scholarly journals Ellen Glasgow’s In This Our Life: “The Betrayals of Life” in the Crumbling Aristocratic South

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-88
Author(s):  
Iulia Andreea Milică
Keyword(s):  
Family Relationships ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
American South ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The South ◽  
The Face ◽  
The American South ◽  
Ellen Glasgow ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractEllen Glasgow’s works have received, over time, a mixed interpretation, from sentimental and conventional, to rebellious and insightful. Her novel In This Our Life (1941) allows the reader to have a glimpse of the early twentieth-century South, changed by the industrial revolution, desperately clinging to dead codes, despairing and struggling to survive. The South is reflected through the problems of a family, its sentimentality and vulnerability, but also its cruelty, pretensions, masks and selfishness, trying to find happiness and meaning in a world of traditions and codes that seem powerless in the face of progress. The novel, apparently simple and reduced in scope, offers, in fact, a deep insight into various issues, from complicated family relationships, gender pressures, racial inequality to psychological dilemmas, frustration or utter despair. The article’s aim is to depict, through this novel, one facet of the American South, the “aristocratic” South of belles and cavaliers, an illusory representation indeed, but so deeply rooted in the world’s imagination. Ellen Glasgow is one of the best choices in this direction: an aristocratic woman but also a keen and profound writer, and, most of all, a writer who loved the South deeply, even if she exposed its flaws.

scholarly journals A Vigorous Affirmation of Life: Slaves in the Face of Dehumanization

Elements ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Nista
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American South ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Affirmation Of Life ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The American South

For a slave living under the system of chattel slavery in the American South during the nineteenth century, avenues of self-expression were extremely limited. One of the few ways slaves could exert control over their own lives was through singing and dancing. These arts gave slaves a chance to relieve stress and establish a culture through the creation of musical instruments, songs, and dances. All of these contained hints at the true nature of slaves’ feelings towards the system that oppressed them, feelings that they had to frequently repress. However, despite slaves’ efforts to make this culture entirely their own, masters tried to find ways to use it to their advantage instead of to the slaves’ benefit. The resulting covert power struggle sometimes ended in favor of the masters, taking the form of regulations on slaves’ dances, requirement of the performance of songs and dances for the masters’ entertainment, and even abuse of slaves by using their own arts. Ultimately, however, slaves emerged victorious because of the hidden messages in their songs and dances. Though this method of coping could not erase all the masters did, it was at least one glimmer of hope.

Southern Agrarians

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny LeRoy
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
The South ◽  
Robert Penn Warren ◽  
The American South ◽  
John Crowe Ransom

The Southern Agrarians were twelve writers from the American South who advocated a return to an agrarian-based economy throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In their 1930 collection of essays I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) and others attacked the system of modern industrial capitalism and its effect on the traditional way of Southern life.

Latinas/os in the Southern United States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perla M. Guerrero
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
The South ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
New Destinations ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
The American South ◽  
And Migration

Latinas/os were present in the American South long before the founding of the United States of America, yet knowledge about their southern communities in different places and time periods is deeply uneven. In fact, regional themes important throughout the South clarify the dynamics that shaped Latinas/os’ lives, especially race, ethnicity, and the colorline; work and labor; and migration and immigration. Ideas about racial difference, in particular, reflected specifics of place, and intersections of local, regional, and international endeavors and movements of people and resources. Accordingly, Latinas/os’ position and treatment varied across the South. They first worked in agricultural fields picking cotton, oranges, and harvesting tobacco, then in a variety of industries, especially poultry and swine processing and packing. The late 20th century saw the rapid growth of Latinas/os in southern states due to changing migration and immigration patterns that moved from traditional states of reception to new destinations in rural, suburban, and urban locales with limited histories with Latinas/os or with substantial numbers of immigrants in general.

scholarly journals Slavery and the new history of capitalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-244
Author(s):  
Trevor Burnard ◽  
Giorgio Riello
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Great Divergence ◽  
The American South

AbstractThe new history of capitalism (NHC) places a great deal of emphasis on slavery as a crucial world institution. Slavery, it is alleged, arose out of, and underpinned, capitalist development. This article starts by showing the intellectual and scholarly foundations of some of the broad conclusions of the NHC. It proceeds by arguing that capitalist transformation must rely on a global framework of analysis. The article considers three critiques in relation to the NHC. First, the NHC overemphasizes the importance of coercion to economic growth in the eighteenth century. We argue that what has been called ‘war capitalism’ might be better served by an analysis in which the political economy of European states and empires, rather than coercion, is a key factor in the transformation of capitalism at a global scale. Second, in linking slavery to industrialization, the NHC proposes a misleading chronology. Cotton produced in large quantities in the United States came too late to cause an Industrial Revolution which, we argue, developed gradually from the latter half of the seventeenth century and which was well established by the 1790s, when cotton started to arrive from the American South. During early industrialization, sugar, not cotton, was the main plantation crop in the Americas. Third, the NHC is overly concentrated on production and especially on slave plantation economies. It underplays the ‘power of consumption’, where consumers came to purchase increasing amounts of plantation goods, including sugar, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, and coffee. To see slavery’s role in fostering the preconditions of industrialization and the Great Divergence, we must tell a story about slavery’s place in supporting the expansion of consumption, as well as a story about production

