Southern Register Fall 2016

FALL 2016

Introducing the First-Year Southern Studies MA Class JAMES G. THOMAS, JR.

This year’s incoming class of graduate students includes two international students and others from all areas of the United States.

They have a wide variety of backgrounds and ideas, but all share a common interest in the South.

Rachel Childs was convinced to pursue her MA in Southern Studies after volunteering at the Southern Foodways Alliance’s 2015 fall symposium. She holds a BA in Englishwriting from Berry College. Childs recently spent four years in Boston as a developmental editor for textbooks and professional resources at Macmillan Learning. A metro-Atlanta native, she is delighted to be back below the Mason-Dixon line, where grocery stores carry pimento cheese.

Victoria De Leone grew up in Sisters, a small mountain town in Central Oregon. She fled the small town life after high school, landing at New York University. After defending her thesis on immigrant foodways and literature, she stuck around Brooklyn to work as a community manager for a tiny food startup. After a year of moving too often and a handful of cross-country road trips, she decided she was tired of subways and headed south. She is now a Graduate Fellow at the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Don Harvey is returning to Mississippi after a thirty-five-year absence. Born in Biloxi and raised in Hattiesburg, Don graduated

The incoming Southern Studies graduate class gathers on the steps of Barnard Observatory. Row 1: left to right, Victoria De Leone, Holly Robinson, Je’Monda Roy, Jacqui Sahagian; row 2: Rachel Childs, Kevin Mitchell, Elise Potentier. Not pictured, Don Harvey

from Mississippi State University in chemical engineering in 1971.

His federal career in occupational safety and health began in Jackson, Mississippi, and his career later took him to Kentucky, North Carolina, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. While in Maryland, he completed his masters of health science in environmental heath science at Johns Hopkins University in 1999. He retired from federal service in 2011.

After moving to Northwest Arkansas, he spent many weekends traveling to blues festivals around the South. His abiding interest in blues music led

him to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

Kevin Mitchell earned both his AOS in culinary arts and his BPS at the Culinary Institute of America.

Through his passion for food culture, the preservation of Southern ingredients, and the history of African Americans and food, he decided to pursue his MA in Southern Studies where he will work with the Southern Foodways Alliance. He is a fan of the mission of the Slow Food organization continued on page 27

THE

SOUTHERN R EGISTER

A Publication of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture

•

The University of Mississippi

OX FO R D, M I SSI SSI P P I , U. S.A

Published Quarterly 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 www.facebook.com/SouthernStudies Twitter and Instagram: @SouthernStudies

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

IN THIS ISSUE Fall 2016 1. Introducing the First-Year Southern Studies MA Class 2. Director’s Column 3. Living Blues News 4. Brown Bag Lunch and Lecture Series 4. Mark Your Calendars!

4. In Memoriam 5. Southern Foodways Alliance Hosts Graduate Student Conference, September 19 and 20 5. Let Them Eat Cake and Talk Business 6. Twenty-Fourth Oxford Conference for the Book 6. Engaging the Hispanic/Latino South 7. Eudora Welty Awards for Creative Writing Presented 8. Sarah Dixon Pegues, the “Heart of the Center,” Retires This Fall 9. Mississippi Stories: Center Launches Documentary Website 10. Gammill Gallery Exhibition: North Mississippi—2016 12. Center Welcomes New Sociologist Back to Campus: A Q&A with Brian Foster 13. Edward Ayers Delivers Gilder-Jordan Lecture 13. Fall Special Topics Class to Focus on Women in the South 14. Writing from a Southern Perspective: Alums in Publishing 17. Contributors 18. Nashville’s Immigrant Foodways: Southern Foodways Alliance Documents the Flavors of Nolensville Road 18. William Eggleston Exhibition Opens at University Museum 19. Reading the South 24. Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference 26. Calls for Papers

REGISTER STAFF Editor: James G. Thomas, Jr. Graphic Designer: Susan Bauer Lee Lithographer: RR Donnelley Magazine Group The University complies with all applicable laws regarding affirmative action and equal opportunity in all its activities and programs and does not discriminate against anyone protected by law because of age, color, disability, national origin, race, religion, sex, or status as a veteran or disabled veteran.

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D I R E C T O R ’ S

C O L U M N

• WINTER 2014

“Southern Studies.” “Southern Studies?”

“Hmm, Southern Studies?”

Fairly often colleagues and I sit along with other professors at tables welcoming high school and transfer students as they and their parents visit campus to think about attending the University of Mississippi. As they walk along, reading the titles of programs, they often say “Southern Studies” with all sorts of intriguing inflections, sometimes without knowing we can hear.

Increasingly, I’m happy to say, some of those students and parents say, “Oh, good, Southern Studies,” and they tell us how they know about us already.

The Center for the Study of Southern Culture will celebrate its fortieth birthday in 2017, and we’ll soon start making plans for an event worthy of the number forty. That birthday, along with the beginning of a new semester, makes this a good time to think about what Southern Studies students have done and are doing.

In a two-week period this summer, several things happened that dramatized the range of what Southern Studies graduates have done.

• Susan Glisson is stepping down from her position as director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. Susan, a good friend and an alum of the MA program, worked for the university for twenty years, and we cheer for the influence she has had here and will in the future.

• An alum brought a summer class on civil rights and memory to campus.

They were late to a scheduled discussion with me because they were meeting with Susan and she was “too interesting to leave.”

• In Barnard Observatory, I stepped into a Teach for America staff meeting and was happy to see four Southern Studies alumni there.

• One alum who works for StoryCorps is making a trip to Alabama to do documentary work with another alum who works in Birmingham for the Human Rights Campaign.

• Several of us got to hear an alum and former colleague as he read from his collection of short stories at Off Square Books.

• And another friend/alum/colleague, Joe York, has announced he is moving on from his position making films for the Southern Documentary Project. As he leaves, he is on a circuit showing the film he and Scott Barretta produced.

Here at the Center, alums of the Southern Studies program work as associate directors, at Living Blues, in the Southern Foodways Alliance, and at the Southern Documentary Project. Multiple alumni kindly serve on the Center’s advisory committee. On the UM campus, they work as recruiters, counselors, writing instructors, librarians, and English as a Second Language faculty.

Dozens of our students and alums contributed to the Mississippi Encyclopedia, which comes out in 2017. In the state of Mississippi, they have positions of consequence at the Mississippi Department of Archive and History, the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Mississippi Humanities Council, the Mississippi Development Authority, the Mississippi Library Commission, and multiple museums and interpretive centers. Across the region and beyond it, they work in all sorts of ways where understanding cultural life intersects with supporting, presenting, and teaching about cultural life.

Southern Studies alumni teach at all levels. They teach, counsel, coach, and, of course, raise children. They work as administrators and raise funds to support education and research. They are graduates of or students in PhD continued on page 27

Fall 2016

The Southern Register

Living Blues News

The Southern Register

n recent years Jackson, Mississippi, has dubbed itself as the “City with Soul,” which in advertising campaigns often refers to the Southern hospitality of its residents. For many music fans, though, the tag immediately brings to mind the city’s venerable Malaco Records— a.k.a. the “Last Soul Company”—whose roster has boasted Jackson’s own Dorothy Moore and Bobby Rush as well as departed soul heroes including Little Milton, Johnnie Taylor, Bobby “Blue” Bland and Z.Z. Hill.

Moore’s 1976 hit single Misty Blues established Malaco on the national scene, while Hill’s 1980 smash Down Home Blues was a bellwether for Jackson’s emergent role as the center of “soul blues.” Still, these achievements didn’t quite translate into Jackson becoming known as a “music city” in the same vein as those that bookend Mississippi—New Orleans and Memphis.

Tough competition, indeed.

The Jackson blues scene also faces competition in the minds of blues fans who stubbornly equate Mississippi with the Delta, and whose focus on notions of rural “authenticity” might blind them to the fact that Jackson has long been the home of a vibrant down-home blues scene.

As Jim O’Neal’s overview of Jackson’s many Mississippi Blues Trail markers makes clear, the city has played an important—if largely unsung—role in the history of the blues, down-home and otherwise. Blues pioneers Tommy Johnson, Rubin Lacy, Ishmon Bracey, Walter Vinson and Charlie McCoy played house parties and dances here, and local furniture merchant and talent scout H.C. Speir arranged for the recording sessions of

Soul

Bill SteBer

A City With

I

Bill SteBer

McKinney "Blues Man" Williams at the Queen of Hearts Blues Club in Jackson.

Little Brother Montgomery modernized prewar sounds, and Jackson was also instrumental in the transition of Delta blues to electric Chicago blues, spawning artists including Muddy Waters’ longtime pianist Otis Spann.

Sonny Boy Williamson II (Rice Miller) and Elmore James were active performers on the Jackson scene, making their debut recordings for Lillian McMurry’s Trumpet label on North Farish Street. In addition to documenting the sounds of New Orleans, Johnny Vincent’s Ace label cut the first single of James sideman Sam Myers, a stalwart on the Jackson scene until he joined Dallas-based Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets in the mid-’80s.

Guitarist Dexter Allen, Jonah Nelson bass and Maya Kyles on drums performing at the Blue Monday Blues Jam at Hal and Mal’s in Jackson. many others, including the Mississippi Sheiks and Charley Patton. Today a direct connection to the pre-war era is found in the music of Louis “Gearshifter” Youngblood, who carries on sound of Tommy Johnson.

The state capital also boasted a more uptown flavor, expressed through the clubs and

theaters on North Farish Street, the wide-open “‘Cross the River” district that flaunted gambling and bootleg liquor during Mississippi’s extended Prohibition era and Steven’s Rose Room was the city’s luxurious showcase for leading R&B and jazz acts.

Residents including Johnny Temple and

MISSISSIPPI

by Scott Barretta

The Jackson Blues scene 8 • LIVING BLUES • August 2016

more active and vibrant than either of us had realized. Photographer Bill Steber shot pictures of nearly thirty different musicians at the Blue Monday Jam in one night. There were the elders, but there was also a whole wave of new artists coming

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Greenville

Mississippi River

I came of age in Jackson, Mississippi.

