Volume 46, Issue 2, November 2012

The Native South Issue
David A. Davis is Assistant Professor of English and Southern Studies at Mercer University and Editor of the SSSL Newsletter.

My hometown, Macon, Georgia, is site of the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds. This area has been inhabited for at least 11,000 years. About 1,000 years ago, people here began building elaborate funeral mounds, and construction projects and archeological digs over the past several decades have revealed thousands of bones and artifacts. These objects suggest a narrative about an entire civilization that thrived in the South long before the South ever existed.

When Hernando de Soto’s expedition crossed North America in the 1540s, they encountered the mounds, and they found a large, prosperous population center thriving in the mounds’ shadow. The diseases that the expedition spread, however, depleted the population, and over the next few centuries, encounters between natives in the South and settlers in the South would be consistently tragic, culminating with Removal, the systematic dispossession and expulsion of tribes in the South to make way for expanding cotton plantations. Macon’s history is in many ways a microcosm of native history in the South.

The discourse of the Native South examines the legacy of Native Americans in the region, interactions between Native Americans and other southerners, and the ways in which native identity persists in the South. A number of scholars, including SSSL’s new president, Eric Gary Anderson, have opened a conversation between scholars of southern literature and scholars of Native American studies that adds an important new dimension to the discourse. In this issue of the newsletter, Melanie Benson Taylor describes recent interventions in Native South scholarship, and LeAnne Howe and Robbie Ethridge discuss the field and some avenues for new research.

Also in this issue, Lorie Watkins shares a remembrance of Noel Polk, a legend in southern literary studies who passed away earlier this year.

President’s Column
Eric Gary Anderson is Associate Professor of English and Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at George Mason University. He is the author of American Indian Literature and the Southwest: Contexts and Dispositions and several essays on southern literature, Native American studies, and ethnicity and geography.

In LeAnne Howe’s 2001 novel Shell Shaker, Isaac Billy writes a newspaper column titled “Advice to the Choctaw Lovelorn.” But “when people began calling him ‘The Indian Ann Landers,'” we’re told, “overconfidence swelled him up like a tick.” This cautionary note makes me even more glad that I’m an SSSL President, not a Miss Lonelyhearts columnist, and even more certain that my own column really needs to take a different tack. Specifically, I need to channel air traffic control tower supervisor Steve McCroskey. Steve, played by Lloyd Bridges in the movie Airplane!, is best known as the man who might have picked the wrong week to give up a seemingly endless number of things probably best left unmentioned in my inaugural SSSL President’s column. “Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up _____,” Steve ruefully exclaims, again and again, which is to say “looks like I picked the wrong week to try something new,” given the far bigger, far stranger, far newer kind of newness threatening to descend from the skies.

It looks like I picked the wrong week to work on my first SSSL Newsletter column. Northern Virginia, where I live and work, is in many respects ambiguously, dubiously “southern”—but less so when the red part of the Hurricane Sandy radar map hovers over your house for more than 24 hours. We were lucky, compared to many in my home state of New Jersey, many in my old stomping ground of lower Manhattan, and many in the Caribbean whose struggles went largely unmentioned by U.S. media, but Sandy’s loud wind and heavy rain was the southern meteorological soundtrack to this column’s first, halting, incomplete draft.

Then, as anyone who grew up in my baby boomer suburban neighborhood in central New Jersey would know, came Mischief Night. Halloween Eve festivities are not, I think, what they used to be, which I take to be more a generational than a regional difference. But, for me, Mischief Night still looms large and conspires with Halloween and Election Day in ways that awaken my inner Steve McCroskey. I didn’t add many words to this column as trick-or-treaters and political solicitors, some of the latter bearing trace evidence of souths far from my own, descended on our house.

Words come much more readily, though, when I think about the other big event on my calendar this time of year: Native American Heritage Month. The George Mason University Native American & Indigenous Alliance student group (NAIA) has scheduled a full slate of events for this November, highlighted by our tenth annual Veterans’ Day Powwow. NAIA, which was two amazingly spirited students and an advisor in its early days, has grown to the point where some of our meetings are standing-room only. About one hundred of Mason’s 30,000 students self-identify as Indigenous. NAIA here is nowhere near as big as NASA, the Native American Student Association at my previous home institution, Oklahoma State University. And yet. At George Mason University in northern Virginia, some twenty miles west of Washington, DC, some ten miles east of Manassas National Battlefield Park, and some eighty miles due south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Indigenous and non-Native people come together every year to celebrate Native American Heritage Month.

As this issue of the Newsletter makes clear, there is more than one way to tell the stories of Indigenous literatures and cultures in and of the south. From an SSSL point of view, “the Native South” is relatively new (and yes, we need to do something about the “the” as well as the rest of this work-in-progress name). From a Native American and Indigenous Studies point of view, the cultures, histories, transformations, and survivals of Indigenous people here, as elsewhere, are longstanding and generally well-known. Robbie Ethridge’s shatter zone paradigm offers one important way of understanding complicated Native cultural splittings and recombinations in parts of the southeast: the “transformation of the Mississippian world,” driven by European invasion but also centered, to the considerable extent possible, on “Native polities and people.” This work matters, not only for anthropologists and historians, not only for Indigenous communities, but also for those of us who work in literary studies. The more I hear someone at an SSSL session ask a question about how X or Y connects to Indians in the South, the more I know that we really are finding new ways to do the crucial, creative, interdisciplinary work of reconceiving “Southern Culture” as “cultures in and of ‘the South.'”

So let’s modify Steve McCroskey’s rueful exclamation: it looks like we picked the right place, and the right time, to think anew about our ever-shifting, ever-multiplying field/s. With LeAnne Howe, Robbie Ethridge, Melanie Benson Taylor, and many others, I honor and celebrate the distinct, vital, lasting accomplishments of those who came before us—very much including what might well be the most stunning Indigenous accomplishment of all: surviving colonial invasion. Historians, ethnohistorians, anthropologists, and archaeologists, to name no more, have been working in Native Southern studies for longer than literary studies people, but as my friends and colleagues say so powerfully in the pages that follow, the promise of good, fresh, interdisciplinary, Native Southern literary studies work is robust. Keep an eye out for new and forthcoming work by, for example, Gina Caison, Rain Goméz, and Kirstin Squint. The stories I’ve told here add to this picture by making a case for various other kinds of native southern work—linked to research and scholarship, of course, but emphatic about the importance of teaching, curricular development, advising and supporting student groups, and building alliances across fields and cultures.

