Southern Register Spring-Summer 2019

SPRING-SUMMER 2019

D I R E C T O R ’ S

C O L U M N

This is my last director’s column for the

Southern Register, as I step down from the role of director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture on July 1.

When I was a kid, the preacher at my church gave his last sermon, and while I knew it was supposed to be dramatic and maybe emotional, I remember thinking it sounded a great deal like most of his sermons. To make sure this column doesn’t look like previous columns, I’ll write it in the form an interview. With apologies to documentarians who might have doubts about this format, I will both ask and answer the questions.

So, I heard you’re retiring. Is that right? No, I’m just stepping down from the position of director. I will continue to be a professor of history and Southern Studies, teaching courses and working with graduate students in both programs.

How long have you been Center director, and why are you stepping down? I became interim director in 2007 and fulltime director in 2008, so I’ve been at the job for twelve years. That’s probably long enough for anybody to do a position like this, both because I want to do some other things and because the Center should benefit from the new possibilities that come with having a new director.

Are there favorite parts of being Center director? Working with so many creative, innovative people is the best part.

I’ve said frequently that the students who are willing to go through life explaining their Southern Studies degree tend to be rule-breaking, creative characters. The same thing is true about faculty and staff colleagues, present and past. There are plenty of specific things the Center can be proud of accomplishing over the years—the intriguing new classes colleagues keep creating, public events that bring people and their ideas to campus, the energy and experimentation of the Southern Foodways Alliance, the expansion of documentary work, the completion of encyclopedias, the success of Living Blues, individual and group scholarly work, incredible work by students and THE

SOUTHERN REGISTER

A Publication of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture

•

The University of Mississippi

OX FO R D, M ISSISSIP P I, U. S. A • WINTER Published by The Center for the Study of Southern Culture The University of Mississippi Telephone: 662-915-5993 • Fax: 662-915-5814 E-mail: cssc@olemiss.edu • southernstudies.olemiss.edu

N E W S L E T T E R • P U B L I S H E D Q U A R T E R LY

2014

Spring-Summer 2019 Cover photo, Wheel in Field, by James G. Thomas, Jr.

REGISTER STAFF Editor: James G. Thomas, Jr. Editorial assistants: Rebecca Lauck Cleary and Margaret Gaffney Graphic Designer: Susan Bauer Lee

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alumni. But more than any specific projects, I like the way people are always trying out new things, rethinking what to do, how to do them, and why they matter. I will continue to be involved in lots of things at the Center, but I will miss the excitement of working so closely with so many good friends. I’m delighted that one of those friends, Katie McKee, will be the next director.

What has been the most challenging part of the director position? To be honest, there are a number of things administrators should do well that I never came close to mastering. But to be specific to Southern Studies, the biggest challenge is also what makes it so interesting.

There are lots of people studying what they love, studying what they hate and want to change, studying what interests them most in the world, challenging expectations and systems of power, experimenting with methods and media, and disregarding any apparent boundaries dividing scholarship, teaching, service, and outreach.

Our colleague Adam Gussow wrote a great book about the concept of the crossroads; we might imagine the Center at multiple crossroads of teaching and scholarship, academics and public engagement, innovation and people’s expectations, and aesthetic considerations and political commitments. In that sense the crossroads is a fascinating, busy place, with lots of roads in and out, and with multiple people showing up at different times and for different purposes. I used to wonder if the director is supposed to direct traffic at the crossroads. But that’s where the metaphor fails. It has been easy to realize that no, the director’s job is to recognize and appreciate that work, to help make available whatever people need, and then to stay out of the way.

What will you miss least? That’s easy—administrators get too much email. Even if every email message were thoughtful and interesting, there would still be too many of them. Every once in a while I worry that I’m starting to feel about email the way William Faulkner felt when he was fired from his job as university postmaster and, according to a local anecdote, complained about being at the beck and call of anybody with the money to buy a stamp. My teaching load will double, but my email load will decline by more than half. It seems like a good trade.

Is it possible to summarize how the field of Southern Studies has changed? I doubt it. First, it’s a series of fields, rather than a single field. Second, people in those fields have been moving for some time away from apparently straightforward questions about southern distinctiveness or continuity and change in favor of hearing multiple voices, understanding multiple experiences and multiple

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Center for the Study of Southern Culture Welcomes New Director Katie McKee Will Be the First Woman to Lead the Center’s Work For only the fourth time in the forty-year history of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, a new director will take the helm.

Katie McKee, McMullan Associate Professor of Southern Studies and associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi, begins her new role July 1.

“I am humbled by this opportunity and excited to get to work,” McKee said. “The Center has a rich history of thoughtful leadership and successful programming.

I look forward to a future that extends that work and embraces new possibilities.”

The cross-disciplinary Southern Studies faculty and the Center’s undergraduate and graduate degree programs are the core of its work.

Although the job of director will be new for McKee, she has been a part of the Center since 1997, in both a teaching capacity and as Southern Studies graduate program coordinator. She arrived in Oxford after teaching humanities at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. In 2001 the University of Mississippi named her Humanities Teacher of the Year, in 2004 she received the Cora Lee Graham Award for Teaching Freshmen, and

Incoming Center director Katie McKee (bottom right) with current and past Center directors (clockwise from top left) Ted Ownby, Charles Reagan Wilson, and Bill Ferris. The group met at Ajax Diner in Oxford on May 15. Later that day Ferris spoke at Square Books about his Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris.

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Katie McKee

in 2015 the UM College of Liberal Arts named her Outstanding Teacher of the Year.

“Katie is one of the faculty members who helped bring to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture questions of the Global South,” said Ted Ownby, the Center’s outgoing director. “That perspective encourages faculty and students to rethink Southern Studies so that it moves away from dualistic comparisons between the US North and the US South, and instead imagines Southern Studies as part of a broader global system of ideas, people, and products. She has brought that perspective to all of her classes and formalized it into a graduate class, Globalization and the South.”

She has team-taught effectively with faculty members from history, documentary studies, sociology and anthropology, and she has run conferences and edited work with scholars from many disciplines.

The search process provided an excellent opportunity for faculty, staff, and students in every part of continued on page 25

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Each year the Center gives several awards for papers and documentary projects following each year’s graduation ceremony on campus.

Ted Ownby announces the recipients at the Southern Studies graduation luncheon in Barnard Observatory.

Graduation was on Saturday, May 11, this year.

Here are the winners for 2018–19: The Gray Award, which honors outstanding scholarship in an undergraduate paper, went to Katherine Aberle for her paper “To Converse with the Most Excellent Men: Classical Education, Cultural Capital, and the Formation of a Ruling Class in the Antebellum South.” The work was Aberle’s Honors College thesis.

The Coterie Award, which also honors outstanding scholarship in an undergraduate paper, went to Garland Patterson for her paper “Alien Child: Seeking Solace in the Southern Gothic,” which she completed in Southern Studies 402.

The Ann Abadie Award for the best documentary project went to Susie Penman for her MFA thesis film project, Juvenile Injustice: Youth, Crime, and Punishment in New Orleans.

The Sue Hart Award for outstanding work in gender studies went to Je’Monda Roy for her MFA thesis film Getting to the Root.

The Sarah Dixon Pegues Award in the study of southern music went to Samuel Willcoxon for his Honors College thesis, “Highway 61: Good Roads, Great Migrations, and Delta Blues,” and the Peter Aschoff Award, also for outstanding work in the study of southern music, went to Mary Stanton Knight for her documentary film Singing Out. The Lucille and Motee Daniels Award for the best paper by a Southern Studies graduate student went to Olivia Terenzio for her paper

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ANDREA MORALES

Center Holds Awards Ceremony at Graduation Luncheon

First row (left to right): Je’Monda Roy (MFA), Mary Knight (MFA); back row: Frances Barrett (MA), Hooper Schultz (MA), Jonathan Smith (MFA), Mary Blessey (MFA) “The South and Brazil,” and the Lucille and Motee Daniels Award for the best Southern Studies master’s thesis went to Hooper Schultz for “The Carolina Gay Association, the Southeastern Gay Conferences, and Gay Liberation in the 1970s South.”

Liam Nieman amd Mattie Ford each won James Timothy Jones scholarships for Southern Studies undergraduates.

This year’s MA and MFA graduate classes included Mary Blessey, Frances “Frankie” Evelyn Barrett, Mary Knight, Je’Monda Roy, Hooper Schultz, and Jonathan Smith.

Their projects are varied, and their subjects and methods illustrate the wide net cast by Southern Studies graduate students.

Mary Blessey graduated from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, with a BA in philosophy in 2011. After completing her MA in Southern Studies in 2016, she

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decided to join the inaugural class of the Center’s MFA in Documentary Expression program. Her thesis project was a short film on Robert F. Kennedy’s 1966 visit to the University of Mississippi.

Frances “Frankie” Barrett entered the Southern Studies MA program in 2017. Her thesis, “A Bargain at Any Cost: The Rise of Dollar General,” traces the history of Dollar General Corporation and explores the cultural impact of Dollar General as well as the corporation’s effects on the lives of workers, shoppers, and community members. Also, each year the University of Mississippi’s College of Liberal Arts selects six graduate students to receive the Graduate Achievement Award.

This year, Barrett was one of these recipients. She was recognized at the university’s annual awards ceremony on April 4.

Mary Knight has a BA in

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ANDREA MORALES

journalism, an MA in broadcast journalism, and now an MFA in documentary expression. Her thesis manuscript, “Dear Hubert Creekmore: An Archival Search into the Life of a Queer Mississippi Writer,” examines the life of writer, translator, poet, painter, and trained classical pianist Hiram Hubert Creekmore Jr. The second component of this thesis, the short documentary film Dear Hubert Creekmore, explores the author’s ties to his childhood home of Water Valley, Mississippi, in his novels and poems.

Je’Monda Roy is a three-time graduate of the University of Mississippi, obtaining her BA in English in 2016, her MA in Southern Studies in 2018, and her MFA in documentary expression in 2019. Her thesis, “Getting to the Root: The Struggles and Resilience of Black Womanhood through Stories of Natural Hairstyles at a Predominantly White Institution,” captures Black women’s stories at the University of Mississippi. Although the project is set in one institution in the South, the stories and methods apply to American society and how the lack

Barnard Observatory graduation cake

of Black representation in white spaces shape Black lives, specifically Black women’s lives.

Hooper Schultz is a native of Raleigh, North Carolina, and recently completed his Southern Studies MA. His thesis, “The ANDREA MORALES

During the graduation awards ceremony, incoming Center director, Katie McKee, presents Ted Ownby with a framed photograph by David Wharton, along with thanks for his twelve years of leadership at the Center

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Carolina Gay Association, the Southeastern Gay Conferences, and Gay Liberation in the 1970s South,” explores how the successes and failures of local organizing networks in the South shaped national conversations on the rights of queer Americans. Its starting point is 1970 with the Triangle Gay Alliance’s formation in Raleigh, and it ends in 1978 with the third annual Southeastern Gay Conference and repeal of Miami-Dade County’s nondiscrimination ordinance.

Jonathan Smith’s thesis manuscript, “Silence Descends: Lynchings and Their Aftermath in Lafayette and Union Counties, Mississippi,” centers around historical research into the lynching of L. Q. Ivy in Union County, Mississippi, and how knowledge of the lynching has been transmitted within the broader community through newspaper articles and oral histories. The accompanying experimental piece, Buried in Silence, which Smith calls an “illustrated podcast,” details his introduction to the lynching and calls for memorialization of L. Q. Ivy.

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Getting Better All the Time Online Encyclopedia Creates Advisory Board, Adds New Entries Taking the nine-pound Mississippi Encyclopedia everywhere you go may seem daunting, so last summer, an online version debuted. Now, a new advisory board is considering how to best improve the online encyclopedia. “The goal is to make it a living document, always trying to be better, more inclusive, and more a product of and relevant to contemporary scholarship,” said Ted Ownby, a coeditor of the Mississippi Encyclopedia.

The advisory board, representing a range of academic specialties from institutions throughout the state, will make suggestions about new entries that the encyclopedia should commission, potential new contributors to consult about writing, and existing entries to improve. Board members will also make suggestions about broader issues about how to continue improving the online encyclopedia to reach new audiences and do new things. “Already, their suggestions have led to several dozen new ideas, including a good number of new entries that are available to read online,” Ownby said.

The board met for the first time last fall to consider how best to improve the online encyclopedia, and includes individuals from Mississippi Institutes of Higher Learning, the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Museum of Mississippi History, and the University Press of Mississippi.

