American Studies Commons^™

Oral History Of Eddie Lee Webster, Jr. (Part 2 Of 2), Eddie Lee Webster Jr., Chet Bush

Oral History Interviews

In this second of two interviews, Webster shares about his childhood and the people who surrounded him growing up. Webster reflects on life in the rural areas of Quitman County near Lambert, MS. Webster shares about the woman who raised him, Arizona Bradford, a godmother who legally adopted Webster and his brother and sister. Bradford also raised five other children.

Oral History Of Eddie Lee Webster, Jr. (Part 1 Of 2), Eddie Lee Webster Jr., Chet Bush

Oral History Interviews

Eddie Lee Webster, Jr. is a resident of Marks, MS in Quitman County who participated in the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

An Oral History With Liz Stagg Of The Oxford Farmers' Market, Liz Stagg, Victoria De Leone

Oral History Interviews

Liz Stagg and her husband Frank Coppola owned and operated The Farmers' Market Store for 12 years. It was a small store in Oxford, MS that offered local produce, meats, dairy, and other food items. Her husband passed away in 2015, and Liz closed the store in October 2016. I was trying to understand how Liz saw her place in the community, and what drove her to open, and close, the store.

This oral history was conducted as a final project for Catarina Passidomo’s class on Southern Foodways in the Fall of 2016.

Furling The South Carolina Confederate Flag: Political Expediency Or Cultural Change?, Grant Burnette Lefever

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Until July 2000, three Confederate battle flags flew at the South Carolina State House—one in each Legislative chamber and a third on top of the State House dome, on the same pole and just below the U.S. flag and the state’s Palmetto flag. A legislative compromise that year removed the flags from the State House to a prominent site 100 yards away in front of the building, next to a memorial to South Carolina’s Confederate dead. Though it only moved the flag a short distance and to an arguably more visible location, the 2000 compromise was the culmination of over …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Economic Enchantment In Eudora Welty's A Curtain Of Green, Elizabeth Moore

Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes Eudora Welty's short story collection, A Curtain of Green, and the interactions between its characters and the Mississippi economy. The paper takes into account Eudora Welty's work with the WPA during the Great Depression and her experiences photographing Mississippians throughout the state. Additionally, this thesis uses Welty's terminology when describing her experience of shopping as a child, specifically the enchantment of goods. This material is used to argue that Eudora Welty does address economic elements in her early short stories. Furthermore, this collection demonstrates a difference between gender participation in the economy, particularly among salesmen and female …

The Mockingjay Phenomena: A Study On The Position Of Young Adult Women In Dystopia, Hannah Hultman

Honors Theses

The purpose of this research is to explore the messages and impact of three young adult dystopian trilogies, The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Uglies. In particular, the role of the American female teenager in political, economic and social spheres is discussed through examining the three female teenaged protagonists of these novels. For comparative purposes, George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World function as counterpoints to the young adult novels; the analysis of these different novels will prove that young adult dystopian novels show young adult women that their choices and actions can be integral to their societies …

Between Species: Biopolitics, Resistance, And Interspeciesality, Temple Jo Gowan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three twentieth-century novels—Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, and Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats—in the context of posthumanist animal studies. A Foucauldian biopolitical lens foregrounds the inextricably linked ways that both human and nonhuman animal bodies are governed and controlled in a biopolitical era. Each chapter focuses on textual links between speciesism and the oppression of particular human groups based on gender, sexuality, and race, arguing that each novel offers new ways of thinking about both our own species, other animal species, and how humans relate to the nonhuman world.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Read Me: The Emergence Of Female Voice In American Epistolary Fiction, Allison Melissa Ramsey

Honors Theses

The objective of the thesis was to study how the letter, as a narrative device provided by the epistolary genre, supplies unheard female characters with an avenue to speak when their worlds do not allow it. In the novels, the letters not only permit a female character to practice building a voice, but also provide a self-reflection and identification experience, which enables the woman to see where she is, rewrite her role, and control where she wants to go. Through reading Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, and Maria Semple's …