Let’s keep talking, imaginatively and deeply and daringly and (yes) optimistically, about our research and writing but also about our teaching and mentoring, our service, our curriculum- and program-building, our organizing, and all the other, all-too-often invisible things that we do, as southernists, to make and remake Southern studies. In Virginia, thanks mainly to Karenne Wood’s tireless leadership, we are fortunate to work with the Virginia Indian Heritage Program (part of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities) and the Virginia Indian Nations Summit in Higher Education, a collaboration that brings together tribal representatives, Native high school and college students, representatives of college and university NAIS programs, state government workers, and other interested parties, the better to talk together and learn from each other about the work we’ve done and the work that comes next. I hope you’ll get to know the Karenne Woods and the VINSHEs in your home state. And I’m excited by the prospect that SSSL will, too.

Warm thanks to David Davis for proposing a Native South issue of the Newsletter and for making it happen. And thanks, now and always, to LeAnne, Robbie, and Melanie for your friendship and your brilliance. Achukma.

Oh! and our 2014 conference will meet March 27-29, 2014, in Arlington, Virginia. A call for proposals is coming soon, as is a new SSSL website. And SSSL committees are staffed up and hard at work. Thanks to the Holman Committee (Lisa Hinrichsen, Melanie Benson Taylor, and chair Chris Metress) and the Rubin Committee (Leigh Anne Duck, Cole Hutchison, Sarah Gleeson-White, Jim Watkins, and chair David Davis), and thanks to Michael Bibler, Lisa Hinrichsen, and Kirstin Squint for joining me on the SSSL 2014 Conference Committee.

Louis D. Rubin Prize
Beginning this year, SSSL will award the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize for best article on southern literature published by a society member in a peer-reviewed journal. The prize honors the legacy of Dr. Rubin, who founded the society, established the Southern Literary Journal and the southern literary series from LSU Press, and started the careers of many writers and critics.

Essays listed in the recent publications section of the newsletter during a given calendar year will be eligible for consideration. The inaugural award will be presented at the American Literature Association conference in 2013.

Membership
To remain current and continue receiving SSSL updates, please renew your membership. Send this membership form to Kathryn McKee with a check for $20 for tenured and tenure-track faculty or $10 for instructors, graduate students, or retired faculty.

If your address has changed, please update Kathryn McKee at [email protected].

Go to top

Rocket Man: The Rise of the Native South (Verse One)
Melanie Benson Taylor (Herring Pond Wampanoag) is Associate Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002 (2008) and Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause (2012).

I want to begin, purposefully, with that granddaddy of all southern clichés, from the irrefutable granddaddy of modern southern letters. I refer, of course, to William Faulkner and his tirelessly repeated quip that “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” This refrain continues to enjoy such wide currency in literary, cinematic, even political discourse far beyond Faulkner’s moment that we may well have stopped questioning what he actually meant—much like a tune grown so familiar that we cease to wonder whether we’ve gotten the lyrics altogether wrong (anyone familiar with the recent Volkswagen ad, featuring drivers belting out myriad mistranslations of Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” will understand just what I mean). To inhabitants and critics of the “Native South” in particular, Faulkner’s irrepressible chorus has often functioned as an infectious tune whose myriad renditions have not always been quite on pitch. Until now, that is.

If anyone has reason to sing about the South’s undead pasts, it would be the Southeastern American Indian. Yet for reasons that resonate with colonial repression tactics on a national scale, those voices are seldom heard. When they are acknowledged, they tend to be scratchy, disembodied recordings played on an antique gramophone. To channel Faulkner again:

“We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Choctaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable” (Absalom, Absalom!, 80)

In this (nearly as famous) passage, Faulkner is of course not really talking about Indians at all, but their southern aristocratic heirs—“Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them”—and, in turn, the troubled legions they spawn. When Faulkner decided to pay any attention to those “inexplicable” Indians of the Southern past, he sketched them in forms familiar and intimate: as wealthy plantation owners, frivolous fops, and ex-slaves. In short, his “Chickachoctasaw” inventions were red on the outside, but white and black to the core.

Both before and after Faulkner’s interference, Indians in the South suffered from the overwhelming strokes of colonial amnesia and the persistently biracial solipsism of a region constructed on the memory and trauma of chattel slavery. Consequently, Native peoples themselves are resurrected in the regional literature just long enough to serve as foils or parables. The Agrarians, for instance, were fond of comparing themselves with the poor Indians, who provided a convenient analogue to their own narrative of perceived dispossession and proprietary assault, and essayists John Crowe Ransom and Herman Clarence Nixon even identified themselves (unironically) as “natives” and the northern carpetbaggers as “invaders.” Later writers continued to find in the South’s tragic Indians a kindred fount of fictional fodder. Forrest Carter, perhaps most famously and outlandishly, presented himself as an Appalachian Cherokee in The Education of Little Tree (1976), an “autobiography” only recently exposed as the fraudulent fantasy of a KKK grandmaster and white supremacist speech writer (Carter penned the memorably antisegregationist lines delivered by Alabama governor George Wallace). Less obviously fraught Indian impersonations have been perpetrated by both white and African American southerners, such as Walker Percy, Barry Hannah, Toni Morrison, and Charles Frazier, rendering the Indian perhaps one of the more classically “southern” tropes—and in the process, exponentially less and less “real.”

This trend echoes what has been a national phenomenon. Indians more than any other cultural group have been relegated to a past anterior, a national museum of obsolescence and tragedy, and exhumed merely as allies and costumes in pageants of someone else’s injustice (witness the Tea Party—both the original protestors and their more recent reincarnations—donning war bonnets and moccasins in their protests against taxation policies). The South’s version of this national narrative has featured its own particular tones of nostalgia and kinship, but for the most part, indigenous prologues have been subsumed by more recent colonial crimes. Naturally, southern literary criticism has tracked along similar lines. We have interpreted “the burden of history” largely to mean the ponderous cargo of slavery, and in doing so, southern studies in its “New” iterations has only gently revised the preoccupations of the “Old.” Certainly, our perspectives and orientations have shifted in ways that matter tremendously: we’re now looking hemispherically and globally at comparative plantation societies and literatures; we’re acknowledging the continued weight of Faulkner’s undead pasts on contemporary southerners from diverse demographies beyond the biracial; and we’re deploying theoretical approaches that radically expand our notion of what counts as “southern” and why. African Americans, immigrant laborers, and narratives of industrialization and modernity now figure prominently in the regional story, and the South’s seemingly unique position within the nation has been acutely diagnosed and deconstructed. All of these trends and conversations are now well-entrenched and thriving, and they have produced numerous field-changing summits, symposia, anthologies, and monographs that have become canonical, and not just in the small orbit of the SSSL. Indeed, never has there been a better time to be engaged in southern studies—unless, of course, one is trying also to navigate the equally dynamic and similarly parochial field of Native American studies.

