WINTER 2020 Celebrating 50 Years of Living Blues
Le I ll Wi e Big ree ri
LB #174 Cover 9/6/04 3:37 PM Page 2 LB #182 Cover_Rockie 1/25/06 5:49 PM Page 2
INSIDE: 2004 Living Blues Awards Winners
Vasti Jackson Issue #264 Vol. 5 , #6 Henry Butler IrmaIrma ThomasThomas
Issue #174 vol. 35. #5 Issue #182 Vol. 37. #1 Rockie Charles ® © George Porter Jr. Lionel Ferbos Sr. Little Freddie King e Lega Deacon John Moore LOW OWN Eddie Bo Bobby Charles OWLIN WOLF Phil Frazier u e t u lin e u ne d illia s Mem Shannon Clarence Frogman Henry Walter Wol fman Washington LOW EN
$4.95 US $6.95 CAN $4.95 US $6.95 CAN err e www.livingblues.com www.livingblues.com Also Featuring... Joe Jonas • Parchman Women’s Blues ie ung
Special Double iSSue! 2015 Living Blues Festival Guide Living Blues Awards Winners Inside! 25th Annual Living Blues Awards Winners Inside! Larr ul er Issue #236 Issue #233 Vol. 46, #2 Vol. 45, #5 ® © ® © ellie a ® © ® © aniel Issue #244 • Vol. 47, #4 Issue #256 Vol. 49, #4 thE JaCKson bluEs sCEnE an a i ards n Traveling e ra the BLUES & u Bus Mississippi PROTEST Rhiannon Giddens $6.95 US $6.95 CAN www.livingblues.com Blues Fantastic Negrito Trail! Women Otis Taylor of the Blues Reverend Sekou Jewel Brown Reggie Garrett Ardella Williams • Jesi Terrell FEATURING: Diunna Greenleaf • Terrie Odabi King Edward • dorothy MoorE $6.95 US $6.95 CAN $6.95 US $6.95 CAN $6.95 US $6.95 CAN $6.95 US $6.95 CAN www.livingblues.com Veronika Jackson www.livingblues.com www.livingblues.com www.livingblues.com JEssE robinson • grady ChaMpion 50 Reviews Inside! Your guide to the Rhiannon Giddens EddiE Cotton • JJ thaMEs Blues in Mississippi gEarshiftEr • JarEKus singlEton Over 40 Reviews Inside! DIRECTOR’S COLUMN
Writing “2020” still feels to me like the beginning a In our vision, students come from science fiction novel. Yet here in our fifth decade, the Center a variety of backgrounds, receive for the Study of Southern Culture is looking to a future full financial support, and grad- even beyond the monumental year we are beginning. Last uate to fulfilling employment. August, we held a “visioning” session involving all thirty of Investing in People means the people whose work is primarily connected to the Center, that not only do we continue to attract and retain top including everyone at the Southern Documentary Project, faculty and staff, but we also hire with an eye toward the Southern Foodways Alliance, and Living Blues maga- diversifying our makeup and remain committed to zine, as well as all faculty and staff. Under the direction of nurturing the creativity of everyone who works in the incomparable Ari Weinzweig of ZingTrain, our guiding Southern Studies once they get here. We build our areas question was straightforward but not simple to answer: what of expertise by hiring additional faculty who study the will the Center look like ten years from now, in 2029? history and experiences of African Americans, Latinx Our brainstorming began over two days in late summer, people, and Native Americans in the South. but the results have sustained us through the fall as we Creating Transformative Learning and Engaging continued working in smaller groups to hone our priori- Communities takes the Center’s knowledge, tools, and ties. Ari encouraged us not to get our feet tangled in details resources off campus both to share our work and to just yet but to use thick description as means of seeing the learn more about the work we can and should be doing. Center as it could be a decade hence. We have been circu- Here the potential arises for partnerships with the UM lating drafts of our vision internally for several months, and School of Education and the UM Division of Diversity we are excited now to share an abbreviated version of it and Inclusion as ways of deepening our relations with the with you. Over the course of our extended conversations, immediate communities of Oxford and Lafayette County, seven commitments emerged as central to our shared future. but also with broader audiences in Mississippi. Eventually Developing Meaningful Collaboration leads us we hire a Community Engagement staff member who to seek both internal and external partners. Within the facilitates work like the projects we already have on the Center, units work together on common themes uniting ground in Yalobusha and Marshall Counties. our programming and our classrooms. Beyond the Designing Inclusive Infrastructure allows our Center, we initiate partnerships with other offices and physical space to reflect our unified mission. First, we groups on campus, with other colleges and universities, upgrade our current facilities in Barnard Observatory to and with community groups who hold a stake in our showcase more fully the scope of our work. Second, we focus areas. As a starting point, our programming theme add a Documentary Arts Wing, complete with teaching for spring 2020 is “Movement and Migration in, to, and labs, multimedia production facilities, gallery space, and through the US South,” and topics proposed for the an auditorium that houses multiple events. In this part of future include voting rights and climate change. the vision, the Center has an in-house library and digital Building Student Community grows the enroll- archive, as well as a full-time archivist. ment in our BA in Southern Studies, our three-track MA Funding the Future acknowledges that innovation (thesis, documentary, and internship), and our MFA in comes at a price. Here we envision a full-time Center Documentary Expression, all while emphasizing the value development officer, as well as a reconfigured Center of interdisciplinarity in a profoundly interconnected world. Advisory Committee whose members continue to have broad interests and creative ideas that span fundraising,
T outreach, and alumni relations. SOUTHERN REGISTER Finally, Earning Global Recognition dedicates the A Publication of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture • The University of Mississippi Center to raising its regional, national, and international
S TT S A T OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI, U.S.A T Published by profiles so that both scholars and nonscholars find our The Center for the Study of Southern Culture work to be groundbreaking and useful. Not coinciden- The University of Mississippi tally, the Center has revitalized our Future of the South Telephone: 662-915-5993 • Fax: 662-915-5814 initiative, which focuses on questions and issues imme- E-mail: [email protected] • southernstudies.olemiss.edu diately relevant to the region’s current challenges and Winter 2020 anticipates those that may arise in coming years. On the cover: A detail from Memories and Time, by KC. We will be regularly measuring our decisions and our REGISTER STAFF opportunities against the ambitious vision we outlined together, and we invite you to join us in thinking about Editor: James G. Thomas, Jr. the now and future South. 2029 will be here before we Editorial assistants: Rebecca Lauck Cleary and Margaret Gaffney Graphic Designer: Susan Bauer Lee know it.
Page 2 Winter 2020 The Southern Register Le I ll Wi e Big ree ri
Living Blues News Issue #264 Vol. 5 , #6
® © The bass may be the Rodney a drummer, and vice versa. You lay Dangerfield of the blues band—it the foundation harmonica players, LOW OWN just doesn’t get any respect. It is the guitar players, even keyboard players most unheralded and misunder- can spring off of.” And bass legend LOW EN stood instrument on the bandstand. Jerry Jemmott who, due to a crushed err e ie ung Many fans don’t really get the role cochlea, can’t really even hear the Larr ul er of the bass and its place in music. bass. His unique approach has been: ellie a To put it simply, the bass provides “I mainly followed horn players and aniel an a i ards n the connection between rhythm and singers . . . not being able to hear e ra melody, holding down the bottom what everybody else was playing. I u Bus
$6.95 US $6.95 CAN end with the drums while helping had to make up what I thought should www.livingblues.com to propel the melody with the be played.” So here is our take on guitar and vocals. LB has dedicated the blues bass player—the low down 50 Reviews Inside! issues to every other instrument on the low end. in the blues (even two drummer We recently lost one of the sweetest issues), and two bass players have persons in the blues world. Beverly I also want to give graced our cover (Willie Dixon and “Guitar” Watkins, who died on our readers an update on writer Lee Willie Kent), but this is our first October 1, was a gem. She was an Hildebrand. As many of you know issue devoted exclusively to the eighty-year-old grandmother, but Lee suffered a stroke two years ago bass player. With this special issue she was also one badass guitar player and has been unable to write since we have now paid tribute to the and stage performer. Watkins came then. I caught up with him a couple complete blues band. into the blues at a time when female weeks ago, and he is living comfort- Inside, we cover eight of the top guitar players were a rarity. While ably in VA housing (Lee is a Vietnam bass players in the blues today, plus she never achieved stardom, she veteran) in California, still passion- this issue’s Let It Roll column focuses did follow her dream and affected ately listening to music and reading, on Willie Dixon’s Big Three Trio, everyone who ever saw her play. She and trying to keep a good attitude on who each has his own approach certainly had an impact on me. the cards life has dealt him. to the bass. Lil’ Ed’s bass-playing As we close out 2019, we take a It seems impossible, but 2020 brother Pookie Young says his role few extra pages to catch up on some marks LB’s fiftieth anniversary. Stay is “holding the backbeat; stay in the of the obituaries we missed earlier. tuned for several special issues to pocket, and let them build off of that.” An unfortunate reality of covering celebrate our golden moment. Floyd McDaniel’s son E.G. McDaniel the blues world is that obits are often says, “I’m a firm believer that the the only national coverage some Brett J. Bonner best friend a bass player can have is local artists get. In Memoriam Elizabeth Spencer July 19, 1921–December 23, 2019
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 3 Winter 2020 SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. Visit the Center’s website, southernstudies.olemiss.edu, for up-to-date-information about all Center events.