Sister Act: Margaret Walker And Eudora Welty, Carolyn J. Brown

Study the South

At the end of their lives, in the 1980s and ’90s, both Margaret Walker and Eudora Welty were recognized several times by their hometown and state for their long careers and bodies of work. The paths they traveled to reach this intersection of common recognition were quite different, however. Almost exact contemporaries -— Welty lived from 1909-2001 and Walker from 1915-1998 -— they share similar timelines and histories, both having lived through the Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. But as one was white and one was black, their stories are very different, as are their paths …

An American Prophet: Wendell Berry's Community Ethic, 1965-1977, Joel Garrott

Honors Theses

This thesis provides a detailed commentary on Wendell Berry's agrarian ethic as articulated in his early literature of the 1960s and 1970s. It is part biography of Berry's early life, part history of his early thought, and part literary interpretation of his early work. It expounds on the significance of Berry's personal connection to place, and situates Berry's agrarian argument for community life in the context of the social issues addressed in his early literature. The central argument of this project is that Berry's agrarian ethic was grown out of his relationship with his native place in Kentucky, and that …

I Have Been Somewhere: Place In The South Carolina Poems Of Nikky Finney And Kwame Dawes, Purvis L. Cornish

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following thesis focuses on the role of “place” in the poems of two black South Carolinian poets, Nikky Finney and Kwame Dawes. Borrowing from cultural and humanistic geographers’ myriad understandings of place, as well as philosophers’, I examine the ways in which Finney’s Rice and Dawes’s Wisteria function as meditations on and transmutations of the South Carolina low country in both its physical and non-physical dimensions, ultimately shedding light on historically silenced and marginalized emplaced realities. I also examine how Finney and Dawes employ different strategies of emplacement and their influence on the poems’ structure and meaning. In the …

“The Hard Work Is Done In The Looking”: Analyzing Representations Of And Responses To Appalachia In Popular Culture, Elizabeth Rose Barnes Trollinger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For many Americans, the concept of Appalachia as a singular place has been created through images in popular culture, often stereotypical. This thesis presents an evolution of Appalachian representations—or, more appropriately, a chronology of images in stasis, as they seem to have remained fairly unchanged over time. Responses to those images, however, have changed greatly. Most importantly, responses from within Appalachia have transformed, with regional people gaining power over the types of images of the region in popular culture. There is, however, a paradoxical dualism in the responses from within the region, as some Appalachians grow weary of being stereotyped …

The South According To Quentin Tarantino, Michael Henley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s portrayal of the South and southerners in his films Pulp Fiction (1994), Death Proof (2007), and Django Unchained (2012). In order to do so, it explores and explains Tarantino’s mixture of genres, influences, and filmmaking styles in which he places the South and its inhabitants into current trends in southern studies which aim to examine the South as a place that is defined by cultural reproductions, lacking authenticity, and cultural distinctiveness. Like Godard before him, Tarantino’s movies are commentaries on film history itself. In short, Tarantino’s films actively reimagine the South and southerners …

Material Melancholy: Stranded Objects In Modern Southern Women's Writing, James Travis Rozier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation traces the origins and uses of a specifically southern obsession with the past. Examining how southern women writers represent the compulsion to remember, I demonstrate how, in their narratives, efforts to retain intimate relationships with an idealized past obstruct characters' ability to live in the present. Their fiction aligns neatly with the dynamic described in psychoanalysis as 'melancholia’—not least because, in each case, these relationships with the past are typically ambivalent or even destructive, and the melancholic subjects must 'work through' their damaging attachments. Typical psychoanalytic approaches, however, have neglected how such troubled remembering might be influenced by …

Colorism And African American Women In Literature: An Examination Of Colorism And Its Impact On Self-Image, Jakira Davis

Honors Theses

The purpose of this study is to explore how African American women in literature have been impacted by colorism. Through this study which included a fictional novel from the twentieth century and a non-fictional novel from the twenty-first century we are able to see how women of color have been impacted by colorism. This thesis explores evidence of the impact of colorism and its impact on the image of African American women and young girls. This thesis suggests that there is evidence of colorism found in literature and thus colorism is a real issue in the African American community that …