We moved there in 1973 when I was nine. It was a big small city then, and in many ways it still is. Jackson was also the place where I discovered music. I vividly remember riding around in a white Econoline van while sitting in a beanbag chair, looking at the gold shag carpet that covered the floor, walls, and ceiling and listening to eight-track tapes over and over and over. I first encountered blues through a junior high school field trip to, of all places, Malaco Records. I recall touring the building and being blown away by the large studio and mixing board. I also remember they gave each of the kids a 45 r.p.m. to take home. Mine was Dorothy Moore’s Misty Blue—my first blues record.

I became interested in blues music in my late teens and realized it was everywhere around me. King Edward, Big Daddy a.k.a. 500 Pounds of Blues, Sam Myers, Jesse Robinson, and others played places like the Subway Lounge, the Queen of Hearts, George Street Grocery, and many more places every weekend in Jackson. I didn’t know that this wasn’t the norm everywhere else in the country. Even high school dances had bands like Larry Rasberry and the Highsteppers. Blues was thick in Jackson.

Here we are thirtyodd-years later and the blues scene is still thick in Jackson.

Scott Barretta and I had been talking about doing a Jackson issue ever since the big Mississippi issue we did two years ago. What we found when we delved into it a bit further was a live blues scene in Jackson that is far

Vicksburg

Meridian 20

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Hattiesburg

Biloxi 10

August 2016 • LIVING BLUES •

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up playing blues—Jackson blues—all of them influenced by the elders, the scene, and, for many, their own roots in the area. They are the future of Jackson blues. And, as you’ll see from the volume of artists in this issue, the future looks bright indeed.

Jim O’Neal wrote a historical analysis of Jackson blues, providing rich details that set the context for everything that is happening today. The current scene is the legacy of one that dates back to the 1920s and ’30s when artists like Ishmon Bracey, Bo Carter, Tommy Johnson, Walter Vinson, Joe and Charlie McCoy, and many more were living, performing, and even recording in Jackson. As the decades rolled on so did the deep blues scene, with artists like Johnnie Temple, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Sam Myers, Luther Huff, and Elmore James all recording or performing regularly in Jackson. With the emergence of soul and the soul blues scenes in the 1960s and ’70s, Jackson was again alive with activity. All of these generations of blues in Jackson led us to the richness of the scene found there today.

Brett J. Bonner

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Brown Bag Lunch and Lecture Series Fall 2016

The Brown Bag Series takes place at noon in the Barnard Observatory lecture hall.

September 28 “Ten-Minute Song Analyses” Jaime Cantrell Visiting Assistant Professor of English, University of Mississippi Darren Grem Assistant Professor of History and Southern Studies, University of Mississippi Ted Ownby Center Director and Professor of History and Southern Studies, University of Mississippi

October 10 “1920s–1930s Blues and Blues Traveling” Steve Cheseborough Portland, Oregon October 12 “Houston’s Harlem Renaissance” Amy Cameron Evans Teaching Artist Kashmere Gardens Elementary School Houston, Texas

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September 19 Southern Foodways Alliance Graduate Student Conference Keynote Lecture Krishnendu Ray Barnard Observatory September 19–20 Southern Foodways Alliance Graduate Student Conference University of Mississippi October 13–16 Nineteenth Southern Foodways Symposium University of Mississippi and Oxford, Mississippi October 19 Screening of SouthDocs/SFA Films Shelter on Van Buren Oxford, Mississippi

November 1 Corazon de Dixie: Mexicanos in the US South since 1910 Julie Weise Assistant Professor of History University of Oregon

DAN SEARS

October 5 The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s Kenneth Janken Professor of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

October 19 Willie: The Life and Times of Willie Morris Teresa Nicholas Biographer Jackson, Mississippi

Mark Your Calendars!

November 16 “Southern Sound and Space” Chris Colbeck Southern Studies MA Graduate Oxford, Mississippi

k Fall 2016

November 2 Screening of SouthDocs/SFA Films Shelter on Van Buren Oxford, Mississippi March 29–31 Oxford Conference for the Book University of Mississippi and Oxford, Mississippi

eE In Memoriam Elizabeth “Libby” Shaifer Hollingsworth June 13, 1933–July 2, 2016

The Southern Register

Southern Foodways Alliance Hosts Graduate Student Conference, September 19 and 20 fosters graduate students’ professional growth by giving them a platform to showcase their research, as well as by offering practical information on professionalism and publishing that can serve them even after they complete their studies.”

Krishnendu Ray, the chair of the food studies department at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, will deliver the conference’s keynote talk. He is the author or editor of four books, the

most recent of which is The Ethnic Restaurateur. Ray will speak on Monday evening, September 19, at 6:00 p.m.in the Tupelo Room in Barnard Observatory. The talk is free and open to the public.

Monday’s and Tuesday’s panels will take place in the Yerby Conference Center. All are welcome.

Undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff with an interest in food studies are especially encouraged to attend. A schedule will be available at www.southernfoodways.org.

SARA WOOD

On September 19 and 20 the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) will host its fourth annual graduate student conference at the University of Mississippi. The conference, held in partnership with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and Graduate School, offers a unique experience for graduate students in a variety of disciplines to present their research in food studies.

This year’s nineteen presenters hail from universities across the United States and Canada, including the University of Mississippi, the University of Virginia, Goucher College, Tulane University, and the University of Washington. Five panels, moderated by sociology and anthropology faculty members, will cover topics such as oral history, place and identity, and the Global South, among others. A sixth panel consisting of faculty and staff offers advice to graduate students seeking to publish their work and looking for jobs inside and outside academia.

“A variety of disciplines intersect food studies,” said Afton Thomas of the SFA, “and this conference brings those groups together. The event

Participants at the 2015 SFA Graduate Student Conference

JAMES G. THOMAS, JR.

Let Them Eat Cake and Talk Business

The Southern Register

On June 10 at Off Square Books in Oxford, Darren Grem, assistant professor of history and Southern Studies, read from and signed his new book, The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity. The book, published by Oxford University Press, details how business leaders, organizations, money, and strategies advanced the religious and political ambitions of conservative evangelicals in the twentieth century. The Center helped celebrate his new publication with a cake.

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Twenty-Fourth Oxford Conference for the Book

Simone Delerme

University of Mississippi Oxford, Mississippi March 29–31, 2017

The Twenty-Fourth Oxford Conference for the Book (OCB) is set for March 29– 31, 2017. The conference will bring together fiction and nonfiction writers, journalists, poets, publishers, teachers, and students for three stimulating days of readings, lectures, panels, workshops, and social events that celebrate the written word.

Past programs have included sessions on Southern foodways, Appalachian studies, poetry, creative nonfiction, Mississippi and Southern history, gender studies, biography, sports, comics, and photography, among numerous other topics. OCB partner Square Books will host several sessions of author readings and conversations.

The slate of speakers has not been released, but the complete program will soon be posted on the Center’s website. The conference is open to the public without charge.

Reservations and advance payment are required for the opening-night gala dinner/cocktail reception on the evening of Wednesday, March 29 ($50).

Thacker Mountain Radio will have a special OCB show on the Oxford Square at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 30. Square Books will host book signings each evening for the authors presenting that day. The

Wednesday and Friday signings will be at Off Square Books, and the Thursday signing will be before and after Thacker Mountain Radio.

The Children’s Book Festival (CBF) will take place on Friday, March 29, at the Ford Center for Performing Arts. The goal of the CBF is to give each area first- and fifth-grader a book of his or her own, which they will read along with classmates and their teacher. Committees made up of local school librarians, teachers, and representatives from the Lafayette County Literacy Council (sponsor of the first grade), Junior Auxiliary (sponsor of the fifth grade), and Square Books Jr. choose the books for each grade. During the OCB, the authors will present programs for the children at the Ford Center.

We’ll announce the authors for the 2017 festival later this fall.

The next Southern Register will have a detailed schedule, a complete list of authors, and more information about programs. For up-to-theminute information, call 662-9153374, visit www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com, “like” the OCB on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ OxfordConferencefortheBook, or e-mail conference director James G. Thomas, Jr. at jgthomas@olemiss.edu.

Individuals and organizations wanting to provide support for the Conference for the Book can mail a check, with Conference for the Book noted in the memo line, to the University of Mississippi Foundation, 406 University Ave., Oxford, MS 38655. Contact development director Nikki Neely at 662-915-6678 or nlneely@olemiss.edu or by visiting www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com/support.

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Engaging the Hispanic/Latino South Hispanic Heritage Month and Beyond

This fall the University of Mississippi and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture are finding new ways to partner with other institutions to commemorate—and extend— National Hispanic Heritage Month (officially September 15 to October 15).

On September 22 Simone Delerme, McMullan Assistant Professor of Southern Studies and Anthropology, travels to the University of North Carolina–Charlotte to give the lecture “Puerto Rican Southern Belle: From Harlemworld to Disney World to Mississippi,” and on November 1 Julie Weise (assistant professor of history, University of Oregon) visits the Center to speak on her book, Corazon de Dixie: Mexicanos in the US South since 1910. Other events on the UM campus will include a film series; a lecture, “What Does Columbus Day Mean Now?” by Rolena Adorno, Sterling Professor of Spanish, Yale University; and a lecture by Delerme, “Spanglish Reflections and Nuyorican Dreams: Latinos in the US South,” on September 23, among others.

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Eudora Welty Awards for Creative Writing Presented Each year the Center for the Study of Southern Culture presents the Eudora Welty Awards for Creative Writing to Mississippi high school students during the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.

Established and endowed by the late Francis Patterson of Tupelo, the awards are given for creative writing in either prose or poem form. The prize for first place is $500 and the prize for second place is $250. In addition, each winner also receives a copy of the Literature volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

Schools may submit one entry in each category. Faculty and staff of the Center judge the entries.

This year’s first-place Welty Award went to Annalee Purdie. Miss Purdie is from Madison, Mississippi, and attended Jackson Academy. Her winning short story, “A Summer in the Heat,” is a sophisticated examination of the wages of violence, linking war to the domestic space of the home. It is a richly textured tale, woven from the strands of World War II-era rural life, and the judges felt Miss Purdie did a particularly striking job of describing the sensation of being in the natural world. She writes, “Sometimes, I have noticed, there are moments when you can see the world literally breathe around you.

