scholarly journals Adapting Shakespeare around the Globe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrei Nae
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
American South ◽  
Film Adaptations ◽  
Arranged Marriages ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Past ◽  
The American South ◽  
Local Cultures

In the past two decades, the rejection of the fidelity criterion has led to the release of a multitude of films that rework and appropriate canonical literary works to suit local political goals. The works of William Shakespeare have been some of the main beneficiaries of this new direction, as indicated by the significant number of appropriations, remediations, and ‘tradaptations’ (translations-adaptations) that have turned Shakespeare into a global figure. In this article I focus on two film adaptations of Othello, O (Nelson, 2001) and Omkara (Bhardwaj, 2006), that recontextualize the play’s narrative content into two different settings at the turn of the millennia: the American South and India. My aim is to highlight the manner in which the two films repurpose the content of the play in order to reveal the tensions that mark the two local cultures. Early modern concerns such as miscegenation, female sexuality, and religious and racial otherness are appropriated and represented along new cultural coordinates that reflect the anxieties of the two new local cultures. For example, in O, the issue of miscegenation is translated in accordance with the racism that marks the conservative American South, while in Omkara miscegenation is translated as the conflict between two Indian views on marriage: the traditional one that advocates arranged marriages, and the modern one that supports love marriages.

The “Southernness” of Country Music

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Huber
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Commercial Product ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Study Country ◽  
The American South

This chapter presents an overview of Bill C. Malone’s “southern thesis,” as first articulated in his 1968 study, Country Music, U.S.A.: A Fifty-Year History, and examines the influential role that this regional interpretation has played in shaping country music scholarship. The chapter surveys some of the major trends in the scholarly literature over the past five decades regarding the music’s perceived southernness. It explores Malone’s problematic presentation of the American South as an exceptional region rooted in a unique rural folk culture, and the resulting historiographical debates. The chapter also identifies some significant topical and interpretative lacunae that now pervade the country music scholarship as a result of Malone’s interpretation, and suggests several approaches to rectifying these omissions, including reinterpreting prewar country music as a commercial product of a modern, urban-industrial America and focusing attention on the American regional traditions and musical tributaries that contributed to its creation.

Souths as Prologues: Indigeneity, Race, and the Temporalities of Land; or, Why I Can’t Read William Faulkner

2019 ◽  
pp. 15-32
Author(s):  
Jodi A. Byrd
Keyword(s):  
William Faulkner ◽  
American South ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
The South ◽  
The Past ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
The American South

Reading Faulkner as a Chickasaw scholar can, at times, be disorienting in the juxtapositions of history, remembrance, family, and fiction; the experience itself relocates and displaces as much as it coheres a sense of the past or of a place. Mired in the scenes of settlement, Faulkner’s world-building helped set into motion contradictory and cacophonous discourses of blackness, whiteness, and indigeneity in the American South, and in doing so, provided the imaginative terrains through which we continue think about the intersections of slavery and colonialism. Taking up Absalom, Absalom! alongside critical work in indigenous studies, black feminism, and queer of color critique, this chapter will consider how indigeneity interrupts the temporalities and spatialities that are often taken for granted in how we understand the South as prologue for race in America.

My Pronoun, ’tis of Thee

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-104
Author(s):  
Allan Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
American South ◽  
First Person ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
The Past ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The American South ◽  
Further Development

Chapter 8 interrupts the narrative to explain the importance of the further development of “Guy” to “guy” or “guys.” It tells about the second-person personal pronouns of English from Old English times, a thousand years ago, to the present. These are words we regularly use in speech and writing: first-person singular “I” and plural “we,” third person “he, she, it” and “they,” and then the second person, which happens to have undergone major changes in the past few centuries. Originally the second-person singular was “thou,” the plural “you.” But then, like several other European languages, the second-person plural was seen as more polite than “thou,” so “you” became second-person singular too. That was fine, except now a listener couldn’t tell whether a speaker was referring just to the listener or to the whole group. So with “you” solidly entrenched as second-person singular, a substitute had to be found for second-person plural. One possibility was “y’all,” still preferred in the American South, but that can be used for the singular too. Eventually, while the vacancy remained empty two centuries later, a successful substitution emerged, none other than the “guys” most of use as second-person plural today.

