Southern Identity Research Articles

Eccentric, unintelligible, gregarious and undomesticated: Southern Italian female characters in three films by Leonardo Pieraccioni

Prominent scholarship on the Italian South has reflected on the otherized, inferiorized and racialized positionality of the region’s territories, cultures and populations within the national Italian debate, with the North functioning as an allegedly virtuous norm that the South constantly fails to conform to. The gendered imagery that inscribes this type of ethnic and territorial subordination permits, in this context, the visualization of anomalous, recalcitrant and undomesticated Southern women that function as a metaphor of the irredeemable otherness of the South. In this article, I use as a starting point three films starring and directed by Leonardo Pieraccioni, namely I laureati (The Graduates) (1995), Il ciclone (The Cyclone) (1996) and Il paradiso all’improvviso (Suddenly Paradise) (2003). I consider these films in order to analyse the screen personas of Tosca D’Aquino and Anna Maria Barbera, both of whom embody, in different ways, the encounter between Southern identity, eccentricity and non-normative corporalities.

The Last Fire-Eater: Roger A. Pryor and the Search for a Southern Identity by William A. Link (review)

The Last Fire-Eater: Roger A. Pryor and the Search for a Southern Identity by William A. Link (review)

The Last Fire-Eater: Roger A. Pryor and the Search for a Southern Identity by William A. Link (review)

The Last Fire-Eater: Roger A. Pryor and the Search for a Southern Identity by William A. Link (review)

Nostalgia in Social Media and the Construction of the “Southern” Identity of the Adenis

Changes in political sentiment among the inhabitants of the former South Yemen, an increase in calls for independence, and rethinking of the Southern identity are accompanied by a rise in nostalgia for the past among the inhabitants of the former South Yemen. Based on the materials collected by the methods of digital ethnography, the article analyzes the role of nostalgic processes in the construction of local identities among Adeni social media users. Nostalgic moods are mainly focused on the time of the British presence (1839–1967) and the existence of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (1967–1990). Through a nostalgic prism, these historical periods are often perceived by the Adenis in the same way and merge into one image of the lost «Belle Epoque», while the socio- political contradictions and economic diffi culties that existed back then are being forgotten. The image of the unattainable past becomes a space for the construction of the Southern identity in the present with the Adenis comparing their current reality with bygone times, uniqualizing their historical experience and opposing themselves to the inhabitants of North Yemen.

Sutton E. Griggs and Thomas R. Dixon: A Reconstruction Call and Response

Sutton E. Griggs and Thomas R. Dixon: A Reconstruction Call and Response

Ann L. Tucker. Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy.

Ann L. Tucker’s Newest Born of Nations contributes to a vast scholarly conversation on the United States’ place within the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. The book also adds to a substantial dialogue on the nature of antebellum southern identity, the degree of slaveholding nationalism, the durability of Confederate national commitment, and the extent of anti-Confederate Unionism. Documenting “a southern interpretation of nationhood” (2), Tucker explains how a domestic sense of nationalism depended on comparisons to nations and nationalist movements abroad. In her telling, elite white southerners looked to the promise and peril of Europe’s 1848 democratic revolutions to measure the stability of their slaveholding republic and to justify disunion and Confederate nationhood. The “international perspective,” Tucker explains, was “a readily available metaphor for speaking to an audience of fellow white southerners, one that allowed its adopter to translate the concerns of slaveholders into the language of international nationalism” (4). Deftly analyzing a wide range of printed sources, Tucker details how elite white southerners interpreted the fates of distant nations within domestic understandings of liberalism and conservatism. Like most American nationalists, white southerners cherished their liberal privilege of democratic self-government, an ideal under assault across much of the Atlantic rim. The rule of law, individual rights—at least for white men—and the assurance of constitutional sovereignty bolstered the slaveholders’ Union. White southerners nevertheless renounced unchecked liberalism as a threat to a conservative, hierarchical social order. American slaveholders interpreted the stark imbalances of European nations swinging from the extremes of revolutionary democracy to counterrevolutionary centralization as a clear lesson that the United States had to align liberalism and conservatism; otherwise, the alleged right to enslave people would become imperiled.

Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe

Reviewed by: Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe Robert Jackson Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought. Edited by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 242. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6356-2; cloth, $95.00, 978-1-4696-6355-5.) There is a lot to like in this collection. The contributors are prominent scholars of southern history and literature who represent two generations of thoughtful, dedicated work. Many of the individual essays have particular strengths: Stephen Berry’s essay on Edgar Allan Poe is beautifully written and—rare in an academic piece of this sort—rather dramatic in the telling. Essays by John Grammer and Scott Romine on New Journalism and Reconstruction-era literary revisionism, respectively, are excellent models of the case-study method. Another highlight is Michael Kreyling’s essay, which contrasts the writ-erly approaches of Tony Judt and Michael O’Brien, a pair of eminent British-born historians who passed away in recent years (Judt in 2010, O’Brien in 2015). Kreyling examines their distinct methods on the way to lauding O’Brien’s Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (2 vols.; Chapel Hill, 2004) for its difficult balancing act between the rigors of an overarching interpretive frame and the frequently rebellious “subtleties of individuality” (p. 219). An eminent literary scholar himself, Kreyling takes the occasion to meditate on the challenges of reconciling the immensity of the past with the historian’s inescapable fate—“the process by which history becomes writing and inevitably writing becomes history” (p. 203). This is an apt conclusion to a volume whose debt to Michael O’Brien is significant. The editors dedicate the collection to O’Brien, and, indeed, a respectful invocation of O’Brien’s scholarship is a frequent, if not quite compulsory, gesture across the essays. The contributors are divided evenly between history and literature, and they speak to the two disciplines in overlapping ways that mirror much of O’Brien’s own methodology. Southern intellectual history here seems largely contained in these two disciplines; this is a rich, battle-tested interdisciplinary matrix, to be sure, but there does not seem to be much awareness of other disciplines—sociology, performing arts, religious studies, the pure and applied sciences, to name several in increasing scales of magnitude—and what they might contribute to this shared scholarly project. The vision of southern intellectual history that emerges in these pages instead relies most fundamentally on the worlds of print culture and publishing. Two essays, by Beth Barton Schweiger and Jonathan Daniel Wells, address book history. Others deal with individual authors and their publishing contexts: Berry on Poe’s tortured relationship to the reputation-imparting Charles Dickens; Timothy J. Williams on Edwin Wiley Fuller and his audience of Lost [End Page 131] Cause enthusiasts; Grammer on Willie Morris’s cultivation of the “Wrecking Crew,” a southern cohort at Harper’s Magazine at the end of the 1960s; and Romine on Edward A. Pollard’s almost comical search for authentic southern identities that would meet the needs of his imagined readership. “The constant in Pollard’s writing,” Romine concludes wryly, “is a conception of ‘all true southerners,’ even if the true southerner in question never survived the next publication cycle” (p. 176). Indeed, even Michael T. Bernath’s essay on the complex situation of northerners who worked as schoolteachers in the South near the beginning of the Civil War, and whose mere presence frequently whipped up violent conflicts based more on local class antagonism than regional or racial identification, emphasizes this point. Bernath characterizes such figures as “public intellectuals” (although his discussion of their actual thoughts and ideas is minimal); and he concludes that the contest of ideas that played out in local newspapers in response to their presence “shows the central role that print played in antebellum southern life” (pp. 49–50). Another remarkable aspect of this volume is the almost complete absence of Black or other nonwhite subjects. Many, perhaps most, of the essays address slavery, segregation, and racism itself...

The Last Fire-Eater: Roger A. Pryor and the Search for Southern Identity

Reviewer Howell K. Kaiser writes that William A. Link's The Last Fire-Eater: Roger A. Pryor and the Search for Southern Identity shows that R.A. Pryor's "remarkable—and at times contradictory—transformations mirrored the puzzling journey of the South before, during, and after the Civil War."

Translating the Global South in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Elaine Castillo’s America is Not the Heart

My article aims to examine the concept of the Global South (Russel West-Pavlov) as it is represented in two contemporary novels, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Elaine Castillo’s America is not the heart. Firstly, the article discusses the novels as representative of “born translated literature” (Rebecca L. Walkowitz), identifying how their content and formal characteristics reflect such a framing. Secondly, I discuss the Southern identity of the protagonists in relation (Pashmina Murthy) to the places and the characters they relate to. Thus, my article proposes an analysis of the Southern identity performed by the characters in the public space and within their interaction with other communities from the Global South.

