a reactionary movementamong pro-Confederate supporters who viewed the attacks on Confederatesymbols as an affront to their Southern heritage. Some neo-Confederategroups exploited the backlash, and the pro-Confederate sympathy it generated,as an opportunity to build their communities. This essay examineshow the neo-Confederate group League of the South (LOS) used its websiteto attract members to its community in the week before the Confederateflag’s removal from South Carolina’s state capitol on July 10, 2015. Analysisreveals LOS may have aided its community-building efforts by attemptingto foster a sense of shared identity within the pro-Confederatecommunity and employing fear-raising rhetoric relating to the backlashagainst Confederate symbols. The relevance of examining U.S.-based hategroups’ Internet rhetoric has substantially increased in recent years as theUnited States has witnessed a series of deadly mass shootings perpetratedby various extremists, some of whom were apparently motivated by rhetoricthey accessed on U.S.-based extremist sites.

Tales From the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles

Reviewed by: Tales From the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles Leigh Fought TALES FROM THE HAUNTED SOUTH: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era. By Tiya Miles. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2015. By its nature, dark tourism embraces the ugly parts of history and human relations shunned by tours that focus on elegant architecture and heroic city fathers. As such, haunted history tours have become one of the few venues through which public historians have engaged the history of slavery. In Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era, the product of Pennsylvania State University’s Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era, Tiya Miles questions the use of such methods as didactic tools. With a good eye for poetic detail and a thoughtful, charming voice situated somewhere near Fox Mulder on the spectrum between believer and skeptic, Miles acts as her reader’s tour guide through her own inquiries and observations. She begins by sketching out an overview of the popularity of haunted history shows and tourism, and briefly takes her readers on forays into the business of ghost hunting, ghost stories, and of dark tourism as an industry and field of study. The bulk of her analysis focuses on the Sorrel-Weed House in Savannah, Madame LaLaurie’s house in New Orleans, and the Myrtles Plantation near St. Francisville, Louisiana. Naturally, all three insisted upon the title of most haunted in America and appear regularly on ghost-hunter television programs. Miles notes several troubling features of the stories told at these sites. First, each story absolves white, American, male slaveholders from blame for historical wrongdoings, casting the villains as outsiders or the victim as deserving of her fate. They also gloss over the exploitation of black women by describing serial rape as “an affair,” “concubinage,” “infidelity,” and an assortment of other euphemisms that fail to engage the limited choices and realities faced by enslaved women. In each, too, African American spiritual practices are represented differently than evangelical Christianity, Catholicism, or other serious, syncretic belief system holding great power for believers, but as mysterious drums, disturbing rituals, and gris-gris tchotckes. Furthermore, the black communities surrounding these sites do not control the story. As Miles observes of the storytellers and their audiences, these are largely stories told by white people for white people, allowing tourists to brush up against a disturbing past without becoming honestly disturbed. Then, of course, there is [End Page 170] the problem of evidence for the historical events behind these stories and the coincidence of the ghost stories appearing on record just as dark tourism became a market. Miles is less concerned with the lack of evidence behind the stories and more worried about the ways that the owners of these sites squander opportunities to use the “holistic experience” of visiting a house and the frisson of a ghost story to understand a life lived under slavery. Just as southern heritage tours do little to teach about the history of enslaved people, so do these ghost tours flatten their lives into a grand guignol. The possibility of seeing a ghost overshadows sympathy for the pain of a life and death so tragic that, according to lore, would cause a spirit to haunt a site. More upsetting, as Miles points out, the commercial success of tours that trade in stories about violence inflicted upon slaves parallels the business that traded in slaves. Still, she sees potential for these types of tours to engage not only the history but also questions about truth and fact. The engaging and subversive tour given by “Tommy,” the popular, openly gay, African American descendant of the Myrtles’ slaves, Miles believes, suggests that “tourists were apparently willing, even eager, to hear a spirited perspective from an unlikely source even though it challenged conventional expectations” (114). At 132 pages of text, Tales of the Haunted South is a short but deep and complicated volume, combining the history of slavery, the antebellum south, and tourism, as well as public history, folklore, sociology, and the dubious...