FEBRUARY 3 Garrett Felber is an assistant professor of history at Monday, 5:30 p.m. the University of Mississippi. His research and teaching Barnard Observatory focus on twentieth-century African American social “Moving Spirits: History of the Enslaved and Civil movements and US social and political history, Black Rights through Dance and Song” radicalism, and the carceral state. Jennifer Mizenko and Rhondalyn Peairs FEBRUARY 12 Do you know the stories of the enslaved persons Wednesday, noon who built the University of Mississippi buildings that Barnard Observatory you walk into on a daily basis? What is the ideology TrueSouth behind the symbols that are found on campus? In this SouthTalk, members of the Lafayette/Oxford/University John T. Edge and of Mississippi community embody local history through Wright Thompson dance and song. TrueSouth is an SEC/ESPN series. The documentary- Jennifer Mizenko is a professor of dance at the style show explores contemporary southern identity. University of Mississippi. She has a BA in psychology Each episode leverages Southern Studies ideas and from Kenyon College and an MA in dance from The personalities to explore one city through two restaurants. Ohio State University. Rhondalyn Peairs is an Oxford Wright Thompson is executive producer, and John T. native, an educator, and a local historian. She is a Edge is host. Both will join us to screen their Memphis graduate of Tougaloo College and is currently enrolled episode, which features, among others, Zandria in the Southern Studies MA program at the University Robinson, a former Center colleague. of Mississippi. John T. Edge directs the SFA, writes about food- ways, and teaches in the University of Georgia’s MFA program in narrative nonfiction. Wright Thompson is FEBRUARY 5 a writer and filmmaker for ESPN. He lives in Oxford, Wednesday, noon Mississippi, with his family. Barnard Observatory “Fighting Prison Nation: The FEBRUARY 13 Nation of Islam’s Challenge to Thursday, 11:00 a.m. Criminalization” Overby Center Auditorium Garrett Felber “Advancing Each Other: Building Garrett Felber discusses his new Coalitions across Communities” book, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Mandy Carter Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Struggle, and the Carceral State, a political history of the NOI that documents the Mandy Carter is a human rights interplay between law enforcement and Muslim commu- activist and a legend in the LGBTQ+ nities in the postwar United States. His talk highlights community. A resident of Durham, familiar figures in new ways while highlighting the North Carolina, she is a cofounder forgotten organizing of rank-and-file activists in prisons. of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), a human Felber shows how state repression and Muslim orga- rights organization devoted to uniting LGBTQ+ people nizing laid the groundwork for the modern carceral state in the South and to assisting poor, rural, and working- and the contemporary prison abolition movement that class southerners in becoming leaders in shaping the opposes it. region’s future. Her talk focuses on her fifty-two years of
Page 4 Winter 2020 The Southern Register grassroots activism. She explores how diverse commu- and culture at Roanoke College. She writes on topics nities might unite around shared goals of peace and ranging from Maya poetry to Afro-Mexican history. justice. Her visit is cosponsored by the Center for the Keith Cartwright is chair and professor of English at the Study of Southern Culture, School of Journalism and University of North Florida and served as Fulbright- New Media, the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Robles Chair of US studies at Universidad de las Gender Studies, and the Center for Inclusion and Cross- Américas Puebla. Cartwright and Flores-Silva are collab- Cultural Engagement. orating on a book project and series of documentary films examining the Gulf of Mexico as a transnational region and enduring cross-cultural frontier. FEBRUARY 19 Wednesday, 5:30 p.m. Barnard Observatory FEBRUARY 26 Wednesday, noon “The Women of Yalobusha County” Barnard Observatory Dottie Chapman Reed, with Colton Babbitt, Michelle Bright, Brittany Brown, Keon Burns, and Movement and Migration Rhondalyn Peairs Series Lecture During the fall semester, five students in SST 560, Oral “Their Own Kind of Removal: History of Southern Social Movements, taught by Jessie Lumbee Indians in the Wilkerson, collaborated with Dottie Chapman Reed to Antebellum South” develop the Black Families of Yalobusha County Oral Malinda Maynor Lowery History Project. Reed, who lives in Atlanta, is a member of the University of Mississippi Class of ’74, grew up in For the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina, their long Water Valley, and writes the column “Outstanding Black struggle has entailed working through the South’s Women of Yalobusha County” for the North Mississippi racial binary and resisting the erasure that seemed an Herald. The students of SST 560 will present a multivocal, inevitable outcome of Indian Removal. The Lumbees multilayered history based on interviews from their oral persisted in an increasingly hostile environment by history project. Dottie Chapman Reed will speak during adapting some aspects of white culture, including the Summit on Women and Civic Engagement sponsored apprenticeship and marriage, and by building literacy by the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies and practicing Christianity. Others participated in black earlier that day. market activities and met social challenges through legal channels. Their efforts provided a sense of social unity that defined their sense of belonging and defined them FEBRUARY 20 as a distinct community in a biracial region. Thursday, 5:30 p.m. Malinda Maynor Lowery is a professor of history at Barnard Observatory UNC-Chapel Hill and director of the Center for the Movement and Migration Study of the American South. She is a member of the Series Lecture Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She is the author of The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle. “Imagine Freedom: Sounding Yanga’s Cry across Gulf Shores” Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright MARCH 4 Wednesday, noon In the mountains of Veracruz from 1570 to 1609, a Barnard Observatory young African-born Gaspar Yanga led resistance against Movement and Migration the Spanish and forced recognition of his group’s Series Lecture freedom, self-governance, and rights to the land. Yanga’s “Racist Kitsch for the Twenty- Freedom Cry addresses the legacy of this Maroon commu- nity and its founder through interviews with residents First Century? Anthropomorphic Kawaii of Yanga, Veracruz, and adjacent towns. The film pays Asians, -style, and the homage to the Africans who won their freedom and Culture of Cute” examines how Yanga’s triumph and Afro-Mexican lega- Leslie Bow cies still challenge us in spaces shaped by racial legacies across the Gulf. We understand the harm embodied by mammy cookie Dolores Flores-Silva, from the Mexican Gulf state jars, minstrel coin banks, and any number of household of Veracruz, is professor of Latin American literature items depicting African Americans during the Jim Crow
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 5 era, yet these demeaning anthropomorphic objects being transformed by an influx of migrants, primarily have found new iterations in the twenty-first century: Latino. How are these newcomers incorporated into the global circulation of the Asian figure as saltshaker, the social, political, and economic life of communi- kitchen timer, and decor. How is it that such commodi- ties that were nontraditional destinations of migra- ties manage to circumvent taboos surrounding ethnic tion, and how are they challenging the South’s historic caricature that now surround their infamous progeni- black-white racial binary? tors in the US South? How do these new forms of racial Simone Delerme joined the University of Mississippi’s kitsch evade contextualization as racist kitsch? Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Center In part, the answer lies in the rise of the Japanese for the Study of Southern Culture in the fall of 2013. She style known as kawaii or “cute style” since the 1970s, specializes in migration to the US South, with interests in an aesthetic form that has specific resonance for Asian race relations, integration and incorporation, community racialization. This talk explores the racial feelings that development, and social class inequalities. the “cute” enables and draws upon narratives of African American collectors of black memorabilia to engage Asian Americans’ ambivalent relationship to racialized MARCH 18 kawaii things. Wednesday, 5:00 p.m. Leslie Bow is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Overby Center Auditorium Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the Visiting Documentarians University of Wisconsin-Madison. Series Always in Season MARCH 4 Jacqueline Olive Wednesday, 7:30 p.m. Nutt Auditorium Jacqueline Olive is an independent filmmaker and Skrontch Music immersive media producer with fifteen years of experi- ence in journalism and film.Always in Season, her debut Skrontch Music is a project feature documentary, explores the lingering impact of led by saxophonist, clari- more than a century of lynching and connects this form netist, and composer Byron Asher that explores the of racial terrorism with racial violence today. The film histories and lineages of jazz in the South through follows Claudia Lacy as she moves from paralyzing contemporary soundscapes. Featuring a ten-piece New grief to leading the fight for justice for her son, Lennon Orleans-based ensemble, Skrontch Music’s debut album Lacy, who was found hanging from a swing set in rural incorporates elements of sound collage and text from North Carolina in 2014. As the film unfolds, Lennon’s primary source documents to address the intertwined case—and the suspicions surrounding it—intersect with histories of the formation of New Orleans jazz and anti– stories of other communities committed to breaking the Jim Crow activism. The ensemble will present mate- silence of their own recent histories and leading the way rial that uses similar techniques to investigate the blues to justice. This event is cosponsored by the Oxford Film and the radically political and musical themes that are Festival, March 18–22. embedded within them. Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the Department of Music. MARCH 25 Wednesday, noon MARCH 18 Barnard Observatory Wednesday, noon “‘Do you know what it Barnard Observatory means?’ New Orleans Movement and Migration Englishes” Series Lecture Christina Schoux Casey “From Latino Orlando to Christina Schoux Casey is International Memphis: associate professor of English linguistics at Aalborg Migration and Transformation University, Denmark. Her research focuses on New in the American South” Orleans Englishes and how language intersects with Simone Delerme cultural commodification, neoliberal globalization, authenticity, and nostalgia. Casey will discuss New Simone Delerme will share her ethnographic research Orleans language, from Who Dat! to bounce music to that documents the ways that southern places are Vietnamese and French.
Page 6 Winter 2020 The Southern Register APRIL 7 race/ethnicity, migration, labor, political mobilization, Tuesday, 5:30 and social inequalities. Overby Center Auditorium You Asked for the Facts APRIL 15 Mary Blessey Wednesday, 5:30 p.m. In 1966 four years after the historic Barnard Observatory enrollment of James Meredith at the “Black Food Geographies: Race, University of Mississippi, student Self-Reliance, and Food Access” activists devised a plan to defy Mississippi’s speaker ban and bring Robert F. Kennedy Ashanté Reese to the university to reveal the truth about former Using Washington, DC, as a governor and staunch segregationist Ross Barnett. launching point, this talk explores Mary Blessey is a Mississippi filmmaker and recent how structural racism shapes our graduate of the Center’s MFA in Documentary national food system and how communities define, Expression program. She received her MA in Southern critique, and navigate contemporary food access Studies, also from the University of Mississippi, and she inequities. is the owner and founder of her production company, Ashanté Reese is an assistant professor in the depart- Holley Street Media. Her film,You Asked for the Facts, is a ment of geography and environmental sciences at the component of Blessey’s MFA thesis project. University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
APRIL 8 APRIL 22 Wednesday, noon Wednesday, noon Barnard Observatory Barnard Observatory “The Teacher-Shortage Crisis, the Alternate Route, “Burial Ground Is Common and the Mississippi Teacher Corps Thirty Years Later” Ground: Connecting Communities Andrew Mullins through Research/Performance” Andrew Mullins will discuss Mississippi’s teacher Chuck Yarborough shortage and its causes, as well as the alternate route and Southern Studies alum Chuck the thirty-year history of the Mississippi Teacher Corps. Yarborough and students from the Mississippi School Andrew Mullins served as chief of staff to University for Mathematics and Science will share and discuss the of Mississippi chancellors, and worked under chancel- transformative individual and community impact of lors Gerald Turner, Robert Khayat, and Dan Jones. He is award-winning research/performance projects produced emeritus associate professor of education and a founder at their Columbus, Mississippi, school. of the Mississippi Teacher Corps. Chuck Yarborough (MA ’95) has taught high school history classes at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science since 1995. He has been recognized with APRIL 15 multiple awards for teaching and community service, Wednesday, noon including being named 2019 Tachau Teacher of the Year Barnard Observatory by the Organization of American Historians and 2018 Movement and Migration Series Lecture Social Studies Educator of the Year by the Mississippi Council for the Social Studies. “Slaughterhouse South: Migration, Ethnoracial Boundaries, and the Social Organization of Labor” Vanesa Ribas APRIL 30 Thursday, 3:00–5:00 p.m. Drawing on sixteen months of work as a meatpacker in a Butler Auditorium in the Inn at Ole Miss North Carolina slaughterhouse, Vanesa Ribas investigates Future of the South Initiative Lecture the intergroup dynamics between migrants and native- “LGBTQ+ Activism and Advocacy in Mississippi” born workers, showing how the experience of oppres- sive exploitation mediates relations between Latina/o Co-hosted by the Isom Center and part of the Oxford migrants, African Americans, and whites. Pride schedule, we will hear from advocates and activists Vanesa Ribas is an associate professor of sociology about their work to make Mississippi a more welcoming, at the University of California, San Diego. She studies safer, and fairer state for LGBTQ+ people.
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 7 GAMMILL GALLERY EXHIBITION Po’ Monkey’s: Portrait of a Juke Joint Photos and text by Will Jacks
For ten years I spent many Thursday nights at Po’ Monkey’s Lounge, a juke joint outside of Merigold, Mississippi. In the late 1990s this iconic location became the biggest marketing piece used by the state of Mississippi in its quest to promote— and economize—its rich musical heritage. The Mississippi Delta, and its unparalleled history of the blues, was the most significant part of an economic plan to build an economy around cultural tourism. Lauded as “the last of the rural juke joints,” Po’ Monkey’s somehow managed to keep a loyal local following while increasingly attracting tourists from around the world. Blues purists bemoaned the marketing push that undermined the juke’s authenticity, but the found a home. I found friendships, ’90s while in college. On those early core crowd that had been coming and I found the most unexpected trips I wasn’t seeking to understand since the ’60s was still very much mentor. Willie Seaberry was one of anything. I just wanted a beer or two. around when Willie “Po’ Monkey” my greatest teachers. I was young and clueless as to the Seaberry—the owner and namesake When I first visited Willie’s juke significance of the place and the man of the space—passed away in 2016. joint I was intrigued by its myth. who ran it. By the time I returned, I went in search of a story, but I’d heard stories and had even years later, I mostly wanted to what I found was so much more. I visited once or twice in the early understand why the rest of the world had added a visit to Willie’s juke to their bucket list. What I found was a deeper connection to my home. I recon- nected with classmates from high school who I’d lost touch with despite the fact that as adults we lived only a few minutes away from one another. I realized that without the formal structure of school to bring us together, we’d allowed life to pull us into smaller and smaller worlds. Willie Seaberry provided a new structure for our reunions, and just as I forged a bond with the classmates of my youth, so, too, did I form deep connections to those who visited the lounge regularly. Those are the bonds that made Po’ Monkey’s special. We came because
Page 8 Winter 2020 The Southern Register we enjoyed one another. We came to laugh and celebrate and dance and sing together. We drank together. We ate together. On July 14, 2016, we cried together. We are all still seeking that joyous space that closed the night Willie left us. Since Mr. Seaberry’s passing I’ve realized what it all meant, and why we were so lucky. On the Thursday following his death, a celebration was held at Sky Box in Shelby. When I entered the club, the space was certainly different, but the people were the same. The following week we moved to Annie Bell’s in Clarksdale, and the week after that we gathered at the Old Time Blues Place in Marks. We talked about Mr. Seaberry, we toasted his life, and we were grateful for him bringing us all together. I hope this work honors him Will Jacks is a photographer, curator, storyteller, and educator of culture and relationships appropriately. in the Mississippi Delta, the Lower Mississippi River region, and the American South. He teaches photography and documentary courses in the Mississippi Delta.