Review: Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times, edited by Christina Baade and Kristin A. McGee

Review: <i>Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times</i>, edited by Christina Baade and Kristin A. McGee

Liminally Positioned in the South: Reinterpreting Brazilian and Chinese Relations with Africa

ABSTRACT This article brings to fore long-standing intricacies and dilemmas in Brazil’s and China’s international positioning. It reveals the complex discursive repertoires shaping the Brazilian and Chinese sense of Self in the world, in the Global South, and, more particularly, in relation to Africa. It engages with the concept of “liminality” to highlight how constructing South–South relationships and invoking Southern identities have been ambiguous, indeterminate—thus liminal—endeavors in these countries’ international affairs. By dissecting their diplomatic and corporate narratives towards Africa, our analysis demonstrates, notwithstanding tensions and contradictions, how Brazilian and Chinese actors have creatively acted upon this liminality to pursue foreign policy goals and economic projects. In doing so, the article stresses the floating, ambiguous nature of powerful constructs such as “South” (and “West”), and binary oppositions between them. It concludes by discussing how a liminality perspective allows us to understand the unfixed and multifaceted nature of roles and identities in international relations.

Reaching Back: Convict Leasing and the Trusty System in the Nineteenth Century

Reaching Back: Convict Leasing and the Trusty System in the Nineteenth Century

A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America by Claire M. Wolnisty

Reviewed by: A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America by Claire M. Wolnisty Cane West A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America. By Claire M. Wolnisty. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. xx, 159. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-4962-0790-6.) In the mid-nineteenth century, as Americans looked westward across the continent, many white U.S. southerners also pursued expansion projects southward into Central and South America. Southern commentators such as Matthew Fontaine Maury felt that the future of the slaveholding U.S. South rested on the success of this sectional expansion into Latin America. Claire M. Wolnisty highlights "multiple southern expansionistic ideologies" pursued by filibusterers, commercial expansionists, and southern emigrants who developed increasingly hemispheric formulations of manifest destiny (p. xiv). She argues that these southern expansionists created political and economic networks between the U.S. South and South America through which the U.S. South could serve as the model for an "expansionistic, proslavery, and modern power poised to dominate the Western Hemisphere" (p. xiii). A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America builds [End Page 382] on recent scholarship by historians such as Matthew Pratt Guterl, Brian Schoen, and Matthew Karp emphasizing southern slaveholders' engagement with other nineteenth-century slaveholding societies in the Western Hemisphere. Wolnisty's study into the various nation-state and non-nation-state formulations of power in Central and South America demonstrates the possibility of "far more fluid spatial concepts" of an independent South than the eventual Confederacy (p. xv). The book's three chapters follow distinct groups of southern expansionists, primarily between the 1850s and 1870s, as they responded to European imperial projects in the hemisphere and domestic tensions over slavery. Chapter 1 focuses on the shifting rhetoric among military filibusterers in Nicaragua. Wolnisty draws from the writings of leading filibusterers, particularly William Walker, who first appealed to widespread anti-European sentiment before shifting to explicitly proslavery arguments that drew more sectional support. In chapter 2, her strongest chapter, she discusses the "economic infiltration" of commercial expansionists in Brazil (p. 37). She draws on letters and business ledgers from Americans in Brazil who created nonterritorial economic networks as an alternative to more high-profile military-backed territorial annexations. In chapter 3, Wolnisty follows newspapers and diaries of former Confederates who emigrated to Brazil after the Civil War. She argues that these immigrant communities carried their proslavery southern identity beyond the borders of the United States by adopting prewar southern expansion models. Readers of the Journal of Southern History will be drawn to the implications of a much more geographically fluid southern identity. Wolnisty's border-transcending southerners "became proslavery, modern economists within southern–South American networks" (p. xvii). Whether in Brazil or Nicaragua, these southern expansionists tied their identity to the promise of modern slave labor societies and settler-colonial communities modeled after the U.S. South. Wolnisty's conclusions also decenter cotton as the source of U.S. southerners' power. Cotton rarely appears in the text as Wolnisty focuses on themes of anti-European sentiment, slavery-driven capitalism, and geographic mobility. Though the study ostensibly covers the time frame of 1808 to 1877, to examine nearly a century of southerners looking toward South America, the study is largely focused on the years 1850–1877. This narrower time frame leaves readers with a limited understanding of how "expansionistic visions adapted to the shifting hemispheric environments" of the nineteenth century, with the notable exception of the post–Civil War emigrants to Brazil (p. xv). Material fluctuations in the volume of U.S.-Brazilian trade or the number of postwar southern emigrants to Brazil might provide some understanding of changes in hemispheric relations, but much of this evidence is listed only in the endnotes. A Different Manifest Destiny is helpful for scholars interested in the international dimensions of the nineteenth-century U.S. South and hemispheric case studies of southern, proslavery manifest destiny. The forms of non-state expansion show how southerners sought to develop global trade networks in the nineteenth century, and the attempted settler-colonies in Nicaragua...