To be sure, champions of Native culture have made tremendous inroads in southern conversations. We’ve begun exhuming the long buried traces of Indian precedence in the region, none more explicitly and thoroughly than Annette Trefzer in her Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction (2006), which recenters southern discourse around the formative presence and persistence of Native Americans in southern literature well into the twentieth-century. Along with Trefzer, our own SSSL president Eric Gary Anderson has been largely responsible for generating pointed and prolonged discussions about the vibrant, productive, and complex tribal cultures occupying the South before it was “the South.” Beyond the realm of literary study, historians have engaged in substantial efforts to rehabilitate our knowledge and appreciation for the tremendously sophisticated societies that ruled the region prior to Euramerican settlement. In 2008, a new journal called The Native South was introduced by the University of Nebraska Press, edited by prominent historians Robbie Etheridge, James T. Carson, and Greg O’Brien. Now in its fifth volume, the journal “challenges scholars of southern history to expand their conception of the field to include more than the black and white post-colonial south that colors much of the historical literature of the region” (http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Native-South,673964.aspx).

While these developments have been instrumental in our efforts to appreciate the South’s prismatic diversity, they have been by and large “historical” gestures and gains. The more difficult task has been reckoning with the aftermath of Removal and the remnant tribes who continue to live, work, and thrive in the contemporary South, either in revitalized bands or nations, or in some state of assimilation within “southern” culture more broadly. For reasons that make perfect political and cultural sense, those explorations have happened relatively more quickly in southern studies (where everyone seemingly welcomes the chance to acknowledge—or become—a Cherokee princess). In Native American studies more broadly, separatist and tribal nationalist positions have tended to discourage such cross-pollination. For wholly sympathetic reasons, Native sovereignty maintains an exceptional status within the realm of current academic and political discourse, where “nationalism” has become synonymous with imperialism—save for tribal nationalist contexts, where the “nation” remains a perennially embattled but unequivocally affirmative component of self-determination. Pursuing separatist modes of scholarly discourse thus means protecting and cultivating tribal sovereignty, both political and intellectual. No one has handled the translation of such concerns into a southern context more deftly and delicately than our own SSSL president, beginning with his contribution to South to a New Place (2002) where he insists on the importance of Southeastern Indian “inaccessibility” as a form of strategic empowerment. There is a reason we tend to overlook the South’s surviving Native peoples, Anderson argues, and it is precisely because they don’t want to be seen—or at least not through the warping lens of colonial assimilation and presumptive knowledge. Because of Anderson’s tireless efforts both in print and in behind-the-scenes organizing efforts, a substantial body of scholarship devoted to the indigenous cultures of the Southeast has nonetheless arisen and been embraced as more than a fleeting, boutique subspecialty, and it has done so with exceptional tact, grace, and respect for the Native cultures themselves who share these vexed regional histories, lunch counters, and water fountains.

Others of us have barreled into this terrain a bit more aggressively, and in doing so, have thrown open the door for more provocative future interrogations of regionalism, tribalism, and comparativism. We have seen fruitful inquiries into the patterns of confluence and antagonism between Native and African southerners, who often shared blood, crop, and battle lines both before and after emancipation: scholars like Claudio Saunt, Tiya Miles, and Theda Perdue have examined these trends historically, while Malinda Maynor Lowery, James F. Brooks and others have traced their influence on later generations and tribes, such as the Lumbee of North Carolina. New regional histories are frequently placing Indian leaders and slaveholders at the center of the South’s formative epochs, as in pivotal works by Angela Pulley Hudson, Christina Snyder, and Robbie Etheridge. As Snyder puts it, we must recover these roots in order to appreciate the remarkable degree to which “Native Americans and African Americans were just as southern as their white contemporaries, and their connections and memory and history run as deep and as true” (Slavery in Indian Country, 8).

While the task of resurrecting those deep histories has proceeded apace, attention to contemporary culture and literary production remains relatively less abundant. But that, too, is changing, in part because the last two decades have seen the emergence of superb new works of fiction and poetry from Southeastern Indian authors commanding our consideration. Marilou Awiakta (Cherokee-Appalachian), Louis Owens (Choctaw/Cherokee from Mississippi), and even Alice Walker (African American and Cherokee) led the way, followed by increasingly visible authors such as LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), Dawn Karima Pettigrew (Cherokee), Karenne Wood (Monacan), Janet McAdams (Creek), and Geary Hobson (Cherokee), among many others. The recent publication of a Southeastern Indian anthology edited by McAdams and Hobson has dramatically increased the availability of texts in this new canon, as well as critics’ ability to acknowledge and appreciate it as such.

So far, that reception has been slow but steady. Increasingly, panels on indigenous topics and Native keynote speakers have been turning up on conference programs throughout the South, most notably at the SSSL and usually under Anderson’s steadfast influence, and exciting new dissertation work and journal articles are forthcoming from a cadre of emergent scholars. To date, one scholarly monograph has been published—my own Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause (2012)—seeking to recognize the “Native South” as a substantial literary subfield in its own right. Yet in doing so, I warn that designating still more separatist cultural silos might be counterproductive to the rich cross-cultural dialogues begun within New Southern Studies and (more importantly) the region itself. Therefore, I argue explicitly for a reevaluation of both southern and Native cultures that pushes past their historical antagonisms and antitheses and recognizes instead what these seemingly distinct groups share: histories, discourses, genealogies, and fierce rhetorics of loss, nostalgia, humanism, purity, sovereignty, and unrequited recompense. In doing so, I’m answering the call of Native scholars who advocate more “Indian-friendly” versions of postcolonial theories that go under the various rubrics of globalization, syncretism, and cosmopolitanism. In particular, I’m attempting to employ Tol Foster’s idea of “relational regionalism” or Paul Lai and Lindsey Claire Smith’s recent theory of “alternative contact.”