Stuart Rockoff, executive director of the Mississippi Humanities Council and a board member, said the advisory board is a wonderful group of diverse scholars reflecting the breadth of the online encyclopedia. “Our goal was to make the online Mississippi Encyclopedia an ever-growing, living site, and

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the advisory board is key part of achieving this,” Rockoff said.

Members of the board include D’Andra Orey ( Jackson State University), Stephanie Rolph (Millsaps College), Lorrie Watkins Massey (William Carey University), C. Liegh McInnis ( Jackson State University), Amanda Powers (Mississippi University for Women), Charles Westmoreland (Delta State University), Ted Atkinson (Mississippi State University), Jennifer Baughn (Mississippi Department of Archives and History), Preselfannie Whitfield McDaniels ( Jackson State

James G. Thomas, Jr. (University of Mississippi), Katie McKee (University of Mississippi), and Ted Ownby (University of Mississippi).

According to Rockoff, there has been tremendous growth in the online encyclopedia’s usage, with the number of visitors increasing almost ten times over the past six months.

“Now, well over 10,000 users a month visit the site. So far, people from all 50 states and in 148 different countries have used the site,” he said. “I’m most excited that people living in 140 different Mississippi communities have read entries about their state’s rich history and culture.”

University), Kate Cochran (University of Southern Mississippi), Leslie Hossfeld (Clemson University), Rolando Herts (Delta Center for Culture and Learning, Delta State University), Daphne Chamberlain (Tougaloo College), Robert Luckett ( Jackson State University), Susannah Ural (University of Southern Mississippi), Simone Delerme,(University of Mississippi), Jodi Skipper (University of Mississippi), Otis W. Pickett (Mississippi College), Betsy Bradley (Mississippi Museum of Art), Rebecca Tuuri (University of Southern Mississippi), Rebecca Myers (Museum of Mississippi History), Craig Gill (University Press of Mississippi), Stuart Rockoff (Mississippi Humanities Council),

Material recently added to the website includes entries on gospel composer, educator, and activist Lucie E. Campbell; drag artist John Epperson, otherwise known as Lipsynka; Po’ Monkey’s juke joint; songwriter and producer Glen Ballard; religious and civil rights leader Thelma Stevens; and congressman Bennie Thompson.

Several more entries will be added this summer.

The online version of the 1,451page Mississippi Encyclopedia, a project that began at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in 2003 and concluded with publication in 2017, is available at www.mississippiencyclopedia.org.

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Rebecca Lauck Cleary

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“Just Let It Play” Brian Foster Urges Students to “Think Deeply”

“Fill up your jukebox with the right songs and just let it play,” Brian Foster said. Now an assistant professor of Southern Studies and sociology at the University of Mississippi, Foster graduated from the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College in 2011. This past February 19, he served as keynote speaker for the UM Honors College spring convocation at the Gertrude C. Ford Center. He asked students to think deeply about their memories, and his jukebox-themed speech followed his doctoral and current research on the Mississippi Delta.

Foster began his speech by reminiscing about his childhood, growing up in Mississippi, his adolescence and his college years. He ended each refrain with, “I remember. I promise I do,” before challenging audience

members to keep track of their own memories. “Always remember how things are now,” he said. “Never forget how they used to be. I’m here to say one thing, just one thing: that y’all will remember the story.”

Honors College Dean Douglass Sullivan-González introduced Foster by speaking about his time as a student and emphasizing the Honors College’s commitment in preparing the next generation of leaders.

“We must continue to cultivate the mind and commit ourselves to the common good,” Sullivan-González said. “Rare is the occasion when I get to see the Barksdale dream come full circle and watch our leaders grow up and come back to the state.”

Foster, who transferred to the University of Mississippi in 2009, traveled across North Mississippi to PHOTO BY PARKER GALLOWAY

meet young Black men with hip-hop aspirations for his Honors College thesis. He wanted to find what set these people apart and what motivated them.

Following graduation, Foster earned his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In the summer of 2014, his research gave him the opportunity to live in Clarksdale and study the ways in which the blues influences and is influenced by the culture of the Mississippi Delta. “We have to be able to tell who people are to tell who we are,” he said.

Foster’s career brought him back to the University of Mississippi, where his research on the blues continues. After interviewing 316 people for more than 1,000 hours in a variety of settings—from bars to clubs to backyards—Foster said he is learning how to tell a story. “Coming back to Mississippi, as a man of color, takes purpose,” he said. “I want to remember just so I can forget, so I can tell stories . . . that tell what you’ve done and what you want told.”

Mason Scioneaux This article was first published in the Daily Mississippian.

Brian Foster delivering the keynote address at the UM Honors College Convocation

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Roll Down Like Water

Gammill Gallery Exhibited Photographs from Memphis by Andrea Morales

“Now, let me say as I move to my conclusion that we’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through.”

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech on April 3, 1968, the day before he was killed in Memphis.

Roll Down Like Water is part of an ongoing photographic body of work focused on Memphis, Tennessee, today in the everyday, five decades after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine

After School at Foote Homes, 2015

Nathan Bedford Forrest, 2015

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Motel. Memphis, a majority-Black city with boundaries carved by the Mississippi River and positioned at the gates of the Delta South, swells with a light from the people. In his “Mountaintop” speech at Mason Temple, King asked Memphians to “redistribute the pain” of those suffering in the community, like the striking sanitation workers who he was there to support. Borrowing from the Bible’s Amos, he implored, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

The photographs search the contours of the city’s quotidian landscape for glimpses of memory toward that

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Melrose High School Homecoming, 2017

call in the struggle against racist and unequal systems.

Andrea Morales (b. 1984, Lima, Peru) is a documentary photographer based in Memphis and a producer at the Southern Documentary Project.

Her work seeks to create space away from binaries and with a gaze toward justice. She grew up in Miami, earned a BS in journalism with a certificate in Latin American studies from the University of Florida, and an MA in visual communication from Ohio University. A photojournalist for various newspapers, she worked in cities and newsrooms of all sizes for nearly a decade, including the El Sentinel in South Florida and the New York Times before landing in Memphis.

The exhibition was on view at the Gammill Gallery from April 16 to May 17, 2019. All photographs by Andrea Morales.

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Kimani at the March Commemorating the Striking Santitation Workers of 1968, 2018

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AYear inA Oxford: COMPLICATING STORY

Mattie Ford on Her Freshman Year in Southern Studies

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PHOTO COURTESY MATTIE FORD

Mattie Ford

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When I walked into my first undergraduate Southern Studies class last fall here at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, I was surprised, even shocked, to hear a northeastern accent come from my professor. Here?

I asked myself. In this space, with Bill Ferris’s photography hanging on the walls and William Faulkner’s portrait resting on the shelf?

I’d just spent the last two years treading water in the Northern Virginia suburbs, where northeastern accents made me feel like I didn’t belong, where “Mississippi” somehow always sounded like a bad word. I’d left the East Coast and what I took for its pretentiousness, to come home to find words that do justice to this place, the South, words I had been trying to find for so long. Here I could let my accent float with every night, bright, or light; I could listen to Doc Watson and only get an occasional funny look. I could be among people who I relate to better and who I feel are more genuine, products of a place in that way it seems only native southerners are and those transplants in large urban spaces outside the South often are not. I see the Center as the Mecca for my field, I tell people; this is really the only place to do what it is I want to do.

And yet— There he sat, a New York native and product of the Ivy League, teaching me, a southerner, about the South. That resentment I felt in Northern Virginia bubbled up. I just as quickly recognized his credentials and humbly checked my bias. The class was an eye-opening experience, the first event that clarified for me what I was doing here. I had to go beyond my love for and supposed responsibility toward the South that I couldn’t quite articulate. I was here to complicate the South, to push beyond my naïve notions of who could and could not love, admire, and appreciate this place.

Complicating the South, however, is not necessarily a fun or comfortable charge. My teeth grind when I see southerners themselves disparage this place, or when yet another

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“I was here to complicate the South, to push beyond my naïve notions of who could and could not love, admire, and appreciate this place.” instance of intolerance is revealed, or when something happens in the South that projects a negative image to the rest of the nation. I’m learning that embracing that discomfort in order to make something usable out of it is the only way forward.

This realization came to me when I read Eudora Welty, an author who I wrote off long ago as being strictly for the elite but yet an author who turned out to feel like a familiar voice and a friend. This realization came with reading Zora Neale Hurston, again, and understanding her not only as a writer but as a folklorist and a scholar. It came with reading Jesmyn Ward, whose strength and conviction brought me hope. It even came when trudging through Walker Percy, a writer who I understand is important but simply different than these women who

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have given voice to that which I could not express.

When I lived outside of the South and looked in, it was easy for me to find buzzwords and clichés to rationalize and simplify this place. It was easy to reduce its many layers, stories, and dynamics to explain it to people who didn’t quite seem to care to understand. But living here and studying here has helped me realize that those layers are the very things that fascinate and frustrate me most about the South. The Center’s intentional conversations about these things, about the grittiness and the discomfort and about all of the things we wish we didn’t have to deal with, is what propels me forward as both a student and a lover of this place. It goes beyond classes in the pink room and brown bag lectures for lunch.

At this university and in this part of our state that so often feels like one big laboratory for the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the accessibility and helpfulness of professors who are willing to connect and talk out frustrations goes just as far as studying various authors. This multifaceted approach to understanding this place, studying its history and literature while maintaining a dialogue about the realities of its present, is what has helped me most this year.

Studying here has helped me articulate the questions that make this place so very complicated: How do we think about and talk about marginalized southerners without reducing people to analyzable subjects? Where is the line between important storytelling and exploitation? How do we put the past to rest and maintain a southern identity? How do we retain the beauty and magic of the South while dismantling the oppressive institutions that bolster it?

I don’t know the answers to these questions yet, but I am happy to be asking them. Uncomfortable as it may be, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture is giving me the tools and the support to complicate this place.

Mattie Ford

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Zaire Love presenting her TEDx Talk, “Baby Hair + Hot Sauce = Embrace What They Ain’t”

Southern Studies Students Celebrate a Multiplicity of Identities One of the hallmarks of academic participation is the use of knowledge and skills gained to affect the world at large, and here at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, students do just that in myriad ways, both within the university community, and the community at large with which we interact. As Center associate director Jimmy Thomas recently said, “Our students use Southern Studies as a vehicle

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through which to use voices, to speak up, to recognize and uncover and celebrate difference.”

Whether leading TEDx talks on the importance of Black womanhood, founding and leading LGBTQ+ organizations at the University of Mississippi, recording and screening documentary films featuring marginalized groups and individuals in the greater Oxford community, or critiquing our

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institutions’ policing of Black hairstyles, Southern Studies graduate students in particular have been at the forefront of the university’s efforts to improve itself and make the University of Mississippi—and, more broadly, our nation—a better place for all.

Students at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture use their training in Southern Studies to complicate the notions of

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ANDREA MORALES

Making a Difference and Working for Change

southernness and identity. One of our most noticeable conversations around identity and southernness centered on student efforts to have the Confederate monument in the Circle on campus removed to the Confederate cemetery. Student groups like Students Against Social Injustice, or SASI, led the push to expose the statue’s racist Lost Cause–ideology roots and to argue why the Confederate cemetery is a better place for the monument than the heart of our campus. Southern Studies students, staff, and faculty joined with the undergraduatestudent protesters who organized the marches, sticker campaigns, and other educational programming to help shed light on the statue’s history. This organizing led to the Associated Student Body, Graduate Student Council, Staff Council, and Faculty Senate passing resolutions recommending the statue’s removal. The Center for the Study of Southern Culture similarly released a number of statements from faculty, staff, and students calling for the removal of the statue.

Through associate professor Jessie Wilkerson’s Queer Oral History course SST 560, graduate and undergraduate students were able to make their voices and those of others heard in a different way. Students organized a project that recorded the oral histories of a dozen or so LGBTQ+ Mississippians in the area and reinterpreted those stories for a public performance that invited the community to hear about the experiences of LGBTQ+ people in North Mississippi. The performance at the Burns Belfry African American

SST MA graduate student Frankie Barrett (left) and Center operations assistant Margaret Gaffney (right) at a demonstration in support of removing or relocating the Confederate statue on the UM campus last February

Museum and Multicultural Center was extremely well attended, and the group went on the perform again at the Southeastern Women’s Studies Association’s annual conference at the University of Mississippi this spring. The hard work that Southern Studies students and faculty did on this project will be preserved at the digital archives of the Department of Archives and Special Collections of the University of Mississippi Libraries.

Jackson native and Southern Studies double-graduate Je’Monda Roy has received her MA and MFA from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. She is only the second master’s double graduate in

Center history, an immense achievement. Her MFA thesis project, Getting to the Root, is a film about Black women’s struggles at the University of Mississippi, a PWI, or Predominantly White Institution.