The wind inhales and exhales and moves the dust and the grass and the wildflowers and the things of the world along. The earth rotates and the clock ticks and the insects scuttle and the heart beats. Sometimes, if you are still enough, you can see all of it moving together in one

The Southern Register

Eudora Welty Awards winners, (l-r) Annalee Purdie and Kallye Smith

continuous motion, all of it frozen in a cluster, working in a strange sort of harmony.”

This year’s second-place Welty Award went to Kallye Smith, a Magee native who attends Simpson Academy in Mendenhall. Her entry, “Monster, Monster,” is a short story about infatuation, devotion, and deception. Miss Smith’s multidimensional characters and her departure from strict realism particularly struck the judges: “There is the tension of mystery that drives the story,” they wrote, “and a skillful use of imagery to create a lyrical emotion.” For example, she begins the story with the line, “I know you think I’m a

monster, but monsters can fall in love too.”

Purdie and Smith, along with their families, attended the awards ceremony in Nutt Auditorium on the University of Mississippi campus on Sunday, July 17, during the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.

To see a list of past winners of the Eudora Welty Awards, visit the Center’s website: http://southernstudies.olemiss.edu/academics/previous-winners-eudora-welty-awards/.

The Center congratulates the winners of this year’s awards.

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James G. Thomas, Jr.

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Sarah Dixon Pegues, the “Heart of the Center,” Retires This Fall ROBERT JORDAN

After being a constant in Barnard Observatory for thirty-five years, Sarah Dixon Pegues will retire from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. As the Center’s administrative assistant since 1980, she handles all financial matters, including budgets, payroll, travel requests, procurement, and purchasing, as well as processing grant applications and helping with reports for externally funded projects.

An Oxford native, Pegues earned her BS from Mississippi State University. After finishing college, she job-hunted all that summer, and the Center was the last of six interviews she had with various university departments. “After meeting (former director) Bill Ferris and hearing about the mission and projects of the Center, I felt this would be a very interesting place to work, and it has been,” Pegues said.

Ferris, now the senior associate director at the Center for Study of the American South and Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History at the University of North

Sarah Dixon Pegues

Carolina at Chapel Hill, said Pegues has been essential to the Center’s growth over the years. “Sarah is truly the heart of the Center,” he said.

“For over thirty-five years she has kept a watchful eye on Center staff and their programs, and she made sure their finances were in order. I was blessed to work with Sarah

(l-r) Bill Ferris, Alex Haley, and Sarah Dixon Pegues

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during my eighteen wonderful years at the Center. She is a true star for all who know her.”

During her three and a half decades on campus, she has seen many shifts in the Center and UM. “The biggest change has been the growth of the Center—from the number of BA and MA students to the number of faculty and staff and outreach projects,” she said. “The biggest change at the university is how it has grown in the number of programs, projects, and buildings. When I first started in 1980 you could name the departments and you knew where they were located.

Now there are tons of departments, institutes, and research centers. I would be a terrible tour guide!”

Ted Ownby, director of the Center, said that Pegues knows how to get things done.

“I’ve said that Southern Studies tends to attract people who want to do things their own way and want to break the rules . . . or never learn them,” said Ownby, who has worked with Pegues since 1988. “People like that can sit around theorizing and redefining all day, but we need someone like Sarah to make sure we get

The Southern Register

our bills paid. I should also mention that she’s the master of a rare form of communication in universities: the one-line, completely clear and successful e-mail message.”

Great people, including her former bosses and current colleagues, are one of the best parts of working at the Center, she said. “I’ve even met a few celebrities along the way. I still have the photo I took with Alex Haley, author of Roots, from when I first started!” That memory, along with seeing Ferris play his guitar and sing the blues, are some of her favorite recollections.

“Sarah’s presence has added to the spirit and life of the Center,” recalled associate director emerita Ann Abadie. “She will be greatly missed after her retirement, but her legacy will endure for those who knew her and for those who merely enjoy the results of her service.”

Professor emeritus Charles Reagan Wilson, who joined the Center as managing editor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture a few months after Pegues was hired, said the Center is blessed by her presence. “In the early 1980s, it was a lively place, full of interesting people experimenting with ideas and projects about the South,” Wilson said. “Sarah was always the down-to-earth one who assisted us with managing the finances of projects that often didn’t have enough financing, and she always figured out easy ways to help and keep on budget.”

Throughout Wilson’s directorship of the Center from 1998 to 2007, he appreciated her professionalism and good spirits. “I always thought I detected a half-skeptical eye to some of our wilder ideas, but she kept us grounded,” he said.

It’s not all numbers for Pegues, though. “I love to read romance and romantic suspense novels, listen to music—as everyone knows when they pass by or enter my office—and hang out with family and friends,” she said.

Her last official day is December 31, 2016.

Mississippi Stories Center Launches Documentary Website In July the Center launched the Mississippi Stories website, which seeks to tell the complex story of Mississippi and Mississippians through multiple forms of documentary practice: film, photography, oral history, and sound. The website presents work by students, staff, faculty, and alumni of the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, including Center institutes and partners Living Blues magazine, the Southern Documentary Project, and the Southern Foodways Alliance. You can find it at www.mississippistories.org.

The Center will post new stories periodically. Some of these will be finished and complete projects, and others will be snapshots of works in progress or outtakes from larger projects. Some projects will explore topics outside the state of Mississippi, but all the documentarians learn and practice at the Center, based in Oxford.

The site will also make available archival documentary work created since the Center’s founding in 1977. This archival work will include publications constructed from documentary work, like the magazines Rejoice! and Old Time Country. We hope that publishing materials from previous decades will encourage thoughtful discussions about how documentary work—how people do it and define it, how it uses scholarship and is part of scholarship, and how best to share it with a public—may have changed over the years.

For more information about Mississippi Stories, contact Sara Wood at sara@ southernfoodways.org, or Becca Walton at rwalton@olemiss.edu.

View SouthDocs Films Online Several films by the Center’s Southern Documentary Project are available to view online: Mississippi Innocence by Joe York, The Toughest Job: William Winter’s Mississippi by Matthew Graves, Rebels: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss by Matthew Graves, and Longleaf: The Heart of Pine by Rex Jones. Find the films at www.southernstudies.olemiss.edu/watchfilms and share with friends.

Rebecca Lauck Cleary

The Southern Register

Fall 2016

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Anna McCollum, House, Wire, Kudzu, Lafayette County

Gammill Gallery Exhibition North Mississippi—2016

The photographs in this exhibition are from last spring’s Southern Studies seminar in documentary photography. The semester-long assignment was for students to construct a visual inquiry of life in North Mississippi, both as lived and as displayed by the built environment. In one sense, their task was to compile a photographic catalog of the region that might potentially be of use to future scholars. The students were encouraged to treat North Mississippi as 1) a physical place, 2) a cultural space reflecting local life and values, and 3) a site of human activity.

They were also told to value the ordinary and to concentrate on making pictures of everyday life rather

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Anna McCollum, Taco Truck Hug, Oxford

Fall 2016

The Southern Register

Martha Barr, Mobile Home, Lafayette County Lana Ferguson, Dog in Pickup, Oxford Square

than focusing exclusively on the extraordinary.

There were three students in the class: Martha Barr, Lana Ferguson, and Anna McCollum. One advantage of it being such a small group was to give students the opportunity to contribute a sizable number of photographs in the final exhibit.

Indeed, each of the three has more than twenty pictures in the show, with each of the gallery’s three sets of panels devoted to the work of a single student.

David Wharton Lana Ferguson, The Party Starts Here, Oxford

Martha Barr, Kettle Corn, Double Decker, Oxford Square

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Fall 2016

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Center Welcomes New Sociologist Back to Campus: A Q&A with Brian Foster Brian Foster knows his way around the University of Mississippi. In fact, he won the Center’s Peter Aschoff Award for the best paper on Southern music in 2011 with his BA Honors thesis, “Crank Dat Soulja Boy: Understanding Black Male Hip-Hop Aspirations in Rural Mississippi.” This fall, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology welcome him back as a new assistant professor of sociology and Southern Studies.

Foster returns to the university from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he earned his MA and began his PhD work. Prior to entering UNC-Chapel Hill Foster earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Mississippi.

We spoke with Foster right before the beginning of this semester as he got ready to finalize his syllabus and complete work on his dissertation, “Born by the River, Place-Making, and the ‘Post-Blues’ Mississippi Delta.”

You earned your bachelor’s degree in African American Studies. What about that field led you to specialize in sociology?

There was something about reading James Baldwin next to Building Houses out of Chicken Legs next to For Colored Girls that pushed me to think more critically about the world, to grow confident in asking questions, to value empirical analysis and creative, effective writing. In some ways, these were the sensibilities that led me to sociology. In other, perhaps more tangible, ways, I just had the great fortune of working with some dope-ass professors [at the University of Mississippi]—folks like Zandria Robinson, Deirdre Cooper Owens, and the late Jesse Scott—who, among so many other things, reinforced to me that the type of work/ research/writing that I wanted to do was possible, and needed, within sociology.

Tell me about the Race, Place, and Space class you’re teaching this fall.

I grew up in a small town—one of those places with one flashing light, one grocery store, dirt roads, and lots and lots of tradition. I realize, every day I think, how much my experiences then and there shape who I am here and now, and matter for how I experience and make sense of even the most ordinary daily experiences. The Race, Place, and Space course will deal with those dynamics—questions

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about how place shapes who we are, what we value, and how we attribute meaning to the social world. But, and I think this is more important, we’re also going to deal with how place matters for different manifestations of inequality and privilege (for example, environmental racism, residential segregation, rural poverty, and gentrification). In addition to working through some pretty difficult and complex ideas, the class will also ask students to take what they have learned into the field and document some phenomBrian Foster enon of place: a photo essay of a football Saturday at the Grove or a short documentary around food deserts and rural farmers’ markets, for example.

