"Placing the New Southern Studies in conversation with film studies, this book is simply the best edited collection available on film and the U.S. South.---Grace Hale. University of Virginia --

"Placing the New Southern Studies in conversation with film studies, this book is simply the best edited collection available on film and the U.S. South.---Grace Hale. University of Virginia --

How could liberalism and apartheid coexist for decades in our country, as they did during the first half of the twentieth century? This study looks at works by such writers as Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison to show how representations of time in southern narrative first accommodated but finally elucidated the relationship between these two political philosophies. Although racial segregation was codified by U.S. law, says Leigh Anne Duck, nationalist discourse downplayed its significance everywhere but in the South, where apartheid was conceded as an immutable aspect of an anachronistic culture. As the nation modernized, the South served as a repository of the country's romantic notions: the region was represented as a close-knit, custom-bound place through which the nation could temper its ambivalence about the upheavals of progress. The Great Depression changed this. Amid economic anxiety and the international rise of fascism, writes Duck, "the trope of the backward South began to comprise an image of what the United States could become." As she moves from the Depression to the nascent years of the civil rights movement to the early cold war era, Duck explains how experimental writers in each of these periods challenged ideas of a monolithically archaic South through innovative representations of time. She situates their narratives amid broad concern regarding national modernization and governance, as manifest in cultural and political debates, sociological studies, and popular film. Although southern modernists' modes and methods varied along this trajectory, their purpose remained focused: to explore the mutually constitutive relationships between social forms considered "southern" and "national."

Hollywood films have been influential in the portrayal and representation of race relations in the South and how African Americans are cinematically depicted in history, from The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) to The Help (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013). With an ability to reach mass audiences, films represent the power to influence and shape the public's understanding of our country's past, creating lasting images -- both real and imagined -- in American culture. In Southern History on Screen: Race and Rights, 1976--2016, editor Bryan Jack brings together essays from an international roster of scholars to provide new critical perspectives on Hollywood's relationships between historical films, Southern history, identity, and the portrayal of Jim Crow--era segregation. This collection analyzes films through the lens of religion, politics, race, sex, and class, building a comprehensive look at the South as seen on screen. By illuminating depictions of the southern belle in Gone with the Wind, the religious rhetoric of southern white Christians and the progressive identity of the "white heroes" in A Time to Kill (1996) and Mississippi Burning (1988), as well as many other archetypes found across films, this book explores the intersection between film, historical memory, and southern identity.

Within the realm of American culture and its construction of its citizenry, geography, and ideology, who are southerners and who are queers, and what is the South and what is queerness? Queering the South on Screen addresses these questions by examining the intersections of queerness, regionalism, and identity depicted in film, television, and other visual media about the South during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Southern queers on screen often reflect the fantasy of cultural stereotypes. Editor Tison Pugh contends that when southern queers appear in films and on television, and when southern queers watch these portrayals, the inherent contradictions of these cultural depictions reveal the fault lines of gender, geography, and desire. These underlying schisms point to the infinite, if infrequently portrayed, possibilities of actual queer southern life. Examining a range of materials, including gothic horror films and drag queens on public-access television, the contributors show that queer southerners have always expressed desires for distinctiveness in the making and consumption of visual media. Read together, the introduction and twelve chapters deconstruct premeditated labels of identity such as queer and southern. In doing so, they expose the reflexive nature of these labels to construct ideological fantasies of southerners regardless of the complexity of their lives.

The Routledge History of the American South looks at the major themes that have developed in the interdisciplinary field of Southern Studies. With fifteen original essays from experts in their respective fields, the handbook addresses such diverse topics as southern linguistics, music (secular and non-secular), gender, food, and history and memory. The chapters present focused historiographical analyses that, taken together, offer a clear sense of the evolution and contours of Southern Studies. This volume is valuable both as a dynamic introduction to Southern Studies and as an entry point into more recent research for those already familiar with the subfield.

