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Performing Place: Race and Gender in Contemporary Southern U.S

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Performing Place: Race and Gender in Contemporary Southern U.S PERFORMING PLACE: RACE AND GENDER IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN U.S. COMMEMORATION Copyright 2012 Chandra Owenby Hopkins Submitted to the graduate degree program in Theatre and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _______________________________ Chairperson Henry Bial ________________________________ John Gronbeck-Tedesco ________________________________ Nicole Hodges Persley ________________________________ Mechele Leon ________________________________ Stuart Day ________________________________ Chase Bringardner Date Defended: April 6, 2012 The Dissertation Committee for Chandra Owenby Hopkins certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Performing Place: Race and Gender in Contemporary Southern U.S. Commemoration ________________________________ Chairperson Henry Bial Date approved: April 6, 2012 ii ABSTRACT “Performing Place: Race and Gender in Contemporary Southern U.S. Commemoration” examines three commemorative events held in the southern U.S. for the ways in which participants enact desired racialized and gendered identities at each annual commemoration. Three cultural groups and their commemorative events form the case studies that comprise this dissertation and include: the white women’s heritage group, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the “Confederate Memorial Day;” the Native American tribe, the Cherokee and “Frontier Day;” and the African American coastal community of the Gullah-Geechee and the “Sea Islands Festival.” Drawing on participant observation, interviews, published plays, and journals, this comparative study remaps the relationship between the ways in which peoples of “the south” have been staged in American popular culture and how they stage themselves through contemporary commemoration. Each event is imbued with ideas of memory, identity, and heritage for event participants. Memory, identity, and heritage are tied to notions of landscape and place and are therefore examined respectively in chapters two, three, and four for the ways in which they are central to the place-based identity construction participants engage in during each commemorative event. The chapters in this dissertation are each structured to include a history of the cultural group, a history of both the physical site of the event (the land) and the symbolic location of the event (the place), and finally an analysis of the public event itself. This comparative study contributes to the fields of theatre and performance studies, southern studies, African American studies, Native American studies, cultural geography, and American studies. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The content of this dissertation and any errors therein are my own. My thanks are owed to many for their support of the development, research, and completion of this project. Thank you to the Department of Theatre for the Joseph R. Roach Dissertation Research Award that helped fund my initial research, and thank you to the University of Kansas Office of Research and Graduate Studies that provided additional summer research funding. My dissertation committee members have supported me as a student and scholar beginning with my doctoral comprehensive exams. Thank you to Stuart Day and Chase Bringardner for serving as non-department members. Your interest in the project and expertise has sustained me in the writing and defense stages of this dissertation. I appreciate the time and work you have contributed, and it has been a pleasure working with each of you. Thank you to Mechele Leon whose historiographic rigor and infectious curiosity inspired the earliest stages of this project. I am forever grateful for our first conversations and for your continued belief in me. Thank you to John Gronbeck-Tedesco whose wisdom and humor have guided me throughout my time at KU from the “Introduction to Graduate Studies” course till now. It’s been an honor to work with you. Thank you to Nicole Hodges Persley whose unfailing support of me as a student and person has encouraged me to dream bigger, live boldly, and always write with strength. Thank you for your example. Thank you to my dissertation advisor, Henry Bial, who never gave up on me and instead believed when I doubted, supported me when I stumbled, and challenged me when I slowed down. My writing, thinking, and teaching have been changed by my work with you over the years and you will forever have my appreciation. Thank you to each individual I interviewed for this dissertation. You willingly shared with me, welcomed me, and shaped this project. You have my greatest thanks. Thank you to my iv fellow graduate students in theatre at KU, and a special thanks to Scott Knowles who transcribed my doctoral defense. Thank you to my colleagues and dear friends, Lisa Jackson Schebetta and Jocelyn L. Buckner, for their humor and perspective. I look forward to future projects and dreams together in the coming years. Thank you to my entire family and friends who have supported my pursuit of education with joy and unfailing belief in me. I appreciate all that you have done for me and I would not have finished this project without the support each of you has extended to me. To my grandparents and ancestors: while you came before me, you have inspired me to finish my doctoral degree and I benefit from knowing that you have stood with me as I completed this dissertation. Thank you to my mother, Tammy, who has believed in me as a writer since I was a child and has fiercely supported me each year I spent in graduate school. Thank you to my very first teacher and sister, Leah, whose cartography completed this document and whose companionship enlivened my research experience. Finally, I owe my deepest gratitude to my colleague, spouse, and partner in all things— Boone J. Hopkins. My graduate education, every step of my dissertation work, and my life would not be the same without you. You have my greatest respect, appreciation, and love. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One 1 “Performing Place: Race and Gender in Contemporary Southern U.S. Commemoration” Chapter Two 32 “The Landscape of Memory: Gender and Race at Oakland Cemetery” Chapter Three 70 “The Landscape of Identity: Native Histories and New Echota” Chapter Four 100 “The Landscape of Heritage: Community Preservation and Performance on St. Simons Island” Chapter Five 143 “Re-Placing the South” Image Appendix 155 Notes 199 Bibliography 224 vi Chapter One Performing Place: Race and Gender in Contemporary Southern U.S. Commemoration “Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” -William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! This dissertation explores place-based notions of identity and how these are expressed through commemorative public performances in the contemporary, southern United States. Through this comparative study I remap the relationship between race and space by examining the dialectic of land and identity that emerges from the pages and stages of southern drama and performance.1 Three distinct public performances and their respective locations comprise this study: the Confederate “Memorial Day,” the Cherokee “Frontier Day” Festival, and the Gullah- Geechee “Sea Islands Festival.” These events are examined as case studies of shared community performance that are born from racial, national and gendered conceptions of identity. The public performances are further embedded within notions of memory, identity, and heritage that are tied to ideas of land and landscape. I, therefore, examine landscape as the nexus of memory, identity, and heritage that is central in the construction of self in the American south. I argue that the intersections of race and space in the public performances and plays of the south provide a greater understanding of the ongoing creation and recreation of southern identities and histories through performance. The primary focus of this study is performance with written drama serving as a secondary, referential body of evidence. This work is therefore intentionally positioned at the intersection of the written word (the play) and the embodied practice (the performance) in order to reveal the similarities and discrepancies between the ways in which the 1 peoples of “the south” have been staged through the American canon and how they stage themselves through public performance. Context Representations of “southern” identity—traditionally defined as belonging to those peoples who live in the southern United States or “the American south”—have figured prominently throughout U.S. popular culture. The image of “the southerner” is in many ways haunted by decades of dramatic representation through film, television, drama, and song that have secured a permanent and sometimes perplexing place for southern identities in U.S. popular culture.2 A brief sampling of oft-cited examples from American popular culture features “southern” cuisine, characters, songs, and literature and includes: the controversial 1915 film, “Birth of a Nation;” the 1936 novel and 1939 film, “Gone With the Wind;” the late nineteenth- century Uncle Remus Tales “collected ” by Georgia author Joel Chandler Harris; Paula Deen’s restaurants, cuisine and contemporary television show; the 1972 film “Deliverance” and its unsettling portrayal of rural Appalachia; Cash Money Records and the late twentieth and early twenty-first century explosion of the “Dirty South” hip-hop aesthetic; and the 1962-1971 television show “The Beverly Hillbillies.”3
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