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Articles 1 - 30 of 91
Full-Text Articles in American Studies
Gestures Of Dissent: Self-Fashioning Performance From Southern Women Writers During The Fin De Siécle, Elisa Fuhrken
Gestures Of Dissent: Self-Fashioning Performance From Southern Women Writers During The Fin De Siécle, Elisa Fuhrken
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This project explores Southern women writers during the latter half of the nineteenth-century who asserted and crafted a modernized identity by turning to various modes of transgressive performance and performance spaces. For women of the nineteenth-century, this meant extricating themselves from a domestic, sentimental identity and apprehending a more fluid, dynamic type of being. The modes of performance, such as spectatorship, orality, and gesture, allowed these women to express and articulate an alternative feminine identity while also engaging with an embodied epistemology. This thesis looks at three Southern women writers: Sherwood Bonner’s novel Like Unto Like and her travel letters …
"No Place In American History": Remembering And Forgetting The Sultana Disaster, Elias John Baker
"No Place In American History": Remembering And Forgetting The Sultana Disaster, Elias John Baker
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This project examines the historical memory of the Sultana steamboat disaster of April 27, 1865. The Sultana, ferrying recently-released federal prisoners, exploded north of Memphis, killing over 1,700 in the nation’s worst maritime disaster. Contemporaries interpreted the disaster through a variety of lenses, finding evidence of recalcitrant rebels, the heroism of Union soldiers, and critiques of Republican emancipationist wartime policy. Steamboat safety advocates deployed the disaster’s memory to successfully press Radical Republicans for the 1871 Steamboat Act, establishing the nation’s first maritime safety code. The disaster’s survivors gathered at reunions and published personal narratives to secure the Sultana, and the …
The Meat Of The Gothic: Animality And Social Justice In United States Fiction And Film Of The Twenty-First Century, Amber Hodge
The Meat Of The Gothic: Animality And Social Justice In United States Fiction And Film Of The Twenty-First Century, Amber Hodge
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The Meat of the Gothic: Animality and Social Justice in United States Fiction and Film of the Twenty-First Century— situates twenty-first century US gothic narratives in relation to animal studies, even as it illuminates how these narratives interrogate the effects of historic and ongoing global systems of human oppression: slavery, imperialism, and capitalism. Instead of reacting to bias by asserting a claim to a humanity perpetually imbricated in divisions of class, race, and gender, present-day authors and filmmakers create characters who form communities that include nonhuman actors as a means of generating empowerment and critique. My approach to these narratives …
The Black Petromodernism Of Zora Neale Hurston: Energy, Race, And Mobility, Stuart Mullet
The Black Petromodernism Of Zora Neale Hurston: Energy, Race, And Mobility, Stuart Mullet
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis situates Zora Neale Hurston and the folk communities in her oeuvre within the context of modernity’s dependencies on fossil fuels. Such a disciplinary context provides an energy footing for our understandings of African American migrations in the twentieth century—which radically transformed the nation on multiple levels—and it illuminates the communal values that undergird Black approaches to petromodern forms of mobility. Furthermore, by engaging the Black spaces of the South, my argument begins filling a gap in the energy humanities. Few scholars in this field engage deeply those populations and regions that disproportionately experience the underbelly of petromodernity and …
Masculinity And Cold War Fairy Tales: Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, And Ross Macdonald, Susan E. Wood
Masculinity And Cold War Fairy Tales: Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, And Ross Macdonald, Susan E. Wood
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines the use of fairy-tale allusions to explore masculinity in four novels published during the Cold War period. This notable focus on men and masculinity held in common across these four novels from four different decades is interesting because it suggests that the shift in focus to women and feminist ideals in fairy-tale revisions of the 1970s and after is even more stark a shift than has yet been recognized by scholars. This dissertation finds that Eudora Welty’s novella The Robber Bridegroom (1942), Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955), Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White (1967), and Ross Macdonald’s novel …
An American Pilgrimage: The 1968 Poor People's Campaign Mule Train As Prophetic Social Performance, Cheston M. Bush
An American Pilgrimage: The 1968 Poor People's Campaign Mule Train As Prophetic Social Performance, Cheston M. Bush
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In late spring of 1968, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched a nationwide demonstration known as the Poor People’s Campaign in an effort to overcome poverty. Nine caravans representing people from around the country converged in the Capitol to petition Congress for programs that would broaden opportunities for poor Americans. This work examines the Mississippi contingent of the campaign, the Mule Train caravan, that consisted of roughly 150 people who traveled in 15 covered wagons pulled by about 40 mules. The Mule Train left Marks, Mississippi on May 13 and arrived in Washington, D.C. in time for a June …
A Natural Fit For The Natural State: The Emergence Of Black Power Organizations In Arkansas From 1968-1975, Maurice D. Gipson
A Natural Fit For The Natural State: The Emergence Of Black Power Organizations In Arkansas From 1968-1975, Maurice D. Gipson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This study seeks to explore how Black Arkansans on college campuses in rural towns navigated their local circumstances while embracing tenets of Black Power. By 1968, public PWIs in Arkansas were contending with an influx of Black students due to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. Even though many of the universities had been integrated years and even decades earlier, they were still ill-equipped for the number of Black students that would enroll and descend upon the towns during this period.
