Southern Identity Research Articles

Conservatives in the Everglades: Sun Belt Environmentalism and the Creation of Everglades National Park

AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II, SEVERAL SOUTHERN STATES SOUGHT to sustain the economic growth they had experienced during the war. Many focused on building up their manufacturing, high-tech, and resource extraction industries. At the same time, tourism was poised to become an industry in the postwar South, especially in coastal states that could take advantage of the South's climate, natural beauty, and undeveloped natural areas. These two economic forces seemed destined to clash: many of the South's heavy and extractive industries defiled the environment, while tourism was often dependent on pristine environments. (1) The South's postwar economic development also entailed changes in the identity, or at least the public image, of the South. The region's racist past, its backward reputation, its past hostility to the values of middle-class capitalism, and its legacy of secession were not generally compatible with the desires of business investors. This conflict was even more pronounced in the case of tourism, an economic activity that relied on the public's perceptions of place. (2) Although the region's wartime economic growth was subsidized by the federal government, the rise of the Sun Belt South was inextricably and perhaps ironically linked to the emergence of modern conservatism. (3) This political movement, devoted to tradition, the free market, and individual rights, was particularly attractive to many white southerners who confronted diverse economic, social, and cultural changes during and after World War II. In Florida, a third emergent force shaped the state's economic growth and political climate after the war: modern environmentalism. (4) Environmentalism and ecological ideas about nature, along with conservative ideas about individual property rights and the role of the state, proved to be central to the state's development. (5) The creation of Everglades National Park (ENP) in 1947 was deeply influenced by both environmentalism and conservatism and illustrates the diversity of conservative attitudes in the South toward nature. (6) Florida politicians saw the park as a centerpiece of the postwar tourism industry. This industry was predicated on the state's natural values: its climate, its beauty, its beaches, and its diverse and exotic flora and fauna. The key political figure in the fight for the park was Spessard L. Holland, a titan of Florida politics who parlayed his successful gubernatorial term during World War II into a twenty-five-year career in the U.S. Senate. In many ways, Holland was a typical mid-twentieth-century southern politician: he was pro-business and pro-segregation, and he supported states' rights. Holland typically sought to limit the power of the federal government, yet he vigorously supported the creation of an enormous national park in his state. Holland's enlightened utilitarianism toward the preservation of the Everglades was composed of three ideas. The first was that economic benefits could be extracted from the Everglades. Second, Holland understood that environmental ideas, specifically an appreciation of diverse and exotic flora and fauna, were becoming increasingly important to Americans. Holland thought that the creation of the ENP would reorient the state's economy around tourism and advertise Florida tourism more broadly. Finally, and perhaps most important, the park would aid in the transformation of Florida's identity. The creation of a wilderness park dedicated to protecting biology would signal that Florida was at the forefront of environmental and scientific thinking. The park would demonstrate that Florida was no longer a backwater state from a backward region tainted by the legacy of slavery and secession. Rather, Florida was a modern, scientific state, eager to cater to the desires of American tourists. The belief that the ENP could facilitate the construction of a new identity for Florida was a crucial facet of Holland's Sun Belt environmentalism and illustrates the dynamic and forward-thinking aspects of southern identity after World War II. …

Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 by K. Stephen Prince

Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 by K. Stephen Prince

Serving Up the American South: Foodways and Southern History

Serving Up the American South:Foodways and Southern History Anthony J. Stanonis (bio) Angela Jill Cooley. To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015. ix + 207 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. Edward H. Davis and John T. Morgan. Collards: A Southern Tradition from Seed to Table. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. xiv + 193 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $34.95. Marcie Cohen Ferris. The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xiv + 477 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. A fallow field until the last decade, the study of Southern foodways has now come to bear impressive yields. Scholars have applied a range of interdisciplinary approaches to reveal the ways that foods have influenced Southern culture since the colonial period. More than just sustenance, foods form a dynamic component of Southern society. The meanings applied to foods have determined the very structure of that society. Southerners incorporated racial, class, gender, ethnic, and regional tensions into their foodways. From economics to race relations and from leisure to religion, foods and the practices associated with eating have been central to the formation and evolution of Southern identity. One approach to the study of foodways is to explore the history of a particular item. Edward Davis and John Morgan reap hefty rewards from such an analysis in their Collards: A Southern Tradition from Seed to Table. Davis and Morgan, both trained geographers, craft a surprising potboiler. They weave their scientific inquiry into the biological origins of the plant with a wide-reaching analysis of collard greens’ cultural importance throughout Southern history. Readers thereby discover a “living organism that evolved over centuries of cultural development, lifetimes of cultivation and care, and periodic moments of culinary genius” (p. ix). The authors’ meticulous research adds [End Page 312] beef to their claim that a “forkful of collards contains more Southern history than any other bite” (p. xi). Davis and Morgan draw on a cornucopia of sources. They demonstrate the importance of collard greens within Southern literature, especially for African American writers. They trace the long history of the plant in the South from colonial times to the present, using diaries, magazines, and other print sources. Davis and Morgan gather scientific data as well. The quick-growing greens provided exceptionally high levels of nutrients unsurpassed by other leafy cousins. Davis and Morgan emphasize the point via neatly compiled charts comparing collard greens to plants such as spinach, turnip greens, mustard greens, and kale, among others. This nutritiousness made collards ideal in a region otherwise tied to corn and pork. Often considered a “black” cultural icon—legendary jazz artist Thelonious Monk even donned a collard leaf on his lapel—collards are more properly understood as a symbol of poverty and “southern rurality” (p. 20). Photographs and eye-catching, colorful maps track the popularity of collard greens, mustard greens, and turnip greens—the region’s three favored leafy greens—across the South. The production values invested by the University of Alabama Press are as remarkable as the thoroughness of the scholarship. Most impressively, however, Davis and Morgan employ intensive surveys of university students, grocery store managers, and seed marketers to discover the heartland of collard greens. The authors conduct interviews with gardeners and others, relating how Southerners since the 1950s have turned away from home gardening and gardening for profit. Furthermore, Hispanics have largely replaced African Americans as fieldworkers since the 1980s. Commercial collard seed production died out in the South in the two decades after the Second World War, with Washington State now dominating seed production. Local or small seed cultivators are now rarities, with only ten companies in the United States selling commercial collard seeds. Davis and Morgan systematically drive the back roads of the U.S. South to find rare varieties of collards cultivated by seed-savers over generations. These are “landraces,” plants that have “adapted in one area over a long period without formal breeding methods” (p. 109). The authors interview approximately eighty seed-savers and identify many others...

Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 by K. Stephen Prince (review)

Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 by K. Stephen Prince (review)

Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty by Gary W. Gallagher (review)

Reviewed by: Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty by Gary W. Gallagher Jim Owens Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty. Gary W. Gallagher. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8203-4540-6, 152pp., paper, $19.95. Gary W. Gallagher in his Becoming Confederates: Paths to a National Loyalty, the result of the Lamar Memorial Lectures at Mercer University in 2011, summarizes many topics he has explored in other works on the Civil War. Using brief biographical essays on Robert E. Lee, Stephen Dodson Ramseur, and Jubal A. Early, Gallagher explains these themes: that the Confederacy was a nation; that the “majority of [the] Confederacy’s white residence developed a strong national identity”; that the “mainline military forces represented the [End Page 313] most important institutional expression of the Confederate nation”; and “that military officers formed an important component in the equation of Confederate loyalty” (2–3). He writes in his introduction, “I take my analytical cue from David M. Potter . . . that every human being possesses numerous overlapping and often mutually reinforcing loyalties, with different ones emerging as most important at various times” (3). In examining these theses and applying them to three individual soldiers, he takes exception with those historians who claim the primacy of states’ rights in triggering the Civil War. In these biographical sketches, he notes that there were generational differences: Lee and Early came to their acceptance of secession later than Ramseur, who grew up during the strident days of the sectional crises. He explains how each man grew to dislike Yankees more as the war progressed. Finally, he embraces U. B. Phillips’s thesis of the “centrality of slavery and race to the loyalties of all three men” (6). In his final chapter, Gallagher carries his ideas beyond the war, writing: “The paths toward Confederate loyalty for Lee and Ramseur and Early help delineate important contours of American history from the late antebellum period through the end of the century. They highlight how Americans juggled multiple, often conflicting loyalties. They reveal white southern identity preoccupied with racial control that transcended political and class line. They render it exceedingly difficult to argue the Confederacy should not be deemed a nation. Perhaps most important they help us understand why and how Confederates waged a prodigiously bloody war and the manner in which they dealt with defeat” (91). With Ramseur and Early, Gallagher seems most at home explaining the ultimate embracing of Confederate nationalism. With Lee, he has to deal with a whole literature emphasizing the general’s loyalty to Virginia and his seeming reconciliation in his farewell address to the Army of Northern Virginia, in which he urged his men to go forward without rancor. But Gallagher argues, using Lee’s private correspondence and the actions of Ramseur’s daughter and of Early, that “reunion” and “reconciliation” were not the same. These men, he asserts, were white southerners who did not repudiate slavery. Gallagher uses his research well, citing support as well as counterarguments for his arguments. These three brief biographical sketches introduce his provocative ideas but do not offer definitive proof; that awaits another book with broader cast of characters, both military and civilian, from a broader geographical perspective. The concluding chapter, which discusses the development of Confederate iconography following Appomattox, in particular, offers a succinct [End Page 314] beginning for anyone who wishes to pursue the topic. Gallagher has written a stimulating book, well worth reading, which forces the reader to rethink concepts concerning secession, states’ rights, race, and the legacy of the Civil War. Jim Owens Lynchburg College Copyright © 2015 The Kent State University Press