Works like these are just the beginning of a new phase not just in Native or Southern studies, but in some unlikely and productive space between the two. What happens, I wonder, when we begin to see “relational” zones of coeval—and continuous—collision in spaces such as the South? What changes when we choose to see the South that has always been there, one steeped in indigenous culture and character as much as African and European influences? What happens, in short, when we muster the courage to see the South in the Native and the Native in the South, and to use those revelations as a template for exploring other, unlikely cohabitations nationally, hemispherically, and globally? In the process, we necessarily shatter both Native and Southern myths of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial exceptionalism, exposing the more haunting revelations of our new transnational perspectives: global capitalism’s porous, poisonous disregard for boundaries, borders, or local, tribal, and regional integrity. This is a conversation we need to be having together, not separately, and it’s exciting and more than a little satisfying to know that New Southern and Natives Studies scholars are the ones exploring these new territories, collaboratively rather than combatively.

With such expansive conversations taking root, and with the election of Eric Gary Anderson as President of the SSSL, the work of the Native South has finally assumed center stage, and we can rest assured that it will continue unabated for the foreseeable future. Perhaps at the next SSSL convention, we can invite everyone to a karaoke-style, round-robin symphony of Faulkner’s undying anthem for southern studies. We’ll be stunningly off-script and off-key, but maybe this is as it should be—so long as everyone’s voice can finally be heard above that last ding-dong of doom: puny and inexhaustible, perhaps, but “inexplicable” no longer.

Recommended Further Reading:

• Anderson, Eric Gary. “Ecocriticism, Native American Literature, and the South: The Inaccessible Worlds of Linda Hogan’s Power.” South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Ed. Suzanne Jones and Sharon Monteith. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002. 165-83.
• —. “On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial Strategies in
• Southern Narratives of Captivity, Removal, and Repossession.” Southern Spaces (Aug. 2007). (Available online)
• —. “South to a Red Place: Contemporary American Indian Literature and the Problem of Native/Southern Studies.”Mississippi Quarterly 60.1 (2006-07): 5-32.
• Awiakta, Marilou. Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother’s Wisdom. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1993.
• Benson, Melanie R. Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008.
• Benson Taylor, Melanie. Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.
• Etheridge, Robbie. From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
• Hobson, Geary. The Last of the Ofos. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000.
• Hobson, Geary, Janet McAdams, and Kathryn Walkiewicz, eds. The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010.
• Howe, LeAnne. Shell Shaker. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2001.
• Lowery, Malinda Maynor. Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
• McAdams, Janet. Feral. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2007.
• —. “From Betty Creek: Writing the Indigenous Deep South.” In The People Who Stayed:
• Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal, eds. Geary Hobson et al, 251-56.Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010.
• Miles, Tiya. The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
• —. Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
• Owens, Louis. Bone Game. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.
• —. The Sharpest Sight. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.
• Perdue, Theda and Michael Green. The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
• Saunt, Claudio. Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Un-Making of an American Family. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Snyder, Christina. Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
• Trefzer, Annette. Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007.
• Weaver, Jace, Craig S. Womack, and Robert Warrior, eds. American Indian Literary Nationalism. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.
• Wood, Karenne. Markings on Earth. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001.

Go to top

Interview with LeAnne Howe and Robbie Ethridge
LeAnne Howe, a member of the Choctaw nation, is Professor of American Indian Studies, English, and Theatre at the University of Illinois. She is a prolific author, playwright, and scholar, and her many prize-winning works include Shell Shaker, Evidence of Red, and Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story, and forthcoming in 2013, Seeing Red, Pixeled Skins: American Indians and Film co-edited with Harvey Markowitz and Denise K. Cummings, (Michigan State University Press), and Choctalking on Other Realities, New and Selected Stories (Aunt Lute Books).

Robbie Ethridge is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Mississippi. She is co-editor of the journalNative South, editor of The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540-1760, Light on the Path: Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians, and Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South, and author of Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World and From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715.

SSSL: What is “Native Southern studies”?

LeAnne Howe: Native Studies has been an interdisciplinary program for the research and study of American Indian tribes. However, most American Indian Studies programs and departments are moving to change their names to Indigenous Studies. This is true in Canada and other programs internationally. One of the reasons is that by looking at colonial methodologies that were/are used on Indigenous peoples. . . well, everywhere, we’re opening up the discipline to more potential confluences of research that will benefit students and faculty alike.

Robbie Ethridge: As an answer to this, I will take a page from the journal Native South and the position statement of the founding editors (me, James Carson, and Greg O’Brien). To paraphrase, Native Southern studies is the investigation of Southern Indians and their influence on the wider South and wider world. This however, does not mean that such investigations are confined to the geographic area that was once the Confederacy, but includes “the area occupied by the pre- and postcontact descendants of the original inhabitants of the South, wherever they may be” (Native South, masthead, 2012).

SSSL: How do the identity categories “Native” and “Southern” overlap?

LeAnne Howe: Three of the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” constitute some of the largest American Indian tribes in the United States, and they’re all from southern states. Consider the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma with nearly 200,000 members. The Choctaw tribal towns originally stretched across Mississippi, parts of Alabama, Louisiana and Florida; the Muscogee Creek Nation with 69,000 citizens is originally from Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina; and the Cherokee Nation, the second largest tribe in the United States with over 300,000 enrolled citizens, originally from North Carolina, east Tennessee, and parts of Georgia. These tribes can all consider themselves “Southern” because their original lands are in the South. I like to quote Paul Chaat Smith on this one. He’s talking about the ways mainstream people see the National Museum of the American Indian in D.C. and he contrasts it with how Indians see the museum. “One striking difference in how Indian audiences and many critics responded can be seen in the museum’s insistence on mixing old objects with new, demonstrating its belief that the past lives in the present and conveying its overall message that we are still here” (Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, 99). In other words, for Natives, the past is always present. Our homelands are present tense for us, not someplace we immigrated from and forgot. So much of the writing by Natives and Indigenous peoples always references land. In this way, our identity is both and.

Can a person be simultaneously Native and Southern? Yes. I would expand my answer to include a question. Can a person simultaneously be Jewish and American? If we agree that Jews in the United States can be both Jewish and American, and in some cases American Jews hold dual citizenship, that of Israel and the United States, then it seems possible for American Indians from the South to be Native and Southern. By and large Choctaws consider themselves southerners. Again the reason is LAND. Our Choctaw Mother Mound is in Mississippi. The beginning of our existence as a people begins at our Mother Mound, the Nanih Waiya. It is our birthplace as a people, and as a Nation. Choctaws from Oklahoma regularly return to the Nanih Waiya in Winston County, Mississippi. We visit our birthplace in the South because the land is also our family.