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 9 The Future of the South
Although the year 2020 seems These tags are geolocated on a wall futuristic in and of itself, faculty at map of the desert showing the exact the Center for the Study of Southern locations where remains were found. Culture are looking beyond the This installation will simultane- present with a scholarly eye to the ously take place at 150 locations next twenty years and more. in 2020 both in the US and The Future of the South initia- across the world. tive focuses on the contempo- The University of Mississippi rary region and shapes conver- installation is a partnership with sations about how it will evolve, the Department of Sociology using innovative approaches and Anthropology and will to studying the South within be displayed on the walls of the context of the nation, Lamar Hall. hemisphere, and the globe. Five SouthTalks will also Programming in this designa- have a focus on movement tion has three elements: the and migration, including topic has a presence in the Keith Cartwright and Dolores curriculum, it figures promi- Flores-Silva on February 20, nently in the scholarship of Malinda Maynor Lowery on at least one Southern Studies faculty understand how powerful global February 26, Leslie Bow on March 4, member, and it extends itself to a forces are shaping local realities and Delerme on March 18, and Vanesa form of community engagement for conditions in a variety of southern Ribas on April 15. a broader audience. states,” Delerme said. “Additionally, Other professors working on “We hope it’s a way for faculty to we will look at the historical anteced- the Future of the South initiative lift up their own interests and share ents to the current phase of global- programs are Jessie Wilkerson with them with broader audiences,” said ization to examine longer historical the Invisible Histories project, and Katie McKee, director of the Center connections, similarities, and differ- Andy Harper and Rex Jones using a and McMullan Professor of Southern ences between past global exchanges multimedia class to examine climate Studies and Professor of English. and the most current forms. Each change, specifically at the Bonnet Several programs are set for this week’s readings will evoke a series Carre spillway. spring. “The first Future of the of critical questions about place- “We will have a Future of the South focus we have is movement specific politics, social experiences, South speaker at the Oxford and migration into and through the and economic relationships in the Conference for the Book on April 1,” United States South,” said McKee. US South.” McKee said. “Maurice Carlos Ruffin Simone Delerme, McMullan asso- One project the class will work will talk about the urgent questions ciate professor of Southern Studies on is documenting the migration of that may face literary artists in the and Anthropology, came up with the Vietnamese refugees to Memphis, present moment in the South. His movement and migration concept. Tennessee using a series of articles novel We Cast a Shadow is futuristic, “Simone’s idea has each of the three from the archives of one of the so thinking about the future of the components: a classroom presence, a Shelby County public libraries. South is not a stretch for him.” role in her scholarship about Latinx The public-facing part of the Ruffin will also be at the Southern migration, and a public-leaning movement and migration idea is Foodways Alliance fall symposium, community engagement piece which Hostile Terrain 94, a participatory and SFA programming for 2020 is culminates in the fall with the Hostile art project sponsored and organized also the Future of the South. Terrain 94 art installation.” by the Undocumented Migration The Future of the South initia- Delerme’s SST 612 Globalization Project, a nonprofit research-art- tive is based on a generous grant in the US South class is an interdisci- education-media collective, directed provided to the Center by the plinary graduate course about global- by anthropologist Jason De Leon. Hardin Foundation, which shares ization in the American South, with The exhibition is composed of 3,200 the Center’s deep investment in the an emphasis on migration. “We will handwritten toe tags that represent future of Mississippi and the educa- be examining the interconnections migrants who have died trying to tion of all Mississippians. that link people and nations econom- cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona ically, politically, and culturally to between the mid-1990s and 2019. Rebecca Lauck Cleary
Page 10 Winter 2020 The Southern Register Invisible Histories Project-Mississippi Launched during Tupelo Pride, 2019
On October 11, 2019, the Invisible in downtown Tupelo. Many hopes to expand the reach of the Histories Project-Mississippi people stopped by the table to see project. If you are interested in (IHP-MS) launched at Tupelo the archival documents—maga- learning more about the project Pride’s opening event, held at zines, photographs, newsletters, or possibly donating manuscript the Link Centre. The mission and memorabilia—on exhibit and collections or print materials, please of IHP-MS is to document and to discuss donating materials or contact Jessie Wilkerson (jcwilker@ preserve the history of LGBTQ recording an oral history inter- olemiss.edu). Mississippians. Co-project direc- view. On Sunday, McDowell and IHP-MS will be hosting a one-day tors Amy McDowell (sociology) I wrapped up the IHP-MS launch symposium, “LGBTQ+ Activism and I, and graduate assistants at the Unitarian Universalist and Advocacy in Mississippi,” on Maddie Shappley (sociology) and Congregation of Oxford, where we the campus of the University of Hooper Schultz (Southern Studies) were invited to speak about the proj- Mississippi on Thursday, April were joined by Joshua Burford ect’s mission and goals. 30, 3:00–5:00 p.m. At the event, and Maigen Sullivan, the direc- With funding from a Mellon grant cohosted with the Isom Center and tors of the first and primary IHP and in collaboration with IHP direc- part of the Oxford Pride schedule, site in Alabama. Students from tors Joshua Burford and Maigen we will hear from advocates and McDowell’s and my graduate Sullivan, we founded IHP-MS in activists about their work to make seminars in sociology and Southern April 2019. With support from the Mississippi a more welcoming, Studies also attended. Isom Center, Archives and Special safer, and fairer state for LGBTQ+ The Tupelo Pride organizers Collections, and the Center for the people. Check the Center’s website gave the IHP-MS team the oppor- Study of Southern Culture (which for more information. tunity to spread the word about has included the project in its Future the project and invite people to of the South Initiative), IHP-MS Jessie Wilkerson participate. We had an information table and two pop-up exhibits. One exhibit showcased a selection of record covers from the collection of Charles Smith, known as DJ Prince Charles, a record aficionado who provided the soundtrack to several gay bars in North Mississippi in the 1990s and early 2000s. His record collection is now housed in Archives and Special Collections at the University of Mississippi. For the second exhibit, Shappley and Schultz curated “ethno-poems” from oral history interviews that they completed as part of the Queer Mississippi Oral History Project, directed by McDowell and me. The main event was a drag show, featuring local performers and emceed by GoDiva Holliday, who was also interviewed for the oral history project. The following day the IHP-MS (Left to right): Maddie Shappley, Amy McDowell, Jessie Wilkerson, and Hooper team attended the second annual Schultz, at the Tupelo Pride drag show, where they exhibited a record collec- Tupelo Pride Festival at Fairpark tion and oral history interviews from the Invisible Histories Project-Mississippi.
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 11 The Twenty-Seventh Oxford Conference for the Book April 1–3, 2020
Ernest Hemingway said, “There other Center faculty work. They Calvocoresi, in honor of April is no friend as loyal as a book,” will discuss the history and future as National Poetry Month. The and both friends and book lovers of the press at a luncheon spon- celebration of poetry takes place converge for the Twenty-Seventh sored by the Friends of the Library each April, was introduced in 1996, Oxford Conference for the Book, in the Faulkner Room in Archives and is organized by the Academy of April 1–3, 2020. and Special Collections in the J. American Poets as a way to increase It is the longest-running event D. Williams Library on the UM awareness and appreciation of produced by the Center for the campus. Lunch is free, but reserva- poetry. The panel, Thursday at 4:30 Study of Southern Culture and is tions are appreciated. p.m. at Southside Gallery, will be always free and open to the public. This year’s participants also moderated by Beth Ann Fennelly, Events will take place on the include poets Julian Randall, Laure- Mississippi poet laureate and UM University of Mississippi campus and Anne Bosselaar and Gabrielle professor of English. around Oxford. Authors and sessions are still being Beginning the conference at added to the schedule, but confirmed 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday, April participants include Dorothy 1, Craig Gill, John Langston, Allison, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Jeff JoAnne Pritchard Morris, and Tonia Sharlet, Tommy Tomlinson, Laura- Lonie will celebrate fifty years of Gray Street, Lily King, Zachary publishing by the University Press Vernon, Jay Watson, and Joseph M. of Mississippi. Founded in 1970, Thompson. UPM is the publishing arm of all On Wednesday evening the Book of Mississippi’s state universities Conference Authors Party will be and has long been a friend to the held at the Brandt Memory House Center, publishing the Mississippi at 406 University Avenue and is Encyclopedia, the Faulkner and co-hosted again by Friends of the J. Yoknapatawpha series, and various D. Williams Library. Attendees have an opportunity to mingle with fellow conference attendees and guest writers at this fundraiser, which is $50 per person. All reservations are made online. A session on “Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies” is set for Thursday, April 2, at 9:30 a.m., followed by a “Music in the South” session at 11:00 a.m. In the afternoon, at 2:30 p.m., the Southern Foodways Alliance presents chef and author Martha Foose and former SFA oral historian Amy Evans with A Good Meal is Hard to Find: Storied Recipes from the Deep South. As in past years, Thacker Mountain Radio will host a special Oxford Conference for the Book show at the Lyric Theatre at 1006 Van Buren Avenue on Thursday, April 2. The
Page 12 Winter 2020 The Southern Register two Lambda Literary Awards and the American Library Association Prize for Lesbian and Gay Writing. Allison will be in conversation with Sarah Heying, a PhD student in English literature at the University of Mississippi, where she researches lesbian and trans aesthetics in peri- odicals, comix, and genre fiction from the 1970s to now, with a partic- ular focus on literature written in or about the South and the Midwest. At noon on Friday, the Lafayette County and Oxford Public Library at 401 Bramlett Boulevard will host a poetry talk and lunch with Laure-Anne Bosselaar, a Belgian- American poet, translator, and guest author is Leesa Cross-Smith, professor. She is the author of four author of So We Can Glow: Stories. collections of poetry, most recently, Friday’s sessions are held at the These Many Rooms. Both the lunch Lafayette County Courthouse on the and talk are free, but reservations Oxford Square and conclude with are required. a reception and book signing at Off Campus visitors may purchase Square Books. parking passes for $3/day at the This year the Oxford Conference welcome center on University Ave., for the Book is happily partnering adjacent to the Grove, upon arrival with the Glitterary Festival to bring to the conference each day. author Dorothy Allison to the The Oxford Conference for the conference on Friday afternoon. The Book is sponsored by the Center Glitterary Festival is a queer literary for the Study of Southern Culture festival with a broad definition of and Square Books, and supported what is literature and what is queer. by the Lafayette County Literacy It will take place on April 3–5. Council, the J. D. Williams Library, Dorothy Allison describes herself the Friends of the J. D. Williams as “a feminist, a working-class story Library, the Overby Center for teller, a southern expatriate, a some- Southern Journalism and Politics, time poet, and a happily born-again the John and Renée Grisham Californian.” She is the author of Writers Fund, the Junior Auxiliary the novel Bastard Out of Carolina of Oxford, and the Lafayette and the short story collection Trash, County and Oxford Public Library. which won The conference is partially funded by the University of Mississippi, a contribu- This year the Children’s Book Festival will be held tion from the R&B Feder March 27, the weekend before the Oxford Conference Foundation for the Beaux Arts, for the Book. More than 1,200 a grant from the Mississippi students from Oxford and Humanities Council, and promo- Lafayette County schools will tional support from Visit Oxford. be in attendance at the Ford To learn more about the Center for the Performing authors and register for special Arts. Oge Mora will speak events, visit the conference to first-graders at 9:00 a.m. website at www.oxfordconference- about her book Thank You, forthebook.com and the confer- Omu! and Cassie Beasley ence’s Facebook page. The confer- will speak to fifth-graders at ence schedule will be posted online 10:30 a.m. about her book Circus Mirandus. this February.
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 13 STUDENT PROFILE
Zaire Love
Finding Vision Everywhere: Zaire Love
How can someone you’ve never murdered outside his place of busi- an emotional pull? But that was the met be an inspiration? Just ask MFA ness in Los Angeles on March 31, catalyst of me making The Black Men student, Zaire Love. For her, the 2019. Though Love didn’t know I Know my thesis,” Love said. death of a musician in California him, his tragedy had a profound The idea of what she wanted impacted her work on a personal effect on her work. was already there: to make a short level in Mississippi. “I was just strangely impacted film talking to black men about Rapper, entrepreneur, and by it, so much, and a lot of people their struggles, wants, and desires. activist Nipsey Hussle released were, and we were just, in a sense, After Hussle died, she realized that his debut studio album, Victory not understanding, because we instead of putting flowers on a loved Lap, in 2018 to critical acclaim didn’t know this person in close one’s grave, she wanted to meta- and commercial success, but was proximity, so why did we feel such phorically give them their flowers
Page 14 Winter 2020 The Southern Register now. “After Nipsey Hussle passed, Indie Grits and they gave me some with people she just met is the we did a lot of memorializing and a money to make it into a seven- matter of familiarity that may or lot of honoring him, and I thought, minute film and that gave me an may not prove to be an advantage. what if he got all of that love while opportunity to expand it.” “With Phi Beta Sigma, I had no he was here? He could’ve had an Harper says that Love came to real expectations. It was just kind impact and made changes as a the MFA program with stories of like, okay, let’s just go there,” trailblazer,” Love said. “So, I guess already bursting from her imagi- Love said. “Whereas with family, I my film is twofold: one, to show nation. “It was clear early on that had certain expectations of certain the vulnerability of black men who what Zaire needed was for the things that I thought were going to society might look at a certain way, Southern Studies faculty and staff be said or how things were going and two, giving them the opportu- to help her learn the foundational to be done. And so, when it was nity to be their full, authentic selves, aspects of storytelling and cultural not said or it was not done or not so they can say, ‘I’m important studies and then to get out of her how I thought the conversation enough to have this beautiful film way,” Harper said. “Zaire has taken was going to go, it went completely made of me, and it shows all of the full advantage of both the course- differently. Then, that’s where you sides to me. It is pushing me in a work and the practical aspects have to deal with reality, and that’s light that I would love to see myself of documentary fieldwork to put why The Black Men I Know kind of in, and now I’m going to take steps herself in a position to be someone felt heavier.” in order to get there.’” who will be a force in telling the Her inquisitive nature helps her to Her thesis film, The Black Men stories of a complicated South for tell all these stories. “I can just ask I Know, follows an uncle and a years to come.” questions of other people. I get their nephew whose neighborhood in Turning strangers into family answers, and it ignites things in Memphis introduced and inducted is also becoming a hallmark for me. I can really create from there. them into violence, incarceration, Love. In the fall semester, she I don’t have to make anything up, and hustle. “I look at how that spent three months with the men and I think that sparks even more manifests itself as trauma and how of the Eta Beta chapter of Phi Beta creativity and passion and purpose these traumatic experiences have Sigma Fraternity Incorporated. She because it’s not some abstract thing. shaped who they are and how they worked with them from September Its somebody’s real life.” interact with the world,” said Love, to November and produced a Regardless if her subject matter who earned an undergraduate twenty-minute documentary that is close to her, or something that degree in theatre from Spelman debuted at the MFA showcase in becomes close to her during her College and a master’s in education December. “It’s basically about filmmaking, Love is someone to from Houston Baptist University. these young black men in a frater- watch both now and in the future. “I Inspiration can come from nity living in Mississippi, their have a vision for myself and where strangers like Hussle, or from close brotherhood, the community in that will take me. I do want to be family. For her first film,Trees , her which they build and the safe spaces a Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, grandmother plays the main role. that they hold,” Love said. She Nina Simone-esque type of figure Initially, it began very small, as showed the fraternity members’ in the arts of everything that’s black Andy Harper encouraged her to interactions and formed a connec- and southern,” Love said. “So, the enter a one-minute film competition. tion with them herself. singer, the writer, the filmmaker, “I made up a song, and I told my “Over the span of three months, the advocate, all wrapped in one, granny about it, how she would be and the bond that you form, now where when you say, Zaire Love, the tree and how the tree symbol- that it’s over, I feel like they’re you understand my work centers izes black women in that there is so family, and they feel that way around the black South, and it has much majesty and so much wisdom towards me. When they posted the made progress and impact. Not in but a lot of times we just walk trailer, they tagged me in it and said an essence to become famous, but past these trees not even thinking I’m their favorite videographer,” to uplift where I come from, and about how did they get there, how Love said. “I was not expecting what has made me.” did they grow, how long are they the relationships that we built. The there, and what they’ve seen and respect that I have for them and Rebecca Lauck Cleary how much knowledge they have they for me is just really beautiful.” acquired just by standing and being Love says that the biggest differ- there, being rooted in a place,” ence in working with people she’s Love said. “Then, I submitted it to known her whole life, and working
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 15 ALUM PROFILE Diagnosing Literature and Culture Odie Lindsey Frames Healthcare
Medical school may not seem like the most obvious place to study and the Region the South, but Odie Lindsey takes future nurses and doctors and asks them to consider this complicated region with a medicinal spin. As the writer in residence at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society (MHS), he teaches writing and literature to students whose academic work investigates the cultural, economic, demographic, and biological factors that impact health. “The aim is to further develop critical and analytical skills by asking students to consider both the craft and aesthetic of writing, and to uncover and explore the cultural structures, codes, and themes within fiction, nonfiction, and poetry,” Lindsey said. He earned his MA in Southern Studies in 2007 from the University of Mississippi and an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A combat veteran, his related short story collection, We Come to Our Senses (2016), was included on Best of 2016 lists at Military Times and Electric Literature, and his fiction and essays have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Iowa Review, Columbia, Guernica, the anthology Forty Stories, and elsewhere. His work examines the crosscurrents of war, gender, sexuality, and the South, and the role of the body in southern literature Odie Lindsey and culture.
