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David L. Jordan: From the Mississippi Cotton Fields to the State Senate, a Memoir (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)
by David L. JordanIn David L. Jordan's earliest memories, he is lying in the fields, the black earth beneath him and the sky and sun above, filtered through the leaves of the cotton plants. The youngest of five children in a family of sharecroppers, he was nursed and grew up in those fields, joining his family in their work as soon as he was old enough to carry a sack. David L. Jordan: From the Mississippi Cotton Fields to the State Senate is the memoir of black Mississippi state senator and city councilman Jordan. His life in twentieth-century Mississippi spanned some of the most difficult times for black Mississippians as they coped with the effects of crippling economic circumstances caused by tenant farming and second-class citizenship enforced through the most violent and repressive means. Jordan shares his experiences from early childhood growing up in Leflore County, the heart of the Mississippi Delta, through his life and work in government. He rose from humble beginnings to become professional educator and eventually one of the Deep South's most recognizable social and political activists. In this revealing autobiography, Jordan describes his witness to the often brutal and humiliating mistreatment of blacks by white racists. He is one of the few persons still alive who attended the sensational trial of the two white men accused of the horrific lynching of Emmett Till in 1955. Jordan recounts the atmosphere and drama surrounding the case with telling effects, shining light on this brand of Mississippi injustice that will help readers understand why many people consider the case the real genesis of the modern civil rights movement. Though change was often slow and grudging, Jordan's Mississippi has evolved and continues to overcome. Indeed, Jordan's story is notably a revelation of his role as a catalyst in shaping many of the gains that blacks have achieved in Mississippi in the past fifty years. With a deep belief in the power of education, hard work, and determination, Jordan has worked tirelessly and courageously so that all his fellow citizens might enjoy the human and political rights he has long championed.
C. L. R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence
by Nicole KingC. L. R. James (1901–1989), one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century, expressed his postcolonial and socialist philosophies in fiction, speeches, essays, and book-length scholarly discourses. However, the majority of academic attention given to James keeps the diverse mediums of James's writing separate, focuses on his work as a political theorist, and subordinates his role as a fiction writer. This book, however, seeks to change such an approach to studying James. Defining creolization as a process by which European, African, Amerindian, Asian, and American cultures are amalgamated to form new hybrid identities and cultures, Nicole King uses this process as a means to understanding James's work and life. She argues that, throughout his career, whether writing a short story or a political history, James articulated his attempt to produce revolutionary, radical discourses with a consistent methodology. James, a Trinidad-born scholar who migrated to England and then to the United States and who described himself both as a black radical and a Victorian intellectual, serves as a definitive model of creolization. King argues that James's writings also fit the model of creolization, for each is influenced by diverse types of discourses. James rarely wrote from within the confines of a single discipline, instead choosing to make the layers of history, literature, philosophy, and political theory coalesce in order to make his point. As his West Indian and Western European influences converge in his work and life, he creates texts that are difficult to confine to a specific category or discipline. No matter which writerly medium he uses, James was preoccupied with how to represent the individual personality and at the same time represent the community. The C. L. R. James that emerges from King's study is a man made more compelling and more human because of his complicated, multilayered, and sometimes contradictory allegiances.
Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-2006, Third Edition
by Manning MarableSince its original publication in 1984, Manning Marable's Race, Reform, and Rebellion has become widely known as the most crucial political and social history of African Americans since World War II. Aimed at students of contemporary American politics and society and written by one of the most articulate and eloquent authorities on the movement for black freedom, this acclaimed study traces the divergent elements of political, social, and moral reform in nonwhite America since 1945. This third edition brings Marable's study into the twenty-first century, analyzing the effects of such factors as black neoconservatism, welfare reform, the Million Man March, the mainstreaming of hip-hop culture, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. Marable's work, brought into the present, remains one of the most dramatic, well-conceived, and provocative histories of the struggle for African American civil rights and equality. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Marable follows the emergence of a powerful black working class, the successful effort to abolish racial segregation, the outbreak of Black Power, urban rebellion, and the renaissance of Black Nationalism. He explores the increased participation of blacks and other ethnic groups in governmental systems and the white reaction during the period he terms the Second Reconstruction. Race, Reform, and Rebellion illustrates how poverty, illegal drugs, unemployment, and a deteriorating urban infrastructure hammered the African American community in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Jazz and Death: Medical Profiles of Jazz Greats
by Frederick J. SpencerWhen a jazz hero dies, rumors, speculation, gossip, and legend can muddle the real cause of death. In this book, Frederick J. Spencer, M.D., conducts an inquest on how jazz greats lived and died pursuing their art. Forensics, medical histories, death certificates, and biographies divulge the way many musical virtuosos really died. An essential reference source, Jazz and Death strives to correct misinformation and set the story straight. Reviewing the medical records of such jazz icons as Scott Joplin, James Reese Europe, Bennie Moten, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Wardell Gray, and Ronnie Scott, the book spans decades, styles, and causes of death. Divided into disease categories, it covers such illnesses as ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease), which killed Charlie Mingus, and tuberculosis, which caused the deaths of Chick Webb, Charlie Christian, Bubber Miley, Jimmy Blanton, and Fats Navarro. It notes the significance of dental disease in affecting a musician's embouchure and livelihood, as happened with Joe “King” Oliver. A discussion of Art Tatum's visual impairment leads to discoveries in the pathology of what blinded Lennie Tristano. Heavy drinking, even during Prohibition, was the norm in the clubs of New Orleans and Kansas City and in the ballrooms of Chicago and New York. Too often, the musical scene demanded that those who play jazz be “jazzed.” After World War II, as heroin addiction became the hallmark of revolution, talented bebop artists suffered long absences from the bandstand. Many did jail time, and others succumbed to the ravages of “horse.” With Jazz and Death, the causes behind the great jazz funerals may no longer be misconstrued. Its clinical and morbidly entertaining approach creates an invaluable compendium for jazz fans and scholars alike.
Mulata Nation: Visualizing Race and Gender in Cuba (Caribbean Studies Series)
by Alison FraunharRepeatedly and powerfully throughout Cuban history, the mulata, a woman of mixed racial identity, features prominently in Cuban visual and performative culture. Tracing the figure, Alison Fraunhar looks at the representation and performance in both elite and popular culture. She also tracks how characteristics associated with these women have accrued across the Atlantic world.Widely understood to embody the bridge between European subject and African other, the mulata contains the sensuality attributed to Africans in a body more closely resembling the European ideal of beauty. This symbol bears far-reaching implications, with shifting, contradictory cultural meanings in Cuba. Fraunhar explores these complex paradigms, how, why, and for whom the image was useful, and how it was both subverted and asserted from the colonial period to the present. From the early seventeenth century through Cuban independence in 1899 up to the late revolutionary era, Fraunhar illustrates the ambiguous figure's role in nationhood, citizenship, and commercialism. She analyzes images including key examples of nineteenth-century graphic arts, avant-garde painting and magazine covers of the Republican era, cabaret and film performance, and contemporary iterations of gender.Fraunhar's study stands out for attending to the phenomenon of mulataje not only in elite production such as painting, but also in popular forms: popular theater, print culture, later films, and other media where stereotypes take hold. Indeed, in contemporary Cuba, mulataje remains a popular theme with Cubans as well as foreigners in drag shows, reflecting queerness in visual culture.
The New Great American Writers Cookbook
by Dean Faulkner WellsPublished in 1981, The Great American Writers Cookbook was a treasure trove of recipes submitted by the country's most celebrated authors. This all-new collection, a fine follow-up for a new era, features recipes that range from peanut butter sandwiches to eggplant caviar, with dishes—and anecdotes—offered by writers of every imaginable stripe, ethnicity, region, and culture in America. Contemporary novelists such as National Book Award winners Jonathan Franzen and the late, great Bernard Malamud share space with columnists Dave Barry, P. J. O'Rourke, and Christopher Buckley, with journalists and novelists Andrei Codrescu, Anna Quindlen, and John Berendt, and with poet and novelist Sandra Cisneros. The interspersing of recipes from older and younger generations reveals cookery as creatively diverse as the writings from David Guterson, T. C. Boyle, Elizabeth McCracken, and former First Lady Barbara Bush. This unusually tangy assortment of more than 150 recipes runs the gamut from tofu to heart-clogging chili. Writers play fast and loose with ingredients and forewarn readers planning to try them that some of the most seductive recipes are loaded with cholesterol. With such temptations as “Thighs of Delight,” “Crevettes Désir,” a “sexy spaghetti sauce,” and a lemon icebox pie that allegedly elicits proposals of marriage, the recipes—and stories revealing their origins—is enticing, bizarre, and promisingly tasty. The collection gives particular emphasis to contemporary southern writers—Padgett Powell, Jack Butler, Larry Brown, Ellen Gilchrist, and Josephine Humphreys, among others, although their recipes are often far from being quintessentially “southern.” Scintillating with writerly antics and witty histories as transfixing as the recipes themselves, The New Great American Writers Cookbook is not just for daring cooks. It's also a collector’s item for food-doting lovers of American literature.