Southern Identity and Serendipitous Opportunity in Qualitative Research Among Appalachians in Chicago

In qualitative research, identity is often discussed in terms of being an outsider vis- à-vis the subjects and setting. While important, there are research situations that require instrumental demonstrations of identity rather than a cloaking of the outsider status. This article uses ethnographic work among urban Appalachians in Chicago as a backdrop to examine how identity is a conduit for enhancing serendipitous opportunities in research. While it is known that identity facilitates more access to subjects, I examine instances of when it is purposefully used to the advantage of the researcher among populations resistant to outsiders. I demonstrate instances of identity work as an interactive process between the researcher and subject that involves the use of shared meanings that convey authenticity and acceptance to facilitate inquiry.

Grappling With Gender, Religion, and Higher Education in the South: Mary Sharp College from Its Founding Through the Civil War

This article offers a case study of how regional, gender, and religious ideals collided at one Tennessee women’s college during the antebellum and Civil War eras. Mary Sharp College, founded by Baptists in 185, strongly advocated for women’s education that equaled the contemporary men’s institutions. Local factors relating to religion and education contributed to the creation of Mary Sharp College. Tennessee Baptists founded the college as a replacement for more informal education of women and made the school the first women’s college in the U.S. to require Latin and Greek. Two key early figures tied to college, the Vermont-born Graves brothers. James Robinson Graves, a Baptist pastor and editor of The Tennessee Baptist, provided advertising for the college; Zuinglius Calvin Graves, a Baptist educator, gave it direction. J. R. and Z. C. Graves combined southern identity, gender ideology, and Baptist piety to produce a unique form of higher education for women. Although the Graves brothers saw the home and family as the proper place for southern white women, they still believed in the necessity of a rigorous education. Mary Sharp built up faith and southern character in women and prepared them for their chief service to society: motherhood. When the Civil War came, despite their own northern connections and divided loyalties in Tennessee, the Graves brothers and their college fully supported the Confederacy. Despite the college’s supposedly secure location, an occupation by the Union army led the school to close in 1863 and remain closed until 1866, when it reopened as a much weaker school but as one firmly committed both to educated female piety and to the “Lost Cause.”

A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America by Claire M. Wolnisty

A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America by Claire M. Wolnisty

The US South's View of Latin America - A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America. By Claire M. Wolnisty. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 159. $50.00 cloth; $50.00 e-book.

The US South's View of Latin America - A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America. By Claire M. Wolnisty. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 159. 50.00 e-book. - Volume 78 Issue 4

William Faulkner and the Search for American Southern Identity: An Anthropological Approach

The American South is the cultural root and archetype for the fictional world of William Faulkner, a prominent author in modern world literature. The theme Faulkner and the South has been studied exhaustively and elaborately, especially from historical and cultural perspectives. However, the issue of Faulknerian Southern identity remains a gap in the current literature, so this study sets out to address that gap. This paper is an anthropological approach to Faulkner, with two research questions: how did Faulkner interpret American Southern identity? how should a set of keywords that encapsulates Southern identity in Faulkner’s writing be established? Applying anthropological theory of identity and the method of generalization and identification of cultural patterns, this study focuses on the four outstanding novels in Faulkner’s legacy. These novels provide a picture of the Southern identity, wrapped up in a set of keywords whose two main pillars are burden of the past and agrarianism. The other traits - pride, nostagia, melancholy, complex, conservativeness, indomitability - intertwine and promote each other, creating the very Faulknerian South.