K. Stephen Prince. Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915.

K. Stephen Prince. Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915.

Haunted by the Ghosts of Pickett’s Charge: Echoes of the Civil War in Two Novels by Vietnam Veterans

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In Vietnam and the Southern Imagination, Owen W. Gilman Jr. writes that have an affinity for history, and thus Vietnam has been joined frequently the long span history cultivated in the South. One the more vocal critics the American war in Vietnam, Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, directly connects the southern response the Vietnam War the southern cultural memory the Civil War, suggesting that perhaps we Southerners have a sensitivity this sort thing [stalemate in Vietnam] that other Americans cannot fully share. We--or our forefathers--experienced both the hot-headed romanticism that led Fort Sumter and the bitter humiliation defeat and a vindictive Reconstruction. This historical sensitivity the echoes the Civil War, coupled with the relatively large proportion southern soldiers serve during the war, may explain why certain literature the Vietnam War contains a distinctly southern note. Historian Joseph Fry notes that: As they had done in every foreign war since 1865, southerners rallied the cause. The eleven states the former Confederacy provided nearly one-third the soldiers who served in Vietnam, even though the South was home only 22 percent the nation's population. Approximately 28 percent the military personnel who died in Vietnam were southern (15,437 55,622) and 27 percent the Medal Honor winners hailed from Dixie. Themes honor, duty, patriotism, and anticommunism predominated in postwar interviews with southern veterans. Fry goes on argue that following the U.S. withdrawal from Saigon, Dixie's response the U. S. loss in Vietnam reflected the South's previous experience with coming terms with defeat. As had been the case following the Civil War, southern leaders and most southern warriors were that their cause had been honorable and patriotic. However, this would not prove be the case for southern veterans the war with literary ambitions. Between 1978-1979, two authors and Vietnam veterans from strong southern backgrounds published their first novels: James Webb's Fields Fire came out in 1978, followed by Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers in 1979. Each man would attempt reconcile his experiences in Vietnam with the southern identity he was raised value and each would turn the Civil War contextualixe his own service, albeit from strikingly different perspectives. (1) Webb represents a relative rarity amongst Vietnam War authors, southern or otherwise, in that he remained convinced that [his] cause had been honorable and patriotic long after his return from Southeast Asia. This likely explains why his novel provides the more straightforward treatment this uniquely southern historical sense. Fields Fire is notable for being one the few literary works emerge from the Vietnam War that maintains a hawkish stance on the conflict. In it, Webb, a Naval Academy graduate and recipient the Navy Cross for valor in combat, rages defiantly against anyone who would question the value valorous service the nation, even when that service took place in the moral nightmare that was Vietnam. Webb singles out Robert E. Lee Hodges Jr., a Kentucky boy raised on legends his ancestors' proud service their country, to show how, at least in the South, present-day persons are linked patterns larger than the individual self. Besides the obvious connection General Robert E. Lee, Hodges's name also links him another notable literary example southern honor, From Here Eternity's Robert E. Lee Prewitt. Like Prewitt, Hodges's father died young, killed in action in World War II four months before he was born. The only memories he has Robert E. Lee Hodges Sr. are stored in a dusty footlocker that contains two old uniforms and a scrapbook filled with photos of his father in an ill-fitting uniform, wearing a defiant solemn bold glare copied from some rebel ancestor, his cap cocked the side his head. …

Remembering Mayberry in White and Black: The Andy Griffith Show’s construction of the south

The 1960s situation comedy The Andy Griffith Show and its fictional setting, Mayberry, comprise a lieu de mémoire, a site of memory, with multiple and shifting meanings tied to history and identity. The series relied on sophisticated notions of nostalgia to invent a seemingly traditional yet unconventional American South. Although its lead character was a Southern sheriff during the volatile Civil Rights Movement, Mayberry eschewed racial tension by having no recognizable Black residents. Yet, the obituaries for its star, Andy Griffith, in 2012 not only illustrated the program’s stamp on American and Southern identity and memory but also the ways Mayberry as a site of memory had been embraced, reinterpreted, and reimagined by a twenty-first century audience that includes African Americans. Decades after its prime-time run, The Andy Griffith Show is a beloved reconstruction of Southern history, memory, and identity that spurs nostalgic notions of community even from African Americans shut out of its original narrative.

Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon. By Cindy Ott (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012. xvi plus 323 pp. $23.45)

From food of the poor to the essential dessert at one of America's most inclusive holidays, Ott uses the pumpkin to illustrate the way that culture and commodities influence each reciprocally over time. Pumpkins and squash were undifferentiated in the colonial era and were valued because they were easy to grow, high-yielding, and hardy. While some forms of squash were sold in limited quantities at market, there was little economic value to selling pumpkins because all classes grew it on marginal land for supplementing their diets and as animal fodder. Initially, the pumpkin was seen as a lower class food by colonists while most Europeans viewed its large size and wild growth as a symbol of an America that was on the “edge of civilization” (24-5). Ott explains that the pumpkin's meaning was ambiguous until it shifted for the first time in 1796 with Amelia Simmons' American Cookery. Ott says this was the “beginning of the transformation of the pumpkin from uninspired side dish into glorified dessert,” and this culinary shift lead by women in the household helped to elevate the pumpkin into a cultural icon (52). While Ott does not discuss women's contribution to the creation of this American symbol in length, it appears this culinary shift was critical in elevating the orange pumpkin above other forms of squash. While there are no botanical differences between squash and pumpkin, the two became divorced as the pumpkin came to represent more than just an everyday food item. The pumpkin came to represent hard-work, independence, and the values of agrarian life and thus became synonymous with New England. Ott argues that the South was less receptive to adopt the pumpkin because plantations embraced capitalist production, therefore, Southern identity was not as receptive to agrarian ideals of small farmers that emanated out of New England. Elevating the pumpkin to a dessert was a crucial change because it disassociated many of the previous negative images of the pumpkin and made it into a proud symbol of New England, and eventually the entire United States, but the transition from regional to national symbol and its adoption in other regions of the country is still obscured.

Rooting for the Home Team: Sport, Community, and Identity ed. by Daniel A. Nathan (review)

Reviewed by: Rooting for the Home Team: Sport, Community, and Identity ed. by Daniel A. Nathan Russ Crawford (bio) Rooting for the Home Team: Sport, Community, and Identity. Edited by Daniel A. Nathan. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Pp. 223. $85.00 cloth; $25.00 paper; $12.49–$13.50 ebook) With the help of several top scholars from the sport history community, Daniel A. Nathan has tackled a large subject: the role of sport in building community and identity. He correctly admits that no single volume can encompass all that can be written on the subject, but the fourteen essays in this compilation make a good start. The authors of the essays have collectively written or edited forty-four books of their own, along with numerous articles in the academic and popular press, but also include two newcomers to the field. Their contributions range from traditional academic efforts such as Mark Dyreson’s analysis of the groundbreaking sociological work Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (1929) by Robert and Helen Lynd, which placed basketball at the cultural center of Muncie, Indiana, to more deeply personal treatments such as the chapter by Susan Cahn, who writes about the community she found playing pickup basketball at a Buffalo, New York, recreation center. Among the topics explored are: 1920s Thanksgiving Day football games between Howard and Lincoln universities, golfer Bobby Jones and southern identity, the media’s creation of so-called football towns, Iowa girl’s six-on-six basketball, Chicago sixteen-inch softball leagues, Baltimore’s identification with the Colts before the team’s relocation, the importance of announcer Vin Scully for Dodger fans, Red Sox Nation, Penn State football coach Joe Paterno’s Happy Valley before the scandals, Kansas basketball, the hidden life of Philadelphia fans, and the cult-like presentation of boxer Mickey Ward in Massachusetts. As with any compilation, some efforts succeed better than others. [End Page 154] Especially effective are the essays on Scully, whose importance to baseball extends well beyond the Dodgers, and the exploration of how former six-on-six basketball players have formed a Facebook community dedicated to remembrance and nostalgia for the lost game. The attempt to contrast the image of Bobby Jones with that of post-scandal Tiger Woods is not as successful; the idea fades before it can be fully explored. Likewise, the attempt to flesh out the picture of the notorious fans in Philadelphia also fails to produce much that is particularly enlightening. As a whole, however, all essays do manage to succeed in their aim of describing the role of sports in building community and identity. The main critique of the work is not for what it contains but for what it lacks. From a scholarly point of view, the essay on Red Sox Nation only lightly touches on the efforts by the team’s management to aggressively market the idea of a community formed around the team. Greater consideration of building community and identity as a marketing strategy would have nicely expanded the scope of the works’ explorations. In addition, the essays uniformly hold that the communities and identities built around sports are positive. There is no consideration of the bizarre, immoral, and often illegal behavior spawned by too closely tying identity to a community based on sport. From a personal point of view, the absence of any consideration of Husker Nation is a significant slight. This is where the general reader will most likely leave the work unsatisfied—when their particular “nation” is left on the sidelines. So too might fans of NASCAR, hockey, and other sports that did not make the cut for inclusion find this volume incomplete. Nathan chose his contributors well, and the essays are uniformly engaging and interesting. He provides interesting analysis in his introduction and afterword, which bring together, with some success, the disparate subjects. Rooting for the Home Team will add rhetorical evidence to the widely held narrative that community and identity can be built and maintained by sports teams. This volume, therefore, is a good start, one that others might add to by considering other [End Page 155] communities and identities, as well as exploring whether communities and...

Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins and the Modern Conservative Identity

Walker Percy's novel Love in the Ruins (1971) reveals the complications of American suburban politics at the height of the Cold War and of the civil rights movement in the United States, a moment during which racial anxieties became disguised as political moderation. Written in the wake of Richard Nixon's successful 1968 run for the presidency, during which his campaign suggested sympathy with white southern suburban segregationists to gain popularity in the South (an area where candidates historically performed poorly), Love in the Ruins portrays a polarized suburban population in the South of a politically fractured United States: a mishmash of southerners and nonsoutherners, conservatives and liberals, living together united in their racism. The novel's suburban Cold War dystopia depicts a post-South in which political ideology, socioeconomic realities, and literary and popular media portrayals of southernness supplant any geographic or cultural understanding of place as the basis for southern identity. (1) Love in the Ruins not only portrays the postsouthern but also forecasts the current red state-blue state political map of the United States in its sheer politicization of nearly every individual and community in the novel, paralleling the spread of conservative politics to the white suburban middle class in the 1960s. This southern identity and politics became suburban identity and politics, uniting communities across the United States not by geography but by ideology, and suburban political moderation morphed into modern conservatism--moral and social conservatism coupled with financial neoliberalism. The novels emphasis on lampooning extreme political viewpoints and portraying racial strife (long associated with the South but present now in suburbs) as merely a symptom of such ideological extremes suggests an attempt to divorce geography from sensibilities and values long associated with the South. In the depiction of suburban politics, the book ultimately points toward Percy's own satirical but quite telling revision of the southern identity, one in which personal connections to ideologies play a prominent role once southern identity has been separated from concerns of place. Ultimately, Love in the Ruins paints portraits of Americans--not necessarily southerners--participating in cultures and practices associated with the United States South through media representations, televised events, real estate developments, and other reproductions of the South. Love in the Ruins satirizes devotion to hyperbolic political views through caricatures of materialistic suburban dwellers, throughout the novel Percy also expresses anxiety about current social trends, exhibiting a realization that the former foundations of the U.S. South are eroding. Michael Kobre argues that Percy really was of two minds and traditions. Percy was raised in the Old South and its traditional mores, yet Percy also recognized that the severe and honorable traditions he had inherited were increasingly outdated in a New South that was, in his own words, 'happy, victorious, Christian, rich, patriotic and Republican (4). Indeed, Percy's own vision of this New South is remarkably in line with historical studies that explore the roles suburbs played in the turn toward modern conservatism in the U.S. South in the twenty-five years after the end of World War II. During the postwar expansion of industry to the region, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Memphis became centers of commerce attracting more and more southerners--white and black alike--to their metropolitan regions, individuals who decided to give factory and office work a go as opposed to remaining to compete with increasingly larger commercial farms. Brown v. Board of Education undoubtedly influenced patterns of suburban growth as did the white flight from urban centers. Particularly relevant to Percy's imagined suburbs is historian Kevin Kruse's exploration of white flight out of Atlanta and the political identity that developed out of the manner in which whites fought to preserve segregation. …

Documenting Hunger: Famineways in Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing

Documenting Hunger:Famineways in Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing Jolene Hubbs (bio) Recently, southerners have embraced foodways as a way to define what makes them distinctive. This move makes sense. If “the consumption of southern foodways . . . might be interpreted as a modern-day expression of one’s southern identity,” as Beth Latshaw suggests, then whether we are sipping mint juleps on verandas or sweet teas at barbecue joints, we are both enjoying and expressing our regional distinctiveness (107–108). And unlike earlier ideas about what makes the region unique—white supremacy, according to Ulrich B. Phillips; poverty, guilt, and defeat for C. Vann Woodward—foodways seem to represent an inclusive, affirmative vision of southern distinctiveness. When it comes to poor white southerners, though, linking sustenance and self can leave a bad taste in the mouth. The television show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, for instance, serves up unsavory visions of the maxim “you are what you eat” by blurring the lines between a poor white family’s denigrated class position and its degraded culinary practices. This program invariably shows the stars, self-proclaimed rednecks who live in rural Georgia, eating junk food, roadkill, foodstuffs won at the grocery auction, and other abject fare. [End Page 1] Television critic Willa Paskin contends that “there is no show on television that plumbs the extremely real and loaded connections between food and class in America like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” but what the show probes is at least as much about middle- and upper-class viewers’ food-related class prejudices as it is about lower-class families’ eating practices. As responses to the show reveal, viewers can misconstrue poverty as preference, seeing the reality stars’ foodstuffs less as what can feed a family of six for eighty dollars per week— the family’s grocery budget, as matriarch Mama June readily admits—than as what poor whites’ unwholesome appetites demand. A Hollywood Life writer, for instance, frowns on family members for “spending their coupons on candy bars rather than produce” (Stiehl). Because it betrays an unfamiliarity with coupons, which almost never offer discounts on fresh fruits and vegetables, this tsk-tsking may say more about the writer’s class privilege than the family’s poor decision making. By reading limited choices as bad choices, outside observers can mistake impoverishment for improvidence. Before they censured the candy bars and roadkill of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, well-off white people denounced the snuff and clay that prior generations of poor whites used to stanch their hunger pangs. In the first section of this article, I reconstruct a nearly three-century-long history of depicting poor white hunger as an issue of depraved appetites rather than deprived diets. Assembling examples from novels, travelogues, memoirs, short stories, and essays, I chart a tradition, largely unremarked by other scholars, that helps us recognize and redress regional and national misconceptions about hunger. Having laid bare the problem of treating poverty as pathology, I then turn to works by Dorothy Allison and Barbara Robinette Moss that offer readers a new taste of poor white life in the South. Allison’s novel Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) and Moss’s memoir Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter (1999) rebut the idea that unhealthy appetites—rather than poverty and its attendant ills—plague poor white people. In these books, Allison and Moss pioneer a set of literary techniques that I term “famineways,” a riff on “foodways,” which John T. Edge defines as “the study of what people eat and why they eat it.” By means of quotation, allusion, and related intertextual strategies, famineways write hunger onto the bodies of these authors’ characters and texts, allowing us as readers to explore what people are not eating and why they are not eating it. By consuming other works— metabolizing their politics and poetics—Allison and Moss fortify their stories, constituting them not as bare-bones stabs at portraying poverty but as vigorous [End Page 2] bodies taking sustenance from a host of literary antecedents. Using famine-ways, these contemporary southern women writers not only expose material and nutritional lack but also contest the long history of treating poor white hunger as an issue...

Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915

Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915

The edible South: the power of food and the making of an American region

In Edible South, Marcie Cohen Ferris presents food as a new way to chronicle the American South's larger history. Ferris tells a richly illustrated story of southern food and the struggles of whites, blacks, Native Americans, and other people of the region to control the nourishment of their bodies and minds, livelihoods, lands, and citizenship. The experience of food serves as an evocative lens onto colonial settlements and antebellum plantations, New South cities and Civil Rights-era lunch counters, chronic hunger and agricultural reform, counterculture communes and iconic restaurants as Ferris reveals how food--as cuisine and as commodity--has expressed and shaped southern identity to the present day.The region in which European settlers were greeted with unimaginable natural abundance was simultaneously the place where enslaved Africans vigilantly preserved cultural memory in cuisine and Native Americans held tight to kinship and food traditions despite mass expulsions. Southern food, Ferris argues, is intimately connected to the politics of power. The contradiction between the realities of fulsomeness and deprivation, privilege and poverty, in southern history resonates in the region's food traditions, both beloved and maligned.

