American Studies Commons^™

Performance: All Our Names Were Freedom, Jessica Wilkerson, Kevin Cozart

About the Project

Students in Jessica Wilkerson's class, SST 560 (Oral History of Southern Social Movements), participated in a staged reading of All Our Names Were Freedom: Agency, Resiliency, and Community in Yalobusha County, a multivocal and multilayered narrative inspired by listening to the interviews recorded that semester. The event at the Spring Hill M. B. Baptist Church was attended by approximately 70 community members, UM faculty and students, and six of the interviewees.

Through The Words Of Those Who Have Experienced It: Reading The Whitney Plantation Along Neoslave Narratives, Sarah Payne

Study the South

Recent representations of slavery, however well intentioned, have provoked discussions about who should represent black pain and oppression and what purpose such representations serve. Also evoking such questions are contemporary plantation tours, most of which are white-centered, “moonlight and magnolia” recreations. There have been efforts to represent slavery more accurately at plantations such as Oak Alley, and most notably, the Whitney Plantation, which opened in 2014 in Wallace, Louisiana.

This essay asks how our understanding of the Whitney Plantation, as a representation of slavery, a public history project, and an example of dark tourism, might be affected by reading the …

Outstanding Women Of Yalobusha County: The Project Continues, Colton Babbitt, Brittany Brown, Keon A. Burns, Cecelia Parks, Michelle Bright, Rhondalyn K. Peairs

About the Project

Statements from the graduate students in Jessica Wilkerson's class, SST 560 (Oral History of Southern Social Movements), preparing to collect the "untold stories" appeared in the North Mississippi Herald on October 17, 2019.

Recording Yalobusha's Black History: Phase I Begins, Dottie Chapman Reed

About the Project

In this article from North Mississippi Herald, October 17, 2019, Reed describes meeting the graduate students in Jessica Wilkerson's class, SST 560 (Oral History of Southern Social Movements), at the University of Mississippi.

Fieldwork In Yalobusha County, Jessica Wilkerson

About the Project

A summary of the daytrip to Yalobusha County taken by graduate students in Jessica Wilkerson's class, SST 560 (Oral History of Southern Social Movements). After church services in both Water Valley and Coffeeville, the students made first connections with their interviewees.

Oral History Project: Black Families Of Yalobusha County, Jessica Wilkerson

About the Project

Document presented to persons interested in participating in the oral history project. Sections included: who we are, what is oral history?, what happens during an interview?, and contact information.

Preserving Our History To Help Us Understand The Past And Present: Launching Phase Ii, Outstanding Black Women Of Yalobusha County; From The Ole Miss Classroom To The Yalobusha Community, Dottie Chapman Reed, Jessica Wilkerson

About the Project

Articles from North Mississippi Herald, August 22, 2019, describe the benefit of, and plans for, and oral history project to capture the stories of Black families in Yalobusha County.

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

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

A Modernized Fairy Tale: Speculations On Technology, Labor, Politics, And Gender In The Oz Series, Zachary Hez Hollingsworth

Honors Theses

On the surface, L. Frank Baum's Oz series would appear to merely be fourteen books of inventive children's fantasy, but in truth Baum communicates several personal progressive beliefs to his youthful audience through the use of his fantastical world upon closer examination. For my research, I reread every book in Baum's original Oz series and made note of any potentially relevant allegorical or metaphorical themes. Once I started to notice a trend of themes regarding technology, labor, politics, and gender, I settled on these themes to be the overall focus of my thesis's discussion. I read as many academic essays …

Haunted Mississippi: Ghosts, Identity, And Collective Identity, Hailey Cooper

Honors Theses

This thesis wrestles with the duality of the terms haunting and ghosts in relation to Mississippi and its collective identity and narrative. Ghostlore and haunted tourism provide insight into shared cultural constructs and indicate an absence of certain perspectives from more generally held ideas of identity. Analyses of ghost stories from around the state explore these hauntings of history and ghosted narratives, so it is ghosts v. ghosted and hauntings v. haunted. I use ghost stories from Natchez, MS to explore postsouthern spaces and performances of southernness and the narratives around female apparitions to study the role of southern womanhood …

The Cinematic South: A Look Into The South According To Quentin Tarantino, Justin Tyler Necaise