Truth is marching on: the Lasershow Spectacular at the Stone Mountain Park Confederate Memorial and the changing narratives of history

The overarching goal of this paper is to examine the changing historical narratives of the Stone Mountain Park Confederate Memorial as seen through the Lasershow Spectacular, and how this performance speaks to broader issues of race, identity, geography, and memory. The implications of this discourse are especially significant for the identity construction of marginalized collectives. I begin with a brief theoretical explanation of history and cultural memory as socially constructed, including the significance of who gets to create it, its relationship with identity, and the connection between history and cultural memory and popular/consumer culture. Next, I discuss the current state of heritage tourism and how it relates to issues of racial (in)justice. Finally, I turn to Stone Mountain and the Lasershow Spectacular as a case study to examine the social construction of history and cultural memory at a tourist attraction, specifically discussing how the African-American experience is addressed (or not addressed) in Southern heritage tourism. This paper seeks to answer the call in a recent special issue of Tourism Geographies for more work that addresses African-American tourism and the inclusion/exclusion of African-Americans from tourist sites (Alderman, 2013).

Down South in/of Dixie: Rethinking the Tourist South

Down South in/of Dixie: Rethinking the Tourist South J. Mark Souther (bio) Karen L. Cox, ed. Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012. ix + 315 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $74.95 (cloth); $26.95 (paper). Harvey H. Jackson III. The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera: An Insider’s History of the Florida–Alabama Coast. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. 334pp. Illustrations, maps, essay on sources, and index. $28.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Henry Knight. Tropic of Hopes: California, Florida, and the Selling of American Paradise, 1869–1929. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. xii + 266 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $74.95. Catherine Cocks. Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. ix + 255 pp. Illustrations, plates, notes, and index. $59.95. In the last decade, tourism has matured as a historical subfield. It has expanded geographically, temporally, and thematically and has even marked perhaps its first major historiographical watershed—a seeming sign of maturity—as historians in the last fifteen years have either extended or challenged Hal Rothman’s implication of tourism as an erosive force in Devil’s Bargains (1998). Four recent books consider tourism in various parts of the South as it relates to the region, the nation, and the Americas more broadly. The first two books refine our understanding of how tourism reworked Southern communities and Southern heritage, while the second two recover conceptions held by U.S. citizens more than a century ago to show how these ideas enabled promoters to recast tropical or semitropical places as ideal leisure destinations without abandoning the comfort, safety, and virtue of domestic society. Each of the books in different ways also examines the complex interplay of race, class, and geography. [End Page 116] Destination Dixie, an anthology edited by Karen L. Cox, interprets struggles over meanings of the past at thirteen Southern destinations ranging from individual heritage sites to cities. One might question the need for another collection of essays about Southern tourism and depictions of history at Southern destinations. After all, no fewer than a half dozen such works have appeared since W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Where These Memories Grow (2000). Yet Cox’s essayists rethink the tourist South by showing not only stereotypes purveyed by boosters and consumed by willing tourists but also the varying extents to which social change, evolving historical scholarship, and changing consumer demands supplanted older narratives and imagery with newer ones. In the spirit of James Loewen’s Lies Across America (1999), but with only minimal topical overlap and greater contextualization that comes with examining fewer sites, these essays shed light on a number of important tourist destinations that previously received little if any scholarly attention. Some contributors make huge temporal jumps that leave unanswered questions, but overall, Destination Dixie ably explores the challenges of injecting public history informed by modern scholarship into heritage sites where gatekeepers and visitors do not always embrace it. The anthology includes four sections (“People & Places,” “Race & Slavery,” “War & Remembrance,” and “Landscape & Memory”), but these categories are hardly mutually exclusive. In the first section, essays on the homes and hometowns of four iconic figures explain and critique how their respective communities regarded their legacy. Locals and visitors in Hannibal, Missouri, were slow to abandon the idea of the town as living proxy for Mark Twain’s fictional St. Petersburg. Conversely, Olympian Jesse Owens’ Alabama hometown never fully embraced its most famous son. In between, the Margaret Mitchell House and the Elvis Presley Museum failed to reconcile the presentation of race and class, leaving the former unable to account for how Mitchell could have written a racist novel and demonstrated progressive racial thinking, and the latter too blinded by “The King’s” success to grapple with the impoverished community that produced him. The second section reveals a similar difficulty in contextualizing the past at other Southern destinations. Somerset Place State Historic Site bet its future on a moonlight-and-magnolias version of North Carolina’s antebellum history, only incorporating black history in response to sagging visitation. While Charleston addressed African American history through accretions in its tour...