Roy focuses on natural hair as a site of policing, expression, resistance, and creativity for Black women, specifically narrowing in on Black southern women’s experiences at an institution with a racist past and a racially complicated present.

Another Southern Studies MFA student, Zaire Love, has also used her time at the Center to focus on the experience of Black women in the South. Love’s film Trees is a creative documentary piece that explores the

“Our students use Southern Studies as a vehicle through which to use voices, to speak up, to recognize and uncover and celebrate difference.”—Jimmy Thomas The Southern Register

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Je’Monda Roy delivers a presentation on her MFA thesis project Getting to the Root.

beauty of Black southern women through music, spoken word, and movement. Love’s film earned her a Rural Project Grant from Indie Grits Lab this past spring. Additionally, Love’s Ole Miss TEDx Talk, “Baby Hair + Hot Sauce = Embrace What They Ain’t” about the contributions of two Black southern women drew a large crowd on campus and demonstrated the multiple creative talents of our students and their ability to connect scholarship to creativity and activism. “Beyoncé and Fannie Lou Hamer are the perfect combination of relevance, activism, and representation,” Love

said. “I’ve been on this quest to establish honor, respect, and amplification to the stories, narratives, and lives of Black folk in the South, particularly Black women.”

Other similar projects to come out of the Center this year include Mary Knight’s thesis project on Hubert Creekmore, a queer writer from Mississippi; my thesis on the Carolina Gay Association, the Southeastern Gay Conferences, and gay liberation in the 1970s South; and Jonathan Smith’s thesis project on the silence surrounding the lynching of L. Q. Ivy in Union County, Mississippi.

These incredible students, projects, and moments are just some of the activism and education that are coming out of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at this time. Students using their education on southern identity, history, and culture continue to push the boundaries of what the Center means when it says that it “studies the South,” and they continue to incorporate the voices, histories, and dynamic futures of southerners who have previously not been given a seat at the table.

Hooper Schultz

“I’ve been on this quest to establish honor, respect, and amplification to the stories, narratives, and lives of Black folk in the South, particularly Black women.”—Zaire Love Page 14

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Searching for the Blues in Mali Keerthi Chandrashekar Travels to North Africa as Part of Research Project

Last winter my professor and thesis advisor Dr. Adam Gussow asked if I would write an article for the journal Global South on a topic of my choice under the umbrella “Transnational Blues.” I immediately replied that I would love to write about blues in Mali.

Like countless others, I originally stumbled across the music of Mali

through Malian Ali Farka Touré’s collaboration with Ry Cooder, which resulted in the 1994 album, Talking Timbuktu, which won that year’s Grammy for Best World Music Album. That interest was multiplied when I moved to Oxford in 2017 and—thanks to a generous donation of LPs from Fat Possum Records’ cofounder Matthew Johnson—came

across the Malian band Songhoy Blues, a band whose riffs and rhythms and rebel visage struck a chord with me. Through ethnomusicologists like Gerhard Kubik, I also learned that Mali, and the Senegambia region of northern Africa in general, had profound musicological ties to the blues music of African Americans as a result of the transatlantic slave trade.

KEERTHI CHANDRASHEKAR

Aliou Touré, lead singer of Songhoy Blues, fiddling on the ngoni at local Golf district club Songhoy, where the band regularly performs

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KEERTHI CHANDRASHEKAR

A fisherman on the Niger River as seen from the north side

Having worked as a journalist for years, I had developed a distaste for armchair scholarship, especially after finding out that the “seminal” book on the blues, Blues Fell This Morning, published in 1960 by British scholar Paul Oliver, was written without him ever visiting America. After talking with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture’s director, Ted Ownby, I secured funding from the Center to travel to Mali in January 2019. Songhoy Blues had played at Proud Larry’s in Oxford in fall 2017, and I had managed to befriend Aliou Touré, the lead singer. As luck would have it, that connection led to him graciously hosting me in Bamako.

I went to Mali with a goal in mind: to observe the “blues scene” in the capital in the south, Bamako.

For almost a decade Mali has been listed by the US Department of State as a Level 4 country (the highest honor): “Do not travel to Mali due to crime, terrorism, and kidnapping.”

In the country’s northern Saharacentric regions, Islamic extremists have in recent years exacerbated

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and exploited a movement by ethnic groups, such as the Tuaregs, for the right to govern themselves. The reasoning behind their movement for autonomy is rather simple—they feel like the southern portion of the country, led by the capital Bamako and different ethnic groups, was ignoring their infrastructural and societal needs.

What arose was a complicated environment in which religious extremists such as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb were able to gain a foothold, eventually banning music they considered secular and potentially blasphemous. They threatened to cut off people’s fingers for playing the guitar and, in many cases, put them to death, as shown in the 2014 movie Timbuktu and 2016 documentary Mali Blues. Even Mali’s famed Festival au Désert in the north, which had attracted performers such as Robert Plant, was called off after 2012 because of security concerns.

This, naturally, sparked an outmigration of musicians, many to Bamako, where music was allowed and the

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threat of death did not linger over musicians’ heads.

I wondered if there would be observable effects of this in Bamako— the coming together of musicians from various regions with their various styles. Since Malian music has musicological connections with the blues, would I perhaps be able to see how musical styles and ideologies are meshing in this melting pot of musical rhythms and cultures? I even had parallels in America that I wanted to unpack, such as the Great Migrations in the United States and, even more tenuously, the migration of the “blues scene” from southern states to northern hubs like Chicago as a result of disenfranchisement in the South and the promise of economic opportunity in the North. This was, as I was to learn, a rather naïve starting point.

Malians are very proud of their culture. Through conversations with Africans from other parts of the continent, as well as with blues musician Corey Harris, who has traveled multiple times to Mali and other African countries, I was repeatedly

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told that Malians are very outwardly expressive and internally aware of their history. When Aliou picked me up from Hotel Wassulu, one of the first things he told me was, “To understand the music of Mali, you must first understand the thirteen tribes.” There are more than thirteen ethnic groups in Mali, but that was not the point. “We are Mali,” Aliou explained, “where the blues style of music has ancestral connections, but not where it has come home to roost.”

What I had really signed up for, it turns out, was a full-scale emersion into a myriad of musical traditions that can be traced back centuries, not a modern day remix of the blues.

Ali Farka Touré, who passed away in 2006, was adamant that the blues is the fruit of Malian music, adding a new layer to noted blues composer Willie Dixon’s statement, “the blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits.” Ali Farka would also say that there is no such thing as African Americans, only Africans in America. This idea alone can be explored to endless depths, and it complicates musical diaspora lenses that originate in Western academia.

Is there blues in Mali? Sure, but in the sense that there must be a bit of every son and daughter in their father or mother. Understanding the music of Mali—a concept so intertwined with the very fabric of the country—required listening to more than just music. It meant having KEERTHI CHANDRASHEKAR

Garba Touré, guitarist for Songhoy Blues, sitting in with the band during the naming ceremony of Vieux Farka Touré’s son, Amadou

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conversations about geopolitics, music-genre marketing, economics, and life in general. The word blues has been applied liberally to the music of Mali, and musicians there have embraced it. The term desert blues itself is fairly recent, appearing in the last couple decades, promoted by the Festival au Désert and music-industry interest in Tuareg bands like Tinariwen and their guitar-driven music known as ichumar. Many Malians greatly enjoy American blues music from artists like John Lee Hooker—who journalists were quick to designate as the Mississippi Delta equivalent to the desert blues of northern Mali because of the similar droning bass and vocal inflections—and Jimi Hendrix, whose photograph hangs in Ali Farka Touré’s home.

The word blues helps Malian musicians sell records worldwide, and, in the case of bands like Songhoy Blues and Malian pop musician Fatoumata Diawara, call attention to the current geopolitical plight dividing the country (the core musicians of Songhoy Blues are from northern cities like Diré and Gao, near Timbuktu, and their two albums are called Music in Exile and Resistance).

So how do you find out where the blues rears its head on a Saturday night in Bamako’s red-light district, Golf, where the band members of Songhoy Blues live? How do you put a stamp on a foreign musical landscape like Bamako’s?

One where the Niger River cuts the city in two, into the “white part of town,” as Aliou put it, and the southern half?

One where scarred signs on the north side read “Libya Hotel,” hinting at Muammar Qaddafi’s involvement and investment in the country and the arming of Tuaregs?

The reality is you can’t. If you want blues music on a Saturday night, you might be led to some takamba, a rhythm from the Timbuktu-Gao region. If you want to know what the word and concept of blues means to Malians, you will have to understand the Tuaregs, the Songhai (Songhoy), the Bamana, the Mande, the Bozo, the Dogon, and other ancient civilizations, along with the current-day geopolitical interactions between them.

To say, “This is what the blues in Mali, in 2019, looks and sounds like” would be, to steal a sentiment from the Bozo fisherman of the Niger River, like trying to identify a specific parcel of water in a river. It is more prudent and useful to understand the underlying currents and the sediment that creates them.

The blues scene in Bamako for me is sitting under the paltry shade of a tree outside Ali Farka Touré’s house in the northern Lafiabougou district during the naming ceremony for his grandson. It is listening to guitar-driven traditional northern music and sipping hot Malian tea out of shot glasses with strangers who I could only exchange nods and thank yous with. It is experiencing the stinging red Sahara dust and smoking red Dunhills while pentatonic notes danced with the sun’s rays for hours on end, knowing full well that I was soon going to be whisked away to a club on the south side—where the music would continue until four in the morning.

Keerthi Chandrashekar

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Southern Foodways Scholar Travels to Lima to Look for Answers in Peruvian Cuisine

By Catarina Passidomo

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As the Southern Foodways Alliance assistant professor of anthropology and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, my research and teaching have always focused on the connections among food, place, culture, and power, and specifically the discourses that circulate within and through contemporary food movements. I ask questions about the values and meanings people associate

CATARAINA PASSIDOMO

In March of this year, my partner, two kids, four suitcases, a stroller, a banjo, and I boarded a plane to Lima, Peru. Earlier that day, in a hotel room in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I found three passports in my purse. The fourth one (my husband’s, incidentally) had “fallen out of my purse” (I dropped it?) near the baggage claim at the Fort Lauderdale airport the night before, and some kind soul had brought it to lost and found. Also, our suitcases were each less than an ounce or so under the weight limit (after some rearranging). It was hard to tell whether we were off to an auspicious or a bad start.

I’m writing now, on the day of my deadline (because I’m the sort of person who drops passports and works to deadlines) from an apartment we’re renting in the Miraflores neighborhood of Lima. From the open windows I hear what has become the background din of our life here: car horns, construction noises, dogs barking, birds chirping, music blaring, and all manner of people sounds (talking, laughing, yelling, etc). It’s a glorious urban cacophony.

We are about halfway through our four-month stint in Peru, brought here thanks to a Fulbright US Scholar research and teaching grant. I’m studying various state, NGO, and institutional efforts that use Peruvian cuisine to “brand” the country by highlighting its reflection of cultural and biological diversity. This means having conversations with chefs, directors of culinary schools and their students, representatives from tourism boards, the Ministries of Culture and Tourism, and organizations committed to promoting Peruvian gastronomy. I have also been talking to farmers and agricultural advocates to learn whether international excitement about Peruvian cuisine has any impact on them. It’s too early to share very much about what I’m learning, but I can tell you a little bit about what brought me to study what has come to be known as the “gastronomic boom” in Peru.

Catarina y su familia en Perú

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CATARAINA PASSIDOMO

These billboards are currently found in Lima at every bus station and beyond for a new company called “Peruvian Experience,” a “participatory gastronomic experience at every level.” Note the mural in the background that also celebrates Peruvian Andean culture and cuisine with a big cooking pot over an open fire.

with food, and the narratives they tell about what food does or does not represent.

For example, the dominant contemporary narrative about southern (US) food is that it is: (1) delicious; (2) comforting; and (3) central to southern identity. (When you ask southerners what the region “does best,” the answer you are very likely to hear is food, perhaps followed by music, football, or “hospitality,” whatever that means.)

Increasingly, the narrative of southern “comfort food” includes an understanding of the cuisine’s origins in enslavement and colonialism, and its continued debt to diverse southerners of varied origins. Originally the creative and physical work primarily of African American women, southern food is now often celebrated as “melting pot” cuisine, reflective of indigenous, European, and increasingly diverse Latinx and Asian influences. As the region of the US South gets more diverse, the story goes, so does its food.