Response to the Emerging Scholars Roundtable

JON SMITH Simon Fraser University Response to the Emerging Scholars Roundtable WE ARE COMING DUE FOR ANOTHER PARADIGM SHIFT IN SOUTHERN literary and cultural studies. These revolutions have tended to arrive, in disturbingly good Jeffersonian fashion, about every twenty years. The New Southern Studies (NSS) got going in 1999—a year after Michael Kreyling in Inventing Southern Literature had melancholically declared the field dead—with Scott Romine’s The Narrative Forms of Southern Community, Deborah Cohn’s History and Memory in the Two Souths, and Jennifer Rae Greeson’s Yale Journal of Criticism essay “The Figure of the South and the Nationalizing Imperatives of Early United States Literature.” The baby-boomer attempt to diversify the field had in turn arrived in earnest a little less than twenty years before that, partly in a few younger scholars’ contributions to The History of Southern Literature.(1985),butmostnotablyinThadiousDavis’s1988“Expanding the Limits” essay in the Southern Literary Journal. Before that, Louis Rubin had gotten the field going in the early 1960s in reaction against not only the emphasis in American studies on New England “Puritan origins” but also, not coincidentally, all the bad press the white south was getting in the Civil Rights era. The key word in that history (a history that does reflect progress, however halting and incomplete) is dialectical “reaction”—or, in the terms of some of these manifestos, “blasting” or “critique.” Each generation, by virtue of its experiences, reading, training, and subject positions, has corrected argumentative flaws invisible to earlier scholars that were, to the younger scholars, painfully obvious. While I appreciate the insurgent tone and appropriately lefty politics of many of these manifestos, I don’t quite see that happening yet here. Full-blown revolution is a lot to expect, of course, but when you call your pieces manifestos and model the lead one delightfully after that of a bunch of famously make-it-new Modernists, you’re signaling an intention to play at the paradigm-shift level (which is awesome, please keep it up!). When these essays do critique or blast new southern studies, however, they tend to suggest that new southern studies goes too far, not that it doesn’t go far enough, and we have gotten plenty of that already from old 44 Jon Smith southern studies! So in what follows, I want to tease out, where I can, the parts of these essays that I think really do have the potential to move us forward. The elephant in the room here is the massive critique of “the South” and “southern identity” launched by the new southern studies. “I am not even sanguine that the notion of a monolithic South can be recuperated in U.S. cultural studies in a useful way,” writes Jennifer Rae Greeson (10). Leigh Anne Duck makes a plea for “Southern studies without ‘The South’” (329). Scott Romine writes, “I believe that the idea of the South has been mostly a bad idea” (“MoonPie” 63). I call “the South” an “unhelpful scalar unit” (“Post-postpolitical” 75) and—with the forcefulness that comes from watching gentler remonstrances go unheeded—“a meaningless term, naming nothing but fantasies: either a great, 100-million-resident void at the heart of American studies, or a ridiculously strained attempt at identity politics at the heart of southern studies” (Purple 22). Many undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty at the older “southern lit” PhD places and the big southern studies centers, on the other hand—many of whom already identify strongly enough as “southerners” to want to pursue work in “southern literature” and/or help produce barbecue documentaries—still seem to prefer (to enjoy, as the Lacanians say) performing what Kreyling decades ago dubbed a “Quentissential” ambivalent white southern identity. In a forthcoming essay on southern studies centers, I’ve shorthanded the latest version of this stance, a bit snarkily, as “loving barbecue and hating racism.”TheauthorsofthefrequentlydelightfulESOmanifestoaremore than hip enough to realize what a cliché barbecue is, and I laughed out loud when they blasted “the specialist, the professional, debonaire, good country southerner,” but still: when you bless grits, bourbon, butter beans, day drinking, front porches, and country ham, and blast racism, theAgrarians,StoneMountain,Paula Deen, and Dylann Roof...

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...

Stories of the South: race and the reconstruction of southern identity, 1865-1915

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the character of the and even its persistence as a distinct region, was an open question. During Reconstruction, the North assumed significant power to redefine the imagining a region rebuilt and modeled on northern society. The white South actively resisted these efforts, battling the legal strictures of Reconstruction on the ground. Meanwhile, white southern storytellers worked to recast the South's image, romanticizing the Lost Cause and heralding the birth of a New South. In Stories of the South, K. Stephen Prince argues that this cultural production was as important as political competition and economic striving in turning the South and the nation away from the egalitarian promises of Reconstruction and toward Jim Crow.Examining novels, minstrel songs, travel brochures, illustrations, oratory, and other cultural artifacts produced in the half century following the Civil War, Prince demonstrates the centrality of popular culture to the reconstruction of southern identity, shedding new light on the complicity of the North in the retreat from the possibility of racial democracy.

“Squirrel, if You're so Inclined”

This paper examines how a rhetorical reading of recipes as narratives can reveal much about how recipe writers interpellate their audiences and what arguments they make about collective identity. I examined two iterations of Brunswick stew recipes from contemporary Southern lifestyle magazines Southern Living and Garden and Gun to see how these two magazines compare in their approach to food, composition of audience, and definitions of Southern identity. I found that the recipe writers of Southern Living used narrative elements in their recipes to reinforce the importance of cooking in the home, addressing the audience as busy suburban mothers, and defining authentic Southern identity as middle class and progressive. Garden and Gun's recipe narrative emphasized cooking in the restaurant, interpellating the audience as upwardly mobile and cosmopolitan. Both magazines use the recipe narrative to direct attention away from the South's “checkered past” and present a post-race New South.