Since its publication in 1936, Gone with the Wind has held a unique position in American cultural memory, both for its particular vision of the American South in the age of the Civil War and for its often controversial portrayals of race, gender, and class. New Approaches to “Gone with the Wind” offers neither apology nor rehabilitation for the novel and its Oscar-winning film adaptation. Instead, the nine essays provide distinct, compelling insights that challenge and complicate conventional associations. Racial and sexual identity form a cornerstone of the collection: Mark C. Jerng and Charlene Regester each examine Margaret Mitchell’s reframing of traditional racial identities and the impact on audience sympathy and engagement. Jessica Sims mines Mitchell’s depiction of childbirth for what it reveals about changing ideas of femininity in a postplantation economy, while Deborah Barker explores transgressive sexuality in the film version by comparing it to the depiction of rape in D. W. Griffith’s earlier silent classic, Birth of a Nation. Other essays position the novel and film within the context of their legacy and their impact on national and international audiences. Amy Clukey and James Crank inspect the reception of Gone with the Wind by Irish critics and gay communities, respectively. Daniel Cross Turner, Keaghan Turner, and Riché Richardson consider its aesthetic impact and mythology, and the ways that contemporary writers and artists, such as Natasha Trethewey and Kara Walker, have engaged with the work. Finally, Helen Taylor sums up the pervading influence that Gone with the Wind continues to exert on audiences in both America and Britain. Through an emphasis on intertextuality, sexuality, and questions of audience and identity, these essayists deepen the ongoing conversation about the cultural impact and influence of this monumental work. Flawed in many ways yet successful beyond its time, Gone with the Wind remains a touchstone in southern studies.

The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South provides a collection of vibrant and multidisciplinary essays by scholars from a wide range of backgrounds working in the field of U.S. southern literary studies. With topics ranging from American studies, African American studies, transatlantic or global studies, multiethnic studies, immigration studies, and gender studies, this volume presents a multi-faceted conversation around a wide variety of subjects in U.S. southern literary studies. The Companion will offer a comprehensive overview of the southern literary studies field, including a chronological history from the U.S. colonial era to the present day and theoretical touchstones, while also introducing new methods of reconceiving region and the U.S. South as inherently interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional. The volume will therefore be an invaluable tool for instructors, scholars, students, and members of the general public who are interested in exploring the field further but will also suggest new methods of engaging with regional studies, American studies, American literary studies, and cultural studies.

Southern Screens: Cinema, culture and the global South adopts a transversal south-south approach to the study of screen culture across national and cultural territories. It examines the conditions by which screen culture participates in the generation, sharing, and circulation of new knowledge that is both southern and about the global South. The contributors, all of them residents of the world’s southernmost nations, examine new and traditional media that manifests an affinity with southern cultural imaginaries and territories identifiable through the sociological category of "Global South." Some of their chapters engage in analysis linked to specific national contexts, others follow comparative approaches to screen culture across national, regional, and socio-historical borders. Sketching a new tapestry of references to other areas of southern social science and cultural theory, Southern Screens traces a critical genealogy that here finds a productive place within an emerging, comparative discussion of the screen cultures of the Global South. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies.

This expansive three-volume set investigates racial representation in film, providing an authoritative cross-section of the most racially significant films, actors, directors, and movements in American cinematic history. Hollywood has always reflected current American cultural norms and ideas. As such, film provides a window into attitudes about race and ethnicity over the last century. This comprehensive set provides information on hundreds of films chosen based on scholarly consensus of their importance regarding the subject, examining aspects of race and ethnicity in American film through the historical context, themes, and people involved. This three-volume set highlights the most important films and artists of the era, identifying films, actors, or characterizations that were considered racist, were tremendously popular or hugely influential, attempted to be progressive, or some combination thereof. Readers will not only learn basic information about each subject but also be able to contextualize it culturally, historically, and in terms of its reception to understand what average moviegoers thought about the subject at the time of its popularity—and grasp how the subject is perceived now through the lens of history.