Page 16 Winter 2020 The Southern Register Lindsey’s interdisciplinary consists of a series of immersive Lindsey said. “The latter did as Southern Studies training is key outings in Nashville. a volume what I strive to do in to this process, since he says he “Students read scholarly works fiction: attend to both the stand- prefers to teach works that are ripe about a particular health or cultural alone topic, and the larger, struc- with social and cultural complica- topic, before engaging that topic tural scope.” tions. “Echoing one MHS focus on in the city itself,” Lindsey said. Lindsey says he revels in the push the ‘social determinants of health,’ “Subjects of study have included and pull of contention, of complica- my students explore how different sustainable food and food policy, tion, when it comes to considering bodies in different locations are immigration and refugee communi- the South, since the vast majority impacted by social codes and ties, sites of memory and memo- of his students come from beyond behavior, history, policy, belief—and rial, visual art representations, trans the region. “The class challenges how these things shape individual health and health policy, public students to reconsider and reeval- and group wellbeing,” he said. “The transportation, veterans’ health, uate the region, and their assump- texts we consider often echo my and gentrification. After reading the tions, with a focus on the southern Southern Studies interests, such as scholarship and visiting relevant ‘body’—a term that can apply to indi- Larry Brown’s VA-set novel Dirty sites, students produce a written viduals, clinical conditions, policies, Work, Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, report that processes both and or ethics, whether local or global,” Sing, and Molly McCully Brown’s considers the larger relationship to he said. “I take heart in the larger The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics the community.” purpose of the course: to aid their and Feebleminded.” Lindsey also utilizes the Mississippi development as caregivers by asking By bringing both fiction and Encyclopedia in his classroom, which them to suspend what they think they nonfiction into the classroom, is a seamless choice, as he was an know, and to instead be thoughtful Lindsey puts nonfiction materials associate editor of the volume. He in questioning the how, when, and around a work of literary fiction or employs it as a “scholarly spring- why of their beliefs. Of course, as poetry and then builds in related, board.” “Specifically, I asked is qualified for a healthcare frame, immersive exercises. “For example, students to explore topics that I sub out ‘question’ with ‘diagnose.’ if we study the impact of monuments inform or influence Brad Watson In my classes, we diagnose literature and memorials in a novel, they’ll and Jesmyn Ward’s novels—both of and culture.” go to the state capital and consider which are set in Mississippi—even if The biggest gift his students give which bodies are represented in those topics aren’t the focus of the him is the work they produce. statue—or more importantly, which story,” he said. “Most recently, when He challenges them to bring their aren’t—and what this says about our teaching Sing, Unburied, Sing, these healthcare-based specializations cultural ‘body’ and related values,” subjects ranged from Parchman to bear on literary texts, and the said Lindsey, who has received Farm (a major presence in the story), results are inspiring. “I think of the a NEA-funded fellowship to the to Pine forests (a relative glance). student who linked Toni Morrison’s Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Mississippi Encyclopedia articles such 1940s-set The Bluest Eye to a 2017 and a Tennessee Arts Commission as ‘Folk Medicine,’ ‘Black Codes,’ peer-reviewed clinical study in order fellowship in Literature. “Another ‘Law,’ and ‘Voodoo’ and, of course, to illustrate the pervasiveness of example is, when reading Larry ‘Medicine’ were among the many race-based pain stereotypes held by Brown’s Dirty Work, I send students that students used as a prompt for medical students,” Lindsey said. “Or, to observe at the local VA. In the further research, boosting their there was the student who consid- case of these outings, the ‘nonfiction’ insight into Ward’s novel.” ered the impact of bodily trauma, is supplied care of student’s first- The foundation of Lindsey’s PTSD, and historical trauma in Larry hand, written response.” teaching is his writing. He had the Brown’s Dirty Work. They’ve consid- This spring, he is teaching idea for his story collection We Come ered female bodily autonomy and his usual course: Medicine and to Our Senses during his MA thesis mental healthcare in the short fiction Literature (MHS 3050W), a research, and just as the Mississippi of Gayl Jones, the neurological basis writing-intensive course that Encyclopedia is the comprehensive of empathy in the poems of John focuses on literary texts (novels, whole of many individual parts, he Stone. You won’t find much of this poetry collections, short stories, wants every sentence to contribute stuff in literary journals or reviews. essays), complemented by creative to the comprehensive whole of a Don’t tell my students, but they’re assignments and scholarly read- story. “My forthcoming novel, Some teaching me.” ings, and a special-topics course Go Home, couldn’t exist without my Documenting the Body, which work on the Mississippi Encyclopedia,” Rebecca Lauck Cleary
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 17 Living Blues Celebrates Its Fiftieth Year of Publication For half a century, America’s oldest Interviews from Living Blues Magazine, and most respected blues magazine O’Neal recalled, “At one of our first has conducted an ongoing oral history meetings, Bruce said, ‘Well, we’ll all project of the blues, documenting a do this for about five years, and by dynamic musical and cultural tradition that time everybody will have read that continues to thrive today. the magazine and learned every- During the 1960s and ’70s, blues thing they’ll need to know about music was enjoying a resurgence of popularity in the United States and abroad. Yet, at the time there was no domestic print publication that focused specifically on the genre and the musicians creating it. In 1970 a group of seven young blues enthu- the blues, and that’ll be it.’” With siasts—Diane Allmen, Paul Garon, some seed money from Koester, Bruce Iglauer, Jim O’Neal, André they proceeded to put the magazine Souffront, Amy van Singel, and Tim together. They knew nothing of peri- Zorn—gathered at Iglauer’s apart- odical production and had little but ment in Chicago to discuss creating a their own enthusiasm to go on. magazine that focused on the vibrant Living Blues vol. 1, no. 1—on the local music scene. Having connected cover of this issue of the Southern through Bob Koester’s Jazz Record Register—was published in the spring Mart and Delmark Records, they of that year, with Howlin’ Wolf as the wanted to fill this void in music jour- first cover artist. The issue included nalism. In Peter Guralnick’s fore- a first-person interview with the word to The Voice of the Blues: Classic seminal blues musician, as well as a
Page 18 Winter 2020 The Southern Register Katrina/Wolfman 1/25/06 6:04 PM Page 8
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In late September, 2005 LB contributing writer Corey Harris called me with an idea for a short piece on the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the lives of blues musicians in New Orleans. It was a great idea that quickly became our current cover article. As the interviews came in, the power of hearing the musicians (many of whom we had covered through the years in LB) tell their own stories was overwhelming. We quickly realized that nothing we wrote would be as powerful as the words of the musicians. We felt it was important for LB to be a platform for the artists to be able to say what they wanted and needed to say. Some folks are sad, some are angry, some are openly spiritual, but all have an internal strength and sense of perseverance. All of the musicians other than Vasti Jackson and Bobby Charles were living in New Orleans at the time of the storm. The interviews were done over the last month by Corey Harris, Mark Coltrain and Mark Camarigg. Illustrated with the photography of New Orleans based Rick Olivier and David Rae Vasti Jackson Morris, we present our take on Katrina and the blues. Henry Butler IrmaIrma ThomasThomas In their own words...
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SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE - CHICAGO BLUES TODAY! - 25 YEARS OF THE CHICAGO BLUES FESTIVAL Blues largely Chicago oriented throughout Traveling Vol. 39. #3 the its first decade, the magazine soon to ay expanded its scope to include other locales such as Mississippi, California, Mississippi and Texas. Extended interviews Blues with legendary artists such as Bobby o er “Blue” Bland and Jimmy Reed, Trail! alongside lesser-known musicians 0 re ie s like Esther Phillips and Houston insi e insi e Stackhouse, offered insights into $6.95 US $6.95 CAN $7.95 US $7.95 CAN www.livingblues.com www.livingblues.com their lives and times, and provided Your guide to the a greater understanding of the Blues in Mississippi plus Cele rating 5 years of the Chi ago Blues esti al expansiveness and depth of African American blues culture. In 1983 Living Blues relocated from and Xeroxed magazine assembled in Chicago to Mississippi. O’Neal and a basement and sold out of the trunks 2017 Living Blues Festival Guide van Singel transferred the rights to the of cars has expanded to a four-color, University of Mississippi in Oxford, perfect-bound publication printed by ® © where it has been published ever the world’s largest printer and sold on
Issue #248 Vol. 48, #2 since by the Center for the Study of newsstands around the world. Beverly Southern Culture. Peter Lee joined the Living Blues continues to provide Guitar magazine as editor in 1987, where he detailed coverage across the spec- remained until 1992. David Nelson trum of the blues world. Over the Watkins assumed the editorship in 1992, last three decades, special issues have ronnie Baker followed by Scott Barretta in 1999 highlighted blues-based and blues- Brooks and current editor Brett J. Bonner adjacent genres like zydeco, Hill live in ’75 in 2002. To date, Living Blues has Country blues, soul blues, and sacred the story of antone’s published more than 260 issues, nearly steel. The magazine has also docu- 2,500 articles and stories, and over mented flourishing local scenes in Mr. sipp 11,000 reviews, with all of its content cities such as Houston, New York, Los Ben Hunter supplied by a network of freelance Angeles, New Orleans, Birmingham, $6.95 US $6.95 CAN www.livingblues.com writers and photographers. What Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi. Chasing the paramount paper trail began as a black-and-white typeset The Hurricane Katrina special issue
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 19 North Miss Hill Country 3/29/07 6:33 PM Page 8
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LB 189 Cover 3/29/07 6:21 PM Page 1
eye you are in the country again off near Hunter’s Chapel church where McDowell and his wife Annie NEW James Blood Ulmer i ! once played for services and are now buried. This is HILL the same church where featured artist Rev. John The Next Wilkins preaches today. It all ties together. For decades this land has been an incubator
LIVING BLUES #189 APRIL 2007 for a blues style that—while not without outside influence—is unique in its sound. (For a more detailed history of the scene see David Evans’ arti- cle on pg. 76.) Grounded in the sounds of blues- men such as Sid Hemphill, Napoleon Strickland, Mississippi COUNTRYGeneration Mississippi Joe Callicott, Fred McDowell, Johnny Woods, and more recently Otha Turner, Jessie Y Mae Hemphill, R.L. Burnside, and Junior ill ountr Blues photography by Bill Steber Kimbrough, the North Mississippi Hill Country ill ountr Blues blues sound is steeped in regional tradition. Perhaps the most distinct elements can be heard in the African-American fife and drum tradition rooted in the area. The droning, hypnotic quality the next generation The term North Mississippi Hill Country of much of the guitar playing from the region mir- con- Issue #189 - Vol. 38. #2 BLUESjures up images of rolling green pastures, wide open spaces dotted with little Cedric Burnside rors the extended fife and drum workouts com- communities all circled with thick wooded forest land. Unlike the Mississippi mon at local picnics. MISSISSIPPI HILL COUNTRY BLUES: THE NEXT GENERATION - 2007 BLUES FESTIVAL GUIDE Delta, the hill country is made up of mostly cattle farms and small, single Today’s North Mississippi Hill Country blues family hard scrabble farms. There are no huge cotton plantations, few big sound is held in the hands of the children and houses, and little industry. Yet the hill country has a uniqueness to it—it is grandchildren of the early masters. In this issue very much Mississippi, but it is definitely not the Delta. we present the next generation of North Drive up Highway 7 headed north from Oxford, Mississippi and the “mod- Mississippi Hill Country blues. A tradition that ern” world quickly fades away. As you cross the Tallahatchie river time seems to David and Junior Kimbrough play together at Junior's juke joint, August 1993 continues to evolve and thrive in a rich little fade away like the smoke from Bette Davis’ BBQ—the first stop on any trip into region of Mississippi soil. Marshall County since it is also the first place to buy cold beer. You can take 310 west and pass the old Club Disco 9000, and wind your way past the fishermen —BRETT J. BONNER with cane poles and john boats headed off to Sardis Lake to spend the day fish- R.L. and Duwayne Burnside play together at Junior Kimbrough's juke joint ing. The smell of fried catfish hangs in the air. You can turn north on 305 and in August of 1993. catch Highway 4 where Junior Kimbrough’s old juke joint once stood. Or you can keep heading west and you’ll pass near Buford’s Store where Napoleon Strickland and Otha Turner used to play at one of the local fife and drum pic- nics. You are just around the corner from where the Turner family currently holds its annual picnic. Within a few miles you’ll pass the old Stuckey’s restaurant where Fred McDowell pumped gas, then on into Como and in the blink of an
Kinney Kimbrough
Kent Burnside Duwayne Burnside David Kimbrough John Wilkins and others...
