Unearthing the Weeping Time: Savannah’s Ten Broeck Race Course and 1859 Slave Sale
Introduction The blades of grass on all the Butler estates are outnumbered by the tears that are poured out in agony at the wreck that has been wrought in happy homes, and the crushing grief that has been laid on loving hearts. —Mortimer Thomson (Philander Doesticks)1Q. K. Philander Doesticks, “Great Auction Sale of Slaves at […]
They Never Witnessed Such a Melodrama
Essay On a spring evening in 1911, a mob of about fifty white men in the small city of Livermore, Kentucky, lynched Will Potter on the stage of the local opera house. Potter was the black manager of a segregated poolroom where Clarence Mitchell, a young white liveryman, and a friend had come to play. […]
Routes of Reconciliation: Visiting Sites of Cultural Trauma in the US South, Northern Ireland, and South Africa
Introduction During the summer of 2008, I travelled to Northern Ireland and South Africa as part of “Race, Religion, and Reconciliation,” a project which brought together three faculty members and eighteen graduate students from the University of Mississippi, the University of Ulster, and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Spatial issues loomed large in these divided societies […]
Southern Memory, Southern Monuments, and the Subversive Black Mammy
Southern Memory, Southern Monuments, and the Subversive Black Mammy Question and Answer Wallace-Sanders responds to questions about the photographs she uses, the proposed Mammy Memorial Institute, the political responses to the proposed mammy memorial in Washington DC, and the mammy figure within Lost Cause discourse. About Kimberly Wallace-Sanders Kimberly Wallace-Sanders is Associate Professor of […]
Prop Master at Charleston’s Gibbes Museum of Art
Introduction Artists Susan Harbage Page and Juan Logan designed Prop Master: An Installation specifically for the Main Gallery of the Gibbes Museum of Art. In its totality, Prop Master constitutes what Logan and Page call “a disruption from within.” As the person who acquires and manufactures props for theatrical and film productions, the prop master […]
The Morning with Many Tongues
Readings Sean Hill reads the poem “Just as Sure.” Poem text. Sean Hill reads the poem “Nigger Street 1937.” Poem text. Sean Hill reads the poem “The State House Aflame 1833.” Poem text. Sean Hill reads the poem “In Memory Hill Cemetery.” Poem text. About Sean Hill Born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill has an M.F.A. from […]
Same-Sex Intimacy in Fiction about Southern Plantations
Same-Sex Intimacy in the Fiction of Southern Plantations Part 2: Bibler refers to Gaines’s novel Of Love and Dust, focusing on how same-sex relations can disrupt plantation hierarchies Part 3: Bibler explores three frames: queer black fraternity, elite white planter homoeroticism, and “southern kitchen romance” Part 4: Bibler discusses the plantation and related literary social […]
Natasha Trethewey Interviews Elizabeth Alexander
Interview with Natasha Trethewey Part 2: Alexander discusses growing up in NYC and Washington DC, DC as Upsouth, identifications with Blackness and southernness Part 3: Alexander discusses southernness and urban space, and reads from “Letter: Blues,” “Frank Willis,” “Talk Radio, DC” Part 4: Alexander reads “Race” and comments on the pale-skinned body; Trethewey compares “Race” and Phillip Levine’s […]
Aestheticizing a Political Debate: Can the Creek Confederacy Be Sung Back Together?
Aestheticizing a Political Debate: Can the Creek Confederacy Be Sung Back Together? Part 2: Womack analyzes Posey’s representation of the vexed relationships between Creeks and Freedmen in the Creek Confederacy Part 3: Womack contrasts Posey’s stories of racial/ethnic interdependency with the contemporary reality in the Creek Confederacy About Craig Womack Dr. Craig Womack is an Oklahoma […]
Deep Ellum Blues
Introduction The railroads made Dallas, Texas into a city, highways made it a Sunbelt city, and DFW Airport made it an international city. Never much known for making things, it has been a place where products are financed, brokered, and transported: leather and buffalo hides in the first place, followed by cotton and oil, clothing […]