scholarly journals Protecting the spirit of the American South: Representations of New Orleans Culture in Contemporary Children’s Picture Books

2019 ◽  
pp. 281-292
Author(s):  
Ewa Klęczaj-Siara
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Picture Books ◽  
American South ◽  
Body Movement ◽  
Southern Culture ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Children's Picture Books ◽  
The American South ◽  
Children's Stories

This article explores selected aspects of southern culture as presented in contemporary children’s picture books. It analyzes children’s stories which celebrate New Orleans’ residents and their traditions. Unlike many scholars who point to the end of the New Orleans spirit due to recent economic and demographic changes, children’s authors perceive the culture as a resource which regenerates the city. By means of writing for children they keep the city’s distinct black culture from disappearing. The aim of this article is to examine to what extent the spirit of the South has survived in the minds of contemporary authors and artists addressing young generations of readers. It discusses the presence of such cultural elements as jazz music, body movement and the ritual of parading in selected children’s picture books set in New Orleans. Among others, it analyzes such titles as Freedom in Congo Square (2016) by C. Weatherford, and Trombone Shortly (2015) and The 5 O’ Clock Band (2018) by Troy Andrews. The article focuses on the interaction between the verbal and the visual elements of the books, and the ways they convey the meaning of the stories.

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.

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.

scholarly journals Decolonizing Ways of Knowing: Heritage, Living Communities, and Indigenous Understandings of Place

Genealogy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 95
Author(s):  
Rachel Breunlin
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
American South ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Visual Ethnography ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Public Scholarship ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
The American South

In “Decolonizing Ways of Knowing: Heritage, Living Communities, and Indigenous Understandings of Place”, we build on the scholarly and artistic practice of deep memory work to present a collection of articles, films, and artwork that contribute critical genealogies from the United States, Africa, and the South Pacific. In this introduction, examples from Antoinette Jackson’s work in the American South and Rachel Breunlin’s work with the Neighborhood Story Project in New Orleans and Western Australia are used to build the special issue’s framework around public scholarship and art. With a particular emphasis on polyvocality, visual ethnography and creative nonfiction, the introduction argues that the work of decolonizing genealogy can be supported by respecting epistemologies that are deeply connected to place. Collectively, the contributors to the special issue demonstrate that creative practices around personal and collective histories can be an important way of reconnecting ties that may have been severed during years of colonialism.

“Though Their Skin Remains Brown, I Hope Their Souls Will Soon Be White”: Slavery, French Missionaries, and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the American South, 1789–1865

2008 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-370
Author(s):  
Michael Pasquier
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
American South ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Pastoral Letter ◽  
The Will ◽  
The American South ◽  
Natural Difference ◽  
Will Of God

On August 21, 1861, Bishop Auguste Marie Martin of Natchitoches, Louisiana, issued a pastoral letter “on the occasion of the War of Southern Independence.” In it, Martin argued that slavery was “the manifest will of God.” It was the will of God for Catholics to continue “snatching from the barbarity of their ferocious customs thousands of children of the race of Canaan,” the cursed progeny of Noah. It was also the obligation of Catholics to repudiate abolitionists for “upset[ting] the will of Providence” and misusing “His merciful plans for unrighteous actions.” Father Napoleon Joseph Perché, coadjutor of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, submitted his approval of Martin's pastoral statement by printing it in the Catholic newspaper Le Propagateur Catholique. Three years later, the Roman Congregation of the Index issued a statement condemning the opinions espoused by Martin and approved by the French ecclesiastical leadership of New Orleans. The Index was Pope Pius IX's organization in charge of censoring ideas deemed unacceptable to Catholic doctrine. The Index argued against Martin's proposition “that there exists a natural difference between negroes and whites,” and that God sanctioned slavery as a means of redeeming Africans.

7. Hybrid sounds

2020 ◽  
pp. 100-113
Author(s):  
Charles Reagan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American South ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
American Music ◽  
Southern Culture ◽  
African American Music ◽  
Southern Music ◽  
The American South ◽  
Minstrel Shows ◽  
Musical Genres

‘Hybrid sounds’ highlights southern music. The first association of music with the American South came from the presence of African American slaves. The pre-Civil War blackface minstrel shows displayed southern connections in its imagery of the plantation. After emancipation, African Americans gained employment in such groups as the Georgia Minstrels, as they moved to New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis, where they adopted the trumpet, the piano, and other instruments that soon became familiar in the music of black southerners. Sacred music, blues music, jazz, and folk music were all important musical genres which shaped Southern culture and the importance of the commercialization of African American music played a role.

The Color Line

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Scaff
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
American South ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
The American South ◽  
Line P

This chapter examines how Max Weber's travel through the American South helped him gain a better understanding of the problems of race and race relations in the former Confederacy, forty years after the end of the Civil War. Weber's reasons for making the journey from St. Louis, Missouri, through Memphis, Tennessee, to New Orleans, then north through Tuskegee, Alabama, to Atlanta and beyond are not entirely clear. He was interested in questions about race and the consequences of slavery, and his interest in agrarian economies also would have attracted him to the post-Civil War South. The chapter first considers Weber's exchanges with W.E.B Du Bois, which illuminate the former's focused interest in the problem of race in America, before discussing the lessons learned by Weber from his stay at Tuskegee. It also explores how Weber's experience in the South influenced his ideas about race, ethnicity, class, and caste.

Embodying and Transgressing Race in the Novels of John Gregory Brown

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARTEMIS MICHAILIDOU
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Southern Literature ◽  
American South ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
John Gregory

This essay will discuss corporeal and racial representation in the work of John Gregory Brown, a little-known, yet immensely rewarding, New Orleans novelist. Placing the discussion within the rich literary tradition of the American South, I will focus on the male protagonists of his first two novels – Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery (1994) and The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur (1996) – and examine why Brown's characters constantly shift between different racial positions, and how notions such as racial purity or fixed subjectivity are exposed and interrogated. My analysis will also address physical defect, and explore how Brown destabilizes the ideal of the body as a privileged locus of authoritative wholeness. I will be arguing that, as a cultural and racial signifier, the body in Brown's work is linked with fluidity and fragmentation, and that the boundaries between whiteness and blackness are continuously reshaped by the characters' ambiguous perceptions of themselves as subversive, multi-racial subjects. The conclusion will maintain that both novels offer new insights into the interaction between corporeal representation and racial identity, which make an important contribution to the tradition of American and, particularly, southern literature.

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.

An Archaeology of a Chinese Laundryman in the Jim Crow South

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-162
Author(s):  
D. Ryan Gray
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
Chinese Immigrants ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
The American South ◽  
Plantation Labor ◽  
Jim Crow South

The experiences of Chinese diasporic communities in the American South has been little studied compared to those in the West, despite the importance of Chinese immigration in discussions of post-Emancipation plantation labor. This chapter explores the making of a Chinese American identity in Jim Crow–era New Orleans through the archaeology of a Chinese-operated hand laundry, in business at the same location for three decades. Chinese immigrants in the South entered a two-tiered racial hierarchy in which they were officially relegated to a lower status, but the ambiguities of color in an urban setting like New Orleans provided opportunities to use the material markers of ethnicity instrumentally to negotiate a status that was neither white nor black.

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