I think this narrative itself is really interesting, but I’m even more interested in people’s investment in it; why do southerners and nonsoutherners tell this story

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about southern food’s origin, evolution, and importance?

And why does it matter? What can it tell us about the South as a region, southerners as residents of that place, and the fluidity of both of those terms (“South” and “southerner”)?

These are the kinds of questions I had been asking for some time when, in 2015, I had the opportunity to come to Peru with other professors from the United States to participate in a faculty research seminar called Peruvian Food Systems: Balancing Growth and Preservation.

Prior to learning about this seminar, I was completely unaware of what had come to be known as the Peruvian “gastronomic boom.” As I began reading about the boom in preparation for the trip, I was fascinated: it seemed so familiar! Like the US South, Peru seemed to be embracing food as a symbol of both modernity and tradition and, most importantly, as a marker of and potentially a catalyst for some kind of unified national identity to be projected at both foreign and domestic publics.

(The term that I and other scholars use for this is “gastrodiplomacy.”) The more I thought about it, the more similarities I began to notice: the prominence of male chefs of European descent who claimed indebtedness to women—their own grandmothers or ethnically or racialized “others” whose labor and creative capital had in fact generated the foodways these chefs were now in a position to “elevate.” I became interested, too, in how notions of diversity and multiculturalism became mobilized discursively by these chefs but also by state agencies, tourism boards, business consortia, and cultural groups and organizations. It was becoming clear to me that food—or more specifically cuisine—was a powerful element in projects of placemaking, marketing, and branding.

While this neoliberal market orientation was evident, I still couldn’t understand precisely what (or who) is “for sale” in these projects, who gains from them, and who is left out. I wanted to better understand the stories behind these stories—that is, who is crafting narratives that aim to “sell” a place by marketing its food as representative of its best traits, such as diversity, multiculturalism, and tolerance. I’m also interested in what voices, stories, and experiences these narratives either exploit or ignore altogether. So, I came to Peru on a Fulbright fellowship to explore these questions, and I continue to explore them back home in the American South.

Two months in, I still have more questions than answers, but the questions are evolving in what feels like a productive way. And I’ve managed to not lose anything irreplaceable. I’ve ventured outside my comfort zone, teaching college classes in Spanish and living in close quarters with loud children and impatient neighbors. Some days feel relatively unremarkable—reading, teaching, talking to people, the endless and impossible work of parenting with good humor. And other days there are breakthroughs, metaphorical and real mountains to climb, alpacas to eat (one bite at a time). All said, we are all learning a lot, and eating bien.

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ALUMNI PROFILES

Over the Airwaves Tune in to Our Alumni Deejays

It used to be that you would have to drive to a certain area in order to listen to a local radio station, but thanks to the internet, these days you can be anywhere in the world and hear your favorite deejay spin tunes.

Two Southern Studies alums have their own radio shows on opposite ends of the country, both drawing on their University of Mississippi experiences for their listeners. Both shows are available through online streaming.

Shawna Dooley’s show, Down Every Road, is on the Creek 100.9 FM WNEX out of Macon, Georgia.

She spoke to one of the coowners of the station, and he offered her the opportunity to host a one-hour classic country show. The show, whose title was inspired by Merle Haggard’s “The Fugitive,” first aired on July 18, 2016. A new episode airs every other Monday night at 7:00, with an encore presentation of that show airing the following week. So far, she’s completed 62 new shows and played 881 songs, remarkably repeating only three songs so far. She spends at least eight hours preparing each show, selecting the theme and picking the corresponding songs.

“The majority of what I play is post– World War II,” Dooley said. “While I play songs that were charting hits, I also include artists who may not have received as much (or any) airplay on mainstream stations. I want each episode to have songs or artists that

Shawna Dooley

listeners will know, but I also want to expose them to something or someone they might not have heard.”

Dooley is a 1999 MA graduate, and she credits the music-loving friends and professors she had in Oxford for encouraging her reading, writing, and enjoying music. Songs that have inspired themes and episode titles for her radio show include “Night Life,” “Heart over Mind,” and “My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You,” all by Ray Price, “Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young” by Faron Young, “Party Time” by T. G. Sheppard, “On the

Road Again” by Willie Nelson, “Big River” by Johnny Cash, and “I Feel Like Hank Williams Tonight” by Jerry Jeff Walker.

“Within the past year I’ve done a show called ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ where all the songs are about parts of a house; one called ‘Anatomy Lesson,’ where the songs are about body parts; and one called ‘I’m With the Band,’ where all the songs are about musical instruments,” Dooley said.

One of her most popular themes is “Radio Roadtrip,” where she picks songs that mention cities,

“I want each episode to have songs or artists that listeners will know, but I also want to expose them to something or someone they might not have heard.”—Shawna Dooley Page 20

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ALUMNI PROFILES

“It’s really about juxtapositions: how songs can talk to each other and create new ideas and possibilities in the listener’s mind.”—Eric Feldman states, or areas and arrange them geographically along major interstates and highways. The first “Radio Roadtrip” transported listeners from Macon through Muscle Shoals, Tupelo, Galveston, San Antonio, Amarillo, Lubbock, El Paso, and Hollywood on the journey west. The second “Radio

Roadtrip” meandered from Baltimore to West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and then made a homecoming in Georgia.

“One of the station’s owners calls my show a master class in country music, and another refers to me as the station’s country music historian,” Dooley said. “A fellow classmate at

Ole Miss who has listened told me it was ‘academic in the best possible way.’ In addition to enjoying the music and possibly hearing a song or artist they’ve never heard before, I want listeners to understand the cultural and historical context of the songs, songwriters, and artists. Though some of the music is transcendent and not time- or place-bound, when it sheds light on what was happening in the singer’s or songwriter’s personal life, or what was going on in the larger regional or American setting, then the show becomes educational. I know the purpose is entertainment and I want it to be enjoyable to anyone who turns on the radio or streams over the internet, but I strive to produce and deliver a mini-lecture on country music every other week. Down Every Road is my one-hour podium to share my love of country music and give it historical or cultural context.”

Besides the radio show, Dooley’s day job is in the fundraising office at Mercer University in Macon, where she earned her BA as an English major and history and religion minor. To stream current or previous episodes of Down Every Road, visit the Creek 100.9 FM online.

Eric Feldman has a weekly radio show at San Jose City College, in San Jose, California, where he is a film instructor. In his film classes, students are introduced to film and electronic media through viewing and analysis of cinema and video productions from a variety of cultures. The work of filmmakers and vidographers is examined, including screenwriting, cinematography, editing, visual and sound design, acting, and directing.

Eric Feldman with Daisy continued on page 39

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ALUM PROFILE

Bringing History to Life Chuck Yarborough’s Earns OAH Teacher of the Year Award Chuck Yarborough (MA ’95), an instructor of US and African American history at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science in Columbus, Mississippi, is an obvious history fanatic whose teaching style fuses Mississippi’s past and present together in a way that has gained statewide and national recognition. Most recently, he received the Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau Teacher of the Year Award, which was presented to him at the OAH’s annual meeting, held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on April 5.

On May 8, students from Yarborough’s two classes gave an onstage theater performance for the town of Columbus. They celebrated the date May 8, 1865, when Union troops freed thousands of the enslaved in Columbus and Lowndes County. Yarborough has been directing the production, titled Eighth of May Emancipation Celebration, since it began in 2006.

This isn’t the only performance Yarborough has directed for his students. In the beginning of April, forty-eight juniors from Yarborough’s US History class put on the twentyninth annual production of Tales from the Crypt, a theatrical performance held in the historic Friendship Cemetery in Columbus. Yarborough has directed the production for nineteen years.

Students must choose one of the individuals buried in Friendship Cemetery from a town record that Yarborough provides at the beginning of the school year. By April, students will portray the fallen through musical performances, vignettes, and with costumes of southern attire from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Chuck Yarborough accepting the Organization of American Historians’ Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau Teacher of the Year Award in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

To prepare for their big performances, students in Tales from the Crypt and the Eighth of May Emancipation Celebration productions learn about the lives of those buried in Friendship and Sandfield Cemeteries, but not from textbook lectures in Yarborough’s classroom. Instead, students research the lives of those buried, made up of whites, Blacks, immigrants, Confederate soldiers, and the enslaved, from the archives stored in the Columbus-Lowndes County Library and the Columbus Cultural Heritage Foundation.

After Yarborough assigns each student an individual from the past, the class searches through official city documents and censuses to gather information for a research paper, while slowly unearthing the essence of the characters they will play. Yarborough’s approach to

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educate his students on Columbus’ past has also raised money for the town. Tales from the Crypt has raised $30,000 over the past five years.

“History enables us to consider our communities in a cross-cultural manner, and that appeals to me,” said Yarborough, a native of Pass Christian, Mississippi. He earned his BA from Vanderbilt University and graduated with an MA in Southern Studies in 1995. “For the OAH to recognize me with the 2019 Tachau Teacher of the Year Award is an amazing honor,” he said. “Being in the company of educators and historians who have received the award previously feels extraordinary.”

Founded in 1907, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) is the world’s largest professional continued on page 38

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Work-Study Student Will Be Missed Skylyn Irby to Pursue Doctorate in Mathematics The work-study students at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture are an indispensible part of the staff, and over the past two years one has especially stood out.

Skylyn Irby, Ronald E. McNair Scholar and mathematics major in the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, is a senior from Batesville who graduated this May. Irby was recognized on April 5 for her hard work across campus when she was inducted into the University of Mississippi’s Hall of Fame, one of the highest honors awarded to students.

Irby’s interest in mathematics developed at an early age and was a subject in which she always excelled. “It was my favorite subject, and I actually enjoyed completing classwork and homework assignments for my mathematics courses,” she said. “When I came to college, I considered some majors that were related to mathematics, but I soon realized that math would be the only enjoyable part for me. I have always heard the saying, ‘Do something you love, and it will all work out.’ That’s exactly what I did—I followed my heart and decided to major in mathematics.”

During her tenure at UM, Irby has served as vice president of the UM Gospel Choir and has held several leadership positions in both the Black Student Union and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. She has been involved in the Associated Student Body, the MOST Program, and the Bridge STEM Program through the Louis Stokes Mississippi Alliance for Minority Participation.

Irby said her work at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture has certainly impacted her academic experience in a positive way. “Many visitors are often surprised when I say that I am a math major, something that is quite unrelated to Southern Studies,” she said. “However, I have actually enjoyed being a student worker for a department very different from my area of study. I have learned so much just speaking with passersby, employees, professors, and graduate students.

From graduate school advice to just general words of encouragement, everyone at the Center has been a light throughout my two years being employed. I am forever grateful for the family I have gained.”

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Operations assistant Margaret Gaffney says many friends at the Center will miss Irby, who she calls a model student employee. “All of us here at the Center have benefitted from her hard work and constant cheer over the past two years,” she said. “Beyond being a stellar employee and model student, she Skylyn Irby has grown to be a friend as well. I am so proud of all she has accomplished during her time at the university, and I look forward to calling her Dr. Irby. We wish her all the best in her continuing studies.”

Center work-study student Ukwuoma Ukairo, who worked alongside Irby, is excited for her friend’s future opportunities. “Skylyn Irby has paved the way for so many women of color on this campus, including me,” Ukairo said. “She exudes excellence and provides a friendly face to all persons. She is a beautiful person who many, myself included, find themselves proud to know.”

This fall, Irby will pursue a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Alabama on a full scholarship.

“My undergraduate studies have prepared me for the coursework and rigor that I will encounter throughout my graduate studies,” Irby said. “My career goals consist of working for the National Security Agency (the biggest employer of mathematicians), conducting research in math education, and becoming a professor.”

Spring-Summer 2019

Rebecca Lauck Cleary

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FROM STUDY THE SOUTH

Study the South Publishes Two New Essays

New Work Focuses on the Literary Marketplace and White Southern Identity This winter Study the South published two new essays, one of which follows the traditional essay format, and the other tries a structure new to Study the South: a roundtable discussion on a single academic text.

The first essay, “Shame of the Southland: Violence and the Selling of the Visceral South,” written by Sarah E. Gardner and published on January 28, tells the story of Violence—a novel that failed. Violence tells us as much about the literary marketplace as the stories of those more familiar novels that came to dominate the national discourse about the problem South during the late-1920s and 1930s. It tells about a crusading writing team that imagined it could reform the South through print; it tells about a publisher’s fantasies of a region that had been exoticized for much of its history; and it tells about the limits of a narrative strategy that sought to combine a reformist impulse with outlandish sensationalized content.

Perhaps most importantly, Violence reminds us that a literary canon represents a small percentage of titles that were actually published. It thus encourages us to ask what we might find if we shift our gaze away

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from those works that command our attention to those titles that lived short and inconspicuous lives.

