Processional Culture and Black Mobility in Maggie Washington's Wilmington

This article addresses changes in the built environment of the postbellum American South through an examination of the life histories, parade routes, and costuming practices of the Afro-Caribbean Jonkonnu masking tradition. I juxtapose the stories of two practitioners of the tradition across the color line in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Wilmington, North Carolina. Using a material culturally inflected approach to the study of landscapes, I use these two narratives to deepen the histories of African American processional cultures toward a longer time span and a more immersive, performer-oriented approach. Though few conventional objects of ornamentation and display from these practices survive, this article posits that an approach rooted in the materiality of landscape can help uncover festive cultures that have been understudied or undertheorized in more conventional historical approaches. Further, the ubiquitous presence of Jonkonnu and other Black processional traditions in the post-emancipation city suggests the importance of these and other objects, practices, and larger cultures of celebration in combating white supremacist culture.

THE POWER OF THE DISABLED: FLANNERY O'CONNOR’S “THE LAME SHALL ENTER FIRST”

Flannery O'Connor’s (1925-1964) "The Lame Shall Enter First" (1962) deals with three characters: Sheppard, a widower, his son Norton, a ten years old boy and Rufus, a miscreant teenager, whom Norton dislikes. Rufus has a clubfoot, is very intelligent and fond of violence. Sheppard is a philanthropist and likes to help Rufus inviting him to live with them, contrary to Norton’s wishes. In fact, Rufus despises Sheppard, resists help and is aware of his own evil nature. He makes Sheppard embarrassed and causes Norton’s death deliberately, leaving both of them as victims. O’Connor in this context, de/reconstructs the prejudice against the disabled people; in the American South the disabled are regarded as evil characters. On the other hand, although it is generally accepted that the disabled people are good, she shows them as ordinary people having both good and wicked sides. Moreover, they may refuse help and prove personality despite the fact that non-disabled people are inclined or regard it duty to help them. She problematizes the disabled body as ‘the other/marginalized’ being pitiful and pitied. Thus, it becomes clear that O’Connor acknowledges the disabled people as normal as the non-disabled, or powerful, not physically but spiritually and intellectually. The tenets of ‘Disability Studies’ are insightful to discuss the work. Keywords: Flannery O'Connor, "The Lame Shall Enter First", “Disability Studies”, American South

African American history in Natasha Trethewey’s “Native Guard”

The article presents interpretations of the poetry collection “Native Guard” of the American writer Natasha Trethewey — the Pulitzer Prize winner (2007), and Poet Laureate (2012–2014). Through the lens of African American and Critical Race studies, Trethewey’s “Native Guard” is analyzed as the artistic Civil War reconstruction which writes the Louisiana Native Guard regiments into national history. Utilizing the wide range of poetic forms in the collections “Domestic Work” (2000), “Bellocq’s Ophelia” (2002), “Thrall” (2012), — ekphrastic poetry, verse-novellas, epistolary poems, rhymed and free verse sonnets, dramatic monologues, in “Native Guard” (2006) Natasha Trethewey experiments with the classical genres of villanelle (“Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi”), ghazal (“Miscegenation”), pantoum (“Incident”), elegy (“Elegy for the Native Guard”), linear palindrome (“Myth”), pastoral (“Pastoral”), sonnet (the ten poems of the crown sonnet sequence “Native Guard”). Following the African American modernist literary canon, Trethewey transforms the traditional forms, infusing blues into sonnets (“Graveyard Blues”), and experimenting with into blank verse sonnets (“What the Body Can Tell”). In the first part of “Native Guard”, the poet pays homage to her African American mother who was married to a white man in the 1960s when interracial marriage was illegal. The book demonstrates the intersections of private memories of Trethewey’s mother, her childhood and personal encounters with the racial oppression in the American South, and the “poeticized” episodes from the Civil War history presented from the perspective of the freed slave and the soldier of the Native Guard, Nathan Daniels. The core poems devoted to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Louisiana regiments in the Union Army formed in 1862, are the crown sonnet sequence which variably combine the formal features of the European classical sonnet and the African American blues poetics. The ten poems are composed as unrhymed journal entries, dated from 1862 to 1865, and they foreground the reflections of the African American warrior on historical episodes of the Civil War focusing on the Native Guard’s involvement in the military duty. In formal aspects, Trethewey achieves the effect of continuity by “binding” together each sonnet and repeating the final line of the poem at the beginning of the following one in the sequence. Though, the “Native Guard” crown sonnet sequence does not fully comply with the rigid structure of the classical European form, Trethewey’s poetic narrative aims at restoring the role of the African American soldiers in the Civil War and commemorating the Native Guard. The final part of the collection synthesizes the two strains – the personal and the historical, accentuating the racial issues in the American South. Through the experience of a biracial Southerner, and via the polemics with the Fugitives, in her poems Natasha Trethewey displays that the Civil Rights Act has not eliminated racial inequality and racism. Trethewey’s extensive experimentation with literary forms and style opens up the prospects for further investigation of the writer’s artistic methods in her poetry collections, autobiographical prose, and nonfiction.