The Roof of a Southern Home: A Reimagined and Usable South in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun

WILLIAM MURRAY University of Alabama The Roof of a Southern Home: A Reimagined and Usable South in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun WHILE MUCH OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE DEPICTS THE SOUTH AS A source of terror or trepidation,1 Lorraine Hansberry, in A Raisin in the Sun (1959), gives readers a relatively positive regional perspective. She uses the Younger family’s Southern history (mainly accessed through Lena Younger or “Mama”) to provide her characters with a sense of grounded identity and pride that enables the family to move beyond the limitations of their current environment and into a more sustainable space.2 Both the small apartment in Chicago’s Southside and the mental environment of a Northern/national white culture work to limit and restrict the family’s ability to grow and develop, but through the process of adopting their mother’s attitude toward their shared Southern past, Mama’s children gain the confidence needed to face challenges obstructing their pursuit of a sustainable future. The concept of whites adopting an identity rooted in the Southern past is well established, but too often scholars seem to ignore the ways that African Americans have claimed and embraced forms of Southern identity. Despite the history of enslavement, lynching, and Jim Crow, African Americans have a history in the South that extends well beyond abuse and subjection, and Hansberry, in her canonical play, works to reclaim that history for the Younger family and, by extension, her audience. Understanding the way Hansberry constructs Southern history as a usable past in which to root the family’s identity is not only useful for those interested in Southern and African American literature, but also helps readers more fully 1 For an excellent study of this mode of representation, see Trudier Harris’s The Scary Mason-Dixon Line (2009). 2 I mean space here both in the sense of a physical space in which the family members can spread out and maintain individuality as well as a mental environment in which they can ground their identity in a history that gives them pride and a sense of belonging in the United States. 278 William Murray comprehend the character of Mama, who has recently been categorized as narrow-minded or tyrannical.3 Reading Hansberry’s play as promoting a connection to a “Southern” history/heritage could understandably elicit some reservations, in that the very conception of the South as a discernable region is one that is fraught with complications and contentions. As recent work in Southern studies has fruitfully shown, the characterization of the region as distinct largely emanates from a long history of problematic myths and fantasies. Scholars, including Leigh Anne Duck, Michael Kreyling, and Jon Smith, have illustrated how such mythic constructions of the South lead to problematic conceptions of the region as exceptionally noble or degraded. Hansberry’s play, however, offers a version of Southern identity that steers away from reinforcing the existing and problematic understandings of the region that these scholars have identified and argued against. What this means for Southern studies is that the conception of the South, as a space of white romance or white degeneracy, must in some ways fundamentally change in order to incorporate African American voices. The inclusion of black voices as historically Southern should not be mistaken for an endorsement of the deeply problematic notion of “Southern heritage,” as it is commonly held, nor as a romanticization of the Jim Crow South such as Adolph Reed defines, but rather should be understood as work to understand the deeply conflicted sense of identity rooted in a place that has historically marginalized black identity, yet is an ancestral home. Houston A. Baker, Jr., explains this connection to the region in Turning South Again as “an indelible and shaping ambivalence,” and he goes on to point out that being Southern and black works as a complicated “badge of honor in regard to tight places of youth, tight places that were my testing ground, that are my legacy” (17-18). James Cobb, in his chapter “Blackness and Southerness,” further illustrates the multifaceted relationship many AfricanAmericanshavewiththeSouth,bothhistoricallyandcurrently,4 and he ultimately argues against the fallacy “that all southern blacks were...