Sarah E. Gardner is professor of history at Mercer University. Her most recent publications are Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920– 1941 (2017) and Reassessing the 1930s South, edited with Karen L. Cox (2018).

The second essay, published on March 4, is a roundtable discussion between Zachary J. Lechner, Darren E. Grem, and Margaret T. McGehee.

This past summer, Study the South issued a call for papers that included a new approach: roundtable discussions on individual books, exhibits, and documentary films about the South in the 1970s.

In this roundtable discussion, Darren E. Grem and Margaret T.

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McGehee pose questions and offer critical perspectives on Zachary J. Lechner’s recent book, The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960–1980, the title of which makes reference to W. J. Cash’s 1941 The Mind of the South. In his book, Lechner uses Cash’s conception that the cultural life of white southerners consists of a competition among several incompatible images. But unlike Cash’s work, Lecher turns the focus away from the white southerners themselves to study the ways Americans outside the South thought and wrote about the region.

In this discussion, Lechner follows Grem’s and McGehee’s comments with his response.

Darren E. Grem is an associate professor of history and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. In the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History and at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Darren teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in twentieth-century US history, southern history and Southern Studies, and modern politics and culture.

Margaret T. McGehee is an associate

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CENTER WELCOMES NEW DIRECTOR–––––––– continued from page 3

professor of English and American studies at Oxford College of Emory University. Zachary J. Lechner is an assistant professor of history at Thomas Nelson Community College.

He earned his BA from Truman State University in 2002, his MA from Purdue University in 2005, and his PhD from Temple University in 2012. The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960–1980 is his first book.

Study the South is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, online journal, published and managed by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. The journal, founded in 2014, exists to encourage interdisciplinary academic thought and discourse on the culture of the American South, particularly in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, music, literature, documentary studies, gender studies, religion, geography, media studies, race studies, ethnicity, folklife, and art. Contact James G. Thomas, Jr. at jgthomas@olemiss.edu for more information.

Visit Study the South online at www.studythesouth.com to read both of these essays and others.

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the Center to talk with McKee one-on-one or in group settings about goals for the Center, said Kirsten Dellinger, search committee chair, associate dean for diversity and inclusion, and professor of sociology.

“It was immediately clear that people valued Katie’s collaborative leadership style and her dedication to creating a collective vision through strategic planning,” Dellinger said. “Her colleagues hold her in high regard for her cutting-edge research and leadership in the field of Southern Studies.

“It will be very exciting to see Katie, the first woman director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, lead us toward the next phase of the Center’s vibrant existence.”

She recently published Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post–Civil War South, which looks into the past to gain insight into Sherwood Bonner (1849–83), a Holly Springs native who portrayed the discord and uneasiness of the Reconstruction era in her fiction and nonfiction. The book participates in a renewed attention to the period of Reconstruction in American literary history.

McKee is co-editor, with University of Mississippi English professor Deborah Barker, of American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, and her articles have appeared in various journals, including American Literature, Legacy, Southern Literary Journal, and Mississippi Quarterly. Her areas of scholarly research include nineteenth-century American literature, the literature and culture of the nineteenth-century South, writing by women, Global South studies, film studies, and humor studies.

She earned her BA in English at Centre College, and her MA in English, and PhD in American literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

William Ferris was named the Center’s inaugural director in 1978, and under his twenty-year tenure, the university became internationally recognized as a leader in the examination and study of the South. Charles Reagan Wilson became Center director in 1998, when Pres. Bill Clinton appointed Ferris as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ted Ownby, who began his joint appointment in Southern Studies and history in 1988, became the Center’s third director in 2008. Ownby is stepping down to teach in his capacity as the William F. Winter Professor of History.

Rebecca Lauck Cleary

Mark Your Calendar!

The Twenty-Seventh Oxford Conference for the Book April 1–3, 2020

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Andrew Mellon Foundation Recognizes Invisible Histories Project’s Research IHP-Mississippi Satellite Project Lauded for Oral History Work

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recognized the work of several University of Mississippi partners through a $300,000 grant supporting the collection, preservation, future research, and accessibility of LGBTQ history in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.

The grant went to the Invisible Histories Project, founded in 2016

by Joshua Burford and Maigen Sullivan and based in Birmingham, Alabama, with money also going to the satellite Invisible Histories Project-Mississippi.

Mississippi partners on the grant include the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies, and UM Special Collections and Archives. The goal of the project is to expand and make publicly available manuscript and oral history collections that document LGBTQ histories of Mississippi.

Jessica Wilkerson, associate professor of history and Southern Studies; Amy McDowell, assistant professor of sociology; and Jaime Harker, director of the Isom Center and professor of English, are the primary faculty involved in the project.

The seeds of IHP-Mississippi were planted last year when Burford visited the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and met with Wilkerson and her Queer Southern

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History class, which was developing an oral history project. During that visit, Southern Studies faculty and staff, the Isom Center, and UM Special Collections and Archives began exploring the possibility of starting a satellite project of IHP at the University of Mississippi.

According to Burford, the University of Mississippi is the only current IHP satellite site, although plans are for the University of West Georgia to become a satellite in spring 2020.

Along with receiving $10,000 each year for two years to support the project, IHP-Mississippi will be part of the bigger IHP model. IHP’s staff will provide support through site visits, helping to locate research opportunities, advising on queer history courses and research development, connecting institutions to repositories and community organizations, providing branding and paperwork, developing a site plan of goals and outcomes, and providing trainings for students and faculty.

Beyond that, though, Wilkerson said the importance is the opportunity to join the IHP network, in order to learn from archivists and public historians already doing this work.

Burford and Sullivan will visit Oxford this summer to meet with the project team and develop a site plan for the 2019–20 academic year.

Wilkerson said this project will benefit current students and

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hopefully help attract up-and-coming scholars of the Queer South.

“Of course, Jaime Harker is leading the way as a faculty member with her book The Lesbian South,” Wilkerson said.“Mostly, I was inspired by the group of students in my spring Southern Studies seminar. They laid the groundwork for this project by conducting oral history interviews with gay, lesbian, and queer community members in Oxford, and they showed me that a larger project was possible.”

Additionally, Wilkerson’s Fall 2019 Southern Studies graduate seminar will expand the oral history project on Mississippi LGBTQ history.

Wilkerson and McDowell also received an Isom Fellowship to help support the expanding LGBTQ oral history and archiving project.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies.

To this end, it supports exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work.

More information on the Invisible Histories Project can be found online at www.invisiblehistory.org.

Rebecca Lauck Cleary

The Southern Register

Living Blues News We have survived yet another winter, with spring having officially begun. My plums, pears, apples, and blueberries are all in full bloom, with the promise of fruit aplenty to come. Green is quickly replacing brown as the dominant color of the landscape here in north Mississippi.

For me, spring also means the big Living Blues Festival Guide issue. Living Blues is happy to produce the industry’s first blues festival guide each year, and this year is no different. Check out the 2019 edition starting on page 74, or go to the Living Blues website for an even larger list that includes early festivals and international festivals. There are lots of great new blues festivals this year, as well as some old-time festivals celebrating some big milestones.

This issue is jam-packed with content—in fact, we had to add pages to get it all in! Our cover story is on welltraveled bluesman Eric Bibb. A New York native who has resided in Stockholm, Sweden, for the last several decades, Bibb has never stopped broadening his mind, his music, or his vision. His releases continue to stretch the boundaries of blues by incorporating roots music from around the globe.

California artist Mike Henderson is a true Renaissance man: a musician whose roots date to the HaightAshbury days of late 1960s San Francisco, a filmmaker who has made nearly thirty films, and a renowned painter who has taught for forty-three years at the University of California, Davis. It is rare that we have such a talented visual artist featured in LB (Howard Armstrong was another), so I decided to include a small gallery of Henderson’s paintings to share that side of this fascinating bluesman.

Nathan Williams was literally born into zydeco. The younger brother of Sid Williams, owner of the legendary El Sido’s Zydeco and Blues Club in Lafayette, Louisiana, Nathan sat at the feet of Clifton Chenier (his uncle was Chenier’s guitarist Harry Hypolite) absorbing the music of southern Louisiana. In the thirty years since his first release, Nathan Williams and the Zydeco Cha Chas have become the most popular zydeco band on the scene—a scene that will continue to survive thanks to Williams passing on the sounds of traditional zydeco to his sons Naylon and Nathan Jr., and nephew Djuan Francis.

The name Henry “Son” Stuckey has loomed large in the study of one of the most fascinating subgenres of blues—the Bentonia school of blues. The origin of this style has been studied for more than fifty years, as researchers traced the music of Skip James, Cornelius Bright, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, and others back to one source—Henry Stuckey. But Stuckey has remained an elusive figure. He never recorded and, until now, no photograph of him was known to exist. Researcher

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2019 Living B lues Festival G uide!

® ©

Issue #260 Vol. 50, #2

EBRluICes BIBB Is Truth

MIKE HENDERSON NATHAN WILLIAMS MAMIE SMITH THEO HUFF

$6.95 US $6.95 CAN www.livingblues.com

––– DISCOVERED

First ever photos of Be ! ––– nton Pioneer Henry “Son” ia Blues Stuckey!

Michael Schulze tracked down Stuckey’s daughter Mozelle and, lo and behold, she had a number of old photos of her father—even one with him holding his Stella guitar. We publish these photos for the first time, along with new information about Stuckey’s life and musical influences.

In this issue we also launch a new LB column from renowned music writer Jas Obrecht. With each coming issue, Let It Roll! The Essential Blues Sessions will focus on an influential recording session in the history of the blues.

The column will take the reader inside the studio to shine a light on what made that day so special and what made the sides from that day epochal in the blues. We kick off the column with a look at the very first blues recording session, Mamie Smith’s OKeh Records session from August 10, 1920, which produced the first blues hit, Crazy Blues. Future columns will cover the broad expanse of blues, including prewar, postwar, and even field recordings from all over the map of blues history. We hope you will enjoy this fascinating new part of Living Blues.

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Brett J. Bonner

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New Volume in the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series Published Faulkner and the Native South Edited by Jay Watson, Annette Trefzer, and James G. Thomas, Jr. The new volume in the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series, Faulkner and the Native South (University Press of Mississippi), is an exploration of the Nobel laureate’s engagement with Native Americans and the ways in which Native American writing illuminates Faulkner.

Included in this new volume are contributions by Eric Gary Anderson, Melanie R. Anderson, Jodi A. Byrd, Gina Caison, Robbie Ethridge, Patricia Galloway, LeAnne Howe, John Wharton Lowe, Katherine M. B. Osburn, Melanie Benson Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Jay Watson.

From new insights into the Chickasaw sources and far-reaching implications of Faulkner’s fictional placename “Yoknapatawpha,” to discussions that reveal the potential for Indigenous land-, family-, and storybased methodologies to deepen understanding of Faulkner’s fiction (including but not limited to the novels and stories he devoted explicitly to Native American topics), the eleven essays of this new volume advance the critical analysis of Faulkner’s Native South and the Native South’s Faulkner. Critics push beyond assessments of the historical accuracy of his Native representations and the colonial hybridity of his Indian characters. Essayists turn instead to Indigenous intellectual culture for new models, problems, and questions to bring to Faulkner studies. Along the way, readers

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are treated to illuminating comparisons between Faulkner’s writings and the work of a number of Native American authors, filmmakers, tribal leaders, and historical figures.

Faulkner and the Native South brings together Native and non-Native scholars in a stimulating and often surprising critical dialogue about the Indigenous wellsprings of Faulkner’s creative energies and about Faulkner’s own complicated presence in Native American literary history.

Jay Watson is Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies and professor of English at the University of Mississippi. His many publications include Fifty Years after Faulkner, Faulkner’s Geographies, Faulkner and Whiteness, and Conversations with Larry Brown, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

Annette Trefzer is associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Mississippi. She is author of Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction. James G. Thomas, Jr. is associate director for publications at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, is an editor of numerous works on southern culture, including Faulkner and Print Culture, Faulkner and History, Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas, Conversations with Barry Hannah, The Mississippi Encyclopedia, and The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

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The Southern Register

READING THE SOUTH Book Reviews and Notes by Faculty, Staff, Students, and Friends of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture

Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy Edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll.

Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019. 432 pages. $99.99 cloth, $28.99 paper, $28.99 ebook.

