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.

To Ensure Domestic Tranquility: The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE and Political Discourse, 1964–1971

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN DRABBLE
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American South ◽  
Ku Klux Klan ◽  
Action Program ◽  
Federal Bureau ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Covert Action ◽  
Federal Bureau Of Investigation ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The American South

Between September 1964 and April 1971, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a domestic covert action program named COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE. This counterintelligence program endeavored to discredit, disrupt, and vitiate the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist vigilante organizations. While historians are quite familiar with the FBI's efforts to nurture anticommunism and to discredit civil rights and leftist movements, the FBI's role in discrediting KKK groups in the American South during the late 1960s has not been systematically assessed. This article provides an analysis of the first aspect of this three-pronged attack. It describes how the FBI secretly coordinated efforts to discredit Klan organizations before local Southern communities that continued to tolerate vigilante violence. Intelligence information on Klan activities, provided discretely by the FBI to liberal Southern journalists, politicians and other molders of public opinion, helped those white Southerners who were opposed to Ku Klux Klan activity to transform their private dismay into public rebuke and criminal prosecutions. The article also analyzes corresponding COINTELPRO operations that discredited Ku Klux Klan leaders before rank-and-file Klan members. FBI agents and their clandestine informants circulated discrediting information about KKK leaders among rank and file Klan members, inculcating disillusionment among Klansmen and prompting resignations from Klan organizations.

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 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.

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.

Monumental Constructions: Statues, Identity, and Gabrielle Roy’s “L’arbre”

2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-117
Author(s):  
Holly Collins
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
Live Oak ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Significant Attention

Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans garnered significant attention for his book In the Shadow of Statues (2018), observing that many Confederate monuments were erected to buttress Jim Crow laws and serve as a warning to those who supported the civil rights movement. Likewise, there are a number of monuments in Québec that serve a particular political or religious purpose, seeking to reinforce a pure laine ideology. In this article, I explore the parallels between the literal and figurative construction and deconstruction of monuments that have fortified invented ideas on identity in francophone North America. Further, Gabrielle Roy’s short story “L’arbre,” which describes a “living monument,” tells the story of a racialized past in North America and unveils the falsities that have been preserved through the construction of statues that perpetuate racial myth. “L’arbre” examines the natural, unconstructed monument of the Live Oak: a tree that witnessed and holds the visible scars of the many terrible realities that took place in its shadows. I use Roy’s short story to show how she sought to deconstruct a whitewashed history of the post-Civil War American South and suggest that her broader corpus rejects determinism wholesale.

The Capital

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Denson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Heritage Tourism ◽  
Cherokee Nation ◽  
World War Two ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
World War ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
History Of

This chapter describes the expansion of removal commemoration in the post-World War Two decades, focusing particular attention on Georgia's reconstruction of New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. While the project began as a local effort to promote heritage tourism, state officials applied a loftier theme to the commemoration, describing the site as an apology for Georgia's part in removal. The chapter examines the New Echota project in the context of the South's civil rights-era politics and as an example of American Cold War culture. It argues that the commemoration of the Trail of Tears offered white southerners a politically safe way to contemplate their region's history of racial oppression. The New Echota project included very little Cherokee participation, a feature that suggests the organizers assumed modern Cherokees were mostly irrelevant to their work in Georgia. The New Echota project required Cherokees to act as witnesses to commemorative acts conducted by non-Indians. It did not require them to participate as authors of those commemorations.

Binding consumption

2015 ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Alexander Joel Eastman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Black Press ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
History Of

Dozens of newspapers written and edited by people of color flourished in the last decades of the nineteenth century in Cuba. Through an analysis of black press periodicals representative of the main political tendencies between 1879 and 1886 this article examines the economic and socio-political contexts in which the black press operated and demonstrates how Cubans of color successfully carved out a space in the market of newspaper consumption. By examining the economic forces determining circulation and readership of these periodicals, it argues that black Cubans actively negotiated the public spheres of journalism and the marketplace, becoming empowered consumers and creators of information and economic value. This article foreground debates within the black press in order to analyze the history of the Cuban civil rights movement through the perspectives of people of color and to destabilize the notion of black political homogeneity. Black journalists and leaders with national and royalist affiliations vied for political positioning and debated over how to represent the people and the struggles of the raza de color.

From Coca-Cola to Ebola, Racial Riots to Civil Rights, Epic Ashes to Olympic Torch – the Transformation of Emory, Atlanta, and the South

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-44
Author(s):  
Gary Hauk
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American South ◽  
Law School ◽  
The South ◽  
Emory University ◽  
History Of

Good evening, and welcome to Emory University and Emory Law School. I've been asked to give you an overview of the history of Emory, our home city of Atlanta, and in some ways the entire American South, and I've been asked to do this in less than thirty minutes. I thought I would do that with the help of PowerPoint slides, but unfortunately, we do not have the capacity to project those in this outdoor plaza. So—I will have to call on your imaginations and ask you to conjure up the images that otherwise would be shown on a screen. Let's begin.

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