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Arts and Humanities Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2013

American Literature

William & Mary

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

"History Written With Lightning": Religion, White Supremacy, And The Rise And Fall Of Thomas Dixon, Jr, David Michael Kidd Jan 2013

"History Written With Lightning": Religion, White Supremacy, And The Rise And Fall Of Thomas Dixon, Jr, David Michael Kidd

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Baptist minister and author of novels, plays, sermons, and essays, Thomas Dixon, Jr. today remains most known as the storyteller behind the 1915 D. W. Griffith Film The Birth of a Nation. I argue that Thomas Dixon crafted a white supremacist rhetoric and narrative of modern whiteness indebted to the structures of Fundamentalist Christianity. With varying degrees of success, later writers struggled with the legacy the Dixonian cultural narrative bequeathed them.;Fundamentalist theology offered a whole host of tropes, metaphors, and arguments to its users. In short, Fundamentalism presented a rhetorical stance that was, in the hands of an ambitious and …


Southern Orientation: Reimagining Asian American Identity And Place In The Global South, Frank Sung Cha Jan 2013

Southern Orientation: Reimagining Asian American Identity And Place In The Global South, Frank Sung Cha

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Asians have been part of the American South's physical, cultural, and economic landscape since Reconstruction when plantation owners introduced Chinese immigrants to replace newly freed African Americans as their primary labor source. Nearly a century later, sweeping immigration reform led to the influx of thousands of Asian immigrants who transformed the region's social, economic, and physical landscapes. Southern Orientation: Reimagining Asian American Identity and Place in the Global South utilizes twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, film, and oral histories to investigate how the socio-spatial practices of Asians produce new iterations of place-bound identities that unsettle traditional notions of southern community. Drawing …