Conversations with Jerome Charyn (Literary Conversations Series)
by Sophie VallasThis volume of fourteen interviews covers the prolific and rich career of author Jerome Charyn (b. 1937). Four of the interviews appear in English for the first time, and two interviews appear here in print for the first time as well. As one of his autobiographical volumes claims, Jerome Charyn is a “Bronx Boy,” a child born from immigrant parents who went through Ellis Island in the 1920s like so many other travelers without luggage, a “little werewolf” who grew up on his own in the chaos of the Bronx ghetto. “I think I was defined by two things: World War II and the movies.” His work remains deeply marked by this childhood largely forgotten by the American Dream. If Charyn has spent much of his life in Paris, he has paradoxically never left the Bronx: “‘El Bronx’ is there inside my head, and I revisit it the way Hemingway would fish the Big Two-Hearted River in his dreams.” His whole work is a long attempt at evoking his own history and celebrating his lifelong marveling at the power of language—“our second skin”—as well as his deep, unflinching belief in the promises of fiction. Since 1964, Charyn has published more than fifty books ranging from fiction to nonfiction and including short stories; very popular crime novels; graphic novels cowritten with European artists; essays on American culture and cinema as well as on New York; autobiography; and biography—an ever-changing production that has made it difficult for critics to classify him. And yet in many ways Charyn's writing thrives on constant currents: the words “voice,” “song,” “undersong,” or “rhythm” return frequently in his interviews as he explains what literature is to him and ceaselessly asserts that he is trying “to find a music for a musicless world,” a language for “people who cannot speak.”
Down on the Batture
by Oliver A. HouckThe lower Mississippi River winds past the city of New Orleans between enormous levees and a rim of sand, mud, and trees called “the batture.” On this remote and ignored piece of land thrives a humanity unique to the region—ramblers, artists, drinkers, fishers, rabbit hunters, dog walkers, sunset watchers, and refugees from immigration, alimony, and other aspects of modern life. Author Oliver A. Houck has frequented this place for the past twenty-five years. Down on the Batture describes a life, pastoral, at times marginal, but remarkably fecund and surprising. From this place he meditates on Louisiana, the state of the waterway, and its larger environs. He describes all the actors who have played lead roles on the edge of the mightiest river of the continent, and includes in his narrative plantations, pollution, murder, land grabs, keelboat brawlers, slave rebellions, the Corps of Engineers, and the oil industry. Houck draws from his experience in New Orleans since the early 1970s in the practice and teaching of law. He has been a player in many of the issues he describes, although he does not undertake to argue them here. Instead, story by story, he uses the batture to explore the forces that have shaped and spell out the future of the region. The picture emerges of a place that—for all its tangle of undergrowth, drifting humanity, shifting dimensions in the rise and fall of floodwater—provides respite and sanctuary for values that are original to America and ever at risk from the homogenizing forces of civilization.
Sitting Pretty: The Life and Times of Clifton Webb (Hollywood Legends Series)
by Clifton WebbMore than any other male movie star, the refined Clifton Webb (1889-1966) caused the moviegoing public to change its image of a leading man. In a day when leading men were supposed to be strong, virile, and brave, Clifton Webb projected an image of flip, acerbic arrogance. He was able to play everything from a decadent columnist (Laura) to a fertile father (Cheaper by the Dozen and The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker), delivering lines in an urbanely clipped, acidly dry manner with impeccable timing. Long before his film career began, Webb was a child actor and later a suavely effete song-and-dance man in numerous Broadway musicals and revues. The turning point in his career came in 1941 when his good friend Noël Coward cast him in Blithe Spirit. Director Otto Preminger saw Webb's performance and cast him in Laura in 1944. Webb began to write his autobiography, but he said that he eventually had gotten “bogged down” in the process. However, he did complete six chapters and left a hefty collection of notes that he intended to use in the proposed book. His writing is as witty and sophisticated as his onscreen persona. Those six chapters, information and voluminous notes, and personal research by coauthor David L. Smith provide an intimate view of an amazingly talented man's life and times.