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times in the years since. In acknowl- revealed the horrors and aftermath edgment of the contributions Living music—it’s the people and the charac- of the storm through the eyes of the Blues has made to blues documenta- ters that drive us to do what we do.” musicians who survived it, and the tion and scholarship, the magazine It’s what Living Blues was founded Blues and Protest issue detailed how received the Keeping the Blues Alive on, and it remains the same today. blues artists use music to call attention Award from the Blues Foundation Ever focused on a vital, evolving to social injustices. Besides extensive in 1993 and a Mississippi Blues Trail artistic culture, Living Blues looks feature articles, album, book, and film marker from the state of Mississippi forward to documenting the next reviews, and the latest Blues News in 2009. fifty years of the blues. briefs, other regular features include Current editor Brett Bonner Living Blues will celebrate its fiftieth Deitra Farr’s Artist to Artist interview observes, “After nearly a hundred anniversary throughout 2020, with series, Breaking Out stories on under- years of recorded legacy and fifty special events and the official anni- the-radar performers whose careers years of Living Blues, the blues is versary issue scheduled for April/ are on the rise, and the industry’s still a vibrant, powerful, passionate May. To subscribe to Living Blues, only Radio Charts, compiled by Jim musical form whose influence can which All Music Guide calls “abso- McGrath and featuring the top tracks be found in virtually all forms of lutely the best blues publication from blues radio playlists worldwide. popular music. From rock to pop, available, and in fact one of the best Living Blues hosted the first Blues country to rap, the roots of the blues specialized music magazines of any Today: A Living Blues Symposium at run deep and wide. But to those of kind,” visit www.livingblues.com. the University of Mississippi in 2003 us at LB it’s more than simply the and has presented the event several Melanie Young
Selma marchers, some holding placards, walking to the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, March 1965. 25th Annual Living Blues Awards Winners Inside!
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Issue #256 Outrage Vol. 49, #4 “Sing Out!” said Pete Seeger. Protest songs testify about suffering and hope, the tenacity of survival and the gritty determination to overcome injustice and a yearning for freedom. Channeled In these perilous times, a new age of injustice, African American musicians in the blues scene are singing out louder than ever BLUES & through verse and song lyrics. Their power- ful voices join mainstream pop stars who express anger over racism and injustice, such as Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar. Given the COURTESY OF THE ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICES DIVISION, MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY. current backlash against Black Lives Matter on PROTEST social media, even by a few misguided people professing to be blues fans, it is important in Verse that a new wave of protest and social-change I’m tired of being Jim Crowed, gonna leave this Jim Crow town songs has emerged. Doggone my black soul, I’m sweet Chicago bound. Rhiannon Giddens There have been blues songs of protest since the earliest days of recordings. Blues Yes I’m leaving here from this old Jim Crow town songs are inextricably linked to the African I’m going up North where they say money grows on trees American experience of Jim Crow–era segrega- I don’t give a doggone if my black soul is free Fantastic Negrito tion and oppression, and partly derived from I’m going where I won’t need no baby. spirituals and work songs during slavery. Bluesman Phil Wiggins perhaps described I got a hat, got a overcoat, don’t need nothing but you it best: “The blues did not happen because These old easy walkers going to give my ankles the blues Otis Taylor of slavery. They happened despite slavery.” But when my girl hears about this, oh, that will be sad news. Perhaps the blues would have existed without I’m going up North, baby I can’t carry you . . . Jim Crow laws, but the cruel inhumanity and suffering that made life hell for African Maybe one reason why some people don’t readily associate traditional blues with Reverend Sekou Americans in the South brought out voices in social change and resistance is that southern black musicians in the early 20th century song, one of the few ways that the musicians had good reason to fear reprisals from the dominant white power structure. Sometimes could confront harsh injustice was through protest and resistance had to be coded and hidden in innuendo. Author Adam Gussow the blues—songs of the unprotected, who referred to this hidden-meaning lyric as “skillful signifying.” In his lyrical expression of Reggie Garrett Bob Marley called “the sufferers.” It is not the blues, the singer was often unable to say what was really meant without retaliation, coincidental that the personified name “Jim so the singer may, for example, have used the word “devil” to mean the “boss man” or Crow” appears so often in blues songs. The any oppressive force. The boss may hear it and never know the song is about him. term evidently originated from a minstrel Josh White, however, was up north and he did not have to hide his views. In show character developed during the mid-19th 1941, he recorded Jim Crow Train, a classic protest song: century that later became synonymous with $6.95 US $6.95 CAN the strict southern segregation laws. There Can’t you hear that train whistle blow? www.livingblues.com are many songs about “escaping Jim Crow” Can’t you hear that train whistle blow? to migrate north. Cow Cow Davenport didn’t Can’t you hear that train whistle blow? hold back on Jim Crow Blues recorded for Lord, I wish that train wasn’t Jim Crow. Paramount in 1927: Stop the train so I can ride this train Stop Jim Crow so I can ride this train Over 40 Reviews Inside! Stop Jim Crow so I can ride this train Black and white folks riding side by side. 7/22/18 9:05 PM by Frank Matheis Features.indd 11 7/22/18 9:05 PM
Features.indd 10 Page 20 Winter 2020 The Southern Register New Oral History Project Documents African American History in Yalobusha County
During the fall semester, five COZART KEVIN students in SST 560, Oral History of Southern Social Movements (taught by me), collaborated with Dottie Chapman Reed to develop the Black Families of Yalobusha County Oral History Project. Reed, who lives in Atlanta, is a member of the UM Class of ’74, grew up in Water Valley, and writes the column “Outstanding Black Women of Yalobusha County” for the North Mississippi Herald. The students—Colton Babbitt, Michelle Bright, Brittany Brown, Keon Burns, and Rhondalyn Peairs— conducted original research and recorded first-person accounts with eight narrators, all of whom grew up in and have strong family ties to Narrators with interviewers at the oral history program on December 7: (front Yalobusha County: Lillie Roberts, row, from left) Dorothy Kee, Lillie Roberts, Marjorie Moore and Katherine Emma Faye Gooch, Dorothy Kee, Pollard; (back row, from left) Colton Babbitt, Keon Burns, Brittany Brown, Emma Marjorie Moore, Katherine Roland Gooch, Dottie Reed, Rhondalyn Peairs, Michelle Bright, Luther Folson Jr. and Jessie Wilkerson. Pollard, Luther Folson Jr., Luther Folson Sr., and James Wright. Their goal was to create a permanent repository at the University of Culture, the Arch Dalrymple III record to contribute to an under- Mississippi and will be made avail- Department of History, and the standing of African American history able to the public. UM Diversity Incentive Fund. in North Mississippi. Upon completing interviews, With the support of a $3,000 dona- The interviews offer rich descrip- students listened to one anoth- tion from the Sylarn Foundation tions of life for Black people er’s recordings and, after hours (based in Michigan), we will be in Yalobusha County from the of discussion, created a multi- able to continue collecting inter- early twentieth century to the vocal, multilayered history. They views in the spring semester. present, documenting how African presented that collective narra- On February 19, 2020, students Americans attained land, built tive, “‘All Our Names Were will be joined by Dottie Reed for institutions such as churches and Freedom’: Agency, Resiliency, and a second performance of “All Our schools, asserted the right to vote, Community in Yalobusha County,” Names Were Freedom” as part and joined civil rights protests for in a staged reading on December 7, of the Center’s SouthTalks series dignity and equality. The narra- 2019, at Spring Hill M.B. Church and in conjunction with the Sarah tors tell more intimate stories, North before an audience of Isom Center’s Women and Civic too, about the meaning of family approximately seventy community Engagement Summit. The event will in their lives, their faith tradi- members, UM faculty and students, be held at 5:30 p.m. in the Tupelo tions, and their relationship to and six of the interviewees. Room in Barnard Observatory and place. Each of their interviews and The event and larger project is free and open to the public. accompanying documents will have been supported by the be preserved in the institutional Center for the Study of Southern Jessie Wilkerson
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 21 Music, Mythology, Race, and Images of the South Spring Courses Offer Something for Everyone KEVIN BAIN KEVIN Changes to the Southern Studies curriculum made in Fall 2019 are coming to the classroom this semester. For the first time this spring, SST 103: Southern Mythologies and Popular Culture and SST 108: Music and Southern Society are on the schedule. Brian Foster, assistant professor of sociology and Southern Studies, and Darren Grem, associate professor of history and Southern Studies, are team-teaching the SST 108 course, which highlights the riddles and paradoxes of the South. They aim to interrogate the people and history of the South through a critical reading of the region’s protest culture(s)— Jodi Skipper Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam,” Merle Haggard’s “I’m Just a White Boy,” Beyonce’s said Grem, who is also the under- challenge or even change—the racial, “Formation,” and others. graduate student advisor. “A playlist gendered, and economic arrange- “Today, millions around the world consisting of a hundred songs will ments of the South and broader enjoy music born and bred in the serve as the course’s main texts. nation and world.” American South, and this course At home and in class, students The course considers perspec- will examine the major genres of will use the playlist’s musical and tives from a variety of disciplines southern music, proceeding quasi- lyrical contents to understand how and examines a range of texts, from chronologically from the antebellum specific songs, artists, records, and scholarly essays to popular culture. era to the late twentieth century,” performances fit into or reaffirm—or “We will also seek to understand the visual, commercial, social, and Brian Foster political cultures of southern music, examining how musical artists continue to draw lines around what is “southern,” who or what counts as “southern,” and who wins and loses from the making of “southern” music today,” Grem said. Adam Gussow, professor of English and Southern Studies, will introduce SST 103 students to three familiar versions of the mythic South—the pastoral South, the benighted South, and the plan- tation South—that have shaped both native and outsider percep- tions of the region for several centuries, exploring and critiquing them through a range of popular ROBERT JORDAN
Page 22 Winter 2020 The Southern Register Ralph Eubanks think that students see racism as a problem, but race is the root of the problem, and those two can’t be separated.” As usual, a SST 598 Special Topics class is set for spring, this time taught by Ralph Eubanks, visiting professor of English and Southern Studies. The Image of the American South and Beyond examines the American South through the visual art of photography and its linkage with literature, as well as how the image of the American South—as captured through the lens of Walker Evans and the prose of James Agee—has had an impact more broadly on liter- ature. Susan Sontag’s On Photography ROBERT JORDAN and James Agee and Walker Evans’s investments, including literature, has developed in the field through Let Us Now Praise Famous Men serve musical recordings, music videos, human variation and adaptation in as a foundational works. and film. the US, and then changed histori- “My inspiration for the course “We will also investigate two cally over place and time. derives from my years of working related clusters of imagery and “For the latter, I’ve assigned a in the Farm Security Administration ideology: the South-as-western, sociology text to introduce students photography archive at the Library with Smokey and the Bandit, ‘Old to how ‘white’ came to be legally of Congress,” Eubanks said. “What Town Road,’ and ‘I Play Chicken defined in colonial America, how I learned from the FSA archive is with the Train,’ and the ‘blues’ other groups of people were framed that while photography is a way of South, with Robert Johnson selling in relation to that, and how the US seeing, it is also an artform that has his soul to the devil at the cross- South, especially around southern an impact on how writers create roads,” Gussow said. segregation, led to legal definitions of imagery with words. As Dorothea One goal he has for the course, ‘black,’” Skipper said. “We also look Lange said, ‘the camera is an instru- achieved in part by juxtaposing the at some of the major debates that ment that teaches people how to see idealizations and de-idealizations have dominated the study of race without a camera.’” of southern myth with the stub- and ethnicity in the US, and how Eubanks uses the visual record born facts of southern history, will that’s impacted and been impacted of the American South, including be a deeper kind of seeing and by southerners like Zora Neale novels, nonfiction narrative, and hearing. Authors, performers, texts, Hurston and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.” journalism, particularly magazine and themes covered in class will The class also addresses the topics journalism of the 1960s in illus- include “Sweet Southern Comfort,” of slavery, Native Removal, Mexican trated magazines such as Life and Roots, Eliott Gorn on rough and immigration and the creation of Look. “The American South is one tumble fighting,Forrest Gump, Rissi Tejanos, colorism, the eugenics of the most documented regions Palmer and African American invest- movement, and genetic genealo- photographically, largely because of ments in country music, Tucker and gies. Skipper, who only taught this the work of the FSA,” Eubanks said. Dale vs. Evil, “Southern Comfort course for the first time in fall 2019, “Those images provide a grammar Zone,” Mandingo, Swallow Barn, and said students were engaged with for how we see the South. While “Kickin’ Up Mud.” the topic, which was facilitated by remnants of the Depression-era For only the second time, Jodi several group exercises. “My goal South linger, the image of the Skipper, associate professor of was to disorient their preconceived region has evolved over time. anthropology and Southern Studies notions of race, to help them think And that is what we study in my will teach SST 104: The South and about how people become ‘races’ special topics class: how the image Race, which examines historical before getting into the impacts of of the South has changed and is and contemporary dimensions of race,” she said. “It’s admittedly a continuing to change.” racial and ethnic relations in the lot to pack into a class but, I think, US South. The course begins from it’s caused students to think more Rebecca Lauck Cleary an anthropological perspective, by critically about the power of catego- examining how the idea of race ries. That was part of my hope. I
