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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2005 This corner of Canaan: curriculum studies of place and the reconstruction of the South Reta Ugena Whitlock Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Whitlock, Reta Ugena, "This corner of Canaan: curriculum studies of place and the reconstruction of the South" (2005). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 834. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/834 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. THIS CORNER OF CANAAN: CURRICULUM STUDIES OF PLACE AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE SOUTH A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Curriculum and Instruction by Reta Ugena Whitlock B.S.Ed., Athens State University, 1987 M.Ed., Coppin State College, 2001 August 2005 ©Copyright 2005 Reta Ugena Whitlock All rights reserved ii …Put your hand here. Hear the echo of my mama’s pulse, her laugh, her songs. While I live and sing she does not die. (Dorothy Allison, 1994, p. 243) To my grandmothers, Frona Almeda Fisher (Big Mama) and Nettie B Whitlock (Momo), two very different women who shaped my life in very different ways. I would give anything to visit with you both again for just a little while. I dedicate this work, and my subsequent degree, to you. I pledge to hold you in my heart always and honor your lives with my own. iii Acknowledgments As this dissertation is a narrative journeying through past-in-place to re- claim memory, I would like to acknowledge a few of those people whom I have had the great fortune of encountering along the journey. I heard somewhere that a memory is made when the heart takes a picture. I have been blessed with many vivid heart-pictures of memory to document my trip. My family has given me great support through their faith in me and my abilities. When I write of home, you are foremost in my thoughts. Know that you are present in this work. Mother and Daddy, thank you for my upbringing and sense of place. I have always wished the same for my own children. I often hear your voices: Just don’t forget who you are…, and I try to honor my roots by doing some good. Tracy, my brother, I admire the man you are, and I am glad to know you—glad that you know me. Jessica and Daniel, you teach me daily by reminding me that life does not take place in my head. You are both wonderful people. I love you and believe in you. I thank your father for the wonderful job he does in helping you navigate the rough spots. Layla, I look at you and know joy. To Gladys Kopp, my longsuffering roommate and dearest friend and companion. Thank you for taking care of the daily life. Without you, this would not have been possible. I can never repay you for the support and kindness you have shown. I admire and respect you as a lovely human being and as a teacher scholar who remains centered on the heart of the matter: the children. You, too, are present in the work. iv To my friends and colleagues at the Louisiana Department of Education, I want to express special thanks for support and life-lessons I might have missed were it not for your example and care. Edeltress Brown and Latikka Magee- Brumfield (members of the unofficial Black Caucus) thank you for making me an honorary member. It is you who honor me by being my friends. And Mary Belezaire, everyone should have the opportunity to know someone like you for at least a little while. Without actually knowing you, I never would have believed you could have existed. You are a study in women’s agency. I want to express my appreciation to my graduate student friends. I do not imagine how I could have gotten through the program—the ins and outs of the doctoral process—without your collegiality and networking. Sarah Smitherman, Laura Jewett, Nicholas Ng-a-fook, thanks for hanging with me at conferences, with and without the video camera. Brian Casemore and Nicole Guillory, I am so grateful that you saw all along the journey what I was trying to express and accomplish—and then told me, so that I would also know. A special thanks to you, Brian; I thank you and my thesis thanks you. You are a most brilliant fellow—and home folks to boot! And to the teachers whom I have loved throughout my student life—Mrs. Fowler, Mrs. Wimberley, Mrs. Wells, Miss Renwick, Mrs. Mansell, Dr. Laubenthal—know that you made a difference, continue to make a difference. I dedicate my pedagogy to you professionals, who taught by modeling reflection and caring. At every point along my journey, I find a teacher who saw the woman I might become. Thank you. v I wish to express my most sincere gratitude to my doctoral committee: Dr. William Pinar, Dr. Nina Asher, Dr. Mary Aswell Doll, Dr. Katrina Powell, Dr. Carl Freedman, and also Dr. Petra Munro. Each of you brought something special to the study that has made it—and me—stronger. Dr Asher, I always considered that you held me to a standard of divergent thinking and structural discipline that forced me to stretch my capabilities as a scholar. I am glad you did. Dr. Munro encouraged me to remain focused on historical contextualizations, remembering, to paraphrase Abigail Adams’ admonition to her husband, not only the ladies, but the women. Dr. Powell, thank you for helping me out, and for loving Dorothy Allison. Dr. Doll, your crafting of language—of the words that are “food for starved souls” (2000 xvi)—inspires me. May your letters always be in running water. And Dr. Freedman, thank you for engaging in my work. I shall always remember your thoughtful depiction of a Southern gentleman in seersucker suit. Finally, thank you, Dr. William Pinar, my committee chair and major advisor, for many things—your mentorship, graciousness, and scholarship. Truth is, I never wanted to write one misplaced word, in large part because your regards mean so much to me. Most of all, I want to thank you for seeing some potential in me at a time when I dared not speak my dream. You have helped me find my voice, but more than that, my place. For that, I am grateful. vi Table of Contents DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………..iv ABSTRACT…………………………………………………..……………………viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: RE-THINKING SOUTHERNNESS………………….1 2 SEASON OF LILACS: NOSTALGIA AND HOMEPLACE(S) OF DIFFERENCES…………………………………………………..…...57 3 QUEERLY FUNDAMENTAL: COMPLEXITIES OF CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM AND QUEER DESIRE…………….………….....98 4 “THE PRICE OF RESTORATION”: FLANNERY O’CONNOR AND THE SOUTH’S BIBLICAL VISION………………………………..135 EPILOGUE: COMMUNION: IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME…………….….…..182 BIBLIOGRAPHY…..………………………………………………………………..193 VITA………………………………………………………………………………….209 vii Abstract If place is crucial to understanding the self and society, then it is central to curriculum studies that relate the individual and the social. This theoretical autobiographical research seeks to encourage progressive conversation and social political movement in the South by attending to the anomalous forms of Southernness that emerge in the interrogation of feeling Southern. Toward that end, in this dissertation I explore and foreground a marginalized Southern curriculum of nostalgia, homeplace, grace, and queerness. I investigate aspects of Southern place and feeling Southern that are submerged in conventional white patriarchal notions of Southern identity. My narrative allows some of these anomalous forms of Southernness to surface and, out of these forms, create a Southern curriculum of place. This work is necessary for displacing the dominant, race-, class-, and gender-constricting conception of Southernness that perpetuates itself. The politics of place inform individual and collective Southern identities. As examining Southern place and conventional traits of Southern identity reveal a greater complexity to feeling Southern, attending to anomalous forms of Southernness creates conversation about the progressive transformation of Southern place. The forms of Southernness for which I have created curricular forum are as follows: 1) unsettling prohibitive nostalgia so as to disrupt rather than solidify identity/place norms; 2) homeplace as a site for the interrogation of the construction of identity rather than the consoling, pacifying mirror of identity 3) queer Southernness, exemplified in the conjunction rather than the opposition viii of fundamentalism and queer desire; 4) grace that shatters rather than absolves traditional raced, classed, and gendered notions of Southern identity. This study elaborates a curriculum of Southern place; the study is a journey of self—a self situated squarely in Southern place and the raced, classed, gendered, religious sensibilities of the place. In relation to place and self, this research uncovers sites of subjective and social transformation within the American South. Transformation is not a destination, but is itself a passage, forward motion that requires a continuing disruption of traditional Southern codes that leave the South with nostalgia, guilt, and pain. ix Chapter 1 Introduction: Re-thinking Southernness “Don’t you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse?…What corner of Canaan is this?” Faulkner (1954, p.

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