Ghost Hunters of the South
by Alan BrownSoutherners are accustomed to hearing stories of a residence, an old hotel, a mansion, or a battlefield being haunted. In Ghost Hunters of the South, Alan Brown shows that ghostlore is no longer enough for some. The forty-four ghost hunting groups he profiles in this book pack cameras, Geiger counters, thermal scanners, oscilloscopes, tape recorders, computers, and dowsing rods to find and record elusive proof of supernatural activity. With candor, the directors and team members reveal the passions and even obsessions that lead them to this expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes dangerous and chilling pursuit of evidence of the spirit realm. Brown interviews enthusiasts from twelve states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Ghost Hunters of the South takes the reader along on exciting and fearful investigations of places such as the Myrtles, St. Francis Inn, Chickamauga Battlefield, Bob Mackey's Music World, Old Talbott Tavern, North Carolina State Capitol, Granberry Opera House, and 17Hundred90 Inn and Restaurant. Brown participates in some of the investigations to gain a full and objective understanding of teachers, doctors, accountants, housewives, and law enforcement personnel, who devote much of their free time to a quest that many outsiders view with skepticism if not scorn. In fascinating, frightening, and sometimes humorous accounts, Brown highlights the determination of these individuals to answer the question: “What happens to the soul after death?”
Promises of Citizenship: Film Recruitment of African Americans in World War II (Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series)
by Kathleen GermanSince the earliest days of the nation, US citizenship has been linked to military service. Even though blacks fought and died in all American wars, their own freedom was usually restricted or denied. In many ways, World War II exposed this contradiction.As demand for manpower grew during the war, government officials and military leaders realized that the war could not be won without black support. To generate African American enthusiasm, the federal government turned to mass media. Several government films were produced and distributed, movies that have remained largely unexamined by scholars. Kathleen M. German delves into the dilemma of race and the federal government's attempts to appeal to black patriotism and pride even while postponing demands for equality and integration until victory was achieved.German's study intersects three disciplines: the history of the African American experience in World War II, the theory of documentary film, and the study of rhetoric. One of the main films of the war era, The Negro Soldier, fractured the long tradition of degrading minstrel caricatures by presenting a more dignified public image of African Americans. Along with other government films, the narrative within The Negro Soldier transformed the black volunteer into an able soldier. It included African Americans in the national mythology by retelling American history to recognize black participation. As German reveals, through this new narrative with more dignified images, The Negro Soldier and other films performed rhetorical work by advancing the agenda of black citizenship.
Sweet Spots: In-Between Spaces in New Orleans
by Teresa A. Toulouse and Barbara C. EwellContributions by Carrie Bernhard, Scott Bernhard, Marilyn R. Brown, Richard Campanella, John P. Clark, Joel Dinerstein, Pableaux Johnson, John P. Klingman, Angel Adams Parham, Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Ruth Salvaggio, Christopher Schaberg, Teresa A. Toulouse, and Beth WillingerMuch has been written about New Orleans's distinctive architecture and urban fabric, as well as the city's art, literature, and music. There is, however, little discussion connecting these features. Sweet Spots--a title drawn from jazz musicians' name for the space "in-between" performers and dancers where music best resonates--provides multiple connections between the city's spaces, its complex culture, and its future.Drawing on the late Tulane architect Malcolm Heard's ideas about "interstitial" spaces, this collection examines how a variety of literal and represented "in-between" spaces in New Orleans have addressed race, class, gender, community, and environment. As scholars of architecture, art, African American studies, English, history, jazz, philosophy, and sociology, the authors incorporate materials from architectural history and practice, literary texts, paintings, drawings, music, dance, and even statistical analyses. Interstitial space refers not only to functional elements inside and outside of many New Orleans houses--high ceilings, hidden staircases, galleries, and courtyards--but also to compelling spatial relations between the city's houses, streets, and neighborhoods.Rich with visual materials, Sweet Spots reveals the ways that diverse New Orleans spaces take on meanings and accrete stories that promote certain consequences both for those who live in them and for those who read such stories. The volume evokes, preserves, criticizes, and amends understanding of a powerful and often-missed feature of New Orleans's elusive reality.