In June 2016 J. D. Vance published Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. In his bootstrap memoir, the thirty-one-yearold venture capitalist describes his journey out of Middletown, Ohio, away from a dysfunctional family and a community in economic decline. After serving in the military, he graduated from the Ohio State University, attended Yale Law School, and, before long, worked as an investor at a major Silicon Valley firm where he became a rich man. He landed a book deal with the help of his Yale law professor, author Amy Chua, and his book reached American audiences when they were primed for it—in their scramble to understand the rise of candidate Trump’s popularity among the so-called “white working class.”

(We know now that Trump won the presidential election with the votes of a majority of white people, regardless of class and education.)

Vance, who had written for National Review before publishing his memoir, framed his story with some light policy prescriptions and the contentious theory of a culture of poverty: in sum, heteronormative families, education, and grit should fix what ails working-class communities. Vance’s claims on Appalachian identity and mythology catapulted

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him into the punditry media circuit, where he sought to explain the rise of Trump among poor and workingclass whites to primarily liberal audiences.

Dozens of scholars and activists who hail from, and live and work in, the Appalachian region responded quickly to the memoir, especially as it climbed the bestseller list and as mainstream media outlets took it as the story of contemporary Appalachia. Appalachian Reckoning is the most sustained response to Hillbilly Elegy, as well as the political and cultural landscape that gave rise to its popularity. Its editors Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll are well suited to the task, as each has written scholarly books on the history of images of Appalachia and their function in American society.

In Appalachian Reckoning, the coeditors asked scholars, writers, poets, activists, and photographers—almost all of them from or working in the region—to respond to Hillbilly Elegy specifically and to popular ideas of

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Appalachia generally. Readers will find an array of genres, from reviews and poetry to photographs, as well as viewpoints, most of them critical of Vance, with a few defenses of the memoir. Other authors seem less interested in the memoir itself than the cultural backdrop, which so often renders daily life in Appalachian communities invisible.

Historian of Appalachia T. R. C. Hutton offers one of the most trenchant critiques of Hillbilly Elegy.

He explains how Vance draws upon old myths about the Scots-Irish and pins “hillbilly” failures to an allegedly inherited culture. In its time and place, the hillbilly culture worked, Vance tells the reader, but the hillbilly is unfit for modern America.

Vance has little interest in class stratification, declining wages, deindustrialization, or the effects of austerity, and, as Hutton points out, he ignores decades of scholarship on poverty and class in Appalachia.

In “He said/She said” Affrilachian poet Crystal Good proceeds with biting wit, as she refuses to allow Elegy to speak for her experience in Appalachia as a Black woman: “HE takes out white trash in Black Lives Matter bags,” she writes, suggesting the racial under- and overtones of the memoir.

A striking photograph by Meg Wilson imagines Appalachia beyond Hillbilly Elegy. It shows a white, adolescent girl in Old Town Berea in Kentucky during an art festival. Atop a skateboard, the girl with a blond, pageboy haircut, wearing a T-shirt and tutu, looks over her shoulder at the camera and is cheered on by her friends in the background. It’s a vivid, youthful, joyful image of Appalachian youth, contrary to the typical images of the region.

My favorite essay comes from writer and artist Robert Gipe. In

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his funny yet poignant personal essay, “How Appalachian Am I,” he describes growing up in Kingsport, Tennessee, known for being the home of Eastman Chemical Company, where Gipe worked for a time as a teenager. Connecting his growing up years—when he learned to listen to the stories of his hilarious mother and quirky co-workers—to his later cultural work in Harlan County, Kentucky, where he now resides, Gipe offers the best statement on a society that takes one man’s story as the final word on an entire region.

And we are all obliged to work to make sure each of us has the right to hear and tell all the stories and each make our own meaning out of them and the world, and if we don’t work toward that end, we are cheating our neighbor, and we are cheating ourselves of the joy of living, and should be ashamed of ourselves and should be forced to take long car rides in cars with no radio for all of eternity with people who grew up in places where they didn’t learn how to tell stories.

Gipe’s is a lesson not for Vance per se, but all those who read and consumed his book, or read and consumed any single story and took it as the final, flattened word about a richly storied place.

Jessica Wilkerson

Monument: Poems New and Selected

By Natasha Trethewey.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. 189 pages. $26.00 cloth.

Monument is a welcome gathering of “new and selected” poetry, although admirers of Natasha Trethewey’s work might be initially disappointed to find only eleven new poems in the book. Her previous collections, from Domestic Work (2000) through Thrall

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(2012), provide the balance of the text. Despite the familiarity of individual pieces, however, the structure of Monument encourages a re-reading that is fresh and compelling. One of the new poems, “Imperatives for Carrying on in the Aftermath,” suggests the urgency and prefaces the book’s six divisions. Spousal abuse is this poem’s subject, specifically the murder of her mother by Trethewey’s stepfather, but the poet’s imperatives also apply to other situations in which a devastated survivor must “ask yourself what’s in your heart, that / reliquary—blood locket and seedbed.” Consonant with the gold color of the binding and endpapers, Monument is the poet’s precious vessel, a reliquary whose contents are both personal and historic.

Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Native Guard (2006) is reprinted in full at the heart of Monument. Thus the poet emphasizes her commitment to creating memorials for her murdered mother, for Black guardsmen from Louisiana who fought with the Union, and for other southerners of the past—especially Black men, women, and even children. “Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi,” for example, describes a boll weevil plague in 1907, an exhausted sharecropper with a young boy in 1913, and Black

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children on a barge during the terrible flood of 1927 (“refugees from history”). In her keynote address for the University of Mississippi’s symposium on literary and artistic landscapes this spring, Trethewey said she was “hurt into poetry” because of her “fraught relationship” with her “native land.” She illustrated this “landscape of trauma” by reading several Native Guard poems, including “Miscegenation” (on Mississippi’s hostility toward her parents’ mixed-race marriage in 1965), “Incident” (on the Ku Klux Klan’s cross-burning in her grandmother’s yard when Trethewey was a child), and “Pilgrimage” (on the poet’s nightmare of being crushed by the “heavy arm” of “the ghost of history” in a Vicksburg mansion).

“Theories of Time and Space,” the first of the Native Guard poems, describes a boat ride to Mississippi’s Ship Island, the site of the Union fortification pictured on Monument’s dust jacket, its vaulted architecture resembling catacombs. In both the sonnet corona “Native Guard” and in “Elegy for the Native Guards,” Trethewey honors the Black guardsmen who served, and sometimes died, at Fort Massachusetts with no lasting tribute. Unlike Confederate prisoners, who were commemorated by a bronze plaque at the entrance to the fort, the “black phalanx” was forgotten. “What is monument to their legacy?” the poet asks in her elegy, while creating that very monument in the mirrored verse form of her well-wrought abccba sestains. “Elegy for the Native Guards” also mirrors the preceding Native Guard poem, “Monument,” one of Trethewey’s several elegies for her mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough. The monument of the poem’s title is the ants’ mound on her mother’s grave plot: “a blister on my heart.”

As the title of both this elegy and Trethewey’s new book implies, Turnbough is the main subject not only of Native Guard but also of Monument: Poems New and Selected.

Her presence is heightened by many

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of the decisions Trethewey made in reprinting material from her previous collections. For instance, nineteen of the thirty-four Domestic Work poems comprise the first section of Monument, heightening the focus on her family; and Trethewey reverses the original positions of the volume’s first and last poems.

In 2000 Domestic Work began with “Gesture of a Woman-in-Process,” inspired by a 1902 photo of two women at work with their clotheslines and garden patch. In Monument, “Limen” is the first Domestic Work selection, a poem about a persistent woodpecker that serves as “a door knocker / to the cluttered house of memory.” In memory, “I can almost see my mother’s face” as the dead woman again hangs sheets on a clothesline, “each one / a thin screen between us.” Because “limen” signifies both a psychological and a physical threshold, this first poem of the first section of Monument can be seen as the doorway to the whole collection. “Gesture of a Woman-inProcess” brings the Domestic Work selections to an end, framing this first division with images of women at their domestic labors, scenes from the past brought back to life by memory, photographs, and poetry.

With its scene of working women from the early twentieth century, “Gesture of a Woman-in-Process” also provides a threshold to part 2: selections from Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), a volume indebted to E. J. Bellocq’s c. 1910 photos of mixedrace prostitutes in New Orleans. Part of the pleasure of reading Monument is recognizing Trethewey’s craft in building artful links between her previous collections. In an interview with Lauren LeBlanc of the Paris Review, the poet said she was “thinking of this as a totally different book with an entirely new arc and trying to frame my entire oeuvre thus far through a new lens.”

For most of Trethewey’s longtime readers, the two least familiar sections of Monument will be part 4, poems from the 2014 chapbook Congregation, and part 6: “Articulation,” ten poems

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first published in book form here.

Her father, her stepfather, and especially Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough herself are the subjects of this recent work. Trethewey told Erin Vanderhoof of Vanity Fair that, when she was working on a prose memoir about her mother, “there would be moments when I would have to stop and something would come out as a poem, and I couldn’t help it.” Her final poem, “Articulation,” compares Saint Gertrude’s vision of “the sacred heart of Christ” to Trethewey’s dream about her mother’s fatal wound.

The last two lines of Monument then ask: “how could I not—bathed in the light / of her wound—find my calling there?” In “Articulation,” Trethewey responds to the imperative of the book’s prefatory poem: “Ask yourself what’s in your heart.”

Joan Wylie Hall

Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement

By D’Weston Haywood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 352 pages. $34.95 paperback, $90.00 cloth, $27.99 ebook.

What is Black manhood? Who gets to define it, live it, and critique it?

Where did these debates on Black manhood take place—in the home, the barbershop, the lodge, the church? According to D’Weston Haywood in Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement, it took place in the Black press and the Black public sphere for the world to see and read. The study of Black manhood as a historical actor has come in vogue and details how African American men experienced

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intersectionality through race and gender. The study of African American men and manhood has included the Black church, fraternal organizations, education, military and wars, and social justice movements. These studies describe how individuals performed Black manhood within these institutions and how these institutions promoted a certain performance of Black manhood, but they have yet to provide clear linkage between the philosophy of Black manhood within these institutions to the public sphere. Haywood’s book fills the gap in the literature. It adds the institutionalization of Black manhood within the Black press to the story of Black manhood.

It is said that the history of the world is but the biography of great men, and Haywood adds a new lens for us to view some of the “greatest” African Americans—W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Robert S. Abbott. Haywood argues that the Black press was able to engage with Black manhood like no other African American institution could because of the large number of African Americans who were reading newspapers. These editors defined Black manhood and tied it to racial uplift and social justice. Black newspapers’ power was unprecedented, and it

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shaped race, gender, and social justice for the African American community. According to Haywood, Let Us Make Men “reinterprets the twentiethcentury Black press as a tool of Black men’s leadership, public vocalization, gender and identity formation, and space for the construction of ideas of proper Black masculinity that shaped twentieth-century Black freedom struggle to wage a fight for racial justice and Black manhood.”

Let Us Make Men is divided into five chapters spanning roughly a half-century, detailing the story of the modern Black press. In chapter 1, “Go to It, My Southern Brothers,” Haywood argues that W. E. B. Dubois and Robert S. Abbott interlocked manhood, racial politics, and news media using their respective newspapers, the Crisis and the Defender. Chapter 2, “Garvey Must Go,” is an examination of Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, which redefined and exemplified Black manhood in the New Negro era but was nevertheless critiqued and attacked by Garvey’s rivals. The following chapter, “The Fraternity,” through the story of Robert S. Abbott and his grooming of his heir and nephew John Sengstacke, details the difficulties that African American newspapers and Black manhood experienced during the Great Depression. In chapter 4, “A Challenge to Our Manhood,” Haywood considers Robert F. Williams, a southerner and unexpected addition to the fraternity of editors and influencers of Black manhood. Williams, through his Crusader, added a militancy to Black manhood—a militancy based on his region, his class, and his veteran status. The final chapter, “Walk the Way of Free Men,” examines Malcolm X and Muhammad Speaks, telling the story of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad’s push toward separatism, their conflict, Black Power, and the struggle between them to represent the Black Nationalist manhood.

The strengths of this book are many, and among them is the macro

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level analysis of Black manhood as it intersects the public sphere. The need for these men to debate, define, and live out a Black manhood that was grounded in being Race Men adds something new and telling about the Black public sphere, Black gender, and Black history.

Let Us Make Men is the missing link in explaining how the Black public sphere reacted to and engaged both white masculinity and Black masculinity. It is an interdisciplinary examination, cutting across media studies, African American studies, gender studies, and history.

Let Us Make Men sets out to analyze the intersections of race, gender, and the public sphere, and it does so masterfully. It adds to our understanding of some of the most wellknown African Americans by examining their engagement as editors and as Black men. It is a must-read for anyone interested in learning how Black manhood was shaped, who it was shaped by, and how it was transmitted for people to debate, learn, and put into practice.