What Remains: Telling The Story Of Irene Taylor's Murder, Christian Leus
What Remains: Telling The Story Of Irene Taylor's Murder, Christian Leus
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This written thesis serves as a companion piece to What Remains, a six-part audio podcast telling the story of Irene Taylor, a 19-year-old sharecropper’s daughter who was murdered in Altheimer, Arkansas, in 1939. The investigation of the murder, which garnered national press attention, ended with the conviction and execution of Sylvester Williams, a 22-year-old Black man also from Altheimer. This paper expands on the contextual research done in support of the podcast, including close readings of newspaper coverage and fictionalized magazine reports of the case; an examination of the Delta environment’s racialized history and its impact on the lives of …
Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature, Josh-Wade Ferguson
Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature, Josh-Wade Ferguson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
“Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature” revises the methodological assumptions that have underwritten our understanding of blues literature and the politics of race and region that surround it. Where previous commentators have defined blues literature primarily through its formal and thematic connections with blues music and with the sociohistorical contours of black southern life more generally this dissertation expands the boundaries of how we conceive blues literature by examining Langston Hughes’ poems “The Weary Blues” (1925) and “Po Boy Blues” (1926) August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods …
Truth Marching On: Documenting The Plan To Bring Robert F. Kennedy To The University Of Mississippi In 1966, Mary Paige Blessey
Truth Marching On: Documenting The Plan To Bring Robert F. Kennedy To The University Of Mississippi In 1966, Mary Paige Blessey
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
My documentary project focuses on the group of students who planned this event and why they invited Kennedy. The thesis project consists of two parts: a film and a paper. This paper accompanies the documentary thesis film Truth Marching On: Robert F. Kennedy at the University of Mississippi. In this paper, I attempt to do the following: 1) summarize the necessary backstory of Kennedy’s 1966 visit to the university that is central to my film and paper; 2) provide information and analysis of the components that make up the short film, which include interviews, archival materials, and additional film …
Decolonial Resistance In Latinx Writings From Peru To The United States: A Portfolio, Isabel Norwood
Decolonial Resistance In Latinx Writings From Peru To The United States: A Portfolio, Isabel Norwood
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection begins with the premise that colonial relationships manifest in ways beyond exploitation of one nation by another. It relies on the decolonial theory of Walter D. Mignolo in its assumption that imbalances of power in the realms of race gender sexuality and class are fundamentally colonial. With this more expansive understanding of coloniality in mind I examine resistance to colonial exploitation in a range of texts from across the Americas. The first essay in this collection explores the role of the guinea pig in Andean food culture arguing that the continued consumption of guinea pig represents a form …
A Bargain At Any Cost: The Rise Of Dollar General, Frances Evelyn Barrett
A Bargain At Any Cost: The Rise Of Dollar General, Frances Evelyn Barrett
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Dollar General Corporation has grown into a retail titan with more than 15 000 stores across the continental United States. The first chapter of this thesis traces the history of this multibillion-dollar firm since its founding as a family-run business in Scottsville Kentucky in the late 1930s. Situating Dollar General’s history within the evolving contexts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries illustrates that Dollar General Stores succeed when the economy staggers. Neoliberalism and global finance capitalism have only exacerbated the geographic expansion and profitability of the company as the second chapter begins to explore. Although Dollar General Stores open at …
Alaska And The Arctic In The U.S. Imaginary, Ryan Charlton
Alaska And The Arctic In The U.S. Imaginary, Ryan Charlton
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Popular narratives of Alaska have long relied on the region’s mythical status as the “last frontier” a perception which enfolds Alaska into a continental narrative of U.S. expansion. This frontier image has foreclosed our ability to appreciate the profound instability which the 1867 Alaska Purchase brought into U.S. national discourse at a time when Americans were eager to adopt a fixed national identity. In the three decades following the purchase Alaska would resist incorporation into the national imaginary challenging the coherence of U.S. national identity and calling into question foundational myths of the United States as a continental and agrarian …