I often ask students in my classes about their creation stories whether Jews, Christians, or Muslims they tend to say it’s the Garden of Eden—there are, however, variations on the name. Then I ask where the Garden of Eden is located? They name a variety of places: Iraq, Turkey, Israel, or Iran. We talk about why all the confusion of locations. After a while I tell them that the birthplace of Choctaw people is in Mississippi at the Nanih Waiya, an Earthwork with a cave nearby. “This is our creation story,” I say, “and I can get in the car and drive to our tribe’s birthplace. It is on the maps of Mississippi.” We then unpack all the various ways of understanding what is important to people of various cultures. Native culture is less concerned with when an event happened than with where it happened. The place/land where an event occurred such as our tribe’s birthplace is more important than at what century or date in the ancient past. I tell this story to illustrate that yes, we consider ourselves Choctaws, Southerners, and Southeastern tribal people. We are many things at once.

A note about Nanih Waiya. A few years ago the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians in Choctaw, Mississippi, took over the site from the state of Mississippi to protect it and refurbish it. Though I walk on shaky academic ground here, I say “with all the bias I can muster,” to use Craig Womack’s phrase from Red on Red, that “the South” and “Southerners” would not/could not exist without American Indians, yet we are continually denied/erased, footnoted in the histories of the South. Why? Answer: LAND.

The descendants of tribes removed from the South are by and large still southern. Again, I would argue that Southerners mapped on to Native and tribal lifeways – not the other way around. I also disagree with the linguists that say the southern dialect of English comes from Europeans. It’s a ridiculous notion, really. When immigrants move to a new land their children take on the speech patterns of the locals. Listen to Southeastern tribal speech, the ways in which Southern Indians speak. In our languages the vowels are long and are song-speech, and consider the refrains: the repetition of certain rhythmic phrasings spoken by Southern Indians. So the story of how white Southerners mapped themselves onto Native cultures and languages is another prong of research ongoing in Indigenous Studies. Okay? (Oke, Okeh, okay is a Muscogean word regularly used by Southerners of all colors)

Robbie Ethridge: Yes, these identities can overlap and they are not mutually exclusive. Identity, as we know, can be quite slippery, especially when one takes a long view of history. As indicated above, the idea of the American South is, itself, a product of history and largely defined geographically by the slave-owning states of the nineteenth century. Now if we accept that as a geographic definition of the South, with all sorts of caveats about porous borders, and so on, we can then work to identify the original inhabitants of this geographic range. Then, it is a short step to identifying the descendants of these inhabitants. Interestingly, the Mississippian world (900 AD-1700 AD) overlays the antebellum South geographically because the requisites for corn and later cotton agriculture (and its auxillary productions) were similar.

Having said that, though, identifying the original inhabitants of the South is not as easy as it may seem. For one, Indians have been living here for at least 12,000 years, and pre-contact Indians were not static people—some left this geographic area at various times over those millennia and others moved into this geographic area at various times over that long expanse of time. In addition, with the tumultuous years of colonialism, Native people made many long and short migrations across the continent. For example, increasing evidence indicates that the Quapaws are recent immigrants to the South, having moved from the upper Ohio River to the Arkansas River in the mid-seventeenth century where they displaced (most likely) groups of Tunica or Natchez speakers. Conversely, the Creek Confederacy only formed in the seventeenth century, yet they formed from an in situ foundation when pre-contact Mississippian polities fell in the wake of colonialism and survivors regrouped into the Creeks. They then took in people from distant locals like the Shawnees. Yet, I would still consider all of these people, including the more recent immigrants, to be Southern Indians.

And then, of course, Indian Removal complicates this question even more. But as we said in our position statement forNative South. . . the descendants of the original inhabitants “wherever they may be.” Are these descendants “southern”? I’d probably say no, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t of the Native South, it only means they don’t currently reside here.

Reading LeAnne’s response I would only add that I had not thought of this in terms of origins. But I completely agree, that when one considers origins there is no doubt that one can be both Native and Southern.

SSSL: How does Native history complicate racial construction?

LeAnne Howe: The South is bigger than just the story of blacks and whites, but “the South” has willful amnesia when it comes to American Indians. Indian boarding school experiments of mixing blacks and Indians together begins in the South at Hampton Normal School for Blacks and Indians in 1878; earlier still, the study of early 18th century Indian wars 1722-1746 reveals runaway slaves came into our tribal towns, and the formation of new kinship narratives both good and bad. The story is enormously complex. The Removal era beginning in 1830 reveals a much nastier racialized South in which peoples that are “red” are removed (read, ethnically cleansed) so that Southern whites could take over our former lands. Once we begin to study the race and culture of Natives in the South, we see, for example, the roots of the blues in Native call and response songs and in our stomp dances, and even the roots of Jazz. One of the projects that Joy Harjo, Muscogee poet and performer, is working on is how Jazz came about through the music of Muscogean peoples.

Robbie Ethridge: That’s a huge question. One thing is for sure, once you put Indians into the picture of the South, it explodes the binary black/white construction, which I think is for the good. This has been a continued frustration of mine about Southern studies—the study of the South is almost entirely predicated on a black/white South, and it is a bulwark against any other sort of view of the racial complexity of the South. I always ask my non-Native students to take a minute and imagine “facing east,” as Daniel Ricther has put it, and try to see the American experience through Native eyes. It looks really different, and the black/white racial construction is usually the first thing to fall.

The interactions between Indians and Africans also has a long, complex history that also defies the usual model of race and racism used in Southern studies. Some really interesting recent works have been exploring how concepts of race and racism and Indian national sovereignty were intimately linked in the nineteenth century and how Indian people negotiated these tricky waters.

SSSL: Are the relationships among regional identity, tribalism, and transnationalism important to understanding the history, literature, and survival of Indigenous peoples in the South?

LeAnne Howe: Yes. But I would state the question this way: Are the relationships among regional identity, tribalism, and transnationalism important to understanding the history, literature, and survival of Southerners, as well as Indigenous peoples in the South?

Robbie Ethridge: Yes. For one, these relationships belie the stereotype of the static, stuck-in-time Indian. Once we start to consider these relationships, we are forced to put Native people into history and to see that they, like everyone else, are products of history. The world became truly global in 1492, and American Indians, like everyone else from that time forward, were and are part of this global system. Indigenous people around the globe change over time and continue to change with the historical and “prehistorical” winds. It’s the case today, and it was the case in the past. Also, it’s important to see that Indians, like most people, exist at the intersection of such relationships and one cannot take for granted or assume they know what it means to be Indian until one has examined these relationships. Indian people today and in the past forged their identities and affiliations out of this intersection. And I’ll second what LeAnne said—these intersections form us all.