Speaking of doing documentary work, do you anticipate any advantages of working with the interdisciplinary Center faculty?

I met most of the Center faculty when I visited campus earlier this year, and they pushed me in some interesting ways on some of my work. It’s always fun to hear questions and ideas from folks whose primary vantage point falls outside of sociology. I am most excited about the Center’s creative approaches to storytelling. I’m thinking specifically about projects like Mississippi Stories, Living Blues, and the SFA’s Gravy. One of my near-term goals is to extend my work, beyond standard article- and booklength projects, to these digital, multimedia platforms.

I know you’d already done some work on a blog called Still Furious and Brave. How did that start?

The blog was a project that emerged from the shared interests of myself and two of my good friends, Jazmine Walker and Robert Reece (both Mississippi natives and UM alums). We were each at a different professional/academic place in our lives and wanted a platform where we could write about things that were of interest to us— blackness, popular culture, reproductive justice, inequality in Mississippi, comic books—on our own terms, in our own voice, and in a way that played on the strengths of our unique perspectives. For about four years, that’s what the blog was. As we all transition to other academic and professional pursuits, we have agreed to end the blog and make the work available elsewhere.

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James G. Thomas, Jr.

The Southern Register

Edward Ayers Delivers Gilder-Jordan Lecture On Wednesday, September 7, Edward Ayers of the University of Richmond delivered this year’s Gilder-Jordan lecture, “When History Doesn’t Move in a Straight Line: The Civil War Then and Now.” Edward Ayers is president emeritus of the University of Richmond, where he now serves as TuckerBoatwright Professor of the Humanities. Previously dean of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia, where he began teaching in 1980, Ayers was named the National Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2003.

A historian of the American South, Ayers has written and edited ten books. The Promise of the New South:

Edward Ayers

Life after Reconstruction was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the Presence

of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America won the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history and the Beveridge Prize for the best book in English on the history of the Americas since 1492. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2013.

Organized through the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the African American Studies Program, Center for Civil War Research, and the Department of History, the Gilder-Jordan Speaker Series is made possible through the generosity of the Gilder Foundation, Inc. The series honors Richard Gilder of New York and his family, as well as his friends Dan and Lou Jordan of Virginia.

Fall Special Topics Class to Focus on Women in the South This fall Kathryn McKee, McMullan Associate Professor of Southern Studies and associate professor of English, teaches the Southern Studies 598 Special Topics class. Women and the South, which meets Mondays at 1:00–3:30 p.m., investigates the intersection of constructed ideas about place with constructed ideas about gender and race. In pairing “the South” and “Woman,” the class will inevitably hit one of the most famous markers of regional exceptionalism: “Southern womanhood.”

McKee’s class seeks to trouble that term through a series of boundary crossings that subject conventions of

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place and conventions of gender to academic scrutiny.

“We are examining the past and seeing how the geographic idea of the South, as well as gender identity, have changed in the present,” McKee said. “We live in a moment where they still intersect, but we’ve moved away from narrow definitions of both.”

In addition to reading about the perils and politics of representation, primarily through the disciplines of history and literature, the views of everyday women and their lived experiences in “the South” are the focus of an interview project. The class

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will read mainly secondary texts, including works by Judith Butler, Tara McPherson, Patricia Yaeger, Micki McElya, Rebecca Sharpless, Elizabeth Engelhardt, Tera Hunter, and Gloria Anzaldua.

The class will expose students to various disciplinary and methodological strategies, provide them with a context for understanding both traditional approaches to regional study and recent paradigm shifts within the field of Southern Studies, and complicate simplistic reductions of region, gender, and race.

Rebecca Lauck Cleary

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Writing from a Southern Perspective: Alums in Publishing In different ways, these alumni are immersed in publishing, whether it is as an agent, an editor, an author, or working with a literary magazine.

Duvall Osteen, a literary agent in New York City, says earning her Southern Studies degree was the best decision she’s ever made. “It’s helped me immeasurably, by teaching me how to apply broad thinking to a contained subject,” says the 2011 alum. “Like many graduate degrees, the ‘payoff,’ if you will, is personal growth through time spent learning, reading, thinking. The relationships I made in the program, and the innovative ways my professors pushed me to think about culture and history, are critical to how I interact with writers and evaluate manuscripts.”

Nicole Aragi founded Aragi, Inc. in 2002, and early on encouraged Osteen to become a full agent. “This is very much an apprenticeship industry, and with her guidance, I was able to begin representing authors.

I’ve been a full agent for about two years now, and have a growing list of brilliant, thoughtful writers.”

The biggest misconception people have about agents is that they sit around reading all day. “No one reads at work, not even editors,” she said. “I left academia several years ago, and I ended up picking a career with even more homework! I read manuscripts in the morning before work, in the evenings when I get home, and pretty much all day either Saturday or Sunday, depending on my schedule.

None of it happens on the job.”

Although it took her a few years to realize she could have a career working with writers, it was actually the only thing that ever made sense for her to do as someone who found reading both an escape and a joy.

“Like all proper nerds, I’ve been a reader my entire life,” Osteen said.

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Duvall Osteen

“My parents encouraged it—they were readers too. Nothing was too high- or lowbrow. They pushed me to read everything, and they never censored my choices.”

Sarah Condon, who earned her BA in 2005, always wanted to be a writer and said her Southern Studies degree has been a foundation to her career because it is where she learned to write well. “We did loads of writing, and we were always being challenged to try new ways of processing,” Condon said. “Also, my professors assigned so many great texts. I

remember taking an entire semester on William Faulkner. Who has such a luxury? This contributed hugely to my confidence and abilities.”

Additionally, the degree had a major impact on her theology, which is important to the mother, wife, priest, and clergy spouse. “I really didn’t take many religion-themed courses in my time in the department, but consistently learning about the history of the South—with her narrative of sin and her longing for redemption—is really the story of my faith seen through the history of a place,” she said.

As associate editor of the Mockingbird blog, an online ministry founded in 2007 that seeks to connect the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life in fresh and down-to-earth ways via the Internet, Condon does much of her writing on the fly. “Late nights and early mornings are some of my most productive moments,” she said. “We record the weekly Mockingcast with about as much predictability. If it’s morning time, I’m at the microphone with a cup of coffee in hand. If we happen to be recording in the evenings, there is typically wine involved. It is hard to pin down a typical day.”

Tragedy brought her to Mockingbird Ministries a few years

Sarah Condon

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ago, and she compels people to look to Jesus for deliverance from their despair, comfort from their anxiety, and forgiveness for their sins. “I started writing for Mockingbird after the Boston Marathon bombings in April of 2013,” she said. “There was such an outpouring of positive thinking for humanity in that moment, and I needed to respond from a theological vantage point. What I wrote about that event is what I often see and enjoy writing about in the world around me. As intelligent, passionate, and well intended as we want to believe that we are, our hope, theologically speaking, comes from God. I see this same narrative happening on repeat in our cultural conversations.”

Albert Way, who earned his MA in 1999, is the incoming editor of Agricultural History and associate professor of history at Kennesaw State University. He has been interested in agricultural history, along with environmental history, since he realized it was a viable field during Ted Ownby’s seminar in rural history.

“We read a number of landmark books on Southern agriculture, and I’ve been hooked ever since,” Way said. “When I entered the PhD program at the University of Georgia, I started going to meetings of the Agricultural History Society—one of the oldest professional history societies in the nation—and gradually became more involved until the opportunity came up to become the new editor of the society’s journal. I was lucky enough to have strong support from my home institution, Kennesaw State University, and the Agricultural History Society liked my proposal enough to offer me the job.”

Although he does not officially take over as editor until January, he is learning the nuts and bolts of running an academic journal, including receiving submissions and sending them through the peer-review process; brainstorming and soliciting special features such as roundtables and review essays; and learning and organizing the production and

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Albert Way

management of the journal. “We are moving to an online submission service, which will help reduce our administrative load in the long term, but requires a great deal of work in the short term, especially for a non-techie such as myself,” said Way, who also teaches Georgia history, US environmental history, a research seminar in US history, US history since the Civil War, and an occasional graduate class in environmental history. “Of course, my primary job as editor will be working with authors to shape their articles into quality pieces of academic writing. Smooth production and slick design might help attract readers, but ultimately quality content will keep them.”

Way’s enthusiasm for environmental and agricultural history comes from growing up in small-town south Georgia. “I grew up hunting and fishing and was always interested in the processes of working the land—the mix of work and technology, and the transformative results when those things converge, and I had great professors throughout undergrad and graduate school who encouraged me to pursue these interests,” Way said. His Southern Studies experience helped him figure out what graduate school and academia was all about. “I don’t exaggerate when I say it made me a more engaged citizen of the South and the world. It helped me learn how to read, think, write, and talk about serious things. And I learned a lot about beer and music, too.”

Sarah Ballard, an English teacher at Murrah High School for thirteen years, recently helped her students launch a literary magazine. The process began five years ago, when a student approached her with the idea to resurrect the school’s defunct creative-writing publication.

“I went home one night and basically just Googled “Murrah Literary Magazine” and was shocked when all this info came up about their award-winning lit mag called the Pleiades,” Ballard said. “Eudora Welty had been a judge, and Richard Ford had published stories in it when he was at Murrah.”

Sarah Ballard (left) with two students on the Pleiades staff

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Odie Lindsey has been on the road this summer promoting his recently published book of short stories, “We Come to Our Senses,” which centers on men and women affected by combat directly and tangentially, and the peculiar legacies of war. “My first notes and sketches began with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I’m a Desert Storm veteran (1991), so watching another generation mobilize for combat jumpstarted my thoughts about deployment, war narratives, and postwar life in the South,” Lindsey said. “So far the reception has been quite positive: NANCY RUSSELL

Ballard also had an odd sense of familiarity when she realized her own father, a Murrah alum, had a poem published in the Pleiades when he was at Murrah, and it sat framed in her grandmother’s house. So she and a handful of energetic students set about to resurrect the magazine.

“We wrote one letter to the alumni of Murrah asking for financial help, and the letter went viral,” she said.