“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done”: Southern Religious History in Retrospect and Prospect

1998 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald G. Mathews
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious History ◽  
The South ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Many

One of the most distinguishing marks of the American South is that religion is more important for the people who live there than for their fellow citizens in the restof the country. When this trait began to identify the region is surprisingly unclear, but it has begun to attract attention from scholars of religion and society who have hitherto been esteemed as students primarily of areas outside the South. The study of religion in Dixie cannot but benefit from this change. After centuries of obsession with thickly settled, college-proud, and printexpressive New England—an area not noted for excessive modesty in thinking about its place in the New World—students of American religion are turning to a region whose history has sustained a selfconsciousness that makes its place in American religious history unique. For studying the American South begins with a dilemma born of ambiguity: whether to treat it as a place or an idea. Sometimes, to be sure, the South appears to be both; but sometimes it is “place” presented as an idea; and sometimes it is a place whose historical experience should have, according to reflective writers, taught Americans historical and moral lessons they have failed to learn. Confusion results in part from the South's contested history not only between the region and the rest of the United States but also among various competing groups within its permeable and frequently indistinct borders. Differences between region and nation will, however, continue to dominate conversation even though the myth of southern distinctiveness may mislead students as much as the myth of its evangelical homogeneity. If inquiry about religion in the South should be sensitive to the many faith communities there, the history of the South will still by contrast provide insight into the broader “American” society.

The Violent Citizens of the American South

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-185
Author(s):  
BRUCE E. BAKER
Keyword(s):  
Atlantic World ◽  
American South ◽  
The South ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The American South

The three books reviewed here each examine the American South with one central idea in mind: violence, citizenship, and the Atlantic world. The first two seem quite primal ideas, the sort of things historians have been using for ages, and even the Atlantic world is getting rather long in the tooth now. However, each of these three books, in different ways, demonstrates new ways of thinking about ideas central to our understandings of the South and, at their best, make the familiar strange, giving us new ways to understand an old region. Since two of them are edited collections, it probably makes best sense to take them up first, leaving the monograph for later.

Southern Eruptions in Asian American Narratives

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ho
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American South ◽  
Foreign Student ◽  
The South ◽  
Bruce Lee ◽  
The American South ◽  
Racial Harmony ◽  
Fitting In

This chapter discusses the emergence of Asian American literature and film about the South as they disrupt multiple narratives about race relations and racial subjectivity. It particularly studies Susan Choi's novel The Foreign Student (1998), Mira Nair's feature-length film Mississippi Masala (1992), and Paisley Rekdal's creative nonfiction collection of autobiographical essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In (2000). Asian American stories set in the South erupt the myth of imaginary lines between the past and present, arguing that the inclusion of Asian American voices signals not simply a pluralistic affirmation of racial harmony but the complications of understanding race beyond a black–white paradigm. Indeed, a true understanding of southern race relations crosses the geographic borders of the American South into not only Europe and Africa but the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia as well, because the South is a space that is implicated in larger transnational and global flows.

Discrepancies in Dixie: Asian Americans and the South

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jigna Desai ◽  
Khyati Y. Joshi
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American South ◽  
The South ◽  
Recent Immigrant ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Relationship

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the relationship between the Asian American and the American South. The figure of the Asian American is perceived to be discrepant in and antithetical to the American South. Within the American imaginary, the Asian American as perpetual foreigner and alien is always seen as a recent immigrant, and therefore associated with contemporary times, while the South is perceived as an anachronistic and isolated region. This renders the two—the Asian American and the South—allegedly mutually exclusive and incongruous. In these imaginings, the South remains a space quintessentially American but one steeped in an antebellum era of White supremacy, anti-Black racism, and outdated isolation. In supposed contrast stands the figure of the Asian American who is associated with immigration and borders, globalization, and contemporaneity.

Resilience of Southern Identity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Cooper ◽  
H. Gibbs Knotts
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
American South ◽  
First Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Remarkable Change ◽  
Southern Identity ◽  
Interstate Highway System ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
The American South

The American South has experienced remarkable change over the past half century. Black voter registration has increased, the region’s politics have shifted from one-party Democratic to the near-domination of the Republican Party, and in-migration has increased its population. At the same time, many outward signs of regional distinctiveness have faded--chain restaurants have replaced mom-and-pop diners, and the interstate highway system connects the region to the rest of the country. Given all of these changes, many have argued that southern identity is fading. But here, Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts show how these changes have allowed for new types of southern identity to emerge. For some, identification with the South has become more about a connection to the region’s folkways or to place than about policy or ideology. For others, the contemporary South is all of those things at once--a place where many modern-day southerners navigate the region’s confusing and omnipresent history. Regardless of how individuals see the South, this study argues that the region’s drastic political, racial, and cultural changes have not lessened the importance of southern identity but have played a key role in keeping regional identification relevant in the twenty-first century.

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