SSSL: How does Native Southern Studies cross disciplines? How are anthropologists, historians, literary critics, and other scholars working together? Could they work together more effectively?

LeAnne Howe: The Native Southern Studies needs a multidisciplinary approach to grow the field. Indigenous Studies utilizes multidisciplinarity when tackling research projects. An example of multidisciplinarity is a new book by Chadwick Allen titled Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies For Global Literary Studies. Allen analyzes Indigenous technologies like the Earthworks in Ohio, as well as Polynesian ocean-voyaging waka (cultures that are worlds apart) to offer new methods for the interpretation of contemporary Indigenous texts. In my own work I cross disciplines working with archaeologists, cosmologists, physics, anthropologists, historians, and literary critics. It only makes sense in the 21st century.

Robbie Ethridge: How do we work together? I think we do an okay job, but we need to be able to talk across disciplinary lines better, which is sometimes difficult given the specialized jargon we all use—except, perhaps, for the artists. I think we also need to quit patrolling the disciplinary boundaries so much and give each other some leeway for making mistakes, etc., since obviously once one crosses the disciplinary boundary one is bound to make some mistakes. My approach to interdisciplinary work is to begin with the question and then use whatever means we have at our disposal to answer it. If literary criticism helps answer an historical question, then use it. If archaeology helps answer a literary criticism question then use it.

Scholarship on the Native South has been under way for several decades now, but I think only in recent years have we seen a convergence of the disciplines in addressing questions about the Native South. Certainly, the launch of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) pulled together these various strands, and it now has a vital organization and conference where people can talk across disciplinary lines. Obviously, NAISA encompasses much more than the American South, but it does provide a forum for scholars of the Native South from various disciplines to converge, listen to each other, learn about each other’s disciplines and work, and collaborate. NAISA is great for that.

In fact, we started our journal, Native South, in 2007 as a forum for interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary conversations because we thought the time was right for such of a thing. We publish across disciplines—history, anthropology, archaeology, literary criticism, sociology, education, public history, popular culture, linguistics, and so on.

We still have a way to go in doing truly interdisciplinary work, but I think we are on the right track, and we are already starting to see the fruits of these efforts in our classrooms and in our writing. For instance, I use LeAnne Howe and Linda Hogan in anthropology classes on Native North America.

SSSL: What are some of the challenges facing writers and scholars of Native Southern studies? Are sufficient archival resources and publication venues available?

LeAnne Howe: The biggest challenge facing writers and scholars of Native Southern studies is willful amnesia. Racism on all fronts. We’re footnotes in most texts on the South and Global South.

We face prejudices from our institutions as well. Just one small example by way of answering your question. I teach at the University of Illinois, and after the banning of Chief Illiniwek, the unofficial mascot is still “Chief Illiniwek.” The student organizations are still reprinting T-shirts with chief’s symbol and wearing them to our classes in a kind of defiance. The American Indian Studies building on the Illinois campus is periodically threatened. Someone calls and leaves a voicemail threatening to blow our building to smithereens. Swat teams came to our building in 2007, and in 2011, our director of American Indian Studies, Robert Warrior, and his family were threatened by a voicemail left on our office phone. Since I’ve joined the Illinois faculty in 2005, there have been three different administrations—presidents, chancellors, and provosts—all wringing their hands about how to keep us safe. I applaud their efforts, but very little is done. Perhaps no one can stop the harassment by Chief Illiniwek supporters on our campus. But this is just one example of institutional racism.

As to publication venues: There are many good venues for publication, and more journals are being developed all the time. The Native and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) is launching a new journal this year. American Indian Quarterly, SAIL, and American Quarterly, are a few academic journals. Still, we are invisible in most mainstream journals. The Chickasaw Nation press launched a new press about five years ago and they’re publishing new texts each year. This is an exciting development.

The field is not difficult to periodize for Indigenous scholars. Consider the work of Matthew Gilbert (Hopi), Tol Foster (Muscogee Creek), Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw), Joanne Barker (Lenape), Robert Warrior (Osage), Jace Weaver (Cherokee), Craig Womack (Muscogee Creek), and Jane Hafen (Pueblo).

More tribal archives are being developed all the time. Currently, the Chickasaw Nation is developing their archives at the Chickasaw Nation’s Cultural Center in Sulphur. That’s one example.

Robbie Ethridge: It’s funny—some of the biggest book awards in the country have gone to Native scholars and artists. But you can go to a history, anthropology, or Southern studies conference and there will be only a smattering of panels on Native studies, if any at all. You can pick up a conventional American history book and see the same old introductory chapter that basically says “Indians were here and then they were gone” before the author launches into an American story devoid of Indians. Southern studies still insists on a black/white South, as does Southern history and Southern literature. Yet those of us who work in the field know that the story of America is a story of interactions between red, white, and black.

I’ve thought about this so much my head is going to explode. I keep thinking, what is the hook, what can we do to get Indians into the mainstream of the American historical and cultural consciousness. I thought that the stellar works from Tiya Miles, Claudio Saunt, Theda Perdue, Celia Naylor, Fay Yarborough, and many others on the question of African slavery among Indians would have been the hook since Southern studies and history seems obsessed with the question of black slavery. But even these works go underutilized by the mainstream scholars.

And in anthropology, studying American Indians is almost passé or old fashioned, unless one is an indigenous scholar. The reasons behind this are really complicated, but derive in part from anthropology’s obsession with the “exotic” and “far away,” and American Indians just aren’t “exotic” enough or “far away” enough, or some such nonsense.

There are only a few venues for publishing journal articles—Ethnohistory, Native South, American Indian Quarterly, and a few others. I understand NAISA will be launching a journal, so that will help. However, publishing books seems a bit easier because the academic presses recognize that this is important work.

The periodization is a problem because the Indian experience has been so ignored in conventional studies and doesn’t necessarily conform to the usual periodization. For example, Removal is an important moment for Southern Indians, but that does not conform to the usual historical periods. Still, I think most of us find ways to work around this problem.