Subverting The Patriarchal Panopticon: Challenges To Eugenics Rhetoric In The Novels Of Mccullers And Welty, Regina Marie Young
Subverting The Patriarchal Panopticon: Challenges To Eugenics Rhetoric In The Novels Of Mccullers And Welty, Regina Marie Young
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
My thesis takes into consideration the scope of eugenics ideologies and their influence on literature specifically two mid-twentieth century authors from the U.S. South Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. I contend that both writers engage with eugenics rhetoric challenging and subverting the prevailing ideology of the day albeit in differing ways. McCullers and Welty address different facets of eugenics rhetoric in their novels— namely the nature of “defect” and the criteria for “fitness” for “citizenship.” This thesis interrogates the ways in which these writers develop rhetorical strategies for resisting eugenics ideologies in their respective novels Reflections in a Golden Eye …
Freedom At The Freak Show: Carnivalesque Imagery In The Fiction Of Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor And Katherine Anne Porter, Virginia Mccarley
Freedom At The Freak Show: Carnivalesque Imagery In The Fiction Of Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor And Katherine Anne Porter, Virginia Mccarley
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines the function of the circus and the sideshow in the work of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter, arguing that all of these authors employ Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque as a reaction to and against the expectations put on them as women who are pressured to conform to the Southern ideal. In the first chapter, I argue that Eudora Welty uses the carnivalesque to reveal the performativity of normalcy in both “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” (1937) and “A Memory” (1937). These performances, in the first story particularly, offer a critique of …
How Sweet It Is: Swamp Pop Soda And Modern Day Sugar, Rebecca Lauck Cleary
How Sweet It Is: Swamp Pop Soda And Modern Day Sugar, Rebecca Lauck Cleary
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis accompanies a documentary film about Swamp Pop Premium Sugarcane Sodas, a Louisiana cane sugar beverage created by Collin Cormier and John Petersen, two cousins from Lafayette, Louisiana. The two recognized the long history of sugarcane farming in Louisiana, and were inspired to feature real cane sugar from their home state in their beverages. This paper begins with an overview of research about the historical aspect of sugarcane production and continues with contextualization of the interviews with co-founders Cormier and Petersen, as well as sugarcane farmer Jessie Breaux. The accompanying film contains interviews conducted in the summer and fall …
Small Batch: Women's Positions In Southern Craft Beverages, Victoria De Leone
Small Batch: Women's Positions In Southern Craft Beverages, Victoria De Leone
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores three different forms of narrative in order to understand how and why craft beverage industries, specifically beer and whiskey, have been framed as masculine spaces. Women who seek to work in or around these industries are often sorted into the marketing, sales and service corners of the industry, and the production floor still hosts very few women, and those women must negotiate performing their femininity and the masculinities deemed necessary for the environment simultaneously. I argue that the way that we talk about women who choose to do this work is rooted in a history of domestic …
One Or Two Things I Know About Us: Narrative Strategies For Autoethnography, Self-Representation And Healing In Four Memoirs By Poor-White Women From The U.S. South, Joseph Aaron Farmer
One Or Two Things I Know About Us: Narrative Strategies For Autoethnography, Self-Representation And Healing In Four Memoirs By Poor-White Women From The U.S. South, Joseph Aaron Farmer
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines autobiographical writings by formerly poor white Southern women, who are rarely considered as a group and are more typically studied with “rough South” male writers, which would suggest that few women have contributed their own gendered experience to discussions of class, race, and sexuality vis-à-vis Southern poverty. Correcting this assumption, I examine formative statements by women from poor white backgrounds, including Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Red Dirt, Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt, Dorothy Allison’s Trash, and Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle. Each of these writers engage in narrative strategies that do not defend …
Book Of Empire: The Political Bible Of U.S. Literary Modernism, Barry Hudek
Book Of Empire: The Political Bible Of U.S. Literary Modernism, Barry Hudek
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