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 23 FROM THE WEB PAGES OF THE MISSISSIPPI ENCYCLOPEDIA “The March Against Fear”
The March Against Fear, also known Of course, online encyclopedia don’t have “pages” in the traditional sense of the term, as the Meredith March, coursed from but since 2018 we have been adding entries to the online version of the Mississippi Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Encyclopedia. Here’s our latest addition, “The March Against Fear,” by University Mississippi, in June of 1966. The trek of Memphis history professor Aram Goudsouzian. You can find it and other scholarly began as the solo endeavor of James work about life in the state, past and present, online by going to Meredith, but it was ultimately taken www.mississippiencyclopedia.org. up by major civil rights organizations,
activists from around the country, and ARCHIVES. UNIVERSITY AND COLLECTIONS SPECIAL OF DEPARTMENT LIBRARIES. UNIVERSITY STANFORD [M1994_MEREDITH_092], ARCHIVE PHOTOGRAPHY FITCH BOB thousands of black Mississippians. The March Against Fear is most famous for Stokely Carmichael’s unveiling of the slogan “Black Power.” This demonstra- tion showcased an important transition in the national civil rights movement. It further highlighted the triumphs and tensions of black politics in Mississippi. James Meredith had achieved international prominence for his courage while integrating the University of Mississippi in 1962. In 1966 he was a student at Columbia Law School in New York City. On June 5 he started walking south down Highway 51 from the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis. He stated two goals: to encourage black voter registration and to challenge white intimidation. A quirky individ- ualist with a belief in his own divine The June 26, 1966, March Against Fear rally at the Mississippi state capitol, destiny, Meredith also hoped that with Martin Luther King Jr. speaking and James Meredith sitting before the his walk would kickstart a run for podium (right). political office in Mississippi. The next day, just south of Hernando, a white man named By June 7 major civil rights leaders Equality (CORE)—wanted a march Aubrey Norvell emerged from a had congregated in Memphis. In with a focus on black voter registra- gully and fired his shotgun three mass meetings at churches and tions and a strong black identity, as times. He wounded Meredith with in closed-door discussions at the well as armed protection from the bird shot pellets in the back, neck, Lorraine Motel, they debated about Deacons for Defense and Justice. and shoulder. The shooting spurred the nature of the march. Roy Wilkins The NAACP and Urban League an outcry. A photograph of the of the NAACP and Whitney Young withdrew from official participation, writhing Meredith appeared on the of the National Urban League sought leaving King and SCLC as the key front page of newspapers around a racially integrated and nonvio- moderating force. the country. Politicians expressed lent march that would serve as a Over the next three weeks, the their outrage. Among others, lobbying tool for the Civil Rights march moved through Mississippi. Martin Luther King of the Southern Bill of 1966. But leaders of the more Despite the logistical challenges of Christian Leadership Conference militant, grassroots organizations— a traveling mass protest, African (SCLC) vowed to continue such as Stokely Carmichael of the Americans kept staking claims to Meredith’s march. A single man’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating citizenship. The activists staged walk had become a massive civil Committee (SNCC) and Floyd voter registration rallies outside rights demonstration. McKissick of the Congress of Racial courthouses. In Batesville, the new
Page 24 Winter 2020 The Southern Register Eudora Welty registrants included El Fondren, a Throughout Mississippi, whites Awards 106-year-old man who had been heckled the marchers and bran- Each year the born a slave. In Grenada, a town dished Confederate flags. During Center for the notorious for violent racial intimida- the final week, on June 22, a mob of Study of Southern tion, the marchers rallied around local whites attacked the contingent Culture pres- the statue of a Confederate soldier, of marchers who took a side trip to ents the Eudora brandishing their defiance of Philadelphia, Mississippi, to observe Welty Awards white supremacy. They registered the second anniversary of the in Creative hundreds of voters and launched a murders of three civil rights workers. Writing to local freedom movement. Two days later, the marchers planted Mississippi high The march’s sponsors included their tents on the grounds of another school students during the annual Mississippi organizations such as the black school, this time in Canton. Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Mississippi Freedom Democratic The Mississippi Highway Patrol Conference. Established and Party, the Delta Ministry, and the attacked them with tear gas and rifle endowed by the late Frances Madison County Project. Prominent butts. In the grotesque aftermath, Patterson of Tupelo, the awards figures of the Mississippi move- dozens of people required medical are given for creative writing in ment—including Fannie Lou Hamer, attention, while the militancy of frus- either prose or poem form. Charles Evers, Flonzie Goodloe, trated activists intensified. Students must be Mississippi and Lawrence Guyot—played crucial The March Against Fear ended on residents. The competition is open organizing roles. June 26 with the largest civil rights to ninth through twelfth graders, Departing from Meredith’s path demonstration in Mississippi history, and writing should be submitted down Highway 51, the march as fifteen thousand people marched through students’ high schools. detoured into the Mississippi Delta. through Jackson and congregated Short stories should not exceed On June 16, it reached Greenwood, at the Capitol. A weakened James three thousand words, and poetry where SNCC had a long history of Meredith won the loudest cheers. should not exceed one hundred grassroots organizing. Carmichael The march had evolved in ways that lines. Winning students will be provoked his own arrest while trying Meredith never imagined or desired, notified at least a month prior to to erect the march’s tents near a but it accomplished his stated award presentation. The first-place black elementary school. When he goals. Over four thousand African prize is $500, and the second-place emerged from jail, a rally was occur- Americans along the route registered prize is $250. The winners will also ring in Broad Street Park, in the heart to vote, while many more defied be recognized at the opening of the of Greenwood’s black district. SNCC white supremacy by joining the 2020 Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha organizers, such as Willie Ricks, had march. This final great march of the Conference on the University of primed the crowd. When Carmichael civil rights movement had christened Mississippi campus in Oxford on asked, “What do we want?,” the audi- the slogan of Black Power. To many July 19. ence yelled back, “Black Power!” black Mississippians, it was also a Each entry should be accompa- “Black Power” quickly emerged as moment of inspiration. nied by the entry form and post- a point of national debate. The main- marked by May 15, 2020. Faculty stream press interpreted the slogan Aram Goudsouzian and staff from the Center for the as violent and vengeful, while to University of Memphis Study of Southern Culture will many African Americans the phrase judge the entries and select the conveyed desires for black political For Further Reading: winners. Application and submis- autonomy, cultural pride, and the sion requirements will be sent to right to self-defense. On the march, Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s all Mississippi public and private activists launched competing chants Edge: America in the King Years, schools. If you know a Mississippi of “Freedom Now” and “Black 1965–1968 (2006); John Dittmer, student currently enrolled in high Power.” Martin Luther King did not Local People: The Struggle for Civil school outside of the state or who use the slogan, which he considered Rights in Mississippi (1995); Aram is homeschooled, please e-mail a repudiation of nonviolence and Goudsouzian, Down to the Crossroads: [email protected] or call racial brotherhood. Still, he worked Civil Rights, Black Power, and the 662-915-3369 for a copy. To see a in creative tension with activists Meredith March Against Fear (2014); list of past winners or to download such as Carmichael. Whatever their Peniel Joseph, Waiting ’Til the the application, visit http://south- political distinctions, they shared the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of ernstudies.olemiss.edu/academics/ larger goals of black freedom. Black Power in America (2006). high-school-eudora-welty-awards/.
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 25 FROM STUDY THE SOUTH Study the South Publishes Two New Essays Representations of Slavery and Southern Hospitality Subjects of New Work in Center Journal
On November 20, Study the South published a new essay by Sarah Payne, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Liberal Arts at Middlebury College. Recent representations of slavery have provoked discussions about who should represent black pain and oppression and what purpose such representations serve. The tour of Whitney Plantation, which opened in 2014 in Wallace, Louisiana, stands out to Christian teachings just as well as reverence for southern tradition. In this new Study the South essay, Betsie Garner argues that a mutuality char- acterizes the relationship between southern hospitality and Christian hospitality. The image of a gracious southern hostess shares a certain coherence with that of a neighborly Christian, and the notion of hospi- tality resonates with both regional and religious dimensions of identity for many Christians in the South. as the only plantation tour in the US the refusal of racial identity in Garner received a PhD in soci- dedicated to depicting the antebellum twentieth-century women’s writing, ology from the University of South entirely from the perspective of focusing on Harlem, the US South, Pennsylvania in 2017, an MA in former slaves. Using examples from and the Caribbean. Her research inter- sociology from the University of well-known novels such as Octavia ests include southern literature, gender Pennsylvania in 2013, and a BA in Butler’s Kindred and Toni Morrison’s and sexuality, and digital humanities. sociology from Emory University Beloved, Sarah Payne demonstrates On December 20, Study the South in 2011. Her research on topics how the Whitney, like these textual published a new essay by Betsie related to family, culture, and place narratives of slavery, employs bodily Garner, an assistant professor of soci- analyzes how inequality is created epistemology, sentimentalism, a white ology at Tennessee Tech University. and maintained through routine authenticating presence, and a focus The image of a warm and social interaction in people’s daily on authenticity, making neoslave welcoming South is often summoned lives. Additional work on the present narratives useful lenses through which as a moral calling, a sacred duty to topic has appeared in The ANNALS to read the immersive experience of bridge differences by treating others of the American Academy of Political and the Whitney’s unique plantation tour. hospitably. Southern regional iden- Social Science and Sociology Compass. Payne earned her PhD in English tity is positioned as having equal Visit www.studythesouth.com to literature from Northeastern importance to that of Christian reli- read Payne’s and Garner’s essays, as University. Her dissertation analyzes gious identity, hinging on devotion well as other essays in the journal.
Page 26 Winter 2020 The Southern Register University Commemorates Racial Injustice on Campus CALL FOR PROPOSAL with Two-Day Event
On February 24 and Announcing the 25, the University of Mississippi will Study the South commemorate the fiftieth anniversary Research Fellowship of the protests and mass arrests of black at the students that took place on campus on University of Mississippi February 25, 1970. Black Power at Ole Scholars researching the South now have an oppor- Miss: Remembrance, tunity for funded research in the collections of the Reckoning, and Repair Department of Archives and Special Collections at the at Fifty Years will J. D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi. remember and honor The Study the South research fellowship, sponsored by the activism and sacri- the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the fice of student activ- Department of Archives and Special Collections, will ists, reckon with the harm and trauma caused provide funding of $1,500 to one qualified scholar, by the actions of the university and law enforcement, and who will also have access to a carrel in the library and seek reparative solutions grounded in truth-telling and an opportunity to publish an essay in Study the South justice. This event is organized by the Arch Dalrymple III based on their research. Department of History, with support from the Center for Special Collections has particular strengths in areas the Study of Southern Culture, the Division of Diversity and that include political history, the blues, civil rights, Community Engagement, and the Office of the Provost. and the antebellum and Civil War eras. Subject Black Power at Ole Miss will begin February 24 in guides and finding aids at Archives and Special Fulton Chapel, the site of the main arrest, by screening Collections can be found at www.libraries.olemiss. the short documentary film,Black Power at Ole Miss, edu/specialcollectionspages. featuring former student activists interviewed as part of The funds will support travel and lodging expenses, the Parchman Oral History Project during the summer and the remainder serves as a stipend. Research of 2019. The event will also feature a theatrical reading should take place between June 2020 and May 2021. of the hearings of the eight students who were eventually The deadline for application is March 30, 2020, and expelled from the university, produced by theater arts the selection committee will notify the awardee by professor Peter Wood, featuring current students as well May 1. as former students playing themselves. The evening will Study the South is an online scholarly journal at the close with a panel discussion and talkback moderated Center for the Study of Southern Culture. We will ask by visiting professor of Southern Studies, English, and the successful fellow either to give a public presenta- honors Ralph Eubanks. tion at the Center or a short, recorded interview about The second day will feature a luncheon from noon to her or his work, to be shared through Study the South, 2:00 p.m. with current University of Mississippi students, www.studythesouth.com. sponsored by the Black Student Union, Black Alumni All scholars, including advanced graduate students, Association, the Department of African American are eligible for the fellowship. Candidates should send Studies, and the Division of Diversity and Community a 1–2 page description of a research agenda, citing Engagement. It will be followed by a commemorative research questions and specific collections that seem ceremony at the site of the chapel arrest at 3:00 p.m. Dr. most useful, to James G. Thomas, Jr., editor of Study Yusef Salaam, one of the exonerated Central Park Five, the South, at [email protected]. will close with the Black History Month keynote address at the Student Union Ballroom. Please direct any questions to the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement at 662-915-2933.