Toni Morrison’s Sacramental Rememory

2018 ◽  
pp. 13-66
Author(s):  
Erin Michael Salius
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Complete Picture ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Social Death ◽  
The Past ◽  
Religious Vision ◽  
Constant Tension ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South

Chapter 1 considers two novels by Toni Morrison which are widely celebrated for undermining Enlightenment rationalism: Beloved and A Mercy. As critics often note, Morrison’s concept of rememory—an antirealist trope, premised on the supernatural irruption of the past in the present—achieves this by imagining an alternative history of slavery. Yet a complete picture of these novels requires an account of the way that Morrison structures rememory—quite remarkably and with palpable historical reservations—as a Catholic sacrament. The chapter therefore addresses a significant gap in scholarship on Morrison (who identifies as Catholic), but never does it imply that her religious vision is uncritical or pure. Rather, it suggests that the sacramental aspects of rememory are in constant tension with the sharp critique of Catholicism evident in both novels. That critique builds upon the sociological study of slave religion that Orlando Patterson developed in Slavery and Social Death, particularly his pioneering claim that “the special version of Protestantism” which arose in the American South as slave religion was, in key respects, theologically “identical” to Catholicism.

scholarly journals Time Travelling in Dixie: Race, Music, and the Weight of the Past in the British “Televisual” South

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-222
Author(s):  
CHRISTIAN O'CONNELL
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Cultural Continuity ◽  
Tourist Industry ◽  
The South ◽  
The Past ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Way

This article examines a series of British travel documentaries on the American South made since 2008 which are representative of the way in which southern distinctiveness is maintained through television within a transatlantic context. The travelogues focus on historic racial struggles, southern food, and music, and frame the South as a distinctly historical space, where either historical moments obscure the contemporary South, or cultural continuity and resistance to change and modernity are celebrated. The article also discusses the similarities between the travelogues and the southern tourist industry, and how transatlantic “televisual tourism” works against the wider scholarly challenge to southern exceptionalism.

A Place Where Women Can Feel Valued, or Why Academic Professional Associations Matter, Especially for Women

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-75
Author(s):  
Melissa Walker
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
American South ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Professional Associations ◽  
Individual Female ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women Historians ◽  
The American South ◽  
Women’S History

The Southern Association for Women Historians provided a place where female historians felt validated and emboldened. By providing this space over the past five decades, the SAWH has done two important things: advance the careers of individual female historians while encouraging, developing, and legitimizing the study of women’s history. In the process, as several of the scholars here have already suggested, the SAWH helped transform the historiography of the American South by refocusing many of the lenses that scholars have trained on the past. The history of the SAWH demonstrates the crucial role that scholarly professional associations play in shaping fields of knowledge and the careers of individual scholars.

Christianities in the Now South

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
James Hudnut-Beumler
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
American South ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The Past ◽  
Southern Religion ◽  
The American South

This book explores the extent to which there still is a distinctive southern religion, characterized by a predominant evangelical Christianity, composed of white and black representative churches. Recognizing the overdrawn quality of such evaluations even for the southern past, the argument is offered that intra-Christian diversity in the American South has reached the point where the term “Christianities” is more appropriate to capture the range of beliefs and practices visible in the 21st century. Christians in the Now South are so diverse as to sound at times more like a cacophony than the supposed southern harmonies of the past.

scholarly journals Editorial

Transfers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Stéphanie Ponsavady
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
American South ◽  
Auto Industry ◽  
Social Costs ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Railway System ◽  
The American South

True to our original mission, this new issue of Transfers brings together a plurality of disciplines, from history to anthropology and literary criticism. It showcases reactions to the current pandemic as well as far-reaching reflections on the meanings of mobility. Bracketing our issue, two articles engage with the history of mobility. Drawing our attention to the extent of the automobility system, in “The Freeway Journey: Landscape and Mobility in the Southern Auto Industry,” John E. Mohr questions the economic and social costs of developing the I-85 highway corridor through the American South. Hugo Silveira Pereira interrogates “The Past, Present, and Future of Peripheral Mobilities in Portugal” through a history of the Portuguese narrow-gauge railway system that spans over a century.

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