Zachary Scott: Hollywood's Sophisticated Cad (Hollywood Legends Series)
by Ronald L. DavisThroughout the 1940s, Zachary Scott (1914-1965) was the model for sophisticated, debonair villains in American film. His best-known roles include a mysterious criminal in The Mask of Dimitrios and the indolent husband in Mildred Pierce. He garnered further acclaim for his portrayal of villains in Her Kind of Man, Danger Signal, and South of St. Louis. Although he earned critical praise for his performance as a heroic tenant farmer in Jean Renoir's The Southerner, Scott never quite escaped typecasting. In Zachary Scott: Hollywood's Sophisticated Cad, Ronald L. Davis writes an appealing biography of the film star. Scott grew up in privileged circumstances—his father was a distinguished physician; his grandfather was a pioneer cattle baron—and was expected to follow his father into medical practice. Instead, Scott began to pursue a career in theater while studying at the University of Texas and subsequently worked his way on a ship to England to pursue acting. Upon his return to America, he began to look for work in New York. Excelling on stage and screen throughout the 1940s, Scott seemed destined for stardom. By the end of 1950, however, he had suffered through a turbulent divorce. A rafting accident left him badly shaken and clinically depressed. His frustration over his roles mounted, and he began to drink heavily. He remarried and spent the rest of his career concentrating on stage and television work. Although Scott continued to perform occasionally in films, he never reclaimed the level of stardom that he had in the mid-1940s. To reconstruct Scott's life, Davis uses interviews with Scott and colleagues and reviews, articles, and archival correspondence from the Scott papers at the University of Texas and from the Warner Brothers Archives. The result is a portrait of a talented actor who was rarely allowed to show his versatility on the screen.
Comics and Adaptation
by Benoît Mitaine, David Roche and Isabelle Schmitt-PitiotContributions by Jan Baetens, Alain Boillat, Philippe Bourdier, Laura Cecilia Caraballo, Thomas Faye, Pierre Floquet, Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Christophe Gelly, Nicolas Labarre, Benoît Mitaine, David Roche, Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, Dick Tomasovic, and Shannon Wells-LassagneBoth comics studies and adaptation studies have grown separately over the past twenty years. Yet there are few in-depth studies of comic books and adaptations together. Available for the first time in English, this collection pores over the phenomenon of comic books and adaptation, sifting through comics as both sources and results of adaptation. Essays shed light on the many ways adaptation studies inform research on comic books and content adapted from them. Contributors concentrate on fidelity to the source materials, comparative analysis, forms of media, adaptation and myth, adaptation and intertextuality, as well as adaptation and ideology.After an introduction that assesses adaptation studies as a framework, the book examines comics adaptations of literary texts as more than just illustrations of their sources. Essayists then focus on adaptations of comics, often from a transmedia perspective. Case studies analyze both famous and lesser-known American, Belgian, French, Italian, and Spanish comics.Essays investigate specific works, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Castilian epic poem Poema de Mio Cid, Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, French comics artist Jacques Tardi's adaptation 120, rue de la Gare, and Frank Miller's Sin City. In addition to Marvel Comics' blockbusters, topics include various uses of adaptation, comic book adaptations of literary texts, narrative deconstruction of performance and comic book art, and many more.
Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean (Caribbean Studies Series)
by M. Cynthia OliverBeauty pageants are wildly popular in the U.S. Virgin Islands, outnumbering any other single performance event and capturing the attention of the local people from toddlers to seniors. Local beauty contests provide women opportunities to demonstrate talent, style, the values of black womanhood, and the territory's social mores. Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean is a comprehensive look at the centuries-old tradition of these expressions in the Virgin Islands. M. Cynthia Oliver maps the trajectory of pageantry from its colonial precursors at tea meetings, dance dramas, and street festival parades to its current incarnation as the beauty pageant or “queen show.” For the author, pageantry becomes a lens through which to view the region's understanding of gender, race, sexuality, class, and colonial power. Focusing on the queen show, Oliver reveals its twin roots in slave celebrations that parodied white colonial behavior and created Creole royal rituals and celebrations heavily influenced by Africanist aesthetics. Using the U.S. Virgin Islands as an intriguing case study, Oliver shows how the pageant continues to reflect, reinforce, and challenge Caribbean cultural values concerning femininity. Queen of the Virgins examines the journey of the black woman from degraded body to vaunted queen and how this progression is marked by social unrest, growing middle-class sensibilities, and contemporary sexual and gender politics.