Winter 2020 Page 27 The Southern RegistereE READING THE SOUTH Book Reviews and Notes by Faculty, Staff, Students, and Friends of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture
Mississippi Witness: most horrific episodes. Mars’s most active period The Photographs of as a photographer (and the Florence Mars time frame for nearly all the images in the book) was Edited by Elaine Owens. the decade leading up to Introduction by James T. 1965. During that time she Campbell. Photographs by photographed in and around Philadelphia, focusing on Florence Mars. Jackson: general town scenes, small University Press of bits of daily life, and portrai- Mississippi, 2019. 134 pag- ture, primarily of African Americans. es. $40.00 cloth. Except to show what Philadelphia, Mississippi, Florence Mars (1923–2006) was looked like in the middle born, raised, and lived most of her of the twentieth century, adult life in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Most local people seemed to her town-scene and daily-life photo- In some ways, however, she did understand that the Klan had graphs are unexceptional. Some not seem a woman of that time or murdered the civil rights workers, are from too far away; others lack a place. The granddaughter of one but county and town officials sense of moment or narrative. The of the town’s founders—a merchant advanced an account that claimed many portraits she made, however, who prospered by “furnishing” local their disappearance to be a hoax are more striking and provide farmers in the spring and fore- promoted by the civil rights move- considerable food for thought. Her closing upon those who couldn’t ment to defame Neshoba County. several best are from close range pay him back after harvest—she and Florence Mars knew that narrative and concentrate on such qualities as her family were solidly members to be a lie and, along with a very few clothing, body language, and facial of Neshoba County’s ruling elite. other members of the white commu- expression at the expense of physical Despite this position of privilege, she nity, loudly opposed it. She also setting. The portrait on page 71 (also actively opposed the white commu- cooperated with the FBI investiga- the photograph on the book’s cover) nity’s perniciously orthodox attitudes tion of the murders. Such defiance is a case in point. A middle-aged regarding matters of race. of community norms came at a cost, African American woman, dressed in As with many parts of Mississippi both socially and economically. Not a domestic worker’s white uniform, in the 1960s, Neshoba County was only was she publicly shunned, but stares out at us. Her facial expression violently racist. Most members of she also saw her livestock auction is a difficult-to-read mixture of pride, local law enforcement belonged business boycotted, which eventually anger, fear, and desperation. She does to the Ku Klux Klan and were not forced her to shut it down. not look directly into the camera; shy about using the power of the Today, Mars is best known as the instead, her eyes seem focused on billy club (or worse) to prevent author of Witness in Philadelphia, a distant point somewhere above African Americans from making her 1977 account of the civil rights and beyond the photographer. She social, economic, or legal progress. murders and the community’s doesn’t seem happy about having her Infamously, during 1964’s “Freedom denial of responsibility for them. picture made. Summer,” three civil rights workers Mississippi Witness: The Photographs Only two of the book’s fifty-four disappeared in Neshoba County. of Florence Mars, newly published by portraits are of white adults (one of Their bodies were found several the University Press of Mississippi, them being a civil rights activist). A weeks later in a remote rural area. deepens our understanding of the few more are of members of Neshoba This event brought with it the spot- photographer and, more impor- County’s Choctaw community. The light of national attention, both from tantly, provides visual context for rest are of African Americans—men, the news media and the FBI. one of the civil rights movement’s women, and children—sometimes
Page 28 Winter 2020 The Southern Register in groups, sometimes individually. thing, Claire becomes romantic not Facial expressions in these portraits with Nathan but with Hull, a charis- vary widely, but some can be read matic, Chicago-based businessman, as masking deeper feelings. On page in town to sign local customers up 33, an older woman seems put out, for TVA power. What’s more, Claire perhaps impatient about having to finds work as Hull’s assistant, helping stop what she’s doing to pose for a him promote electric utility to her picture. A pair of teenage girls cling rural neighbors, who are more apt to nervously to one another on page 42, trust a local. their faces uncertain and distrustful. In a sense, just as Hardin On page 87, three men seated on a County moves toward the new and bench in front of a store display what unknown, Claire will be challenged looks to be barely concealed ill will to redefine herself. Having walked toward the photographer. Several out on her marriage, she is subjected of Mars’s portraits of black children to judgment, gossip, and even her show kids who seem frightened, mother’s insistence that she reunite sullen, even angry. This should not, with her cheating husband. Of of course, be surprising. In mid- course, her economic and profes- twentieth-century Philadelphia, sional well-being is inextricable from Mississippi, very few African Hull, whose job seniority casts an Americans would dare refuse a white uneasy light on their relationship. photographer permission to make Still, the more Claire tiptoes towards their picture. It would not matter reforestation, and served as a labor- self-footing, the more she’s moved who the photographer was, how generating counterstrike to the Great by the goal of not being anybody’s polite or sympathetic s/he seemed, Depression—and, in the process, second. While the men in her orbit or the reason for the picture; refusal transformed a region and way of life. puff up to fight for her—or rather, would simply be too dangerous. A How to frame such tectonics as their—honor, Claire must determine person would be wiser to pretend compelling fiction? Mark Barr’s how to break free of such constraints. not to mind. As with photography, debut novel, Watershed, does so by Nathan, too, is in search of a new African American lives in that place considering the early TVA era from beginning. Working day in and and time were often dependent on the ground up, focusing on character out, trying to stay off public radar appearances, despite the fact that and place, and the intimate stories of while still making his name at the many of the harsh realities of Jim lives impacted by the agency. jobsite, he reveals snippets of the Crow were all but impossible to hide. Set in Hardin County, in 1937, life he left behind in Memphis, Not even a compassionate Florence Watershed is about a small commu- including his liability for a tragic Mars could change that fact. nity impacted by the construction of utility accident. Like many of his a hydroelectric dam. At the center of cohort, Nathan now aims to secure David Wharton the novel are Claire, a local woman not only a permanent job, but “the whose flight from an unfaithful kind of work that means something.” husband leaves her life in flux, and As he comes to have feelings for Nathan, a hired-on electrical engi- Claire and forms relationships with neer, new to town and desperate for the townspeople, Nathan begins Watershed work, who must stay one step ahead to contemplate settling down in By Mark Barr. Spartanburg, of a murky past. These two are intro- Hardin County. To do so, however, SC: Hub City Press, 2019. duced at the boarding house owned he’ll have to bury his backstory, by Claire’s aunt, where their fellow even outrunning the law-enforcing 264 pages. $26.00 cloth. residents are TVA workers, on site Pinkerton agents, whose presence in for only the duration of the project. town further threatens his plans. Labeled a “great experiment” by They all take meals together, work Complementing the Claire-Hull- Pres. Franklin Roosevelt, the 1933 and live side by side, and run up Nathan tension, Watershed weaves Tennessee Valley Authority Act against each other’s ambitions, and in secondary twists and textures, created a government corpora- shortcomings, and secrets. including war profiteer-like busi- tion tasked with redefining the Given Nathan and Claire’s ness dealings for raw materials and Tennessee Valley watershed. Binding centrality, we might expect the novel tension between outsider hires and seven states, the TVA became the to pursue their love story. Yet Barr’s townies. Throughout, Barr’s language nation’s largest supplier of elec- treatment of his subjects is more is rich and descriptive. In one early tricity, promoted flood control and complicated, compelling. For one passage, Nathan overlooks the river
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 29 valley expanse: “[The men were a] most influential books in the fledg- thousand fretting specks coursing ling field of food studies, recognized, over the site. Ten thousand spires of indeed emphasized the historical rebar thrust up from the dam, their context of the contemporary food lower ends buried in concrete casings system’s rootedness in capitalist that were sunk to the bedrock.” Barr and colonialist structures. In fact, of also showcases a crisp knowledge of course, all good books about food the subject matter, from circuit sche- and related social movements are matics, to dam coffer construction, properly situated within historical, to the preferred make of overalls geographic, and other relevant (which is Pointer Brand, of Bristol, contexts.) What Food Fights does do Tennessee, of course). differently, though, is to use historic Watershed also highlights some of context explicitly to offer commen- the early controversy surrounding tary about contemporary food the government initiative. Though movements and their values, often in the TVA is now a long-established contradictory and surprising ways. fixture of the southeastern landscape, There are a lot of contemporary as the novel follows Hull, Claire, popular debates surrounding food; and the others who travel Hardin understandably, the book can’t County, we are reminded that prog- cover all of them. Those chosen are, ress often breeds fear and suspicion: naturally, a reflection of contributing in this case, of the further mechani- as a multidisciplinary academic field authors’ expertise and the priorities zation of the manual, agrarian South that merges and juxtaposes method- of the editors. Because the book is and of the federal government that ological and theoretical approaches the outcome of a 2012 conference delivered it. Who knew what might to study, analyze, and critique organized by the editors at North happen once the lights came on? various elements of past and contem- Carolina State University, it has The project detail and period porary food systems and related the feel of an actual conversation, cultural themes serve as the contour social movements. This maturation is with authors engaging thoughtfully of Watershed, but it is the personal evident in growing numbers of food (sometimes contentiously) with one stories and relationships that keep studies programs at US and interna- another’s ideas. the novel rushing forward. tional universities (the Association Following the editors’ introduc- for the Study of Food and Society tion, the book is divided into five Odie Lindsey lists forty-five such programs on its sections, each corresponding with a website); this growing list doesn’t “contemporary popular debate” and This review was first published in account for the food-related courses articulated through a debate among Chapter16.org. on offer on nearly every college and the authors themselves. “Producing university campus (the Center for the Food” takes up questions of industrial Study of Southern Culture offers two (conventional) agriculture, its oppo- courses on Southern Foodways, for sition to the agrarian ideal, and the example). Another demonstration animation of that debate in modern Food Fights: How History of the growing prominence of food consumer-driven food “activism.” Matters to Contemporary studies: it is nearly impossible to “Choosing Food” wades into debates keep up with all the edited volumes about “taste” and its referent to social Food Debates and readers published in the past class, and argues that modern notions Edited by Charles C. twenty years that purport to present of “good” eating are heavily influ- an inter- or multidisciplinary exami- enced by elite tastes and proclivities. Ludington and Matthew nation of the role of food in society. “Regulating Food” considers who Morse Booker. Chapel Hill: So, do we need another one? should be responsible for food safety University of North Carolina Ludington and Booker’s recent in the United States, the evolving role volume argues yes, we do, because of the USDA, and often contradic- Press, 2019. 304 pages, “none of the currently available tory public perceptions of food policy. $90.00 cloth, $32.95 paper, books emphasize the historical back- In “Gendering Food,” one chapter $25.99 ebook. ground and continuity of contem- examines the emergence of baby food porary popular debates surrounding as a commodity and how shifting food.” (I don’t completely agree. perceptions about what is “best for Since the turn of the twenty-first Even Sydney Mintz’s (1986) Sweetness baby” reflect complicated idealizations century, food studies has matured and Power, among the earliest and of motherhood and femininity. The
Page 30 Winter 2020 The Southern Register second chapter argues for a renewed the planet at this moment in history), Images in Mississippi focus on women’s history in studies I was dismayed by what felt like of food politics. Finally, “Cooking gapingly obvious oversights. (These Medicine: A Photographic and Eating Food” is the most theo- may be attributable, in part, to the History of Medicine in retical section, with authors drawing book’s rootedness in a conference on classical philosophy to argue either that happened seven years before its Mississippi for culinary luddism, argued by Ken publication.) However, the section Albala (“cooking is central to what on producing food, with the excep- By Lucius “Luke” M. it means to be human”) or culinary tion of Steve Striffler’s discussion Lampton, MD, and Karen A. modernism. Rachel Laudan’s plea of food activism, didn’t say nearly Evers. Jackson: Mississippi for culinary modernism, originally enough about labor and race. If published in 2001 and presented here anything is consistent about the State Medical Association, with a new postscript, is the most American food system, it is its racial- 2018. 266 pages. $80.00 quotable chapter. For example, “no ized exploitation of labor. (“Slavery” cloth. amount of nostalgia for the pastoral doesn’t even show up in the index.) foods of the distant past can wish Arguably, the most urgent contem- away the fact that our ancestors lived porary debates about US and global Like many scholars of southern mean, short lives, constantly afflicted food systems are about their (increas- culture, Magnolia, Mississippi, with diseases, many of which can be ingly undeniable) contributions physician Lucius M. Lampton directly attributed to what they did to climate change (and the related emphasizes the role of place at the and did not eat.” marginalization of indigenous and start of his book about Mississippi I acknowledged earlier that the rural livelihoods). Maybe, if we medicine. Lampton, however, cites book doesn’t and couldn’t claim to survive the decade, the editors can not a poet or historian of the South be comprehensive in its coverage of take up those concerns in volume 2. but the Greek Hippocrates; and a contemporary debates that animate decorative English rendering of his food studies. Yet, as someone who Catarina Passidomo famous oath for doctors is among studies the US South (and lives on hundreds of illustrations gathered