“Money started coming in from all over the country. We published our first issue that year, and it won second-best lit mag in the state (among many other awards) at the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association competition held at Ole Miss in the spring.”

Ballard, who earned three degrees from the University of Mississippi— BA in English in 2000, MA in Southern Studies in 2003, and MA in education in 2005—said the students on the Pleiades staff are creative, quirky, and dedicated, as it is a big part of their identity at school.

“Because of the magazine’s cool ties to Murrah’s past, we’ve gotten a lot of attention for its resurrection,” Ballard said. “The quality of work— both written and visual—is amazing and has gotten a lot of people in the community to open their eyes to the talent of Murrah students. Most of the news Jackson Public Schools gets is negative, but we prove that our students are creating positive art and high-quality written works.”

Ballard plans on continuing to improve the publication every year and she enjoys how the students come out of their shells over the course of the three or four years they are on staff. “We work really hard to have our magazine fit our student population in design and theme,” she said.

“The kids are so proud to have their work published in an actual magazine. It validates that they have legitimate and important things to say about their world and that people care about their ideas. My Southern Studies master’s degree set me on this path. I try and provide my students a safe place to express their own reality, which is vitally important to them and to me.”

Odie Lindsey

starred reviews from industry trades, alongside very supportive newspaper and journal reviews. Eclipsing this has been the feedback from friends, colleagues, and the brave souls who bought the book without prompt!”

He said the book tour has been amazing, since he loves bookstores, but the writing process of finding war stories in day-to-day, postwar life was quite difficult. “In a sense, I had to bring the tension and unease of combat home; doing so meant losing sight of the things so often associated with a war narrative: acute bodily trauma or weapon-based action, obliterated landscapes, heroism, and the like,” Lindsey said. “Instead, my challenge was to explore the transition from taking on mortar fire to handling a jammed copier.”

His Southern Studies MA work is reflected both in on-the-page references and in the effort to write mindfully about the complicated South.

“The Southern Studies experience was tectonic with respect to the challenge of writing noncombat-based war stories,” said Lindsey, who earned his degree in 2007. “Southern Studies pushed me to ask which war narratives were being overlooked; how memory functions with respect to Southern militarism or culture; which bodies earned cultural rewards for their service, and whether this reward jibed with the service itself. I thought about the nature of trauma, of representation in media.… I could go on and on.”

On top of being a fiction writer, Lindsey is a senior lecturer at Vanderbilt’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. “My primary contribution there is teaching medicine and literature courses. These sections center on novels (Larry Brown, Toni Morrison), short stories and essays, all of which have something to do with the body—whether physical or biological, or as applied to intersectional issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, et cetera,” he said.

Rebecca Lauck Cleary

Fall 2016

The Southern Register

CONTRIBUTORS Brett J. Bonner is the editor of Living Blues magazine.

Rebecca Lauck Cleary is the Center’s senior staff assistant and website administrator. She received a BA in journalism from the University of Mississippi and is currently at work on her MA in Southern Studies.

and

The 24th Annual Mississippi Delta

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS FESTIVAL September 30 - October 1

Molly McGehee is associate professor of American studies at Oxford College of Emory University. She received her MA in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi in 2000.

Ted Ownby, director of the Center, holds a joint appointment in Southern Studies and history.

James G. Thomas, Jr. is the Center’s associate director for publications and editor of the Southern Register.

Reserve a front row seat for live drama, lectures, acting competition & porch plays in the historic district where Tom Williams spent his childhood.

Jay Watson is a professor of English at the University of Mississippi and director of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.

David Wharton is the Center’s director of documentary studies and an assistant professor of Southern Studies.

Jessica Wilkerson is an assistant professor of history and Southern Studies. She is currently working on her book manuscript, “Where Movements Meet: From the War on Poverty to Grassroots Feminism in the Appalachian.”

Melanie Young is the publications manager for Living Blues magazine.

rR

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A Pulitzer Centennial Event made possible in part by the Mississippi Humanities Council & the Mississippi Arts Commission The Festival will present the Matt Foss Theatre actors performing scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire in the Cutrer Mansion The actors drew standing ovations for their 2015 performance of The Glass Menagerie there and were invited to perform in the Kennedy Center & the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia. For reservations, call Coahoma Tourism at 662-627-6149. For festival information, visit www.coahomacc.edu/twilliams

The Festival has been sponsored by Coahoma Community College since it was inaugurated in 1993 by the National Endowment for the Arts www coahomacc.edu/twilliams

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Nashville’s Immigrant Foodways

Untitled, n.d.

Southern Foodways Alliance Documents the Flavors of Nolensville Road “Take a drive down Nolensville Road in Nashville, Tennessee, and you’ll have traveled the world in cuisines,” says Ava Lowrey, the Southern Foodways Alliance’s (SFA) Pihakis Film Fellow. In 2016 the SFA documented the foodways of Nolensville Road (also known as Nolensville Pike) in oral history and film.

Nashville boasts a rich immigrant community. According to Mayor Megan Barry’s Office of New Americans, nearly 12 percent of Nashville’s population was born outside the US and half of those people are recent immigrants who entered the country since 2000. Thirty percent of students enrolled in metro schools speak a language other than English.

Lowery produced the short film Little Kurdistan, which documents Nashville’s Kurdish community—the largest in the United States. Oral history collaborator Jennifer Justus and photographer Emily B. Hall recorded and photographed twelve oral history narrators, including a restaurateur from Ethiopia, the owner of a market that sells goods from Bhutan and Nepal, a caterer from Mexico City, a Burmese refugee farmer, and a Persian American hummus entrepreneur.

Visit southernfoodways.org to meet the men and women who work along Nolensville Pike. Farmers, caterers, restaurateurs, market owners, and home cooks, they reflect this city’s growing diversity and add a vibrant and global tone to Music City’s song.

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William Eggleston Exhibition Opens at University Museum Through the eye of photographer William Eggleston, nothing is ordinary, despite his photographs’ apparent depiction of ordinary things and ordinary people doing ordinary things. Eggleston said, “I am at war with the obvious,” a phrase the Metropolitan Museum of Art thought apt enough to use as the title for their 2013 exhibition of his photographs from their permanent collection.

Now, the University of Mississippi Museum presents The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston, an exhibition of thirty-six color and black-and-white photographs from the museum’s own permanent collection, including some never before exhibited.

The University Museum owes its enviable collection of Eggleston photographs to the generosity of Bill Ferris, scholar, author, and founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, who donated the works to the museum. Ferris, himself a photographer and a longtime friend of Eggleston’s, describes him as “the greatest living color photographer. He is the Picasso or Faulkner of what he does.”

“Greatest” or not, every art critic agrees that Eggleston’s work has

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shaped art photography since 1976, when the Museum of Modern Art presented William Eggleston’s Guide, its first-ever solo exhibition of all-color photographs, along with the eponymous catalog, its first-ever publication on color photography. Since that watershed exhibition, Eggleston’s work has influenced most art photography.

Writer and Edgar Award-winner Megan Abbott is the exhibition’s guest curator, and the exhibition’s consulting advisor is Maude Schulyer Clay, a first cousin and protégé of Eggleston’s, herself an acclaimed photographer. The exhibition, sponsored by Friends of the Museum, will be open September 13 to January 14. The public is invited to an opening reception Thursday, October 6, from 7:00–9:00 p.m.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum will host a symposium on October 7 at the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics, with discussion panels at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. The morning panel will include Abbot, Ferris, and Clay, and the afternoon panel will feature Memphis Brooks Museum executive director, Emily B. Neff, Ogden Museum of Art curator of photography, Richard McCabe, and UM art historian Kate Belden-Adams.

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

A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle

By Crystal Sanders. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 266 pages. $27.95 paper, $26.99 ebook.

A decade after some of the most iconic events of the civil rights movement, black Mississippians wondered how much longer before change was possible. Some of the fiercest local activists returned from the 1964 Democratic National Convention raw from defeat and frustrated at the slow progress of civil rights policies. Rather than despair, many working-class African American women offered one more “chance for change” in an innovative early childhood education program.

In her wonderful new book based on an award-winning dissertation, historian Crystal R. Sanders reconstructs the history of the Childhood Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), one of the first Head Start programs in the nation. From 1965 to 1968, working-class African American women across the state partnered with liberal whites and the federal government to bring early childhood education to the state’s poor and disenfranchised citizens. Part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) funded CDGM and gave administrative control to black Mississippians, who did not yet truly have the right to vote but had access to federal funds for the first time. As Sanders writes, “Education has always been political in Mississippi,” and the hundreds of women who staffed the CDGM knew that education programs offered routes to political power in a state where few others existed for black women.

Sanders argues that the CDGM, which was centered in the black-majority Delta, extended and expanded the goals of the civil rights movement after its peak. It operated as both an innovative preschool program and vehicle for claiming political power. The former sharecroppers and domestic workers who made up CDGM’s ranks, many of whom were also veteran civil rights activists, understood “the limitations of civil rights legislation and sought to address the shortcomings through the federally

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sponsored Head Start program.”

Through the CDGM, they worked to “better themselves, their communities, and their children’s futures.”

Sanders roots the history in the decades-long battle for black education before turning to the story’s central historical actors: black women, many of whom once had jobs raising white children. With the birth of CDGM, they applied for jobs as teachers, teachers’ aids, and cooks. The benefits of their new positions to their communities were numerous. Women raised substantially higher wages, gaining financial independence for the first time. Moreover, when they no longer relied on white employers—who were quick to fire employees who dared exercise their rights—they were freer to join civil rights struggles, like registering to vote. For others, working as coordinators and chairpersons for CDGM was an extension of civil rights work.

For instance, Unita Blackwell, the daughter of sharecroppers from Coahoma County, had served as a delegate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The next year, she applied for a CDGM job so that she could “continue her community work for a better life.” Lastly, working in the preschool program gave many women new skills and newfound confidence that would carry them into various political and professional arenas in the coming decades.

Children of working-class and poor African Americans had the most to gain. Mississippi did not offer public kindergarten, so, for the first time, many black families sent their children to a preschool program. CDGM developed teaching manuals, games, stories, and lesson plans that promoted critical thinking, fostered self-worth, and celebrated African American history and culture. The preschool program was holistic in approach and attended to children who were sick, hungry, and malnourished.

