scholarly journals Exotic Otherlands, Headquarters of Death: Sub-tropical Land- and Cityscapes in The Southern Vampire Mysteries

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
American South ◽  
The Other ◽  
Southern United States ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
True Blood ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South ◽  
Interspecies Relations ◽  
Racial Ethnic

The landscapes and cityscapes of the sub-tropical Southern United States, with their opulent nature, exuberant cities, boisterous cultural diversity and troubled history of conflict and violence have long offered an alluring locale for Gothic narratives. This article explores the ways in which <em>The Southern Vampire Mysteries</em> (2001–2013) – the best-selling literary series by Charlaine Harris and the basis for the HBO TV series <em>True Blood</em> – construct the Gothicised imageries of the American South as the terrain of confusing ambivalences; of glamour and exoticism, death and the uncanny. Informed by the discourses of tropicality, Tropical and Urban Gothic and exotic tourism – and the ways they interweave with the concept of Otherness – the paper seeks to illuminate the process of interrelating and consequently exoticising the figure of the Other and Southern sub-tropical land- and cityscapes. It also examines the tropes of urban interspecies relations articulated in the series as a metaphor for the Southern racial/ethnic heritage with its anxieties of miscegenation, transgression and “excessive” heterogeneity. A particular emphasis is placed on the accounts of New Orleans as the liminal space of cultural blending and touristic exploration of the figure of the Other.

scholarly journals Were Concentration Camp Prisoners Slaves?: The Possibilities and Limits of Comparative History and Global Historical Perspectives

2008 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Buggeln
Keyword(s):  
Historical Perspective ◽  
American South ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Southern United States ◽  
War Economy ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Subject Areas ◽  
The American South ◽  
Forced Labour

The author discusses the question of whether concentration camp prisoners can be characterized as slaves during the period of their intensified exploitation as forced labourers in the German war economy after 1942. Recent research has negated this question. This finding rests, however, primarily on the fact that the form of slavery practised in the southern United States was chosen as a reference system and that certain differences are posited as too absolute. The author analyses differences and similarities in selected subject areas between slavery as it was practised in the American South and the forced labour demanded of concentration camp prisoners. Subsequently, an attempt is made to explain the apparent differences and similarities from a global-historical perspective, and hypotheses towards a history of slavery in the age of globalization are elaborated. The goal here is to criticize the central positioning of slavery in the American South as the normative slavery system and to raise once again the question of the various forms of unfree labour under capitalism.

Der Fall des Philosophen

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Gekle
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Oedipus Complex ◽  
The Other ◽  
Philosophical Theory ◽  
Ernst Bloch ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
History Of ◽  
Painful Experience ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One

The history of mental development on the one and the history of his writings on the other hand form the two separate but essentially intertwined strands of an archeology of Ernst Bloch´s thought undertaken in this book. Bloch as a philosopher is peculiar in that his initial access to thought rose from the depths of early, painful experience. To give expression to this experience, he not only needed to develop new categories, but first and foremost had to find words for it: the experience of the uncanny and the abysmal, of which he tells in Spuren, is on the level of philosophical theory juxtaposed by the “Dunkel des gerade gelebten Augenblicks” (darkness of the moment just lived) and his discovery of a “Noch-nicht-Bewusstes” (not-yet-conscious), thus metaphysically undermining the classical Oedipus complex in the succession of Freud. In this book, psyche, work and the history of the 20th century appear concentrated in Ernst Bloch the philosopher and contemporary witness, who paid tribute to these supra-individual powers in his work as much as he hoped to transgress them.

scholarly journals Collecting locally : Walker Evans's photographs of Alabama in Alabama institutions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mallory Lapointe Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of Photography ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Walker Evans ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South

Within the United States, the American South can be perceived as its own entity. From the arts to Southern cuisine, the South commands attention with its own history, myths and culture. Within the history of photography, Walker Evans's photographs of Alabama are arguably some of the most culturally significant images taken of the state and its residents. This thesis investigates how photographs of Alabama are collected in the same locality. By examining the collecting practices of four Alabama institutions in regards to photographs in general, and Walker Evans specifically, this case study will expand on the question of how photographs, in a Southern cultural context, work to create a sense of place and attachment to local geography.

Slavery and Scientific Management

1973 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 811-824 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Keith Aufhauser
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
American South ◽  
Scientific Management ◽  
Productivity Increase ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South ◽  
The One ◽  
Early Discussion ◽  
Slave Mode ◽  
Mode Of Production

In the last few years, the controversy over the economic history of slavery has centered about two positions. On the one hand, Genovese has argued that the slave mode of production was fundamentally antagonistic to the bourgeois mode and that the conflicts between the two systems doomed slavery to a nineteenth-century grave. On the other hand, Conrad and Meyer spawned many studies which, on the whole, denied that any specifically economic difficulties resulted from the fact that the American south was based on slave labor. Against Genovese's original claim that “the material basis of the planters' power was giving way,” the statistical evidence indicated that the profits of the slave plantation were as high as those on non-slave business investments, and that the diffusion of technological changes was rapid enough to cause a rate of productivity increase equal to that of all but the most rapidly growing sectors of the free economy. Sheer volume supplemented the elegance of the early discussion and our knowledge of the slave economy expanded considerably.

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.

Productivity and Income Distribution in the Post-Bellum South

1974 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 422-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen DeCanio
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
American South ◽  
Physical Capital ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Agricultural Labor ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South ◽  
Southern Society ◽  
Basic Characteristics

Racial discord, political violence, and agrarian unrest are integral to the history of the American South from the close of the Civil War through the end of the nineteenth century. The economy of the region had undergone traumatic changes during the war, not the least of which were the destruction of large amounts of physical capital and the transition of the black agricultural labor force from slavery to freedom. The disruption of production during the war was followed by attempts to reorganize agriculture through a variety of institutional arrangements, including wage labor, cash renting, and widespread use of the sharecropping form of land tenure. Many of the legal and cultural manifestations of the racial prejudice which has long outlived chattel slavery made their appearance during these years. Both contemporary observers and modern historians have recognized possible connections between the economic conditions and the political or institutional developments of the period, yet certain basic characteristics of the post-bellum southern economy have never been adequately determined. Consequently, the influence of economic forces in southern society and political life has remained obscure.

Monuments to Absence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Denson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American South ◽  
Tourist Attractions ◽  
Indian History ◽  
The Public ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South ◽  
Cherokee Removal ◽  
Past Wrongs

The 1830s forced removal of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland became the most famous event in the Indian history of the American South, an episode taken to exemplify a broader experience of injustice suffered by Native peoples. In this book, Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal through an examination of memorials, historic sites, and tourist attractions dating from the early twentieth century to the present. White southerners, Denson argues, embraced the Trail of Tears as a story of Indian disappearance. Commemorating Cherokee removal affirmed white possession of southern places, while granting them the moral satisfaction of acknowledging past wrongs. During segregation and the struggle over black civil rights, removal memorials reinforced whites' authority to define the South's past and present. Cherokees, however, proved capable of repossessing the removal memory, using it for their own purposes during a time of crucial transformation in tribal politics and U.S. Indian policy. In considering these representations of removal, Denson brings commemoration of the Indian past into the broader discussion of race and memory in the South.

Southern Crossing: A History of the American South, 1877–1906

1995 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward L. Ayers ◽  
Robert C. Kenzer
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South
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