Contemporary Southern Identity
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| Author | : Rebecca Bridges Wats |
| Publisher | : Univ. Press of Mississippi |
| Total Pages | : 219 |
| Release | : 2013-08-28 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 160473308X |
In Contemporary Southern Identity, Rebecca Bridges Watts explores the implications of four public controversies about southern identity—debates about the Confederate flag in South Carolina, the gender integration of the Virginia Military Institute, the display of public art in Richmond, and Trent Lott's controversial comments regarding Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential bid. While such debates may serve as evidence of the South's “battle over the past,” they can alternatively be seen as harbingers of a changing South. These controversies highlight the diversity of voices in the conversation of what it means to be a southerner. The participants in these conflicts may disagree about what southern identity should be, but they all agree that such discussions are a crucial part of being southern. Recent debates as to the place of Old South symbols and institutions in the South of the new millennium are evidence of a changing order. But a changing South is no less distinctive. If southerners can find unity and distinctiveness in their identification, they may even be able to serve as a model for the increasingly divided United States. The very debates portrayed in the mass media as evidence of an “unfinished Civil War” can instead be interpreted as proof that the South has progressed and is having a common dialogue as to what its diverse members want it to be.
| Author | : James Charles Cobb |
| Publisher | : University of Georgia Press |
| Total Pages | : 268 |
| Release | : 1999 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 9780820321394 |
Cobb, "surveys the remarkable story of southern identity and its persistence in the face of sweeping changes in the South's economy, society and political structure."--dust jacket.
| Author | : |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : |
| Release | : 2004 |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : |
In his seminal essay "The Search for Southern Identity," C. Vann Woodward asserts, "The time is coming, if indeed it has not already arrived, when the Southerner will begin to ask himself whether there is really any longer very much point in calling himself a Southerner. Or if he does, he might well wonder occasionally whether it is worthwhile insisting on the point" (3). Although Woodward first published this essay in 1958, his assertions may be even more pertinent today, given the effect that an increasingly homogeneous national culture has had on American regionalism. Over the past half century, the persistence of questions such as those Woodward raises has manifested itself in an enormous amount of writing about the idea of a distinctively Southern identity. In this essay, I will examine the literature of Ron Rash, a contemporary writer from western North Carolina, and I will explain Rash's complex relationship with Southern identity by considering, at least tangentially, his three poetry collections as well as his three novels. Ultimately, after examining the history of Southern identity, Rash's use of Southern identity and culture in his fiction and poetry, the ways in which Rash's characters exploit Southern identity, and the version of Southern identity that Rash perpetuates in his own life, I will show that Rash is justifiable in his employment and portrayal of Southern identity. Rather than consciously commodifying Southern identity and culture as a marketing tool to sell his work to a specific audience, Rash artfully records a disappearing culture to which he has strong personal ties.
| Author | : James C. Cobb |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 417 |
| Release | : 2005-10-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0198025017 |
From the seventeenth century Cavaliers and Uncle Tom's Cabin to Civil Rights museums and today's conflicts over the Confederate flag, here is a brilliant portrait of southern identity, served in an engaging blend of history, literature, and popular culture. In this insightful book, written with dry wit and sharp insight, James C. Cobb explains how the South first came to be seen--and then came to see itself--as a region apart from the rest of America. As Cobb demonstrates, the legend of the aristocratic Cavalier origins of southern planter society was nurtured by both northern and southern writers, only to be challenged by abolitionist critics, black and white. After the Civil War, defeated and embittered southern whites incorporated the Cavalier myth into the cult of the "Lost Cause," which supplied the emotional energy for their determined crusade to rejoin the Union on their own terms. After World War I, white writers like Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner and other key figures of "Southern Renaissance" as well as their African American counterparts in the "Harlem Renaissance"--Cobb is the first to show the strong links between the two movements--challenged the New South creed by asking how the grandiose vision of the South's past could be reconciled with the dismal reality of its present. The Southern self-image underwent another sea change in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, when the end of white supremacy shook the old definition of the "Southern way of life"--but at the same time, African Americans began to examine their southern roots more openly and embrace their regional, as well as racial, identity. As the millennium turned, the South confronted a new identity crisis brought on by global homogenization: if Southern culture is everywhere, has the New South become the No South? Here then is a major work by one of America's finest Southern historians, a magisterial synthesis that combines rich scholarship with provocative new insights into what the South means to southerners and to America as well.
| Author | : Zackary Dwayne Vernon |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 64 |
| Release | : 2007 |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : |
Keywords: ron rash, souther literature, southern culture, southern identity.