“Book of Empire” reveals that contrary to what is often suggested by scholars, modernism is not a moment of secularization and declining faith and that the Bible is actually a resource for mounting a radical critique of empire, nation-building, and racial oppression that defies conservative notions supporting those undertakings. For Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston, the Bible is a source of moral authority they use to challenge the imperialist, colonialist, and nativist projects of the twentieth-century U.S. In rebranding the Bible as politically radical, these writers are not denying the authority of the Bible, but are re-appropriating …
A “Human Endeavor”: Killing In Contemporary U.S. Combat Narratives, William Mackenzie
A “Human Endeavor”: Killing In Contemporary U.S. Combat Narratives, William Mackenzie
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This PH.D dissertation aims to develop a 3-D numerical model of dam-break flows on movable beds. Three tasks are defined to accomplish the goal of this study. The first task is developing a 3-D hydrodynamic model to simulate dam-break flow on fixed beds with simple geometry and test the water surface tracking technique. This model solves the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations using a finite-difference method on rectilinear, staggered grids. The volume-of-fluid (VOF) technique with SOLA-VOF advection scheme is used to capture the free surface motion. The developed model is tested using several experimental dam-break flows and the VOF technique is …
Cold War New York: Postmodernism, Lyricism, And Queer Aesthetics In 1970s New York Poetry, Jared James O'Connor
Cold War New York: Postmodernism, Lyricism, And Queer Aesthetics In 1970s New York Poetry, Jared James O'Connor
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores the poetry of Joe Brainard and Anne Waldman, two poets of the critically neglected second-generation New York school. I argue that Brainard and Waldman help define the emerging discourse of postmodern poetry through their attention to cold war culture of the 1970s, countercultural ideologies, and poetic form. Both Brainard and Waldman enact a poetics of vulnerability in their work, situating themselves as wholly unique from their late-modernist predecessors. In doing so, they help engender a poetics concerned not only with the intellectual stakes but with the cultural environment they are forced to navigate. Chapter 1 explores Brainard's …
God's Gonna Trouble The Water, Dominiqua Dickey
God's Gonna Trouble The Water, Dominiqua Dickey
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
"God's Gonna Trouble the Water," is a noir set in Grenada, MS in the 1930s. This novel explores the issues of race, gender, and class via the protagonist, a thirtysomething black woman who despite her low status in the socioeconomic hierarchy of this small southern town is able to navigate the delicate complexities of the environment to search for her missing granddaughter, a mixed raced toddler whose father is the son of a prominent white land owner. Although national history portrays Mississippi as maintaining a polarizing view on race relations, the novel will explore how this idea of Mississippi is …
If There Wasn’T Farming, Somebody Wouldn’T Eat: Small Scale Agriculture, Community Autonomy, And Food Sovereignty In Mississippi, Irene Van Riper
If There Wasn’T Farming, Somebody Wouldn’T Eat: Small Scale Agriculture, Community Autonomy, And Food Sovereignty In Mississippi, Irene Van Riper
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines the historical context of small scale farming and grassroots social movements in Mississippi’s history, and investigates the ways small farmers and community advocates are drawing upon their land-based heritage and local knowledge systems to create community-controlled food systems in dialogue with broader national and global conversations about sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty. Employing a multi-scalar method of analysis, the research studies issues from the perspective of individuals, communities, institutions, as well as national and transnational systems. The work draws from previous scholarship in environmental studies, agroecology, critical race studies, rural sociology, critical historiography, agrifood studies, and regional …
Sookie's Place(S): New Roadways Into The South Of The Southern Vampire Mysteries, Sarah Holder
Sookie's Place(S): New Roadways Into The South Of The Southern Vampire Mysteries, Sarah Holder
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Charlaine Harris’ bestselling paranormal romance series, the Southern Vampire Mysteries is only beginning to be understood as more than a cultural phenomenon, but rather as a highly politicized and critical work of fiction that shines through genre designations such as romance, mystery, and fantasy. Much of this praise can be attributed to the series’ heroine, Sookie Stackhouse, who gracefully traverses boundaries that divide what are arguably racial and ethnic groups ever at odds with one another as they share political and social space. Her adventures therefore pose significant questions concerning diversity, equality, and nationalism, but more obviously they ask what …
Maternal Melodrama And Modern Horror: Genre Hybridity In Southern Film, Sara Marcella Williams
Maternal Melodrama And Modern Horror: Genre Hybridity In Southern Film, Sara Marcella Williams