Triangular Francs: The Eisenhower Administration’s Complicated Franco-American-South Vietnamese System of Foreign Aid to Saigon

This article examines the little-known system of foreign aid that the Eisenhower administration called “triangular trade.” Created to increase development aid without specific Congressional authorization, U.S. officials managed it chaotically and often secretly. This article analyzes U.S. application of this policy in relations with France, focusing on an examination of “triangular francs” whose most important manifestation occurred in South Vietnam. It tries to understand the complicated and often contentious relationships between the three nations with respect to “triangular francs,” illustrating its often neo-colonial aspects. After first presenting the system, the article proceeds to examine each of the three participants’ role in it and reservations about it. In particular, it seeks to show how Saigon’s leaders sought to influence the system to make it more advantageous to them and the impact this had on both Paris and Washington.

Developmental Origins of Cardiovascular Disease: Understanding High Mortality Rates in the American South

While many social scientists view heart disease as the outcome of current conditions, this cannot fully explain the significant geographic disparities in cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality rates in the USA. The developmental origins hypothesis proposes that CVD vulnerability is created by poor conditions in utero that underbuilds major organs relative to those needed to process lush nutrition later in life. The American South underwent an economic transformation from persistent poverty to rapid economic growth in the post-World War II era. We use state-level data on income growth and current conditions to explain variation in CVD mortality rates in 2010–2011. Our proxy for unbalanced physical growth, the ratio of median household income in 1980 to that in 1950, has a large systematic influence on CVD mortality, an impact that increases dramatically with age. The income ratio combined with smoking, obesity, healthcare access, and education explain more than 70% of the variance in CVD mortality rates.

All for Liberty

Jeff Strickland tells the powerful story of Nicholas Kelly, the enslaved craftsman who led the Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion, the largest slave revolt in the history of the antebellum American South. With two accomplices, some sledgehammers, and pickaxes, Nicholas risked his life and helped thirty-six fellow enslaved people escape the workhouse where they had been sent by their enslavers to be tortured. While Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vesey remain the most recognizable rebels, the pivotal role of Nicholas Kelly is often forgotten. All for Liberty centers his rebellion as a decisive moment leading up to the secession of South Carolina from the United States in 1861. This compelling micro-history navigates between Nicholas's story and the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, while also considering the parallels between race and incarceration in the nineteenth century and in modern America. Never before has the story of Nicholas Kelly been so eloquently told.

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

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.

“History is Illuminating”: Public memory crises and collectives in Richmond, Virginia

Amid the Black Lives Matter protests and calls to remove Confederate statuary in Richmond, Virginia, during the summer of 2020, the History Is Illuminating project constructed public signs that replicated the traditional historical markers used throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia. The signs were placed along Richmond’s historic Monument Avenue in conversation with the still-standing Confederate monuments. They challenged the monuments’ representation of public memory by re-introducing narratives about prominent Black Richmonders and informing readers of the Jim Crow legislation that enabled the monuments to be constructed and venerated. This edited and condensed interview with organizers from the project describes the multiple crises of collective memory that public historians confront in the American South, as well as the strategies the History Is Illuminating project used to counter dominant narratives about public memory. Finally, the interview highlights the importance of community action and a multiplicity of public memory projects in order to ensure a democratic approach to collective memory.

‘Christian Patriots’: The Intersection Between Proto-fascism and Clerical Fascism in the Antebellum South

This article examines the convergence between clerical fascism and proto-fascism in the Antebellum South of the United States. The author employs Roger Griffin’s theories of palingenetic ultranationalism and clerical fascism to understand the worldviews of Southern intellectuals. The author argues that a cadre of Southern theologians rejected the liberal heritage of the United States and redefined the relationship between the individual and state. Southern clerical fascists reconceived of an alternative modernity that reflected God’s precepts. Slaves, laborers, and slave masters all had a mandate to guide secular and spiritual progress. Furthermore, these Southern clerics believed the best hope for securing God’s order was to be found in the birth of a new Southern society – the Confederate States of America. This study builds upon the works of other historians who discerned the illiberal and authoritarian qualities of the American South while also contributing to delineation of the protean qualities of clerical fascism.