CDGM administrators adopted hot lunch programs and provided health screenings and immunizations. CDGM also prioritized involvement of parents and community members in children’s education.

Even before the CDGM opened its doors, white Mississippians in power began to challenge its integrity, charging the CDGM with fiscal irresponsibility, corruption, and as acting as a cover for the black power movement. As Sanders points out, criticism of CDGM (which was often exaggerated or simply wrong) “did not stem

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from a genuine interest in black education.” Rather, Mississippi’s political elites sought to keep African Americans out of politics, distant from federal dollars, and in substandard schools—a way to ensure a low-wage workforce and racial hierarchy. Under mounting pressure, the OEO director, Sargent Shriver, sought to conciliate white politicians by defunding CDGM and creating parallel organizations. When federal officials negotiated new programs, they handed administration over to moderate white and black men, whose top-down approaches too often excluded African American women, whose leadership and labor had made CDGM revolutionary.

Sanders convincingly shows how CDGM, despite its brief history, made a lasting impact on the state. During its operation it served six thousand children and employed hundreds of people. It opened the doors to a political education for many more. And it laid the foundations for the two Head Start programs still in operation, both of which serve thousands of Mississippi’s youth each year.

Sanders gives credit to the women who worked hard to change the status quo, but she also offers a stark reminder of “the white ruling class’s ability to change course in the face of liberal social reform.” Brown v. Board of Education continues to be celebrated as a hallmark of the civil rights movement, yet school segregation has risen to pre-1960s levels and early childhood education is still not a right of all American children. A Chance for Change is an important history for our time and deserves wide readership.

Jessica Wilkerson

No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta

By Alison Collis Greene. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 317 pages. $34.95 cloth.

Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi’s Closed Society

By Joseph T. Reiff. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 408 pages. $35.00 cloth.

There was a time when scholars spent a great deal of energy discussing whether Southern religion was primarily conservative, using theology, ritual and religious community to support, sanctify, or ignore existing social structures, or if it held substantial potential to reform, rethink and undermine the nature of Southern society. We still ask versions of those questions, but we often do it with more attention to multiple groups, multiple issues, and to

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the specific issues of times and places. No Depression in Heaven and Born of Conviction are exceptional works that explore how religious challenges to authority operated among different groups and in different settings in the twentieth-century South.

In Born of Conviction, Joseph Reiff studies a group of white Methodist ministers who wrote the Born of Conviction statement in 1963. The statement criticized racial segregation and the hatred and violence behind it, defended the pulpit as a place where people should be free to comment on issues of justice, and reaffirmed Methodist belief in the brotherhood of mankind. The statement, motivated immediately by the violence at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962, also supported public education and mentioned the authors’ opposition to communism.

Alison Collis Greene’s No Depression in Heaven takes its title from a 1932 song by James D. Vaughn. Greene’s book studies how religious people in Memphis, the Arkansas Delta, and the Mississippi Delta interpreted and responded to the Depression and New Deal. Where Reiff studies issues of race, Greene starts with issues of poverty—especially agricultural poverty—and explores how church groups understood their responsibilities and opportunities. I suspect few works of Southern religious history have mentioned Franklin Roosevelt and government programs as often as this volume.

Part of the uniqueness of Greene’s volume is its detailed attention to a host of things that were all happening at once. New church groups were starting, older groups were competing for church members, people were dealing with joblessness and hunger, and social-service organizations were trying to help address some problems but maybe not others.

In addition, the New Deal offered a series of federally funded experiments. One of the most

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Barr—in his recent esTerry Barr say collection entitled Don’t Date Baptists and Other Warnings from and Other Warnings My Alabama Mother— from My Alabama Mother brings something new and refreshing to memoirs about the 1960s South: real honesty about the often daily failures of the next generation of liberal-minded white Southerners to act or speak out about what they knew in their hearts Terry Barr was wrong during and after integration. Focusing on his experiences growing up in the once-thriving Bessemer, Alabama, Barr illuminates his and others’ often passive complicity—whether through silence or feigned indifference—in perpetuating racial and class divisions within his small town. Barr, a professor of English and creative writing at Presbyterian College where he teaches courses in modern US literature and creative nonfiction, is a prolific essayist whose work has appeared in numerous print and online periodicals.

While the collection’s title may at first suggest something along the lines of Lewis Grizzard, don’t be fooled.

This book offers a much deeper and fuller exploration of one man’s upper-middle-class white Southern identity—and the conflicts therein—than Grizzard ever wrote.

And while Barr does infuse humor into his work, his tales are more often somber in tone as he candidly shares moments of race- and class-based myopia from his childhood and adolescence while also revealing the painful regret and shame that live on within many of us.

The narratives “Searching for Higher Ground” and “‘Hey, Did You Happen to See?’” show Barr at his best as he takes readers along his journey from naïveté to awareness—awareness not only of the social structures within his Southern milieu but of his own cowardice in the face of them. He does not depict himself as a self-congratulatory progressive who has “seen the light”; rather, the portrait of this artist as a now-wiser man is of someone who knows that he has wounded and that he is wounded— someone who, through writing, is working hard to stitch together what has gone unattended for forty years.

Barr’s unique stories also offer a refreshing look into the dominance of the culture of Protestant Christianity within Southerners’ lives, including within his own home. (Terry’s mother is Methodist and he was reared Methodist; his late father was Jewish.) “Star-Crossed,” in fact, provides the perfect finale for the collection as Barr deftly moves between the past (as he wrangles in his early professional

Following in the tradition of Alabama memoirist Rick Bragg, Don’t Date Baptists explores the world of Bessemer, Alabama, circa 1960’s–70’s from the eyes of a boy who grew up there, struggling to understand the divide of race, class, religion, and neighborhood anxiety. Essayist Terry Barr learns from his parents that not all love is the same; that certain neighbors are not to be trusted; that crosses and stars and popular music can with seamless metamorphosis signal danger, desire, hate, and deep abiding love. While public pools might be filled with clay to prevent integrated swimming, or so-called friends might slur those darker than themselves, this southern boy learns to appreciate how these incidents and relationships have challenged and molded him into the teacher, writer and unapologetic Bessemer man that he is. With humor and poignant authenticity, Barr captures what it means to come of age as the New South cuts its teeth, with much trial and terrible error, in territory that is rich and explosive, devastating and beautiful. 

TERRY TELLS STORIES that are uniquely his and at the same time collectively ours. His cast of characters will have you nodding your head and saying, “Yes…I know those people, too!” He peels back his life with mature, discerning, perceptive eyes and invites us into his growing up and home town experience. He’s a story teller who isn’t afraid to share his doubts, joys, anger, sorrows, and soul.

—Wanda Meade, writer/photographer IN TERRY BARR’S essays we hear an authentic Southern voice rooted in a particular time and place: Bessemer, AL, beginning in the 1950’s. He brings to bear a historian’s delight in concrete details combined with a probing sensitivity to the psychological tensions and complexities beneath the surface of characters and events.

—Steve Beauchamp, poet

$14.99 • 2nd Edition with Bonus Material

Shawnee, Oklahoma 74804 www.reddirtpress.net

Ted Ownby

Don’t Date Baptists and Other Warnings from My Alabama Mother

By Terry Barr. Shawnee, OK: Red Dirt Press, 2016. 228 pages. $14.99 paper.

Most of us, I would imagine, have read a fair number of what literary scholar Fred Hobson has called the “white southern racial conversion narrative.” But author Terry

The Southern Register

Fall 2016

Don’t Date Baptists

2nd Edition

TERRY BARR’S BEAUTIFUL, straight from the heart writings remind us of memory’s healing power; they are evocative of places I know very well but have never been, of people with whom I’m intimately familiar but have never met. These are remarkable personal essays—funny, wistful in the right measure, smart, and heartbreaking. —Leslie T. White, Professor of English University of New Orleans

DON’T DATE BAPTISTS and other Warnings from My Alabama Mother

innovative points in Greene’s consistently innovative volume involves how people got help, whether defined as relief or charity or something else, to people in extreme need. Many of the church groups that had tried to help the poor found that government relief programs worked better than their often haphazard ways during the Depression.

Greene makes an important distinction between the popularity of social security measures, which relieved churches of efforts they had generally tried and sometimes failed to make, and the uncertainty with which many white church groups responded to New Deal jobs programs.

Reiff also shows a back-and-forth process, as most of the ministers who signed the Born of Conviction statement received some support, then faced backlash, and, years later, were often the subjects of celebration for their courage. His book goes into detail about those who signed the statement and those who declined to sign it or denounced it. Even more intriguing is the detail with which the book shows mixed reactions. The majority of the Mississippi Methodist ministers left the state, most because of pressure from opponents.

A reviewer should note the extraordinary research in each of the volumes. What is there to know about twentyeight Methodist ministers in the 1960s? From written and oral history sources, Reiff’s book shows there is a great deal to learn, much of it surprising, about well-educated professionals working inside and outside organized religion. In its own way, No Depression in Heaven matches the thoroughness of Born of Conviction by introducing all sorts of groups—from the Southern Tenant Farmers Union to Mothers Aid Societies to Goodwill Incorporated to the Church of God in Christ, and many others, from the well known to the obscure.

Both books end with brief discussions of memory. Reiff discusses how long it took for Mississippi Methodists who signed the statement to receive celebration for their work.

Greene critiques the argument that Depression-era people took care of themselves and their own and did not want or need government assistance. The picture these works offer of Southern religion is anything but clear and simple; instead, their depiction of Southern religious life is complicated, full of conflict and change, and often simultaneously creative and frustrating.

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life with making sense of his claimed Jewishness and his claimed Southernness) and the present (in which he wrangles with the significance of the cross that one day appears around his eldest daughter’s neck). Within this essay, and really throughout the collection as a whole, we see Barr working to make sense of what the Drive-By Truckers labeled “the duality of the Southern Thing.”