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the eight films directed by Quentin Tarantino. More specifically, it examines how Tarantino portrays the American South, southernness, and southerners throughout his filmography. I watched each film countless times, read each screenplay, and read many articles written about the films. I also read many biographies, and I watched many interviews with Quentin Tarantino. In this work, I find that Tarantino exploits the South in order to create much more despicable characters, which furthers the stereotype that the South is in some way lesser to the rest of the United States. The South according to Quentin Tarantino is …

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 …

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 …

Tales As Old As Time: The Origins Of Selected Fairy Tales And Their Legacies In Popular Culture, Ann Louise Jackson

Honors Theses

This thesis seeks to analyze a selection of fairy tales and their film adaptations. The research centers on the origins of these selected stories and their cinematic derivatives, with particular focus given to authorial and cultural influences as well as audience perceptions of these works. The evolution of character through these fairy tales is an area of interest in this thesis, with an emphasis on agency and the depiction of the heroines through the stories and their adaptations. Including two well-known fairy tales and one that is more obscure, this thesis aims to understand how each variation is conceived and …

Reevaluating Religion: A Case For Inclusivity Of Lgbtq Christians In The Church, Amber Erin Dupree

Honors Theses

This thesis project is focused on understanding the discrimination that is rampant amongst Southern churches regarding their LGBTQ members and offering solutions to this problem that has occurred throughout the many generations of Christianity. In order to understand this discrimination, three books were consulted for the research aspect of this project. The three books include the following: Sweet Tea by E. Patrick Johnson, Don't Be Afraid Anymore by Troy Perry, and Our Tribe by Nancy Wilson. A Questionnaire was also given to people who identified as Southern, Christian, and LGBTQ in order to gain an understanding of the current sentiments …

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 …

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 …

Nella Larsen: An Untold Story Of Race Through Literature, Bria Stephens Stephens

Honors Theses

This study explores the life of Nella Larsen, investigating how her unusual childhood and early adulthood provided substance for her to make critical and unique views on race relations and racially dichotomized communities. The study shows how the Harlem Renaissance was essential in providing this outlet to Larsen; it was an era where African American art was lauded. The investigation required research into Larsen's childhood and early adult life using several different pieces of biographical works. After detailing impactful events in her early life, the study developed further with critical analyzation of her fictional short stories and novels. Additional research …

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 …

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 …

Everybody's Story: Gertrude Stein's Career As A Nexus Connecting Writers And Painters In Bohemian Paris, Elizabeth F. Milam

Honors Theses

My thesis examines how the combination of Gertrude Stein's career, Paris, and the time period before, during, and after The Great War conflated to create the Lost Generation and affected the work of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. Five different sections focus on: the background of Stein and how her understanding of expression came into existence, Paris and the unique environment it provided for experimentation at the beginning of the twentieth century (and how that compared to the environment found in America), Modernism existing in Paris prior to World War One, the mass culture of militarization in World War One …

All Things Loved And Unlovable: Discovering Southern Identity In Black Migration Novels, Michael Holman

Honors Theses

This thesis traces the development of the ways that the South figures in the imaginations of black writers by examining Southern identity in three novels centered around migratory protagonists. The thesis examines the ways in which folk identity, urban landscapes, remigration, and gender shape the migration experience in each novel. The novels discussed here are Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Quicksand posits the South as a place of unique danger, especially for black women, Invisible Man characterizes it as a place defined by oppressive memory that may be utilized as a resource …

Out Of Darkness, Have I Cried Unto Thee: An Examination Of The Treatment Of African Americans At The Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum During Reconstruction, James Gerald Paul

Honors Theses

The area of my research concerns the treatment of the mentally ill at the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum during Reconstruction particularly mentally ill African Americans. My primary research came from reviewing archival documents regarding the asylum at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, MS. The annual reports from the superintendent and board of trustees of the asylum provided the greatest amount of information. In addition to these documents, I also drew input from scholarly works on lunatic asylums including Whitney Barringer and Adia Brooks as well as writers on Reconstruction and the development of black culture in …

Photographic Representations Of The South: Eudora Welty And Doris Ulmann, Molly Maher

Honors Theses

Eudora Welty and Doris Ulmann both photographed African Americans living in the South during the 1930s. Ulmann photographed the unique Gullah community in South Carolina, documenting their agricultural work, religious traditions, and lifestyle. Welty photographed the African American community within her home state of Mississippi. Despite a parallel interest in subject matter, Welty stated that she did not like Ulmann's photography. This thesis examines the differences between Welty and Ulmann's techniques and their relationships to the South, their subjects, and literary texts in order to identify why Welty explicitly expressed a dislike for Ulmann's photographs.