As for archival work, particularly in history and anthropology, there are few historical documents written by Native people, so we have to rely on documents written by non-Natives. This poses some peculiar challenges, but I think we have devised fairly decent ways of vetting these documents. We corroborate and amplify the documentary evidence with multiple lines of evidence from linguistics, archaeology, contemporary ethnographies, oral traditions, and so on. But still, in reconstructing the past especially, we will always have an incomplete picture because the evidence is uneven. But, as I always say, so what? I’d rather use this uneven evidence than let the story continue to go untold to the larger public.

Wow, LeAnne’s story about her institution is chilling. This kind of racism is scary, and it can certainly get in the way of so many things, including having our work accepted by the larger academic and lay audience. It’s all so disturbing, but I’m continually impressed by the courage of Native scholars, activists, artists, and others as they combat this sort of thing.

SSSL: Could you name some of the key texts for Native Southern studies?

LeAnne Howe: In terms of archives I would suggest the Mississippi Provincial Archives: French Dominion, Vols 1-5. The MPA: FD archives are full of great details about Southeastern tribes. I suspect the readers of SSSL will know most of these references I give, so I won’t go into detail. I recommend That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community, by Jace Weaver; Indian Literary Nationalism, by Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior; Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective edited by Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher Teuton; Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History by Daniel Heath Justice; The Sharpest Sight by Louis Owens; Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo; my own novel, Shell Shaker; and an essay I published in 2001, “The Story of America, A Tribalography” in Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies. Of course, I lovedRed on Red: Native American Literary Separatism and Drowning in Fire by Craig Womack. Both are fine Southern literary texts. I love Robbie Ethridge’s Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone, and I use Hero Hawk and Open Hand American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, edited by Richard F. Townsend as a text in my literature courses.

Robbie Ethridge: Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun by Charles Hudson. This book is the most complete and thorough reconstruction of the Southern Indians at the time of European contact (ca. 1540) available.

The Indian Slave Trade by Alan Gallay. Here, Gallay opens up the story of the commercial trade in Indian slaves that went on in the South for over a hundred years. (I’ll take this opportunity to plug my book, From Chicaza to Chickasaw, which details the consequences of the slave trade for the Southern Indians.)

The Indians’ New World by James Merrell. Merrell wrote this book in the late 1980s, yet it still stands as one of the best books about the formation of the historic coalescent societies, the Catawba, in particular, and their lives in the colonial world of the eighteenth century.

The House on Diamond Hill by Tiya Miles. This is a book about African slavery among the Cherokees. Miles reconstructs the story of the Vann family, a prominent, slave-owning Cherokee family. She writes beautifully, but she also opens up and answers numerous questions regarding African/Indian relations, Indians in the antebellum South, and so on.

Oh yes, Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand, edited by Townsend, is a magnificent book. It is the catalog from a Chicago Institute of Art exhibition of Southern Indian objects, and the book has tons of stunning pictures. But they also solicited articles from leading authorities on various topics as well as some from indigenous people. It’s really a great book.

SSSL: What are some opportunities for new research in Native Southern studies?

LeAnne Howe: Thinking in terms of “Indigenous Studies” will open Native Southern scholars to new avenues of inquiry.

In my work as a Choctaw author, playwright, filmmaker, and scholar I currently engage with the field of Indigenous Studies at the marrow of the bone. By that I mean my scholarship and creative production seeks to investigate the memories that we hold in our physical bodies; memories passed down for generations though kinship and fictive-kin memories (read, history); and the memories contained in sacred places such as Indigenous Earthworks in the Western Hemisphere.

At present I’m involved in a four-year project, Indigenous Knowledge, Contemporary Performance, funded through Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) thattakes as its starting point the intersection of two research creation projects within indigenous theatre: first, embodied research on the recovery of Indigenous knowledge in the South[s], and, second, the development of trans-indigenous dramaturgies. The project’s potential contribution to Indigenous knowledge is immense because of its capacity to revitalize Native performance, long fixated on “the victim narrative,” by turning to structural principles to Indigenous forms such as Earthworks.

Each of these related and overlapping projects centers around “test-case” performances under development and to be presented in 2015. The play I’m writing for this project, Sideshow Freaks and Circus Injuns, co-authored with actress and playwright Monique Mojica, uses research from our family members’ histories, (memories) passed down to dislodge the colonizer’s gaze from the Indigenous body. We propose to use research from the relationship between the Freak Show, the ethnographic display of exotics—including Mojica’s Kuna ancestors, some of them Albinos brought to the US and Canada in the early 20th century—in side shows, human zoos, circuses, and museums to investigate how the pornography of disability connects to the pornography of cultural diversity. The research/creation project asks, “How is memory held in our bodies? Where is it stored?” By embodying the experience of our immediate older generations in the South through embodied cultural memory, we explode the normalcy of the pornographer’s gaze. In the traditions of Southeastern ancestors, the Choctaw and the Rappahannock, we use mound building as a dramaturgical structure for our play. Hence, we are a multidisciplinary project. The creative and scholarly methods augment Indigenous epistemologies and indigenous knowledge(s) in the South.

Here’s another example. I’m currently writing a new novel, Memoir of a Choctaw in the Arab Revolt of 1917, forthcoming in 2014. I was a Fulbright Scholar in 2010-2011 in Jordan during the Arab Spring. I began my research by asking questions. Where have Native missionaries been, when did they begin traveling abroad once they were converted to Christianity? So in my own work, I think of trans-indigenous identity in the international arena.

Robbie Ethridge: It’s wide open. I am interested in the early contact era, and that era is only now receiving much sustained scholarly attention. There are many, many questions that remain to be answered about the rise and fall of the pre-contact Mississippian world and the restructuring of life afterwards (formation of the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, etc.). The Southern Indian experience in the Seven Year’s War still needs more thorough scholarly treatment. We need a modern look at Removal for all the tribes of the South. Post-removal studies still have much to be looked at. We also need more on twentieth and twenty-first Southern Indians.

The View from Pearl River
Lorie Watkins is Associate Professor of English at William Carey University. Her research interests include southern literature, African American literature, and American modernism. She completed her dissertation concerning Faulkner’s late fiction under Noel Polk’s guidance in August of 2007.