African-American Land Loss and Sustainable Forestry in the Southeast: An Analysis of the Issues, Opportunities, and Gaps

African-Americans' connection to the land is rapidly disappearing, and with it goes the cultural, political, and socio-economic capital that has helped this population, especially in southern states. There has been a severe decline in black landownership since 1910, resulting in rural counties with predominantly black populations becoming pockets of enduring poverty. Judicious investments in efforts to solve black land loss may lead to solutions to a larger problem: engagement of non-industrial private forestland owners in sustainable land management. Strengthening black forest-based communities as places to invest and live can build on this rich Southern heritage.

Still Back of the Big House: Slave Cabins and Slavery in Southern Heritage Tourism

A massive tourist infrastructure on southern heritage extends across the US South and a significant component of it focuses on nineteenth-century slavery. Southern heritage tourism reveals irrepressible dimensions of racialization, inextricably mediated by gender and class, and highlights the primary influence of the state. Many tourist sites are housed in former slave plantations and some contain the remains, restorations, reconstructions or replicas of antebellum slave cabins and slave quarters. This article describes and evaluates evidence collected from site observations carried out between 1995 and 2011, on the nature, role and functioning of slave cabins incorporated into these sites. It identifies three strategies for presenting slave cabins as part of heritage tourism—relative incorporation, marginalization and symbolic annihilation—each of which relegates slave cabins to the shadows of the big house. These representations reflect divergent heritage goals and continuing unequal access to resources on the part of different social groups.

Commemorative Surrogation and the American South's Changing Heritage Landscape

The past two decades have witnessed momentous changes on the American South's heritage landscape. First, and most dramatically, ascendant civil rights museums have established themselves as bona fide heritage attractions. Second, and more subtly, a nascent movement on the part of plantation house museums is afoot to engage with the lives and labour of enslaved African Americans. The two trends are interrelated and the result is a regional heritage landscape that is more attuned to the dynamics of racial oppression than at any time in the past. Geographers and other tourism researchers have begun to document and analyse these changes, seeking to better understand the motives and implications that are reworking the region's heritage scene. The task remains, however, to develop a more nuanced understanding of audience reactions to the evolving content of southern heritage tourism. Drawn from two extent surveys of visitors to civil rights museums and a plantation museum, this article uses the concept of commemorative surrogation to interpret audience evaluations in order to better understand visitors’ assessment of the changing landscape of southern heritage tourism. Results of the analysis suggest that whereas concerns over deficient surrogation are held by visitors at both civil rights and plantation museums, charges of excessive surrogation are limited to civil rights museums. The implication for the cultural landscape is a potentially revived, searching assessment of the region's past.

Dixie A. Jones, AHIP Medical Library Association President, 2013–2014

As Dixie Jones's name immediately reveals, she is from the South. Her interests, her values, her strengths, and her commitment to family have all been shaped by her rural Southern heritage.

“Under These Classic Shades Together”:

cross American colleges and universities during the late antebellum period, young men associated outside the classroom in literary, social, and fraternal clubs, all-male spaces highly conducive to the formation of strong friendships. Strong male relationships developed in which such terms as “intimacy,” “fraternal love,” and the “after life” were fundamental tenets of a shared experience. Unlike the collective world found in the public sphere of adult men, the antebellum college setting differed precisely because the young men quite frequently lived and dined together in dormitories, boarding and rooming houses, and fraternities, often secretly organized, in the towns and cities in which their colleges were located. Their lives were marked by dynamic uncertainty: not yet fully independent adults, but no longer completely dependent for support on their families. Since at least the 1970s, historians have debated the possibilities of same-sex intimacy among women, the terms of which have often centered on their timing and their prevalence in early American society. Only recently, however, have men as gendered subjects A

The Lost Cause and the Meaning of History

In Virginia, where I live and work, bits of the past pierce the present in ways both startling and routine. Civil War history and Confederate flags do not just appear in museums, archives, and at the state's many Civil War historic sites. They also show up on city sidewalks and in town parks; on beach towels, car bumpers, and the mud flaps of trucks; in dorm windows; and in the statements of elected officials. The Lost Cause—what neo-Confederates today call southern heritage—surrounds us. Often, these signs of the past in the present surprise me, though I have lived in Virginia for fifteen years. On a spring trip to Richmond, I saw two white men and an African American woman waving a large Confederate flag on the sidewalk in front of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (vmfa). It was not clear what exactly these “flaggers,” as some supporters...