“The Duality of the Southern Thing”: A Snapshot of Southern Politics in the Twenty-First Century

“The Duality of the Southern Thing”A Snapshot of Southern Politics in the Twenty-First Century Angie Maxwell (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution In 2001 the talented up-and-coming rock band Drive-By Truckers released Southern Rock Opera. Track number eight, a spoken-word confessional narrative, casts judgment on, as the title reveals, “The Three Great Alabama Icons”: Ronnie Van Zant, Bear Bryant, and George Wallace. The former are recognized with influencing writer and frontman Patterson Hood. The bulk of lyrical analysis, however, is saved for Wallace, whose segregationist record is juxtaposed with his outreach to African Americans in later life. George Wallace with Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, by James Hatcher, December 1974, courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama. [End Page 89] In 2001 the talented up-and-coming rock band Drive-By Truckers released Southern Rock Opera, a critically acclaimed album that was produced only with the financial help of friends and fans. The two-disc Southern Rock Opera was the group’s attempt to explain their South to the world and to make sense of the myths and legends that cast long shadows in Alabama. Track number eight, a spoken-word confessional narrative, casts judgment on, as the title reveals, “The Three Great Alabama Icons”: Ronnie Van Zant, Bear Bryant, and George Wallace. The former are recognized with influencing writer and frontman Patterson Hood. Van Zant, although born in Jacksonville, Florida, is credited with creating an anthem of Alabama and southern pride and Bryant for making football the sacred cow that inevitably drove the un-athletic teenage Hood straight to a guitar. The bulk of lyrical analysis, however, is saved for Wallace, whose segregationist record is juxtaposed with his outreach to African Americans in later life. “And Wallace spent the rest of his life trying to explain away his racist past, and in 1982 won his last term in office with over 90 percent of the black vote,” writes Hood; “Such is the Duality of the Southern Thing.”1 The Drive- By Truckers have left open the full scope of this duality and returned to reflect on it years later, all of which merely hints at the profundity of that statement. Dan Carter’s The Politics of Rage comes as close as any work to understanding the intent behind Wallace’s transformation. And Paul Stekler’s “American Experience” documentary, Settin’ the Woods on Fire, leaves audiences wondering if Wallace’s motive even matters in the first place. In the final verse, the Truckers themselves consign Wallace to hell for his “blind ambition” and insatiable “hunger for votes.” But this “duality” is about much more than Wallace’s rage and violence. It is about much more than Wallace himself. For Wallace, like the demagogues who preceded him and who will follow in his wake, remains a constant subject of scrutiny because he exposed something significant about the regional force that is the American South. Just as Wallace is a generous muse for the Drive-By Truckers, his political career remains a useful source for questions about the modern South. Three questions are particularly poignant regarding this central concept of regional duality and its existence in the contemporary southern political landscape. First, Wallace’s ability to capture the national spotlight pushed Republican attention southward. “Recognizing the seriousness of Wallace’s threat,” notes journalist and author John Egerton, Richard Nixon co-opted his message and made the region a distinct and critical geographic piece of the electoral puzzle for the modern gop. Is this assumption of a distinct or aberrant South still valid? Second, the success of Wallace’s campaign outside of the South, in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, revealed that southern identity was not limited to a geographic boundary; rather, it reflected a state of mind and a worldview that proved palatable to many. What does southern identity look like now?2 [End Page 90] Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is another lesson of George Wallace that is not about the “sinner,” but about the African Americans in Alabama who eventually—whether strategically or sincerely—lent him their support. Indeed, in his critical assessment of Wallace’s 1982...

The Gospel of the Soil: Southern Agrarian Resistance and the Productive Future of Food

The Southern Agrarian movement began with a consortium of writers and intellectuals who argued for Southern sovereignty during the 1930s. Fearing the forces of industrial capitalism, the Southern Agrarians argued that the technocractic mass culture of the Northeast would exterminate Southern identity. The following analysis demonstrates that even though their attempts to establish Southern sovereignty were unsuccessful, these writers reconfigured agrarian space as a sphere of political resistance against growing technologic materialism. This analysis culminates in an exploration of the way that this vision blended heterotopian space and sacred reawakening, creating a new agrarian rhetoric that would influence later generations.