Yet it is clear that Barr still has more to say, that his “working through” is not yet complete. Perhaps this impressive debut tome will beget a second collection of essays—one in which readers learn even more about Barr’s life after graduate school; or more about his experiences as the lone Jewish faculty member at a small liberal arts college where the students, faculty, staff, administrators, and board members are primarily Christian; or more about his and his father’s Southern Jewishness; or more about the life and family that he and his wife, Nilly (whose family immigrated to the US from Iran in the ’80s and who is, by the way, not Baptist), created for themselves in upstate South Carolina over the last twenty-plus years. No doubt readers will leave Don’t Date Baptists hoping that this collection is only the first of many by Terry Barr.

Molly McGehee

Bars, Blues, and Booze: Stories from the Drink House

By Emily D. Edwards. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. 312 pages. $35.00 cloth.

Emily D. Edwards’s Bars, Blues, and Booze: Stories from the Drink House is an engrossing collection of stories from musicians, music lovers, and other denizens of “drink houses”—alcohol-serving music venues, both legal and illegal— and the scene that surrounds them. Taken together, these oral histories provide a fascinating glimpse into the richly complex nature of Southern music culture.

The filmmaker behind the Grateful Dead fan documentary Deadheads: An American Subculture, Edwards is no stranger to localized music communities. Currently a professor of media studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she was drawn to collect the narratives in this book after the passing of several Piedmont artists and personalities, including James “Guitar Slim” Stephens and Guitar Gabriel. Though most of the interviewees and their stories are linked to the Greensboro area, some reach farther afield to locales such as Muscle Shoals and the North Mississippi Hill Country.

Edwards organizes the interviews into themed chapters, beginning with an attempt to define what a drink house is. “A juke joint in Mississippi is the same thing as what they would call a drink house or a liquor house here. Or even just a bar,” says Tim Duffy, the cofounder of the

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Music Maker Relief Foundation. As a student in WinstonSalem, Duffy first visited drink houses in working-class black neighborhood homes and recalls that they were “a mixture of social welfare agency, bar, and clubhouse.” They could also be places of violence: Ralph R. Speas, the archivist of the Piedmont Blues Preservation Society, remembers a now-defunct bar in East Greensboro as being a “bucket of blood.”

Guitarist John Dee Holeman wrote his song Chapel Hill Boogie about the violence of the Tin Top drink house.

When asked about his memories of playing there, Holeman did not offer much more than this: “It was rough. It was really rough.”

Some drink houses were licensed or located in “wet” counties, while illegal or unlicensed houses might operate with an understanding from area law enforcement.

Guitarist and guitar shop owner Michael Bennett tells of the Bear’s Head, a Burke County juke, providing “campaign liquor”—moonshine—to local political candidates.

Musicians who performed at drink houses were often patrons, sometimes earning tips, and sometimes playing for free. Nightclubs were another option for local entertainment and gigs. Guitarist Roy Roberts preferred these larger, “classier” venues, stating that when a working musician performed there, “he knew he was going to get paid.”

At legal and illegal bars that identified as performance spaces, those with musical aspirations might be able to hone their skills and even play with their idols. Vocalist and guitarist Big Ron Hunter began his career playing at drink houses around Winston-Salem; multi-instrumentalist Max Drake relishes the memory of the night his band Arhooly backed Lightnin’ Hopkins at P. B. Scott’s in Blowing Rock.

Venues that were owned and largely patronized by African Americans would also become a “crossroads” of social interaction when white college students and musicians would come to party and seek out “that genuine sound.” As a student at Florida State University in the 1970s, media educator Adrianne Carageorge came upon Smitty’s juke joint while hunting psilocybin mushrooms in a pasture, and she remembers it as a place where “black people” and “country farmer types . . . got along.”

Chapter 4, “White Kids on the Chitlin Circuit,” is dedicated to an interview with husband and wife musicians Rob

Fall 2016

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Baskerville and Penny Zamagni, who played with artists such as Jerry “Boogie” McCain, Bo Diddley, Chick Willis, and Ironing Board Sam, among others. They recalled that people at black drink houses and jukes could be standoffish towards them at times, though once they proved their worth as players—along with showing respect toward their mentors—they were accepted. Their thoughtfully recounted memories, especially of McCain, are a highlight.

Another chapter dedicated to a single interview is chapter 3, “Blues, Booze, and ‘Occupying a Dive.’” The late blues guitarist Chick Willis’s vivid tales of his life in music and his complicated views on race are fascinating and worthy of their own book. Roy Roberts’s stories of playing country music in white honky-tonks in the 1980s are also given singular space. Other chapters focus on studios and drinking scenes during Muscle Shoals’s heyday; juke joints and moonshine across the South (including bassist and teacher Bill Moore’s visit to Junior Kimbrough’s juke in Chulahoma, Mississippi); the presence of hoodoo and folk magic around the drink house; women who provided food for the scene; individual personalities of the Piedmont region; travel stories encompassing other performance spaces, like prisons and festivals; and the intersection of white “baby boomer” and black drink house culture.

There are as many perspectives in this book as there are interviews, and it can be revealing to compare and contrast them. Singer and actress Michele Seidman sees the “blues crowd” as “not typically a volatile crowd,” citing the attack on Lester Chambers by a female audience member at the 2013 Hayward Russell City Blues Fest as an aberrant example. Yet others recount instances of violence and murder: Piedmont Blues Preservation Society founding member Lorenzo “Logie” Meachum was once present at a drink house shooting, and Baskerville and Zamagni point out the sanitized nature of today’s festival circuit. Taken together, these personal narratives underscore the fact that blues culture is not a monolithic entity, and they vary depending on the speaker and his or her viewpoint.

Ultimately, the scope of the work is limited—something the author acknowledges at the outset. Yet these vibrant stories, full of life, are necessary documents of a culture that gave birth to and continues to nurture American music. They remind us that though our times may or may not change, nothing—not the blues and not people’s desire to gather together to seek revelry and escape—ever really fades away.

Melanie Young

BOOKS IN BRIEF Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer at Fifty Edited by Jennifer Levasseur and Mary M. McCay (LSU Press) More than fifty years after its publication, Walker Percy’s National Book Award winner, The Moviegoer, still comforts, agitates, and enlightens generations of readers. Twelve new essays, edited and introduced by Jennifer Levasseur and Mary A. McCay, emphasize the evolving significance of this seminal novel set in New Orleans. The contributors consider the text with diverse perspectives, drawing on areas as wide-ranging as philosophy, theology, disability theory, contemporary music and literature, social media, and film studies.

The Southern Register

The Modernist Architecture of Samuel G. and William B. Wiener: Shreveport, Louisiana, 1920–1960

By Karen Kingsley and Guy W. Carwile (LSU Press) Authors Karen Kingsley and Guy W. Carwile examine the work of the Wiener brothers from the 1920s through the 1960s, detailing the evolutionary process of their designs and exploring why modern architecture appeared so early in this Southern city. Throughout, architectural descriptions of the buildings, archival images, recent photographs, and discussion of the surrounding social and economic culture of northern Louisiana inform a deeper appreciation for the Wieners’ role in establishing modernism in the United States.

Fall 2016

Voodoo and Power: The Politics of Religion in New Orleans, 1881–1940

By Kodi A. Roberts (LSU Press) The racialized and exoticized cult of voodoo occupies a central place in the popular image of the Crescent City. But as Kodi A. Roberts argues, the religion was not a monolithic tradition handed down from African ancestors to their American-born descendants. Instead, a much more complicated patchwork of influences created New Orleans voodoo, allowing it to move across boundaries of race, class, and gender. By employing late-nineteenth and early twentiethcentury first-hand accounts of voodoo practitioners and their rituals, Roberts provides a nuanced understanding of who practiced voodoo and why.

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Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference “Faulkner and Money: The Economies of Yoknapatawpha and Beyond” July 23–27, 2017 Like many of his readers, William Faulkner delighted in the various and often surprising ways money changes hands: in complex business transactions, handshake deals, elaborate wagers, frauds and con games, tainted payoffs, bad investments, and the like.

At the 44th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, registrants will join scholars, educators, students, and other lovers of things Faulkner to follow the proverbial money in the author’s work, life, and career. Five days of lectures, panels, tours, exhibits, and other presentations will explore the multifaceted economics of Yoknapatawpha County, the Faulkner oeuvre, and the literary profession.

Four of this year’s five keynote speakers will make their Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha debuts in 2017.

Perhaps the world’s leading authority on money, language, and literature, Marc Shell is the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English at Harvard University, where he also teaches in the undergraduate literature concentration and the graduate program in history of American civilization. He was cofounder of the university’s summer schools in Olympia, Greece, and Cascais, Portugal. Recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, he is the author of The Economy of Literature (1978), Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (1982), Art and Money (1995), Wampum and the Origins of American Money (2013), and numerous other books on subjects ranging from nationhood, kinship, and disability

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Myka Tucker-Abramson

Gavin Jones

Richard Godden

Fall 2016

studies to Jewish languages and literatures and Canadian studies.

The newcomers also include Bill Brown, the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as deputy provost for the arts. A coeditor of Critical Inquiry since 1993, he is the author of The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (1996), A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003), and Other Things (2015), which tracks the role of objects among the visual, plastic, and literary arts, and in the fields of anthropology, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics; and the editor of Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Novels (1997), and a special issue of Critical Inquiry on “Things” that appeared in fall 2001, won the CELJ award for the year’s best special issue of a scholarly journal, and was expanded and published as a book in 2004. His essays have appeared in American Literary History, American Quarterly, Representations, Modernism/Modernity, PMLA, New Literary History, and Critical Inquiry, among other journals.

Gavin Jones is the Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1999.

A noted Americanist, Professor Jones is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (1999), a Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title; American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in US Literature, 1840–1945 (2009); and Failure and the American

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Writer: A Literary History (2014), which received Honorable Mention from the Association of American Publishers for a 2015 PROSE award in literature. A member of the editorial board of American Literature, the leading journal in US literary studies, he is currently at work on a monograph, “Race, Species, Planet: John Steinbeck’s Experiments.”