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation establishes the groundwork for a new genre of Southern film – a hybrid genre that I call Southern maternal horror. By integrating key elements from the genres of maternal melodrama and modern horror into Southern narratives, Southern maternal horror uses the central ambivalence found in both genres – manifesting as a desire to both return to and escape from one’s maternal origins – to challenge Southern nostalgia. Specifically, within its distinctly Southern framework, this hybrid genre frequently disrupts the romanticized notions of the Old South typically found in classic Southern films such as Gone With the Wind: idealizations …
Thrill Of A Billion Eyes: The Prancing J-Settes, Mary Paige Blessey
Thrill Of A Billion Eyes: The Prancing J-Settes, Mary Paige Blessey
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The “Prancing J-Settes” is the official name of the dance line for the Sonic Boom of the South marching band at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. The popular form of dance termed “J-Setting” sources its name from the Prancing J-Settes. The Sonic Boom of the South and the Prancing J-Settes have a loyal fan following and have had a lasting and widespread influence on popular culture. This is an oral history interview project focusing on the current Prancing J-Settes themselves to hear their thoughts and definitions of the form of dance they perform and its significance. The primary interviews …
How To Find What's Lost When What's Lost Is You: The Presence Of Disappearing Bodies In Vietnam, Afghanistan, And Iraq War Literature, Brandy Rachele Williams
How To Find What's Lost When What's Lost Is You: The Presence Of Disappearing Bodies In Vietnam, Afghanistan, And Iraq War Literature, Brandy Rachele Williams
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The focus of this study is on disappearing bodies in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq war literature. The term “disappearing body” has several connotations. Disappearing bodies refers to throwaway or neglected bodies, bodies that routinely absorb into the landscape. Women and African Americans typically fall into this category, but at times, Vietnamese, Afghani, or Iraqi people may fall into this category as well. The race, gender, and region of the author often determines how Others are posited in the literature. Disappearing bodies also occur in the form of grotesquerie. These bodies appear as dismembered, decapitated, mutilated, and wasting away. Bodies disappear …
Representation Of The American South In Marvel Comics, 1963-2016, Katherine Gill
Representation Of The American South In Marvel Comics, 1963-2016, Katherine Gill
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
My work tracks the role of the American South and Southern characters in Marvel Comics, from 1963 to 2016. This thesis spring from a simple question: how stereotypical does this Northern industry portray the American South? To achieve this goal, I read a lot of comics, applying literary theory (such as Patricia Yeager and Tara McPherson) as well as American cultural studies (1980s televangelism and the history of human trafficking in America) to my findings. After reading multiple comic books from multiple sources, I settled on four different texts, each with a unique approach to portraying the South: the portrayal …
The Radical South: Grassroots Activism, Ethnicity, And Literary Form, 1960-1980, Elizabeth Fielder
The Radical South: Grassroots Activism, Ethnicity, And Literary Form, 1960-1980, Elizabeth Fielder
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
“The Radical South” examines the art and writings of Civil-Rights-era social movements and locates U.S. based political structures in a hemispheric and global network. I reveal that the Civil Rights Movement, ethnic nationalism, and second-wave feminism were not separate entities; rather, the cultural work of activists was an intersectional effort that defied national strategies, such as non-violent protest and race-based separatism, that were often determined by their urban counterparts. Thus, I argue that new political aesthetics emerged from grassroots activism and set in motion ethnic and racial cultural expressions that embraced multiple, even conflicting, identities. As much as this art …
Southern Sound And Space: An Exploration Of The Sonic Manifestation Of Place, Christopher James Colbeck
Southern Sound And Space: An Exploration Of The Sonic Manifestation Of Place, Christopher James Colbeck
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines the relationships between sound and space, sound and time, and the influence of “place,” particularly southern places, on the creative process of contemporary musicians. The work also investigates the possibility of a comsouthern sound or auditory essence which may be embedded within all of the musical genres popularly thought to owe their lineage to the American South. The project is documentary in nature with the written component explaining the scholarship and methodology guiding the accompanying film. At the heart of the work are interviews with eleven contemporary musicians and three scholars of southern culture and history. While …