A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America

In this valuable and compact book, Wolnisty brings attention to the emigration of U.S. southerners leaving the United States for Nicaragua and Brazil, and the commercial and political expansion, interests, and campaigns in Latin America during the mid-nineteenth century, before and after the U.S. Civil War. Based on research in U.S. and Brazilian archives, Wolnisty outlines the multiple U.S. Southern expansionistic ideologies at the time and how the idea of Manifest Destiny emerged as a southward moving, as much as a westward moving, political concept.The chapters that outline Wolnisty’s claims are divided into three sections—“Nicaragua,” “Commercial Expansion in Brazil,” and “Southern Emigration to Brazil.” Her methodological strategy is to outline three different accounts and weave them into a single narrative. For example, she describes how Matthew F. Maury’s idea of Manifest Destiny equated the Louisiana Purchase with his exploration of the Amazon region of Brazil and justified his economic and political interests there. Maury envisioned connecting the mouth of the Mississippi River to the mouth of the Amazon River. According to Wolnisty, the southern filibusters who migrated to Nicaragua employed a racialized (“Anglo-Saxon”) dimension in their expansionistic campaigns, whereas the southerners who went to Brazil did not. Her treatments of U.S. southern emigrants to Nicaragua and Brazil dovetail to show not only how their commercial and political interests in Latin America were different from each other but also why they are important to consider together.However, Wolnisty would have strengthened and broadened her arguments by stating that the southerners who migrated to Brazil and Nicaragua were a diverse group, certainly not the monolithic one that she implies. Among the emigrants to Brazil, for example, were several U.S. northerners from Ohio, Maine, and New York. As a result, Wolnisty creates the impression that Confederates migrated to Latin America in a vacuum. That is, Confederates were not the only people who migrated to Brazil; in fact, many thousands of German, Swiss, Belgian, and especially Italian immigrants established enclaves there at the time, not far from the Americans. Wolnisty also does not mention the Brazilian envoys sent to New York, New Orleans, and even Antwerp to recruit new settlers (particularly agriculturalists). Furthermore, the five major settlements that emerged throughout Brazil, which Wolnisty does not discuss, were both geographically distant and culturally distinctly different from each other. Inclusion of this information would have helped to convey that immigration to Brazil from the southern United States occurred within a complex and multidimensional context.Finally, there are two critical inaccuracies. First, Charles Nathan, one of the major immigration “boosters” discussed in the last chapter, did not remain in Brazil as Wolnisty mistakenly claims. He left for New Orleans with his family in the 1880s and eventually died there in 1910. Moreover, he was not a U.S. southerner; he was likely born either in Britain or in Rio de Janeiro (of British Jewish parents who had been living in Rio since the 1820s and were members of a well-known business family).Second, Wolnisty’s statement that U.S. southerners were encouraged to bring slaves to Brazil is misguided (74). In fact, ample documented evidence shows that Brazilian immigration authorities and governmental agencies, as well as immigrants themselves, specifically advised people moving to Brazil not to bring slaves. Southerners leaving for Brazil were well aware of the Brazilian statute that prohibited foreigners from bringing black slaves with them; most, if not all, of them complied. Wolnisty herself admits that southerners rarely brought their slaves to Brazil (88).Nonetheless, Wolnisty’s study of a “different Manifest Destiny,” combining filibusters, commercial expansion, and southern emigrants within a single work, is a new and commendable endeavor. Overall, this book contributes to a burgeoning scholarly literature about the important nineteenth-century U.S. commercial and political campaigns in Latin America that will be of interest to a wide range of scholars.

Heritage Versus Hate: Assessing Opinions in the Debate over Confederate Monuments and Memorials

ObjectiveThis study evaluates factors that might explain southerners’ opinions toward Confederate monuments.MethodWe conduct a series of multivariate analyses of opinions toward Confederate monuments based on a poll of 789 respondents who live in the American South.ResultsThe majority of southerners surveyed want to leave Confederate monuments where they are, place a marker next to them for historical context, or place them in a museum. Southerners who express high levels of racial resentment are more likely to want to leave monuments where they are, without additional context. Southern identity has no effect on opinions toward Confederate monuments.ConclusionsSoutherners are divided in their opinion on symbols of the Confederacy. Racial resentment explains much more of opinions on Confederate monuments than southern identity, suggesting that “hate” rather than “heritage” is the primary driver of opinions on these symbols of the South's Confederate legacy.