Between Distant Modernities: Performing Exceptionality in Francoist Spain and the Jim Crow South
by Brittany Powell KennedyFor centuries, Spain and the South have stood out as the exceptional "other" within U.S. and European nationalisms. During Franco's regime and the Jim Crow era both violently asserted a haunting brand of national "selfhood." Both areas shared a loss of splendor and a fraught relation with modernization, and they retained a sense of defeat. Brittany Powell Kennedy explores this paradox not simply to compare two apparently similar cultures but to reveal how we construct difference around this self/other dichotomy. She charts a transatlantic link between two cultures whose performances of "otherness" as assertions of "selfhood" enact and subvert their claims to exceptionality. Perhaps the greatest example of this transatlantic link remains the War of 1898, when the South tried to extract itself from but was implicated in U.S. imperial expansion and nation-building. Simultaneously, the South participated in the end of Spain as an imperial power.Given the War of 1898 as a climactic moment, Kennedy explores the writings of those who come directly after this period and who attempted to "regenerate" what was perceived as "traditional" in an agrarian past. That desire recurs over the century in novels from writers as diverse as William Faulkner, Camilo José Cela, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Federico García Lorca, and Ralph Ellison. As these writers wrestle with ideas of Spain and the South, they also engage questions of how national identity is affirmed and contested. Kennedy compares these cultures across the twentieth century to show the ways in which they express national authenticity. Thus she explores not only Francoism and Jim Crow, but varied attempts to define nationhood via exceptionalism, suggesting a model of performativity that relates to other "exceptional" geographies.
American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium
by Steffen HantkeCreatively spent and politically irrelevant, the American horror film is a mere ghost of its former self—or so goes the old saw from fans and scholars alike. Taking on this undeserved reputation, the contributors to this collection provide a comprehensive look at a decade of cinematic production, covering a wide variety of material from the last ten years with a clear critical eye. Individual essays profile the work of up-and-coming director Alexandre Aja and reassess William Malone’s much-maligned Feardotcom in the light of the torture debate at the end of President George W. Bush’s administration. Other essays look at the economic, social, and formal aspects of the genre; the globalization of the US film industry; the alleged escalation of cinematic violence; and the massive commercial popularity of the remake. Some essays examine specific subgenres—from the teenage horror flick to the serial killer film and the spiritual horror film—as well as the continuing relevance of classic directors such as George A. Romero, David Cronenberg, John Landis, and Stuart Gordon. Essays deliberate on the marketing of nostalgia and its concomitant aesthetic and on the curiously schizophrenic perspective of fans who happen to be scholars as well. Taken together, the contributors to this collection make a compelling case that American horror cinema is as vital, creative, and thought-provoking as it ever was.
Personal Souths: Interviews from the Southern Quarterly
by Douglas B. ChambersPersonal Souths, a collection of twenty interviews with famous southern writers, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of The Southern Quarterly, one of the oldest scholarly journals (founded in 1962) dedicated to southern studies. The figures interviewed range from Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams (all from the 1970s), to a virtual Who's Who of southern literature in the second half of the twentieth century. All of these interviews were originally published in the journal in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s and are collected here for the first time. The South is represented broadly, with writers from eight states; at least four represent the “mountain South” (Donald Harrington, Bobbie Ann Mason, Robert Morgan, Lee Smith), while another four typify a “cosmopolitan South” (Reynolds Price, Mary Lee Settle, Elizabeth Spencer, Tennessee Williams). The greatest number of voices, at least eight of the authors, speak for or from the “poor white South” (Larry Brown, Erskine Caldwell, Harry Crews, Donald Harrington, Bobbie Ann Mason, Robert Morgan, Del Shores, Lee Smith). Though there is only one African American writer, Ernest J. Gaines, another interview (William Styron, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Confessions of Nat Turner) also focuses on a conversation about African American literature. The interviews are all fascinating. Not only do they reveal the personalities of these southern literary stars, but they also represent a self-conscious community of writers. It is a testament to the quality of The Southern Quarterly that many of these writers, when discussing their most important contemporaries, often refer to other writers whose interviews are also in this collection. These firsthand discussions will continue to illuminate and inform our understanding of their creative work.