| Author | : Christopher A. Cooper |
| Publisher | : UNC Press Books |
| Total Pages | : 149 |
| Release | : 2017-02-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1469631067 |
The American South has experienced remarkable change over the past half century. Black voter registration has increased, the region's politics have shifted from one-party Democratic to the near-domination of the Republican Party, and in-migration has increased its population manyfold. At the same time, many outward signs of regional distinctiveness have faded--chain restaurants have replaced mom-and-pop diners, and the interstate highway system connects the region to the rest of the country. Given all of these changes, many have argued that southern identity is fading. But here, Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts show how these changes have allowed for new types of southern identity to emerge. For some, identification with the South has become more about a connection to the region's folkways or to place than about policy or ideology. For others, the contemporary South is all of those things at once--a place where many modern-day southerners navigate the region's confusing and omnipresent history. Regardless of how individuals see the South, this study argues that the region's drastic political, racial, and cultural changes have not lessened the importance of southern identity but have played a key role in keeping regional identification relevant in the twenty-first century.
| Author | : Keith D. Dickson |
| Publisher | : LSU Press |
| Total Pages | : 333 |
| Release | : 2011-11-21 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 0807140058 |
Keith D. Dickson's Sustaining Southern Identity offers a masterful intellectual biography of Douglas Southall Freeman as well as a comprehensive analysis of how twentieth-century southerners came to remember the Civil War, fashion their values and ideals, and identify themselves as citizens of the South.
| Author | : Martyn Bone |
| Publisher | : LSU Press |
| Total Pages | : 300 |
| Release | : 2005-06-01 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 9780807130537 |
For generations, southern novelists and critics have grappled with a concept that is widely seen as a trademark of their literature: a strong attachment to geography, or a "sense of place." In the 1930s, the Agrarians accorded special meaning to rural life, particularly the farm, in their definitions of southern identity. For them, the South seemed an organic and rooted region in contrast to the North, where real estate development and urban sprawl evoked a faceless, raw capitalism. By the end of the twentieth century, however, economic and social forces had converged to create a modernized South. How have writers responded to this phenomenon? Is there still a sense of place in the South, or perhaps a distinctly postsouthern sense of place? Martyn Bone innovatively draws upon postmodern thinking to consider the various perspectives that southern writers have brought to the concept of "place" and to look at its fate in a national and global context. He begins with a revisionist assessment of the Agrarians, who failed in their attempts to turn their proprietary ideal of the small farm into actual policy but whose broader rural aesthetic lived on in the work of neo-Agrarian writers, including William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. By the 1950s, adherence to this aesthetic was causing southern writers and critics to lose sight of the social reality of a changing South. Bone turns to more recent works that do respond to the impact of capitalist spatial development on the South -- and on the nation generally -- including that self-declared "international city" Atlanta. Close readings of novels by Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Anne Rivers Siddons, Tom Wolfe, and Toni Cade Bambara illuminate evolving ideas about capital, land, labor, and class while introducing southern literary studies into wider debates around social, cultural, and literary geography. Bone concludes his remarkably rich book by considering works of Harry Crews and Barbara Kingsolver that suggest the southern sense of place may be not only post-Agrarian or postsouthern but also transnational.
| Author | : Katherine Henninger |
| Publisher | : UNC Press Books |
| Total Pages | : 255 |
| Release | : 2007 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 0807831123 |
Proposing a new way to map intersections of photography and American literature, Katherine Henninger demonstrates the importance of pinpointing specific cultural and subcultural history. "Ordering the Facade" traces the visual and literary cultures of sou
| Author | : Mary Weaks-Baxter |
| Publisher | : Univ. Press of Mississippi |
| Total Pages | : 224 |
| Release | : 2018-12-17 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1496819608 |
Millions of southerners left the South in the twentieth century in a mass migration that has, in many ways, rewoven the fabric of American society on cultural, political, and economic levels. Because the movements of southerners--and people in general--are controlled not only by physical boundaries marked on a map but also by narratives that define movement, narrative is central in building and sustaining borders and in breaking them down. In Leaving the South: Border Crossing Narratives and the Remaking of Southern Identity, author Mary Weaks-Baxter analyzes narratives by and about those who left the South and how those narratives have remade what it means to be southern. Drawing from a broad range of narratives, including literature, newspaper articles, art, and music, Weaks-Baxter outlines how these displacement narratives challenged concepts of southern nationhood and redefined southern identity. Close attention is paid to how depictions of the South, particularly in the media and popular culture, prompted southerners to leave the region and changed perceptions of southerners to outsiders as well as how southerners saw themselves. Through an examination of narrative, Weaks-Baxter reveals the profound effect gender, race, and class have on the nature of the migrant's journey, the adjustment of the migrant, and the ultimate decision of the migrant either to stay put or return home, and connects the history of border crossings to the issues being considered in today's national landscape.