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The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 31 by Lampton and Karen A. Evers for this uniquely visual approach to the state’s medical history. The award- winning collaborators have worked together for more than twenty years on the monthly Journal of the Mississippi State Medical Association, with Lampton as editor and Evers as managing editor. As medical editor for the Mississippi Encyclopedia, Lampton also contributed several entries on medicine and promi- nent physicians to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture’s hefty volume. This work for the JMSMA and the ME was crucial in the formation of Images in Mississippi Medicine as both a trove of visual resources and a textual hybrid of history, biography, encyclopedia, and reminiscence. In fewer than ten pages, Lampton’s “Introduction: A History of Medicine in Mississippi” fact, for some readers, browsing noteworthy in the index are the provides a concise and essen- could be the best approach since many references to yellow fever, tial overview for the volume, chronology is not the book’s which Lampton describes as “a beginning with Native American organizational principle; thus, major concern to the antebellum herbal knowledge and suscepti- divisions of material frequently medical community of the old bility to European epidemics and overlap with subsequent divi- Southwest, especially Natchez and ending with twenty-first-century sions. At almost a hundred pages, Washington.” state legislation. Most subsequent “Images in Mississippi Medicine,” Instead of choosing either to pages feature at least one illustra- which follows the introduction, is browse or to read the volume tion—often a full-page enlarge- the most comprehensive section, from start to finish, lovers of biog- ment of a photograph or postcard. but the subsequent divisions— raphy could turn immediately to For example, John Young Murry “Pioneers in Mississippi Medicine,” “Pioneers” to learn about legendary is pictured in 1904, erect in the “Mental Health in Mississippi doctors like John Murry, John saddle on his seventy-fifth birthday, Medicine,” “Public Health in Wesley Monette (who published looking “as he often did on a Mississippi Medicine,” “Institutions a treatise on yellow fever in house-call.” Besides presenting of Mississippi Medicine,” and 1842), William Lattimore, Samuel Dr. Murry as a “surgeon, soldier, “Organizations in Mississippi Adolphus Cartwright, David Lewis statesman, social activist” who Medicine”—often return to people, Phares, and others. Students of served as Tippah County Health places, and events described in public policy, on the other hand, Officer when smallpox vaccine earlier sections. Like Lampton’s might head to “Public Health” for was first available, the brief biog- introduction, the detailed index insights on Mississippi’s battles raphy adds that he was William is a valuable guide, especially for with yellow fever, rabies, pellagra, Faulkner’s great-grandfather. The those with little previous knowl- and tuberculosis. “Organizations point is fascinating for Faulkner edge of Mississippi medicine. in Mississippi Medicine” will be of fans, who are more likely to With its long and often dramatic greatest interest to physicians, but identify William Clark Falkner, history, the Mississippi State “Mental Health” should intrigue “the Old Colonel,” as the famous Medical Association (publisher any reader. great-grandfather. of Images in Mississippi Medicine) is Opening this segment with Like the dust jacket and the among the most frequently cited a three-page “History of the volume’s 11” x 9” dimensions, the subjects in the index, along with Treatment of Mental Illness in strong optical appeal of almost the University of Mississippi, Mississippi,” Lampton outlines every page might seem to suggest the University’s Medical Center many shifts in nomenclature and that this is a coffee-table book and School of Medicine, and treatment from the eighteenth to meant for casual browsing. In the Mississippi Legislature. Also the twenty-first century. The caption
Page 32 Winter 2020 The Southern Register for a nineteenth-century engraving impressive architecture set in wide The empathy Lampton and Evers describes Dorothea Lynde Dix, lawns attracted asylum tourism in demonstrate for those marginal- a Boston activist who came to nineteenth-century America). ized by mental illness is evident Mississippi in the 1840s to support At the end of their short preface too in their several references to the creation of a state asylum for to Images in Mississippi Medicine, Mississippians long overlooked the mentally ill. Although Wikipedia Lampton and Evers apologize for because of race, gender, or poverty. does not mention Mississippi omissions and offer their “hopes for Expanding on medical experi- among Dix’s many lobbying sites, a future volume to fill in the rest of ences of women, LGBTQ citizens, Lampton affirms that, when the medicine’s untold story.” Additional the poor, and people of color 1848 legislature finally passed an images from the Civil War, the would be a welcome addition to appropriation for the Mississippi Depression, and the civil rights era future volumes. A composite of State Lunatic Asylum, “Her pres- could tell some of these stories. More the sixteen white men comprising ence was acknowledged by all attention could also be given to Mississippi’s first Board of Health as critical for the institution’s shortcomings of nineteenth-century in 1877 contrasts vividly with a founding.” Images of early mental medical pioneers, while still admit- recent color photo of “new rural health facilities portray grand hospi- ting their accomplishments. An physician scholars.” Supported by tals and substantial “convalescent expert on cholera and other southern the Mississippi Rural Physicians cottages” with landscaped lawns in diseases, Dr. Cartwright neverthe- Scholarship Program (authorized Jackson and Meridian. In a full-page less justified slavery for physiological by the state legislature in 2007), photograph from 1940, five young and Biblical reasons, as Lampton this diverse group of twenty-first- people pose before the imposing acknowledges. Former state and century medical students gives façade of the “old insane asylum,” national poet-laureate Natasha promise that images of Mississippi then located on the future site of the Trethewey caustically exposes such physicians will increasingly repre- University of Mississippi Medical racism in “Dr. Samuel Adolphus sent the whole of Mississippi. Center. The caption reports that the Cartwright on Dissecting the White asylum was then a popular destina- Negro, 1851.” Her poem would Joan Wylie Hall tion for Sunday afternoon drives make a sad footnote to Cartwright’s (perhaps for the same reason that research on race.
THE TWENTY-SEVENTH Oxford Conference for the Book April 1–3, 2020
Three days of readings, discussions, and events dedicated to books,
TWENTY-SEVENTH ANNUAL writing, and reading. All panels, readings, and talks are Oxford free and open to the public. forConference the For more information and a complete schedule, please visit www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com BOOKWE NES AY FRI AY APRI
www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture
CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SOUTHERN CULTURE
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 33 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference Update “Faulkner’s Modernisms,” July 19–23, 2020
The bracing task of rethinking the art, including “William Faulkner William Faulkner at Twentieth-Century who, what, where, when, and how of and Biopolitics” (2015), “Dog and Fox: The Annotated Screenplays (2017). literary modernism, with the life and Dinosaur: The Modern Animal Her forthcoming books include a work of Mississippi’s most celebrated Story” (2007), and most recently, “Sea monograph, Literature in Motion: Film modernist writer as Exhibit A, will Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist and the Formation of American Literature, be the subject of the forty-seventh Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and 1890s–1930s (2022) and a coedited annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Alexander Calder” (2018). collection, New Faulkner Studies (2021). conference, slated for July 19–23, Returning to the conference as a Other events scheduled for the 2020, on the University of Mississippi 2020 keynoter is Julian Murphet, conference include the popular campus. “Faulkner’s Modernisms” Jury Chair of English Language and “Teaching Faulkner” sessions led by will bring together a distinguished Literature at Adelaide University. James Carothers, Brian McDonald, slate of keynote speakers, panelists, Professor Murphet is author of Terrell Tebbetts, and Theresa Towner. and discussion leaders to explore Literature and Race in Los Angeles “Faulkner’s Modernisms” will also Faulkner’s legacy as an imaginative (2001); Multimedia Modernism: serve as host for the official launch of chronicler and critic of modernity and Literature and the Anglo-American Avant- the Digital Yoknapatawpha project, of the various forms of the modern- Garde (2009); Todd Solondz (2019); a massive Faulkner database and ization process that proved constitu- and most pertinent to this summer’s data visualization project sponsored tive of modernity in his world. conference, Faulkner’s Media Romance by the University of Virginia that Next summer’s five keynote (2017). He is also editor or coeditor has been in development for several speakers include two scholars of ten scholarly collections, including years; a number of collaborators on who are speaking at Faulkner and Faulkner in the Media Ecology (2015), a the project will be present to demon- Yoknapatawpha for the first time. volume of proceedings from an inter- strate its applicability to Faulkner Susan Stanford Friedman is Hilldale national conference of the same name teaching and scholarship. Bookseller Professor of English and Virginia that he organized at the University of Seth Berner will lead a presentation Woolf Professor of English and New South Wales in 2011. on “Collecting Faulkner,” the John Women’s Studies at the University of Also returning is Leigh Anne Davis Williams Library will exhibit Wisconsin. An international authority Duck, associate professor of English rare Faulkner materials and sponsor a on modernism and in gender studies, at the University of Mississippi, “Library Lecture” on a topic of interest she is author of Psyche Reborn: The where she also serves as editor of to Faulkner buffs, and University Emergence of H.D. (1981), a Choice The Global South. Professor Duck Museums will welcome confer- Outstanding Academic Books award is author of The Nation’s Region: ence registrants to a special exhibit. winner; Penelope’s Web: Gender, Southern Modernism, Segregation, and Optional daylong guided tours will Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction (1990); U.S. Nationalism (2006) and over two visit Faulkner-related locations in Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural dozen essays and chapters in publi- Oxford, northeast Mississippi, and Geographies of Encounter, winner of cations including American Literary the Mississippi Delta. We also plan to the Perkins Prize for Best Book in History; Safundi: The Journal of South offer again a guided tour focusing on Narrative Studies for 1998; Planetary African and American Studies’ CR: New Lafayette County’s African American Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Centennial Review; William Faulkner history after the enthusiastic recep- Across Time (2015), a much-discussed in Context; Global Faulkner: Faulkner tion of last summer’s tour, led by local and -debated work among scholars in and Yoknapatawpha, 2006; Faulkner historian and UM Southern Studies the field of “new modernism studies”; in the Twenty-First Century: Faulkner graduate student Rhondalyn Peairs. and most recently Contemporary in Yoknapatawpha, 2000; Keywords for Discount rates for the conference Revolutions: Turning back to the Future in Southern Studies; and American Cinema are available for groups of five or Twenty-First-Century Literature and Art. and the Southern Imaginary. more students. Inexpensive dormi- Patricia E. Chu is lecturer in Finally, we welcome back Sarah tory housing is available for all English at Harvard University Gleeson-White, associate professor of registrants. Contact Mary Leach at and temporary assistant professor English at the University of Sydney. [email protected] for details. For of English at Framingham State A veteran of the 2015 conference on other inquiries, or to submit abstracts University. She is the author of Race, “Faulkner and Print Culture” and to the conference CFP by January Nationalism, and the State in British last summer’s “Faulkner’s Families” 31, 2020, contact Jay Watson, and American Modernism (2007) and conference, she is author of Strange Director, at [email protected]. several articles on twentieth-century Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels and contemporary literature and of Carson McCullers (2003) and editor of Jay Watson
Page 34 Winter 2020 The Southern Register CONTRIBUTORS
Brett J. Bonner is editor of Living Blues. He earned his MA in Southern Studies in 2007 from the University of Mississippi. Rebecca Lauck Cleary is the Center’s communica- tions specialist. She received a BA in journalism from the Kathryn B. McKee is the Director of the Center for the University of Mississippi and her MA in Southern Studies. Study of Southern Culture and McMullan Professor of Southern Studies and English. Aram Goudsouzian is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Memphis. Among other works, Catarina Passidomo is the Southern Foodways Alliance he is the author of Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black assistant professor of Southern Studies and assistant professor Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear. His work has of anthropology at the University of Mississippi. appeared in Study the South. James G. Thomas, Jr. is associate director of the Center, Joan Wylie Hall is a lecturer in the English Department editor of the Southern Register, and director of the Oxford at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Shirley Conference for the Book. Jackson: Studies in Short Fiction and the editor of Conversations Jay Watson is Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies at the with Audre Lorde and Conversations with Natasha Trethewey. University of Mississippi and the director of the Faulkner and Her work has also been published in numerous journals Yoknapatawpha Conference. such as Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Mississippi Quarterly, Faulkner Journal, and the Eudora Welty Review. David Wharton is the Center’s director of documentary studies and assistant professor of southern studies. Will Jacks is a photographer, curator, storyteller, and educator of culture and relationships in the Mississippi Delta, Jessie Wilkerson is assistant professor of history and the Lower Mississippi River region, and the American South. Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. He teaches photography and documentary courses in the Melanie Young is publications manager of Living Blues. Mississippi Delta. She holds an MA is Southern Studies from the University Odie Lindsey is writer in residence at Vanderbilt of Mississippi. Her thesis was on the history of Living Blues University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. magazine.
The Southern Register Winter 2020 Page 35
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