Walking on Air: The Aerial Adventures of Phoebe Omlie (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)
by Janann ShermanAviation pioneer Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie (1902–1975) was once one of the most famous women in America. In the 1930s, her words and photographs were splashed across the front pages of newspapers across the nation. The press labeled her “second only to Amelia Earhart among America's women pilots,” and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt named her among the “eleven women whose achievements make it safe to say that the world is progressing.” Omlie began her career in the early 1920s when aviation was unregulated and open to those daring enough to take it on, male or female. She earned the first commercial pilot's license issued to a woman and became a successful air racer. During the New Deal, she became the first woman to hold an executive position in federal aeronautics. In Walking on Air, author Janann Sherman presents a thorough and entertaining biography of Omlie. In 1920, the Des Moines, Iowa, native bought herself a Curtiss JN-4D airplane and began learning how to fly and perform stunts with her future husband, pilot Vernon Omlie. She danced the Charleston on the top wing, hung by her teeth below the plane, and performed parachute jumps in the Phoebe Fairgrave Flying Circus. Using interviews, contemporary newspaper articles, archived radio transcripts, and other archival materials, Sherman creates a complex portrait of a daring aviator struggling for recognition in the early days of flight and a detailed examination of how American flying changed over the twentieth century.
Selling Folk Music: An Illustrated History (American Made Music Series)
by Ronald D. Cohen David BonnerSelling Folk Music: An Illustrated History highlights commercial sources that reveal how folk music has been packaged and sold to a broad, shifting audience in the United States. Folk music has a varied and complex scope and lineage, including the blues, minstrel tunes, Victorian parlor songs, spirituals and gospel tunes, country and western songs, sea shanties, labor and political songs, calypsos, pop folk, folk-rock, ethnic, bluegrass, and more. The genre is of major importance in the broader spectrum of American music, and it is easy to understand why folk music has been marketed as America's music. Selling Folk Music presents the public face of folk music in the United States via its commercial promotion and presentation throughout the twentieth century. Included are concert flyers; sheet music; book, songbook, magazine, and album covers; concert posters and flyers; and movie lobby cards and posters, all in their original colors. The 1964 hootenanny craze, for example, spawned such items as a candy bar, pinball machine, bath powder, paper dolls, Halloween costumes, and beach towels. The almost five hundred images in Selling Folk Music present a new way to catalog the history of folk music while highlighting the transformative nature of the genre. Following the detailed introduction on the history of folk music, illustrations from commercial products make up the bulk of the work, presenting a colorful, complex history.
Ang Lee: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series)
by Karla Rae FullerTaiwanese born, Ang Lee (b. 1954) has produced diverse films in his award-winning body of work. Sometimes working in the West, sometimes in the East, he creates films that defy easy categorization and continue to amaze audiences worldwide. Lee has won an Academy Award two times for Best Director--the first Asian to win--for films as different as a small drama about gay cowboys in Brokeback Mountain (2005), and the 3D technical wizardry in Life of Pi (2012). He has garnered numerous accolades and awards worldwide.Lee has made a broad range of movies, including his so-called "Father Knows Best" trilogy made up of his first three films: Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), as well as 1970s period drama The Ice Storm (1997), martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), superhero blockbuster Hulk (2003), and hippie retro trip Taking Woodstock (2009).Thoughtful and passionate, Lee humbly reveals here a personal journey that brought him from Taiwan to his chosen home in the United States as he struggled and ultimately triumphed in his quest to become a superb filmmaker. Ang Lee: Interviews collects the best interviews of this reticent yet bold figure.