Organic Angels: Innocence, Conversion, And Consumption In The Antebellum American Novel, Laura Jean Schrock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Midcentury American novelists variously reworked the traditional conversion narrative to reflect a marked cultural shift in attitude towards human "nature," newly conceived as innocent and inclined to salvation. This liberalized aesthetic of conversion takes shape through the trope of the "organic angel," a developmental female figure whose journey from childhood innocence to saintly womanhood merges the processes of sexual maturation and Protestant conversion. Because she purifies self-interested desire by redirecting it towards spiritual ends, the organic angel provides a symbolic reconciliation of the young nation's budding imperial capitalism with its millennial expectations. While traditional emphasis on a maternal ethos at …

Speaking In Wild Tongues: The Borderlands Of Eudora Welty And Alice Walker, Sara Gabler Thomas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Borderlands/La Frontera Gloria Anzaldúa describes her experience undergoing a dental procedure as a battle between her wild tongue and the dentist. Beginning with a discussion of Anzaldúa’s concept of the wild tongue, this project asks how writers across the US South depict unruly tongues and infelicitous speech. Methodologically, this thesis inverts the comreading model in literary studies of reading Third World writers through First World theorists. Instead, beginning with Anzaldúa, I propose to reverse this process and assert a new reading methodology of reading First World writers through Third World theorists. The trope of the wild tongue will mobilize …

Thin Bodies, Elizabeth Meliza Tran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Thin Bodies, is a fictional thriller revolving around a retrospective, female voice. It is a short novel-length view into the insular community of the sorority, specifically in the U.S. Deep South. The town and university are both fictional, as are the characters, sororities, and events, but they are based in realistic institutions of socialization and community. Sarah Beth, our protagonist and narrator, considers her coming-of-age through her recruitment, initiation, ensuing leadership, and eventual fall from grace in her sorority, Theta Kappa. The group of women that this novel intends to characterize struggle with identity and how they are perceived against …

Being Nice Is Lethal: Disciplining And Subverting Southern Femininity In Contemporary Southern Popular Culture, Kaitlyn Vogt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on the performance of southern femininity in contemporary southern popular culture, specifically prescriptive literature and reality television. Both texts provide valuable insight into how southern femininity is disciplined and subverted by individual women and the public. Humorous prescriptive literature in the first chapter provides the data necessary to delineate key markers of “ideal” southern femininity and how primarily elite white women perform it. The second chapter focuses on the show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and how June Shannon opened up a liminal space for thinking about alternative southern femininities before ultimately closing it with her scandal …

Revisiting The Ghosts Of Vatican Ii: Gender In Catholic Horror Cinema Of The American 60s And 70s, Currie D. Mckinley

Honors Theses

This thesis contextualizes 1960s and 1970s American horror films against the historical backdrop of Vatican II with the intent of discovering how the texts, reception, and legacies of the films could illuminate the gender politics of the various changes implemented over the course of Vatican II. The first chapter analyzes the text of Rosemary's Baby as a metaphor for restrictive policies on birth control on the part of the post-Vatican II papacy. The second chapter considers the implications of disagreements between the author and director of The Exorcist with regard to how different individuals wanted the Catholic Church to present …

The Discursive Commons: The Establishment, "Outside Agitators," And "Communist Subversives" In Gadsden's Depression-Era Political Environment, John Disque Agricola

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis addresses a turbulent and often violent political environment in Gadsden, Alabama during the Great Depression. Using a theoretical construct called the discursive commons my analysis suggests how very particular ideas such as the trope of the outside agitator, and the idea of the communist radical, were used by the establishment to incite violence against United Rubber Workers union organizers who came to Gadsden to enlist members in the 1930s and early 1940s. It is my contention that these discursive formations had affective power over the people who committed acts of violence against their own class interests. This thesis …