Southern Gothic and the Queer Male Body

2018 ◽  
pp. 221-240
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American South ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Southern Gothic ◽  
Southern Culture ◽  
Homosexual Male ◽  
Homophobic Violence ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The American South

The homosexual male body as a threatening transmitter of social and libidinal disquiet is addressed by Thomas Long in relation to writing of the American South. He argues that argues that in the post-1945 period, and particularly prior to the Stonewall riots of 1969, the gay male body has increasingly replaced the black body in Southern culture as the abject Other, drawing down on it homophobic violence as a consequence. Working with Eve Sedgwick’s premise that, as a genre, the gothic codifies a form of ‘homophobic thematics’, Long considers how the specific religious, geographical and political intensities of Southern culture are grafted onto that base. The tensions between normative moralities and reactive deviancies that characterise the gothic tradition are heightened by the historical fact of slavery in the American South, which creates a tradition of scapegoating the black body as symbolic of social fears. Underlying that, and more evident in the integrationist period of Civil Rights protest, is a deeply confused struggle between homosocial and homosexual relations. In a range of texts that straddle Stonewall, Long detects a quarrel between what he calls a ‘blazoning’ attitude towards self-expression and the repressive demonisation of the queer body through homophobic discourse.

The American South

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Reagan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
American South ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Racial Tension ◽  
The American South

The American South: A Very Short Introduction explores the American South, a distinctive place with a dramatic history. It is a cultural crossroads, where Western Europe met West Africa in a colonial slave society. The Civil War and civil rights movement transformed the South and remain a part of a vibrant and contested public memory. Moreover, the South's pronounced traditionalism in customs and values have always contended with the forces of modernization and the continuing challenges of racial tension. This VSI looks at Southerners' diverse creative responses to these experiences, in literature, film, music, and cuisine, which have had worldwide influence.

Southern Realism

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-98
Author(s):  
Charlotte E. Howell
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Southern Culture ◽  
Television Production ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
The American South ◽  
Night Lights ◽  
Characteristic Part ◽  
Friday Night

Friday Night Lights (NBC, 2006–2011) and Rectify (SundanceTV, 2013–2016) exemplified containing Christianity’s middlebrow appeal through displacement onto the cultural specificity of a realistically portrayed American South within a quality television drama. These two shows represent Christianity as both the dominant faith of their characters and as a characteristic part of Southern culture. Creatives used the milieu of an “authentic” American South to shift religion away from themselves and their quality-audience expectations, maintaining acceptability within the dominant non-Christian culture of television production. This displacement safely contained religion within the creatives’ production culture, allowing them to acknowledge Christianity’s religious content, but only within the peculiar particularity of the American South.

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.

scholarly journals Walking in Memphis: revisiting the street politics of Ms Jacqueline Smith

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean H Wang
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
American South ◽  
Heritage Tourism ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Urban Redevelopment ◽  
Tourism Industry ◽  
Street Politics ◽  
The American South ◽  
Martin Luther King

This piece revisits the street politics of Ms Jacqueline Smith and her two-plus decades of protest outside the former Lorraine Motel, where civil rights leader Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, was assassinated. Now the National Civil Rights Museum, the Motel is part of a growing heritage tourism industry in the American South, where landscapes of civil rights memorialization are often contested publicly and exist alongside other landscapes of racism. More recently, projects like the Museum have become central to urban redevelopment schemes and vehicles of gentrification. This piece introduces Ms Smith’s protest in relation to such themes in cultural geography, followed by the reproduction of a blog post documenting the author’s encounter with Ms Smith in June 2015. It urges cultural geographers to engage with Ms Smith’s street politics in their writings on landscape and their teachings in the classroom.

“Just a Bunch of Agitators”: Kneel-Ins and the Desegregation of Southern Churches

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-261
Author(s):  
Joseph Kip Kosek
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Southern Baptist ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
American Students ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Church

AbstractCivil rights protests at white churches, dubbed “kneel-ins,” laid bare the racial logic that structured Christianity in the American South. Scholars have investigated segregationist religion, but such studies tend to focus on biblical interpretation rather than religious practice. A series of kneel-ins at Atlanta's First Baptist Church, the largest Southern Baptist church in the Southeast, shows how religious activities and religious spaces became sites of intense racial conflict. Beginning in 1960, then more forcefully in 1963, African American students attempted to integrate First Baptist's sanctuary. When they were alternately barred from entering, shown to a basement auditorium, or carried out bodily, their efforts sparked a wide-ranging debate over racial politics and spiritual authenticity, a debate carried on both inside and outside the church. Segregationists tended to avoid a theological defense of Jim Crow, attacking instead the sincerity and comportment of their unwanted visitors. Yet while many church leaders were opposed to open seating, a vibrant student contingent favored it. Meanwhile, mass media—local, national, and international—shaped interpretations of the crisis and possibilities for resolving it. Roy McClain, the congregation's popular minister, attempted to navigate a middle course but faced criticism from all sides. The conflict came to a head when Ashton Jones, a white minister, was arrested, tried, and imprisoned for protesting outside the church. In the wake of the controversy, the members of First Baptist voted to end segregation in the sanctuary. This action brought formal desegregation—but little meaningful integration—to the congregation.