The True Gospel Preached Here
by Bruce WestBruce West's color photographs document the spiritual and creative work of a self-proclaimed preacher, artist, architect, the Reverend H. D. Dennis, and his wife, Margaret, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. This book explores the fantastic world of the elderly couple who devoted more than twenty years of their lives to converting Margaret's Grocery store into a one-of-a-kind nondenominational church. Guided by visions from God, their elaborate transformation of Margaret's Grocery involved the construction of several towers, the creation of the Ark of the Covenant containing tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, and new religious iconography. A sign at the entrance announced: "Welcome Jews and Gentile This Church Open 24 Hours a Day." Another sign promised: "The True Gospel Preached Here." Bands of high-gloss red, white, blue, green, yellow, and pink paint covered the towers and exterior. Religious artifacts, Mardi Gras beads, plastic flowers, hubcaps, and flashing Christmas lights encrusted the interior walls and ceilings and an old school bus. The Reverend used his church as a roadside attraction to lure seekers so that he could deliver fiery sermons and orations about the need to "practice living perfectly" and the ceaseless pursuit of spiritual wisdom.The product of twenty years of labor and multiple site visits, West's photographs are both intimate and transparent, tenderly revealing the Reverend and Margaret's love of God and for one another, their commitment to their work, and their shared transformation while aging together. The images offer unique insights into the role of spirituality in southern folk art and creativity and the joys and demands of an ascetic and inspired life.
Robbing The Mother: Women in Faulkner
by Deborah ClarkeWilliam Faulkner claimed that it may be necessary for a writer to “rob his mother,” should the need arise. “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies,” he remarked. This study of Faulkner's paradoxical attitude toward women, particularly mothers, will stimulate debate and concern, for his novels are shown here to have presented them as both a source and a threat to being and to language. “My reading of Faulkner,” the author says, “attempts more than an identification of female stereotypes and an examination of misogyny, for Faulkner, who almost certainly feared and mistrusted women, also sees in them a mysterious, often threatening power, which is often aligned with his own creativity and the grounds of his own fiction.” Drawing on both American and French feminist criticism, Robbing the Mother explores Faulkner's artistic vision through the maternal influence in such works as The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; Sanctuary; Absalom, Absalom!; The Hamlet; Light in August; and The Wild Palms.
Faulkner and Race (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)
by Doreen FowlerWith contributions by Eric J. Sundquist, Craig Werner, Blyden Jackson, Thadious Davis, Pamela J. Rhodes, Walter Taylor, Noel Polk, James A. Snead, Philip M. Weinstein, Lothar Hönnighausen, Frederick R. Karl, Hoke Perkins, Sergei Chakovsky, Michael Grimwood, and Karl F. ZenderThe essays in this volume address William Faulkner and the issue of race. Faulkner resolutely has probed the deeply repressed psychological dimensions of race, asking in novel after novel the perplexing question: what does blackness signify in a predominantly white society? However, Faulkner's public statements on the subject of race have sometimes seemed less than fully enlightened, and some of his black characters, especially in the early fiction, seem to conform to white stereotypical notions of what black men and women are like. These essays, originally presented by Faulkner scholars, black and white, male and female, at the 1986 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, the thirteenth in a series of conferences held on the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi, explore the relationship between Faulkner and race.
Charles Burnett: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series)
by Robert E. KapsisCharles Burnett (b. 1944) is a groundbreaking African American filmmaker and one of this country’s finest directors, yet he remains largely unknown. His films, most notably Killer of Sheep (1977) and To Sleep with Anger (1990), are considered classics, yet few filmgoers have seen them or heard of Burnett. The interviews in this volume explore this paradox and collectively shed light on the work of a rare film master whose stories bring to the screen the texture and poetry of life in the black community.The best qualities of Burnett’s films-rich characterizations, morally and emotionally complex narratives, and intricately observed tales of African American life-are precisely the things that make his films a tough sell in the mass marketplace. As many of the interviews reveal, Hollywood has been largely inept in responding to this marketing challenge. “It takes an extraordinary effort to keep going,” Burnett told Terrence Rafferty in 2001, “when everybody’s saying to you, ‘No one wants to see that kind of movie,’ or ‘There’s no black audience.’” All the interviews selected for this volume—spanning more than three decades of Burnett’s directorial career, including his recent work—examine, in various degrees, Burnett’s status as a true independent filmmaker and explore his motivation for making films that chronicle the black experience in America.