Talking with the Turners: Conversations with Southern Folk Potters (review)

Reviewed by: Talking with the Turners: Conversations with Southern Folk Potters Trevor J. Blank Talking with the Turners: Conversations with Southern Folk Potters. By Charles R. Mack. Fwd. by William R. Ferris. Intro. by Lynn Robertson. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. xxxiii + 235, list of illustrations, foreword, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, epilogue, appendix, bibliography, index, audio CD, track list.) Over the past several decades, scholars interested in Southern folk pottery have been treated to a wide variety of excellent publications detailing the uses of the region's abundant clay. Folklorists such as Charles "Terry" Zug, John Burrison, and, most recently, Joey Brackner have contributed valuable texts on the folk pottery traditions of North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, respectively. However, it appears to be increasingly difficult for scholars to find topics within folk pottery that have not already been thoroughly scrutinized and dissected by their colleagues in some way. Consequently, readers may approach Charles R. Mack's Talking with the Turners: Conversations with Southern Folk Potters with skepticism. Nevertheless, as the title suggests, Mack lets his informants do most of the talking, which adds considerably to the book's value for folklorists. Mack, an art historian, has created an interesting and worthy study based on his fieldwork on southern folk pottery. His tone and writing style is inviting and personable, more akin to the register of a folklorist than that of an art historian. Readers come to know the potters as Mack encountered them, accompanied by photographs of both their art and their region's landscape. Mack provides a multitude of excellent color and black-and-white images that display the potters' art. While Mack's subjects are interesting and his content is well organized, the amount of time between his initial fieldwork, which took place predominantly in 1981, and the date of the book's publication is considerable. Mack used this time to reflect on his notes, photographs, and interviews, and the years have helped him to piece together the significance of his data. [End Page 359] This remains problematic, though, as Mack readily admits when he laments that he has accumulated numerous follow-up questions that he has never had a chance to ask. Furthermore, Mack includes a chapter titled "What the Future Holds"; the interviews discussed in this chapter also come from his 1981 fieldwork, which can hardly be seen as a true indication of what folk potters currently believe will become of their craft. In a brief epilogue at the book's end that builds on the potters' predictions, Mack attempts to hastily bridge the lapse of time since his initial fieldwork by providing a quick overview of how folk pottery traditions have unfolded over the last quarter century. The gap between Mack's fieldwork and date of publication may inhibit the book's worthiness as a classroom text; despite this, Talking with the Turners should be of great value to scholars researching folk pottery traditions and southern heritage, and the text effectively documents regional folk pottery traditions in 1981. On the whole, Mack is masterful in his approach to reporting the potters' folklife, reaching beyond their craft and into their values and traditions. Mack garners information on the families' origins and ties, their thoughts and experiences on being trained in pottery making, and the business and marketing aspects of creating pottery for profit. Additionally, Mack collects potters' stories of their turning and burning methods, glazing techniques, the importance and design of their kilns, and tales from their experiences as potters. Familiar pottery families such as the Hewells and Meaders make appearances several times, and Mack is meticulous in providing brief biographies for nearly all of the informants discussed in the book. Of particular interest to folklorists is the accompanying CD, which provides readers with the ability to hear with great clarity the voices of the artists themselves. At times, Mack provides a straight transcript of his interviews with the folk potters, and the dynamism of the potters' voices helps to enliven the written transcripts. The book's audio component, coupled with the text, makes this work an important addition to the libraries of folklorists who study material culture. Talking with the Turners is an...