scholarly journals The multiple mobilities of civil rights in Jeanine Tesori’s Violet and Caroline, or Change

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-253
Author(s):  
Allan Kilner-Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American History ◽  
American South ◽  
Tony Kushner ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
The World ◽  
The American South

This article centres on Jeanine Tesori’s Violet (book and lyrics by Brian Crawley) and Caroline, or Change (book and lyrics by Tony Kushner), both of which are set in the American south during a crucial period in American history running between the assassination of John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both works musically capture the imaginative traditions of the American south through gospel, country, Motown, and blues in order to detail the complex negotiations of the titular female protagonists through challenges of isolation, entrapment and liberation in the months following Kennedy's assassination. This article argues that the promise and affordance of mobility within these musicals are rooted in an uncanny spiritual fervour expressed by Violet and Caroline, both of whom have defined a distinctive, and, as will be recognized by each musical’s conclusion, mistaken theology of personal devotion and faith that runs precisely counter to the liberating potentials in the world around them.

Southern Literature and the Civil Rights Era

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Buckner Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Southern Literature ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
South Central ◽  
The Us ◽  
The American South

Southern literature provides numerous, diverse responses to the civil rights era. Produced during the movement itself and continuing into the 21st century, southern civil rights writing appears as poetry, drama, memoir, graphic narrative, short stories, and novels, including literary fiction and bestsellers. Movement-related works commemorate events, places, and people both famous and unknown. Authors speak of political awakening to systemic racism and violence. They consider the effectiveness of organizing tactics and the ethical implications of resistance strategies. They write compellingly about the ways segregation, protest, race relations, and sweeping social changes affect individuals and their relationships. Southern literature also exists in complex relationship to the civil rights era due in part to both terms’ fluid, evolving definitions. “Southern literature” can refer to works written in and about the American South, yet both of these categories remain more dynamic than static. The South is demarcated geographically as the United States’ southeastern and south central tier and historically as a region with ties to the former Confederacy. The South’s vexed legacy of slavery and segregation plays a role in defining a regional identity that some consider to be distinctive in terms of dialect, food culture, and an emphasis on conservative views of family, community, religion, place, and history. Many scholars, however, see constructions of a distinct southern identity with an accompanying literature as outmoded, particularly in an era of shifting demographics within the US and globalization more broadly. Like “southern literature,” the “civil rights era” resists rigid definition. The movement itself can refer to the period from the US Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools to the 1965 Voting Rights Act—an era focused on specific civil rights leadership, goals, and, notably, the American South. Alternatively, one can define the movement more comprehensively to look at what happened before and after “the King years,” referring to the period’s iconic figure Martin Luther King Jr. This version of civil rights extends the movement to points North and West, includes Black Power (typically focused on the late 1960s and early 1970s), and links it to contemporaneous human rights and post-colonial struggles. Authors from the American South respond to this broader story by connecting the movement to issues such as immigration; policing and incarceration; economic and environmental justice; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights. Here writers depict a dynamic, multifaceted South that continues striving to transform political ideals into realities.

A Good Man is a Trickster to Find

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor Tye
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
American South ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Southern Gothic ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The American South ◽  
Over The Top ◽  
Traditional Storytelling

In my presentation, I will demonstrate the contrast between the pioneer of the Southern Grotesque, Flannery O’Connor, and her famous story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” with Taylor’s use of the gothic in his YA novel. O’Connor adapted her version of the gothic from her predecessors such as Shelley and Poe. But she veers away from the creation of a fantastical monster tradition of the Romantics to drive the focus of the “monstrous” to the very human but harmful behaviors of her characters. Similarly, Taylor’s narrative does away with the over-the-top fantasy of the Romantic tradition and instead chooses to set the narrative in a realistic space with relevant characters. The difference between O’Connor and Taylor is that in O’Connor’s Southern Gothic the setting is the pinnacle of her story while Taylor’s Indigeneity shines through with his humor, traditional storytelling, and orality in his narrative. Differences aside, it is clear that the motive of each text is a call for social reform in O’Connor’s criticism of the social structure of the American South and in Taylor’s criticism of colonization.

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