Derrick Lanois

Nuevo South: Latinas/ os, Asians, and the Remaking of Place

By Perla M. Guerrero. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. 256 pages. $90.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Southern Studies and its related disciplines have long paid attention to Black and white racial divides in the South, but works that engage with the histories of other races or ethnicities in the region have been, until recently, much rarer.

Perla M. Guerrero’s Nuevo South: Latinas/os, Asians, and the Remaking of Place is a welcome addition to this growing body of academic

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literature. Nuevo South explores the history of Vietnamese, Cuban, and Mexican immigrants in northwestern Arkansas, and examines how place and local culture shaped the experiences of each ethnic group as they immigrated to the region.

Guerrero begins by defining a “Nuevo South context” for her work.

She incorporates and responds not only to other works that study Latinas/os in the South, but also historical work about the New South and its examination of the relationship between racial discrimination and economic development. She draws on C. Vann Woodward, W. E. B. Du Bois, Clyde Woods, and racial formation theories, as well as works that examine the experiences of Asian and Latina/o communities in other regions of the United States in order to “delineate racialization processes in a particular kind of southern place and examine how those processes are shaped by a place’s histories, including those of racial violence and the removal of Black communities.” Guerrero foregrounds political economy and social relations, moving effortlessly among the local, state, regional, national, and international narratives that shaped the experiences of and responses to immigrants in the South.

Nuevo South proceeds largely in

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chronological order. Guerrero’s first chapter explores how northwest Arkansas’s racial stratification originated with the removal of Native Americans and the later racial terrorism and ethnic cleansing that led to a major decrease in African American population. Guerrero argues that this history “would be critical in shaping its later responses to racial difference.” Further chapters expand this argument, placing the 1970s arrival of Vietnamese refugees, 1980s Cuban refugees, and poultry industry Latina/o workers in the 1990s in the context of wider narratives, stereotypes, and paradigms of race, ethnicity, and class. Federal military bases and poultry plants play a major role in drawing various groups to the region. Refugees from the Vietnam War and Fidel Castro’s Cuban regime were sent primarily to Fort Chaffee for processing while the government relocated them within the United States. Meanwhile Tyson chicken plants, Walmart, and a low cost of living drew other groups to northwest Arkansas. Guerrero concludes by exploring the questions of why and how Arkansas has avoided passing punitive anti-immigrant state legislation similar to other southern states like Alabama or Georgia, suggesting that business leaders’ desire for cheap labor has prevailed over other political concerns.

Guerrero utilizes a wide variety of sources in her work, relying most heavily on archival and ethnographic research. She digs deeply into state newspaper databases, especially the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and its predecessors. She also utilizes special collections related to Fort Chaffee, including some of the camp newspapers published and distributed among immigrants awaiting processing.

Guerrero’s description of utilizing search terms to access information through digitized newspaper collections may be of particular use to scholars. She employed a variety of search techniques to broaden her research and gather as many sources as possible. Additionally, she did fifty-one interviews over a period of

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eight years with people who live in the region, often using what she calls a “snowball” technique, where one interviewee would suggest another, and another, and so on. Though she wanted to focus on immigrants who actually worked in poultry plants, Guerrero found the most success with middle-class or professional workers or those who acted as “cultural brokers” between immigrant communities and the region’s normative white communities, adding a layer of complexity to the text’s depiction of class as well as ethnicity.

Overall, Guerrero’s work is an excellent examination of the ways that Asian and Latina/o immigrants to the South complicate the region’s understanding of race and its historical racialization processes. She also suggests future directions for further research in the field, detailing untranslated sources that should be of use to future scholars and understudied aspects of immigrant life in the South, like the role that religion and churches play in structuring the reception and the daily life of Asians and Latinas/os. Nuevo South is an invaluable addition to a growing body of academic literature that expands our concepts of who lives in the South and why it matters.

Ellie Campbell

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies Edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell and Alfred L. Brophy. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. 368 pages. $99.95 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 ebook.

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies grew out of an Emory University conference of the same name. Across academic disciplines, within private and public

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universities, and beyond institutions of higher learning, this collection normalizes the relationships between slavery and universities. The editors introduce the collection with the challenges that Americans’ perceptions of universities as enlightened places can bring to their abilities to understand them also as structured sites of oppression. This parallels the difficulty that some Americans have with reconciling the paradox of colonial slavery and the nation’s independence. Both lead to the “cognitive dissonance” necessitating a contemporary reconsideration of the history and legacies of slavery on American campuses.

Slavery and the University is divided into two parts, “Proslavery and Antislavery Thought and Action” and “Remembering and Forgetting Slavery at Universities,” with a total of sixteen chapters. In the first part, historians Craig Steven Wilder, Craig B. Hollander, and Martha A. Sandweiss explore how Revolutionary-era slave-owning sons integrated and impacted the development of northern institutions like Princeton, through an academic pipeline of students from southern and mid-Atlantic colonies and parts of the slaveholding Caribbean.

Wilder (chapter 1) aptly chronicles a mix of colonial and Loyalist heroes,

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developing institutions of higher learning and the slave trade, through southern and northern relationships of dependency. Hollander and Sandweiss (chapter 2) address how Princeton students attempted to mediate conflicting ideas about slavery through African colonization efforts but could not evade Civil War sectional strife. The University had more control over late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century attempts to memorialize its Civil War era past.

This “politics of memory” eventually led to reconciliationist efforts to morally equalize the two sides.

Alfred L. Brophy (chapter 3) shifts to southern academies that not only taught students to defend slavery but also helped frame “proslavery political theory.” These institutions influenced and were impacted by the science of race, which was used to justify and affirm white supremacist hierarchies. Some students brought slaves with them but also negotiated their relationships to enslaved persons owned by southern institutions, like the College of William and Mary, Hampden-Sydney College, and the University of Virginia. As described by Jennifer Bridges Oast (chapter 4), in turn, enslaved persons navigated “a minefield daily” by adhering to and resisting perceived institutional structures and the whims of students seeking to assert power.

A. James Fuller (chapter 6) also addresses this issue at the University of Alabama where students strove to “become men of honor” by having control over enslaved persons. Fuller was influenced by Brophy’s research on Sam, an enslaved man physically abused by students, and how then president of the University, Basil Many, approached those issues.

Manly, a Baptist preacher, “wrote the Alabama Resolutions, which led to the breakup of the national Baptist Triennial Convention and the creation of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

Like those at Alabama, antebellum Emory College administrators set the stage for the Methodist Episcopal Church’s pre–Civil War

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split. In addition to getting a classical education, students were influenced by administrators who legitimized slavery through scripture. Patrick C. Jamieson (chapter 5) shows the University’s staunch opposition to abolition, reflected in its adoption of proslavery texts as the Civil War loomed. This helped to develop young, white men’s identities “as students, Methodists, and, ultimately as Confederate soldiers.”

One major strength of this collection is its incorporation of Black students and administrators into narratives of slavery, universities, and African colonization. Diane Windham Shaw (chapter 7) pieces together the lives of two enslaved men educated at Lafayette College, with an understanding that their education would lead to their emigration to Africa. David and Washington McDonogh take divergent paths; David remained in the US, and Washington emigrated to Liberia. William B. Hart (chapter 8) explores colonization to Liberia “as an anti-Black rather than merely an antislavery movement” through the life and work of Martin Henry Freeman, a student at Middlebury College in Vermont, who became the first African American president of a college, Avery College in Pennsylvania. These men understood that true equality in the US was beyond their reach, despite their education, also evident in Kabria Baumgartner’s (chapter 9) chapter on antebellum New England, which highlights white residents’ condemnation of African American higher education.

J. Brent Morris (chapter 10) takes a gendered approach to education at Oberlin College through women like Lucy Stone, who inverted their expected gender roles by training themselves for public, not private, lives. This is evident in their antislavery efforts informed by personal relationships with former slaves and some of their Oberlin peers, who were daughters of southern slaveholders.

The book’s second part adequately

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transitions to a personal reflection

by Ruth J. Simmons (chapter 11).

As president of Brown Univesity, Simmons spearheaded investigations of the school’s relationships to slavery. Her first-person account is the most compelling essay in this text, as she describes how she prioritized this work upon arrival at Brown and consciously imagined it as a scholarly initiative, with groundbreaking faculty and student research, also modeled in Sven Beckert’s, Balraj Gill’s, Jim Henle’s and Katherine May Stevens’s “short history” of Harvard and slavery (chapter 12). The authors complicate Harvard’s historical memory as “the pioneer of antislavery,” by showing how it caved into pressure from university donors and “their southern slaveholding business partners.” The Harvard faculty also failed to support Judge Edward G. Loring, a member of its law faculty, who returned fugitive slave Anthony Burns in the famous case.

This indicates a university pattern of responding to public opinion on the issue of slavery rather than taking an antislavery stance.

Ywone D. Edwards-Ingram (chapter 13) and Mark Auslander (chapter 14) address slavery remembrance through material culture at the College of William and Mary and Emory University, respectively. Edwards-Ingram looks at the lives and impacts of father and son St. George and Nathanial Beverly Tucker, who both served on the College’s law faculty, and their associations with slavery.

Through archaeological and historical evidence, the author includes recommendations for representing invisible African American heritage at the Tucker house site at Colonial Williamsburg and at campus buildings. Auslander demonstrates Black descendant community’s insider/ outsider relationships to Emory University, through several sites of memory, including a memorial tree, a family reunion photograph, and an enslaved woman’s headstone.

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Ellen Griffith Spears and James C. Hall (chapter 15) use a “critical pedagogy of place” on memory work around the Civil War at the University of Alabama in the late nineteenth century and Lost Cause ideologies’ impact on the campus landscape over time. Their theme of institutionalizing memory and silences shifts to R. Owen Williams’s essay (chapter 16), the final one.

Williams, former president of Transylvania University, argues that Yale and Transylvania should not change the names of residence halls, respectively named in honor of nineteenth-century political figures John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis. Williams is convinced that “name changing is bad history,” a fair assertion, yet the support that he offers is less convincing. After a thorough examination of the institutional processes of naming, Williams asserts “that both institutions were evidently

oblivious to their racism,” implausible in a collection that spent fifteen chapters showing otherwise.

Williams also addresses his time as a Yale student and his campaign to change the name of Calhoun College by adding the name of the first African American to receive a doctorate there. It wreaks of a moral equivalent approach, and Williams admits that he was unable to even convince his Black friend who, of course, should understand.

While president of Transylvania, Williams takes a similar approach to a faculty petition to rename Davis Residence Hall.

Williams is not alone in his belief that name changing is whitewashing history. He is likely more alone in his argument that “we need these reminders” until racism is “truly extirpated.” It can be just as justifiably argued that we remove these reminders until racism is extirpated so that African Americans do not

have additional reminders of their perceived positions in US society.

In the end this, collection, even Williams’s essay, raises a host of interesting issues. Like many edited collections, this one struggles to find the right balance in how it lines up essays, with so many intersecting themes.

The book’s greatest strength is its methodological diversity, ranging from chronological histories to autobiographical essays. The authors make clear the inextricable links between slavery, students, faculty and administrators, African colonization, and the institutionalization of Christian faiths in the US. This work will best be appreciated by those seeking a variety of case studies on slavery’s role in the historical development, sustainability, and academic life of American institutions.

Jodi Skipper

NEW FROM THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI | www.upress.state.ms.us

@upmiss

Available at your local bookseller.

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Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha 2019 “Faulkner’s Families” FAULKNER’S FAMILIES

William Faulkner's first home in Oxford. Cofield Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries.

William Faulkner enthusiCollege, the New School), asts will gather in Oxford for Rebecca Nisetich (University “Faulkner’s Families,” July of Southern Maine), 21–25, 2019, at the University Erin Penner (Asbury of Mississippi. In addition University), Jenna Sciuto to this year’s five keynote (Massachusetts College presentations, by John Duvall, of Liberal Arts), Terrell Katherine Henninger, John Tebbetts (Lyon College), Howard, Carolyn Levander, George Thomas (Georgia and Hortense Spillers, Institute of Technology), January’s call for papers has Michael Wainwright (Royal yielded an additional thirtyHolloway, University of eight speakers.

London), and Michael Presenting for the first Zeitlin (University of British time at Faulkner and Columbia).