Discourses of Desire: Uncovering Discursive Spaces of Race and Gender in Modern Southern Fiction

Discourses of Desire: Uncovering Discursive Spaces of Race and Gender in Modern Southern Fiction Chanté M. Baker (bio) Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy. By Gary M. Ciuba. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2007. x + 287 pp. $47.50 cloth. Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women’s Writing, 1920 –1945. By Nghana tamu Lewis. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2007. xiv + 208 pp. $37.95 cloth. These two recent studies make important contributions to our understanding of noted twentieth-century southern authors and their interrogations of southern culture. While the authors’ scholarly concerns are as varied as the works they investigate, Lewis’s and Ciuba’s projects are linked in that both studies illuminate racial and gendered subtexts underlying the works of selected white southern writers. Entitled to the Pedestal examines five “white women of aristocratic southern heritage”: Julia Peterkin, Gwen Bristow, Caroline Gordon, Willa Cather, and Lillian Smith. Nghana Lewis insists that a close reading of the authors’ novels, essays, and personal writings reveals their clear engagement with and endorsement of two myths derived from the gendered and racial politics of “Lost Cause” rhetoric: the myth of white [End Page 156] southern womanhood and plantation mythology. Rightly challenging conventional narratives of both myths as “white-male-constructed and -governed,” Lewis says white southern women’s participation in maintaining a staunch Confederate consciousness before, during, and after the Civil War is a “mythic authority” inherited by the women novelists featured. Lewis insists that Peterkin’s, Bristow’s, Gordon’s, and Cather’s engagements with myths surrounding southern white womanhood and plantation culture are best understood when examined against the backdrop of modernity. Like their white male counterparts who witnessed and contested national changes in the United States between 1920 and 1945, the writers featured in Lewis’s enlightening study struggle with a “fear of change” and embrace myths endemic to the “Old South” to counter an emerging sociopolitical thrust to further unsettle southern culture and to unseat southern women from their mythic pedestals. Lewis convincingly argues that these women writers challenged the myths as constructs of “idealism and ideology” exclusively, and she insists the novelists espoused those same myths in order to assert varied claims to “authorship and entitlement” at the expense of African Americans and poor whites. She contends that Peterkin’s “patronizing” depictions of African Americans and Bristow’s investment in “mythic notions of womanhood, place, and race,” for example, demonstrate the writers’ implicit engagement with ideas derived from white supremacist ideology. Such ideology also shapes Gordon’s southern white female characters, and it influences the construction of “black racial and poor white class proscriptions” in her work. In her comparative reading of Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl and Smith’s Strange Fruit, Lewis cogently notes how Smith’s particular belief in “aristocratic white southern women’s public activism” afforded such women the opportunity to enjoy the spoils of mythic white womanhood while at the same time evaluating the very racial structures that enable its existence. Even on the silver screen, as cleverly suggested by the title of Lewis’s final chapter, “old sites of [southern mythic] authority” continue to have cultural currency in movies such as Bringing Down the House (2003). She skillfully demonstrates that a desire to “lay claim to the mythic pedestal upon which southern women have been positioned” and to “indemnify plantation culture” was as prevalent yesterday as it is today. Gary Ciuba joins Lewis in uncovering hidden racial and gendered subtexts in his provocative study Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction. Heavily influenced by the theoretical positions of [End Page 157] René Girard, Ciuba investigates how the confluence of desire, violence, and divinity results in the “mimetic desire” that he sees appearing explicitly in southern literature. Resulting from this dialectic exchange are scapegoating or “surrogate victimage mechanisms,” which Ciuba reasons are the progeny of “a culture of violence” interacting with “the violence of culture.” He claims the works of Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy illuminate such mechanisms by imagining how desire, violence, and the...