Myka Tucker-Abramson, lecturer in English and comparative literature at King’s College London, received her PhD from Simon Fraser University in 2013. Her publications include essays in American Studies, Modern Drama, and Studies in Canadian Literature, and she has articles forthcoming in PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory. Her book project “Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal, New York, and the Rise of the Neoliberal Novel, 1948–1965” is currently under review at Fordham University Press. “Novel Shocks” traces the political and ideational origins of neoliberalism to battles over suburban and urban space in the 1950s and early 1960s and examines the postwar American novel as a key site for these struggles.

Returning to the conference is Richard Godden.

Professor Godden, who keynoted at “Faulkner and America” in 1998 and “Faulkner and Mystery” in 2009, is professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is currently completing “Fictions of Deficit: A Narrative Poetics for the Financial Turn at the Closing of an American Century,” the final volume of a critical tetralogy on American literature and economics that also includes Fictions of Capital: The American Novel from James to Mailer (1990), Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution (1997), and William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words (2007). His recent articles include essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald, David Foster Wallace, and Jayne Anne Phillips.

Additional speakers and panelists will be selected early next year from the conference call for papers, which can be viewed at www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner.

Other conference events include the popular “Teaching Faulkner” sessions led by James Carothers, Brian McDonald, Charles Peek, Terrell Tebbetts, and Theresa Towner. Collaborators on Digital Yoknapatawpha, a digital humanities project at the University of Virginia, will present updates at a lunchtime session. Bookseller Seth Berner will lead a presentation on “Collecting Faulkner,” the J. D.Williams Library will exhibit rare Faulkner materials, and University Museums will welcome conference registrants to a special exhibit. Optional daylong guided tours will visit Faulkner-related locations in northeast Mississippi and the Mississippi Delta.

Discount rates for the conference are available for groups of five or more students. Inexpensive dormitory housing is available for all registrants. Contact Justin Murphree at jcmurphr@olemiss.edu for details. For other inquiries, or to submit abstracts to the call for papers, contact Jay Watson, director, at jwatson@olemiss.edu.

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

Teacher

Two Years Teaching in the Mississippi Delta

By Michael Copperman A mesmerizing account of the realities of working with Teach For America in one of the country’s poorest and most challenged regions

The Land of Rowan Oak

An Exploration of Faulkner’s Natural World

By Ed Croom An extraordinary photographic documentary of the wild and cultivated plants and landscape of Faulkner’s inspirational writing sanctuary

Big Jim Eastland

The Godfather of Mississippi

By J. Lee Annis Jr. The biography of a powerful Mississippi senator rife with contradictions

Full Court Press

Mississippi State University, the Press, and the Battle to Integrate College Basketball

By Jason A. Peterson How basketball loosened the grip of segregation and its proponents in the media

ALSO AVAILABLE AS EBOOKS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSELLER

www.upress.state.ms.us 800-737-7788

Jay Watson SouthernRegisterSummer2016.indd 1

The Southern Register

Fall 2016

8/18/16 11:03 AM

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CALLS FOR PAPERS Study the South

A Center for the Study of Southern Culture Publication Study the South, a peer-reviewed, multimedia, openaccess journal published by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, announces a general call for papers.

Study the South exists to encourage interdisciplinary academic thought and discourse on the culture of the American South. Editors welcome submissions by faculty members, advanced graduate students, and professional scholars doing work in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, music, literature, documentary studies, gender studies, religion, geography, media

studies, race studies, ethnicity, folklife, and art to submit article abstracts or complete manuscripts. Final manuscripts and projects must attempt to build upon and expand the understanding of the American South in order to be considered for publication.

For questions or additional information, or to submit an original paper for consideration, please e-mail James G. Thomas, Jr. at jgthomas@olemiss.edu. Submissions must be previously unpublished.

Study the South is available via the Center’s website at www.studythesouth.org.

Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference 2017 “Faulkner and Money” • July 23–27, 2017

To gain a fuller understanding of William Faulkner’s literary career and fictional oeuvre, a reader could do worse than to follow the proverbial money. Faulkner delighted in the intricate maneuverings of financial transactions, from poker wagers, horse trades, and auctions to the seismic convolutions of the New York Cotton Exchange.

Moreover, whether boiling the pot with magazine stories, scraping by on advances from his publishers, flush with cash from Hollywood screenwriting labors, or basking in financial security in the wake of the Nobel Prize, Faulkner was at every moment of his personal and professional life thoroughly inscribed within the economic forces and circumstances of his era. The forty-fourth annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference will explore the relationship between Faulkner and “money,” construed broadly to encompass the economic dimensions of the author’s life and work. Topics could include but are by no means limited to: • the economics of authorship and the literary marketplace; • the role of value, specie, currency, credit, debt, barter, wages, contracts, property, the commodity, capital, finance, investment, gambling, production, consumption, circulation, distribution, and other forms of economic activity or exchange in Faulkner’s writings; • the philosophy, psychology, or anthropology of money in Faulkner’s world; • applications of economic theory to Faulkner’s texts (from classical political economy to the recent work of Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, Niall Ferguson, and others);

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• material economics, or the economy of things; • money and the modern state; • the politics of economic development; • general, restricted, gift, or symbolic economies in Faulkner; • poverty in Yoknapatawpha and other Faulkner locales; • Faulkner in the economic context of slavery, agrarian capitalism, consumerism, Wall Street, Prohibition, the Great Depression, the New Deal, Breton Woods, globalization, neoliberalism, etc.

The program committee especially encourages full panel proposals for seventy-five-minute conference sessions.

Such proposals should include a one-page overview of the session topic or theme, followed by two-page abstracts for each of the panel papers to be included. We also welcome individually submitted two-page abstracts for fifteen- to twenty-minute panel papers. Panel papers consist of approximately 2,500 words and will be considered by the conference program committee for possible expansion and inclusion in the conference volume published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Session proposals and panel paper abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2017, preferably through e-mail attachment. All manuscripts, proposals, abstracts, and inquiries should be addressed to Jay Watson, Department of English, University of Mississippi, PO Box 1848, University, MS 38677-1848. E-mail: jwatson@olemiss.edu.

Decisions for all submissions will be made by March 15, 2017. Additional conference information can be found at www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/Faulkner.

Fall 2016

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continued from 1

and hopes to bring a chapter here to Oxford. In his spare time you can find him in the kitchen, of course, working on recipes that showcase the Gullah culture. You can also find him sipping on bourbon and enjoying a cigar while listening to music or flipping through the latest cookbook.

Elise Potentier landed in America on August 11, 2016, at 4:39 p.m. She was born and raised in a small town located about an hour from Paris, and spent most of her life there. When her parents suggested, as a joke, that she should spend a year abroad, she took their words very seriously and joined an international school in Bournemouth, England, where she earned a degree in English. She chose to come to the University of Mississippi in order to have the chance to travel again and to write a thesis about country music. She fell in love with country music several years ago, starting with Taylor Swift, who led her to many other singers and groups such as Alan Jackson and Brad Paisley.

Holly Robinson is the latest Brit to cross the pond on behalf of the British Association of American Studies. She recently completed her English with Study in North America BA at the University of Exeter and spent a year at Vassar College in New York. She first discovered Southern Studies when learning about the effect that spectacle lynching had on the commodification of slavery. She adds Southern Studies to her repertoire of women’s studies, American studies, Jewish studies, and disability studies. When she isn’t fighting about the importance of popular culture, or listening to Taylor Swift, she can be found at home critically analyzing her favorite crime show, NCIS. Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Je’Monda Roy recently graduated with a BA in English with a Southern Studies minor from the University of Mississippi. Being the first to graduate college in her family, she’s constantly asked to help with assignments for younger siblings and

various family members. Je’Monda is interested in anything related to food and Netflix. She is also very interested in sports, and she serves as the manager for the Ole Miss volleyball team.

Jacqui Sahagian was born and raised in a village in rural Michigan, a place she hopes to never see again.

She thinks her hatred of the Midwest might have something to do with her obsessive love of all things Southern.

After finishing an undergrad English degree at the University of Michigan, Jacqui moved to Nashville to write for music publications. While living in Nashville she fell in love with the South and music writing, and decided she wants to study Southern music in all its incarnations. She plans to do thesis work on gender and violence in Delta blues, and is also interested in the history of local Oxford record label Fat Possum.

In her free time Jacqui can be found reading and smoking outside coffee shops, back in Nashville at her boyfriend’s gigs, or at home with her two cats, Evangeline and Artemis.

continued from 2

programs in, among other fields, American studies, African American studies, education, history, English, sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, religion, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology. They have written the best books on several subjects and are writing more, and they are at work on dissertations on topics ranging from the South and the Caribbean to music and the military-industrial complex to Southern feminists to religion in the American space program.

As the alumni article in this Southern Register describes, they write, edit, publish, and work as agents.

They sell books, write for journals and newspapers, and work in libraries. They make art and music. They do documentary work, paid and unpaid, of many kinds, and they teach and organize documentary work.

The Southern Register

They contemplate things, do digital projects unimaginable when the Center began, and they imagine the future. Whatever they do for a living, they keep reading.

Students with degrees in Southern Studies work for governments as elected officials, in the arts and humanities, economic development, water policy, and the Department of State. They work in campaigns and write and talk about politics, and they work for justice. They work in nonprofits of all sorts. They work as ministers and restaurateurs and pastry chefs, and they work on farms and sell shrimp. They run businesses, some of which they started. Lots are lawyers, and a few are nurses, doctors, and health care administrators. They do multiple things at once, and create new things to do.

It’s pretty extraordinary what students with Southern Studies degrees

Fall 2016

have done and are doing and will do. I’ve said frequently that people who are willing to go through life explaining their degree are likely to be courageous, creative people, so we shouldn’t be surprised, but they keep doing surprising things.

At some point in their lives, most Southern Studies students have likely had to respond to that question, “Southern Studies?” They likely wondered if the person asking the question really wanted to hear about regional studies and interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship. Cheers to the students who have come up with answers to the question, “Southern Studies?” I’d love to hear the ways people have asked the question, and how alumni have answered. Please write me, hsownby@olemiss.edu, and we’ll make a list.

Ted Ownby

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