Yoknapatawpha will be A special late afternoon Josephine Adams (University event on Tuesday, July 23, of Virginia), Jeff Allred will celebrate the unveiling (Hunter College, CUNY), of the William Faulkner The University of Mississippi Kenyatta Berry (indepenmarker on the Mississippi Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference dent scholar), Max Cassity Writers Trail. The unveiling, Oxford, Mississippi, July 21–25, 2019 (Syracuse University), Pardis at Rowan Oak, the William Dabashi (University of Faulkner residence at Old Nevada, Reno), Chris Dieman Taylor Road, will be open (Live Source Theater), to the public as well as Sage Gerson (University to conference registrants. of California, Santa Barbara), Hyseol Ha (University The Mississippi Writers Trail is an ongoing project that of Buffalo), Geri Harmon (Georgia Gwinnett College), consists of a series of markers across the state honoring Maude Hines (Portland State University), Margaret Mauk the work of its most prominent writers. The Mississippi (Florida State University), Tom McLaughlin (Villanova Arts Commission sponsors the project with support University), Tyler Mercer (Live Source Theater), Aili from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Petterssen Peeker (University of California, Santa On Wednesday, July 24, the Department of Archives Barbara), Madeleine Roepe (University of California, and Special Collections in the J. D. Williams Library Santa Barbara), Wallis Tinnie (Florida International will present the annual Library Lecture by Thomas University, Emerita), Maite Urcaregui (University of McHaney, Kenneth England Professor of Southern California, Santa Barbara), Isadora Wagner (US Military Literature, Emeritus, Georgia State University, and a Academy), Mariana Whitmer (West Virginia University), longtime fixture at Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha. and Yuko Yamamoto (Chiba University, Japan).

For registration and other conference information, Returning to the conference this summer are Garry visit the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha website at www.

Bertholf (Davidson College), Joost Burgers (Ashoka outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner or contact Jay University, India), Elizabeth Cornell (Fordham Watson, director, at jwatson@olemiss.edu. Discount rates University), Sarah Gleeson-White (University of for the conference are available for groups of five or more Sydney), Taylor Hagood (Florida Atlantic University), students. Inexpensive dormitory housing is available for Kristi Humphreys (Baylor University), Jeffrey Jackson interested registrants. Contact Mary Leach at mleach@ (University of Mississippi), Robert Jackson (University of olemiss.edu for details.

Tulsa), Jennie Joiner (Keuka College), Anne MacMaster (Millsaps College), Julie Beth Napolin (Eugene Lang Jay Watson The University of Mississippi announces the Forty-Sixth Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. The conference is sponsored by the Department of English and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and coordinated by the Division of Outreach and Continuing Education.

For more information: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, Division of Outreach and Continuing Education, Post Office Box 1848, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677. Telephone: 662-915-7283.

Fax: 662-915-5138. Internet: www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner Bronze busts of William Faulkner and Chickasaw chief Piomingo by William Beckwith; Photos by Robert Jordan / University Communications

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The Southern Register

New Book in Southern Foodways Alliance Series Published Food studies, once trendy, has settled into the public arena. In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a tributary. The new volume in the Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place series, Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, bridges this gap, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture as well as the contributions of Black cooks and chefs to what has been considered the mainstream.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing nearly to the present day, African Americans have often been stereotyped as illiterate kitchen geniuses. Rafia Zafar addresses this error, highlighting the long history of accomplished African Americans within our culinary traditions, as well as the literary and entrepreneurial strategies for civil rights and respectability woven into the written records of dining, cooking, and serving. Whether revealed in cookbooks or fiction,

memoirs or hotel-keeping manuals, agricultural extension bulletins or library collections, foodways knowledge sustained Black strategies for self-reliance and dignity, the preservation of historical memory, and civil rights and social mobility. If, to follow Mary Douglas’s dictum, food is a field of action—that is, a venue for social intimacy, exchange,

or aggression—African American writing about foodways constitutes an underappreciated critique of the racialized social and intellectual spaces of the United States.

Rafia Zafar is a professor of English, African and African American studies, and American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she also serves as faculty director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. Her previous publications include We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760–1870 and the Library of America’s two-volume anthology Harlem Renaissance Fiction.

Recent publications in the Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place series, published by the University of Georgia Press, include Creole Italian: Sicilian Immigrants and the Shaping of New Orleans Food Culture, by Justin A. Nystrom, and Catfish Dream: Ed Scott’s Fight for His Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta, by Julian Rankin, who recently won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Nonfiction award for the book.

DIRECTOR’S COLUMN––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– forces working at the same time, and when possible trying to study with people rather than simply to study about them. Those fields change as the world changes, and as I write these words, people with political power are doing troubling things that new scholarship, teaching, and documentary work should help as we try to understand and respond.

Do you have writing projects you can concentrate on after stepping down?

The Southern Register

Yes, like every academic I know, I have plans for new projects, and I hope the change in my job allows more time to work on them. (One project actually started with a director’s column I wrote a few years ago.) But I’m especially looking forward to having more control over my attention. So, along with writing, I want to try some new things, whether or not they are academic projects. Also, I’m hoping

Spring-Summer 2019

continued from page 2

that if I go for a walk in the woods, it’s not to step away from my job for a while, but just because I like walking in the woods.

Are there interesting ways to say thank you? I don’t think so, so I’ll be brief.

To everyone connected to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the Southern Studies program, many thanks.

Ted Ownby

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Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Celebrates Fortieth Anniversary

Mississippi

Institute of Arts & Letters

CAT HOPE PHOTOGRAPHY

40th Annual Awards Celebrating Our 2019 Winners

Fiction Tiffany Quay Tyson

Noel Polk Lifetime Achievement

The Past Is Never

John Ruskey

TED ELY

RORY DOYLE

BECKETT HOWORTH

Poetry Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Citation of Merit

Oceanic

Steve Rouse

TOM RANKIN

Music Composition Classical

MARISOL DOYLE

AMY SHEPHERD

Square Books

Photography

Visual Arts

Julian Rankin

Rory Doyle

Coulter Fussell

Catfish Dream: Ed Scott's Fight for His Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta

Delta Hill Riders

New Work

Nonfiction

This Dream

Saturday, June 8

CATT SIRTEN

Celebrating its fortieth anniversary of recognizing Mississippi’s artists, writers, and musicians, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters announces this year’s winners for works first published, performed, or shown in 2018. The award winners, chosen by out-of-state judges prominent in their fields, will be honored at the fortieth anniversary awards gala on Saturday, June 8, in Meridian at the Mississippi Arts + Entertainment Experience. At 1:30 p.m. that same day, readings and signings by MIAL award winners will take place at the Meridian Museum of Art. The Noel Polk Lifetime Achievement Award winner is John Ruskey. Described by ​Southern Living​ as an “environmental evangelist for the wonders of the Mississippi River,” Ruskey is a musician, writer, diarist, watercolorist, canoe maker, and river guide.

Square Books in Oxford is a winner of an MIAL Citation of Merit in recognition of its forty years of contributing to the literary life of Mississippi. Opened in September 1979 by Lisa and

Mississippi Arts and Entertainment Experience (The MAX)

Music Composition Contemporary John Milham Arden's Garden

Meridian, Mississippi Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters P.O. Box 2346 • Jackson, MS 39225 662-523-0899 • www.ms-arts-letters.org

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Richard Howorth, Square Books quickly established itself as a center of reading and writing for the state.

Originally focused on the literature of Mississippi and the South, the once-small bookstore grew to three storefronts and a wide selection of books on all topics. Its earliest

signing event was for Mississippi novelist Ellen Douglas, followed the next month by Mississippi poet Etheridge Knight.

Other award winners include Tiffany Quay Tyson (Fiction) for her novel The Past Is Never, Julian Rankin (Nonfiction) for his book Catfish Dream: Ed Scott’s Fight for His Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta, Steve Rouse (Music Composition, Classical) for his composition This Dream, John Milham (Music Composition, Contemporary) for his album Arden’s Garden, Rory Doyle (Photography) for his ongoing project on African American cowboys and cowgirls, Delta Hill Riders, Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Poetry) for her collection, Oceanic, and Coulter Fussell (Visual Arts) for her new works of textile art that often combines quilting and painting.

For more information about attending the awards banquet and related events, please visit the MIAL website at www.ms-arts-letters.org.

Mary Thompson

BRINGING HISTORY TO LIFE––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– association dedicated to American history scholarship. The Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau Teacher of the Year Award is given each year to a precollegiate teacher in recognition of his or her contributions to improving history education within the field of American history. The 2019 award honors Yarborough’s innovative teaching style, one that instills honest historical inquiry while making students excited to discover the local history of Columbus, a history that reflects the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Yarborough’s time with the

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Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science has fostered a successful teaching career, giving him the freedom to implement the skills he gained from the Southern Studies program at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

He said the Southern Studies program fundamentally shaped who he is, and that influence continues to impact both him and his students every day.

“When I was in the Southern Studies MA program, I had the opportunity to work with some of the luminaries of the Center,”

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Yarborough said. “Faculty members like Tom Rankin, Ted Ownby, Charles Wilson, Ann Abadie, Bill Ferris, and others consistently challenged students like me to consider and explore our worlds completely.

Classmates, such as Susan Glisson, Chris Renberg, Aimee Schmidt, Chris Fullerton, Ari Frede, Amy Wood, and others revealed to me both the depth and breadth of southern culture and how its study can illuminate so many other lessons about our collective past, present, and future.”

Jackson Olstad

The Southern Register

CONTRIBUTORS Brett J. Bonner is editor of Living Blues.

Ellie Campbell recently completed her first year as an Southern Studies MFA graduate student. She has an MA in Southern Studies, and works in the University of Mississippi School of Law as a reference and instruction law librarian.

Keerthi Chandrashekar is a second-year Southern Studies MA student.

Rebecca Lauck Cleary is the Center’s communications specialist.

She received a BA in journalism from the University of Mississippi and an MA in Southern Studies.

Mattie Ford recently completed her first year as a Southern Studies undergraduate.

Joan Wylie Hall is a senior lecturer in the English Department at the University of Mississippi.

She is the author of Shirley Jackson:

Studies in Short Fiction and the editor of Conversations with Audre Lorde and Conversations with Natasha Trethewey. Her work has also been published in numerous journals such as Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Mississippi Quarterly, Faulkner Journal, and the Eudora Welty Review.

Derrick Lanois is a first-year Southern Studies MFA student. He has a PhD in history from Georgia State University and teaches history at Rust College.

Andrea Morales is a documentary photographer based in Memphis and a producer at the Southern Documentary Project.

Catarina Passidomo is assistant professor of anthropology and Southern Studies.

Jackson Olstad spent the spring semester as a Center intern and is an integrated marketing and communications major who

hopes to pursue a career in music management and marketing after graduation in May. Ted Ownby, director of the Center, holds a joint appointment in Southern Studies and history.

Hooper Schultz is a recent graduate of the Southern Studies MA program. He will begin work in the Southern Studies MFA program in the fall.

Mason Scioneaux is a reporter for the Daily Mississippian.

Jodi Skipper is associate professor of anthropology and Southern Studies.

Jay Watson is Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies and the director of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.

Jessica Wilkerson is assistant professor of history and Southern Studies.

OVER THE AIRWAYS: ALUMNI DEEJAYS ������������������� continued from page 21 KJCC (104.1 FM) is the college radio station run by and for the students of San Jose City College.

Student-produced shows are broadcast Monday through Fridays, which also live-broadcasts all sports games of the SJCC Jaguars. Shows produced by the Broadcasting 42 class are also featured throughout the school year.

“I typically decide on an opening song, and I kind of go from there,” said Feldman, who has hosted the show since last September. “In terms of methodology, I’ve been heavily influenced by theories of montage, which is rooted in dialectics. So,

it’s really about juxtapositions: how songs can talk to each other and create new ideas and possibilities in the listener’s mind.”

Feldman, who received his MA in Southern Studies in 2009, put together a multimedia project for his thesis about record collecting, so this has been an interest of his for a long time. He said he has many favorite artists and songs to play since he’s collected recordings for fifty years.

“Lately I’ve been obsessing on Youssou N’Dour & Super Etoile de Dakar’s song ‘Njaajan Njaay’ and Smokey Robinson‘s version of ‘Never

In Memoriam The Southern Register

My Love,’ especially the first thirty seconds,” Feldman said. “I grew up in New York City and was able to tune in to both WBAI and WFMU—two stations that nicely mixed connoisseurship with anarchy. In terms of on-air experience, I engineered and edited Scott Barretta’s radio show Highway 61 for many years.”

To see Feldman’s thesis project, go to portraitofarecorddealer.blogspot. com. To listen to his radio show online, tune into the KJCC Live 365 website on Tuesdays at 4:00 p.m.

Rebecca Lauck Cleary

Lester Glenn Fant III January 21, 1941—May 19, 2019

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