The Southern Ties of Helen Keller

THOUGH HELEN KELLER LEFT HER PARENTS' HOME IN TUSCUMBIA, Alabama, at the young age of eight, the culture, people, and sensory adventures of her native state were essential to her outlook throughout her life. The deaf-blind activist, author, and world traveler, born in 1880, considered Ivy Green, her family's Tuscumbia home, as her own. Beginning in her lifetime and continuing today, Tuscumbia and Alabama have similarly regarded her as their own--even featuring her on the 2003 state quarter. Keller was also a child of the broader South. Though after her initial departure she always lived outside the region, her southern childhood and family ties formed and constituted vital elements of her public and private identity. She claimed this identity fondly but frequently labeled as shameful the dominant southern racial ideologies and practices. Paradoxically, it was perhaps Keller's disability that provided the opportunities that most frequently caused her to question southern gender and racial traditions. Her disability took her physically away from the South, as she and her family turned to northern educational institutions with historical ties to abolitionism. Her disability and her politics as an adult separated her from her family ideologically and geographically. Once she became world famous and increasingly active politically, those commenting upon or questioning her political ideas used her southern identity to either praise or deride her and her principles. As she traveled more, claiming global citizenship and analyzing national and world politics, she naturally did so from a base of knowledge and culture built on her southern background. Today, however, Keller is embraced as a national icon representing the triumphs of the disabled. Her image is now divorced from her southern identity. She is viewed as an American, devoid of regional affiliations or associations. In contrast, this essay positions Keller as a southerner of a Confederate family whose background and beliefs helped shape her worldview and her life as a white, southern woman with a disability. (1) Keller and her family embraced an esteemed southern heritage, which they perhaps regarded as being more illustrious than it really had been. When Keller wrote her autobiography, The Story of My Life, in 1903, she described her lineage according to both geography and the Civil War. In this narrative the men served and the women sired. Helen's father, Arthur H. Keller, served as a captain and her maternal grandfather as a brigadier general for the Confederacy. Her paternal grandmother, she noted, was second cousin to Robert E. Lee. Captain Keller edited the Tuscumbia North Alabamian for many years and served in the mid-1880s as U.S. marshal for the northern district of Alabama. Through him, the young Helen claimed Alexander Spotswood, a lieutenant governor (and de facto governor) in early-eighteenth-century Virginia, as her great-great-grandfather. (2) Captain Arthur Keller considered his family to be part of the deserving upper-class white elite, though they likely had less than he desired. Like many other southern landholding and formerly slaveholding whites, they had lost much of their wealth between 1860 and 1880. At the time of Helen Keller's birth, her family lived on the homestead her grandfather had built and named Ivy Green decades earlier due to the beautiful English ivy covering trees and fences. The Kellers were, however, no longer the wealthy family they once were. Moreover, the daily physical labor demanded to sustain the household, even with the aid of the formerly enslaved and their descendants, had surprised and exhausted Helen's young mother, Kate, after she became the second wife of the much older man whom all called Captain Keller. (3) The young toddler Helen, Kate's first child, became blind and deaf due to an illness at the age of nineteen months. From Ivy Green, Arthur and Kate Keller sought assistance with the child whom they loved but, as she grew older, felt increasingly incapable of parenting. …

Making a New South: Race, Leadership, and Community after the Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: Making a New South: Race, Leadership, and Community after the Civil War Brent Campney Making a New South: Race, Leadership, and Community after the Civil War. Edited by Paul A. Cimbala and Barton C. Shaw. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2007. In Making a New South, editors Paul A. Cimbala and Barton C. Shaw assemble an eclectic collection of essays in political, social, cultural, and labor history, all unified by the theme of race. In their individual essays, the authors address the public efforts of southern leaders to forge various, often contradictory, New Souths in rural and urban areas from Virginia to Texas in the century between the collapse of Reconstruction and the 1970s. "Despite the great variations in the particularities of their times, places and intentions," note the writers of the introduction, each of the leaders examined "labored to construct a new South in a cultural context in which racial distinctions pervaded virtually every other issue in public life" (6-7). The definition of "leadership" is sufficiently flexible to include journalists, educators, preachers, reformers, and politicians of all ideological stripes, black and white, male and female, who, variously, strove to maintain prevailing hierarchies, to plot courses of gradual change, or to establish a truly "New" South where African Americans and workers of all races could enjoy the rights previously denied them. Leadership is also grounded in specific communities, enabling the authors to tease out the combination of local and national conditions which buffeted their subjects in their quests to remake the South. In an essay on white leadership in Columbus, Georgia, during the 1870s and 1880s, for example, Faye L. Jensen illustrates how broader shifts in the economy and in transportation conspired with the stodgy conservatism and disunity of the local elite to preclude the kind of urban growth which swelled competitors such as Atlanta and Birmingham. Despite its strengths as a volume and the individual strength of many of the essays, Making a New South suffers from its uncompromising insistence upon southern distinctiveness. "For better or for worse," argues the introduction, the subjects of this book "knew that they were different; they knew they were southerners" (10). This is not, of course, an unusual or controversial claim but it leads inevitably to the rejoinder, "different from what?' This book's aggressively inward focus at times precludes what might be fruitful comparisons of the South with the North and West, comparisons which might challenge notions of southern distinctiveness and, at the least, illuminate its commonalities with the rest of the country. In her essay on housing segregation in Louisville in the 1950s, for example, Catherine Fosl insists that the city—bordering a northern state—"clung to a southern heritage" even though "Jim Crow was legislated in only a piecemeal fashion," making it "both southern and not southern." Rather than looking to housing controversies in other "not southern" cities, such as Chicago or Detroit in the same years, she keeps her narrative squarely focused on "southern intransigent resistance to racial change" (150). Such an approach reinforces discredited but pervasive assumptions that anti-black racism has been a uniquely southern problem. It asserts distinctiveness without actually testing it. Simultaneously—and unfortunately—it sanitizes the history of the rest of the country as well. [End Page 89] Brent Campney Emory University Copyright © 2008 Mid-America American Studies Association

The Confederate Flag: Southern Heritage or Racial Bias?

Drawing on a unique data set that matches legislative votes on the Confederate flag to electoral support for an law, I find evidence that legislators with anti-miscegenation constituents are the flag's most likely supporters. To the extent that opposing the right to marry across races reveals a preference for discrimination, support for the flag appears to have lacked motivation from an unbiased Southern heritage.

Letters to the Editor

To the Editor: I have just received your October 2006 edition and find it lacking in balance as usual. Your book review section always contains slams at the South and southern history. Attention is especially called to the review of The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest. First of all the very title of the book is in a way scurrilous enough, but then your reviewer goes far beyond in suggesting there is a great debate as to whether any celebration of the Confederacy is appropriate. Let me tell you, we in the Confederate community will decide what is appropriate regarding our history and heritage. General Forrest was one of the most significant figures and yes heroes of the War for Southern Independence. No denigration of the man will ever diminish his status in history. By the way, the claptrap about a massacre at Fort Pillow is utter nonsense . All of Lincoln’s war could be so categorized, but it is a false charge against Forrest to say that he conducted a massacre when in fact he took numerous black prisoners at the fort. It seems to me that The Alabama Review should say good things about our state and the South. LEONARD WILSON Commander, Alabama Division Sons of Confederate Veterans To the Editor: I appreciate The Alabama Review giving me the opportunity to respond to Mr. Wilson’s letter. Let me start off by saying that I have no control over the title of the books I am asked to review. One would have to contact the authors for their reasoning in the naming the volume. However, The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest is an apt title since the book is a history not of Forrest himself but of the legends, myths, and popular images of the man over the years. Letters to the Editor T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 160 As for Confederate memorialization and celebration, a close reading of my actual words and the book in question will reveal that I am not suggesting that the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or any southern heritage group cannot or should not celebrate the Confederate past. I am instead pointing out the obvious truth that there is a regional and indeed nationwide debate concerning the appropriateness of such celebrations. Mr. Wilson has surely noticed that all across the South there are challenges to the display of Confederate battle flags, Confederate holidays, and Confederate monuments . I agree with him that southern heritage groups have the right to advocate their position on how the Confederacy is to be remembered. However, other groups such as the NAACP have an equal right to advocate their position as well. Finally, in regard to the Fort Pillow affair, a careful examination of the facts leads virtually every scholar of the Civil War to the obvious conclusion that, although Forrest may not have ordered his men to refuse to take black prisoners, many of them did indeed execute black soldiers attempting to surrender. To say otherwise is to ignore the huge body of evidence which is available to anyone interested enough to sift through it. In conclusion, I would like to add that I applaud Mr. Wilson for his love of the South. I, too, am a southerner, and I am very proud of my region and sensitive to unfair portrayals often found in the media. However, I am open to honest and constructive criticism of my home, its past, and the Confederacy’s place in that past, especially if it aids in a better understanding of our history. John D. Fowler Kennesaw State University Editorial note: Except for corrections of spelling and other purely formal matters, letters to the editor are printed as received. ...