My first meeting with Noel Polk was a test. It proved prophetic in that many of our subsequent encounters tested me as well; he tested my intellect, my abilities, my sensibilities, and my worldview. That initial encounter, predictably enough, was in the classroom. His southern literature class was the first I took in my Ph.D. program. Going in, I seriously doubted my ability to finish the Ph.D., but teaching high school for three years and winning my own battle with cancer had given me the courage to try. I enrolled at the University of Southern Mississippi and signed up for his class right away. I thought that if I could pass his class, then I might stand a chance of finishing the degree. Those of you who have been in Noel’s classroom (or even withstood a session of his intense questioning) know what a fitting test that experience was. He quite literally taught me to read in a new way, with careful attention to detail, nuance, and, most importantly, for what wasn’t there. On the last night of class, he held me back to discuss my final paper. Before he said a word about it, though, he asked about my plans for the future. I told him that I’d probably never finish my Ph.D. and just wanted to get enough hours to teach at a community college. He looked at me over those little round glasses of his and said, “Well, Mrs. Fulton, I think that’s a bit shortsighted of you.”

From that moment, he began to let me into his world and guide me through not just academics, but academia. He taught me about “auhn” and “shurfs” and the value of late Faulkner. He introduced me to Welty as a revolutionary writer, not as some little old lady version of Faulkner. He took me to my first academic conference, taught me the evils of passive voice, encouraged me to publish my first paper (and showed me how to submit it), and continued to direct my dissertation even after he left USM for Mississippi State and the Mississippi Quarterly. During the turbulent administrative years at USM, he demonstrated the importance of speaking against injustice and preserving academic freedom. He was fond of saying—with his tongue only half in his cheek—that he was amazed that the state of Mississippi paid him to teach their children things that they didn’t really want them to know. In short, he was the very definition of a colleague and teacher—always teaching, forever learning, and agreeable even in disagreement. I think of my debt to him often, and I have patterned my own career after his example, even as I know I will always fall short of it.

I finally got the chance to give back just a small portion of what he had given to me when he first told me that he had been diagnosed with cancer. I suspect he told me because he had questions about treatment that I was in a unique position to answer. Moreover, he knew that I could keep a secret, and he desperately wanted to deal with his disease privately, on his own terms. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on either of us—the disease that inspired me to pursue my dream of an academic career is the same one that took him from us much, much too soon.

Predictably enough, Noel left us with one final lesson, even after his death. He upstaged every single speaker at his own memorial service, and, honestly, I was not at all surprised. It began when his brother Mickey told those of us attending the service that Noel asked to have his ashes scattered in the Pearl River. Several of us were taken aback because, as Mickey noted, “Noel spent very little time on or near the Pearl River.” I have even seen him refuse to wade in water where his feet wouldn’t be visible. The gesture was, as Mickey stated, “bewildering,” at least at first. Mickey went on to tell of how in April of 1959 Noel was working in his dad’s Firestone store in Picayune. There he overheard some of the most prominent men in town talking about the lynching of Mack Charles Parker, and that conversation haunted him for the rest of his life. As Noel recounts in the chapter titled “The View from Lookout Mountain” in Outside the Southern Myth, Parker was lynched before he was even charged for the alleged crime of raping a white woman. No one was ever even indicted for the crime. Mickey said that Noel didn’t believe the men he overheard were directly involved in the lynching, but he did believe that they had information that might have led to a conviction. That conversation inspired Noel’s commitment to preserving the rights of others, and in the cover letter to his will, he asked that his ashes be scattered in the Pearl River where Parker’s body was dumped, a gesture to atone for the injustice that he overheard.

I left the service, made a brief appearance at the wake, and immediately went home to read “The View from Lookout Mountain” and try to understand more fully his gesture. I reread that chapter with a particular appreciation for Noel’s claims that he felt guiltily removed from the Civil Rights era in Picayune. He thought it the one great failing of his life, and I was touched that he attempted to rectify that in death. As I sat reading, I realized that Noel was still teaching by example. I also realized that I was still a grateful pupil, doing extra homework because he caught my interest. My debt to him as a scholar is enormous, but that debt pales in comparison to the one that I owe him personally. He taught me and many other students not only about southern literature, but also about the flawed society that produced it and the great injustice that much of it records. He inspired many of us to work against that injustice, and continued to do so even with his dying breath. It was, as Noel wrote of his Uncle Alton’s funeral service in the last line of Outside the Southern Myth, “a most satisfying funeral” (213), one I’ll never forget.

SSSL Panels at MLA
178. Larger Than Life: Southern Heroes
Thursday, January 3, 7:00-8:15 p.m., Beacon F, Sheraton
Program arranged by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature
Presiding: Anthony Wilson, La Grange Coll.

1. “From Text to Stone and Back Again: The Transatlantic Heroism of Stonewall Jackson,” Samuel Graber, Valparaiso Univ.
2. “From the Old South to the New Frontier: Civil Rights, Black Masculinity, and Regional Superheroes in The American Way,” Brannon Costello, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge
3. “The Girls from District Twelve,” Jane E. Kuenz, Univ. of Southern Maine, Portland

471. The Undead South: Beyond the Gothic
Saturday, January 5, 10:15–11:30 a.m., Liberty C, Sheraton
Program arranged by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature
Presiding:Eric Gary Anderson, George Mason Univ.; Daniel Cross Turner, Coastal Carolina Univ.

1. “Disrupting ‘Hillbilly Horror’: Documentary and Realism in Contemporary Films of the ‘Mountain South,’” Leigh Anne Duck, Univ. of Mississippi
2. “Second Life: Salvage Operations in McCarthy’s Undead South,” Susan L. Edmunds, Syracuse Univ.
3. “When Dead Men Talk: Southern Pasts and the Promise of a Just Future,” Brian J. Norman, Loyola Coll.
4. “Funeral Practices and Choctaw Women’s Power in LeAnne Howe’s Shell Shaker,” Kirstin L. Squint, High Point Univ.
For abstracts, visit library.sc.edu/blogs/sssl/.

Calls for Papers
Southern Literary Journal Spring 2014 Special Issue
Literatures of Gulf Souths, Gulf Streams, and their Dispersions
Edited by Keith Cartwright and Ruth Salvaggio

We seek papers for a special issue of the Southern Literary Journal to be devoted to literatures all along and extending from the Gulf of Mexico—from before Cortes and De Soto to after the dispersants of British Petroleum, and from geographies connected by the Gulf as it flows from and into wider Atlantic and Caribbean currents. Our purpose is to address conceptual and disciplinary “gulfs” in the study of a significant and often vexing body of deeper southern literatures and cultures—gulfs that not-so long ago were nigh-invisible or seemingly impassable. Scholarly, creative, and inventive essays are welcome—essays that work within and transgress disciplinary boundaries, essays that engage canonical, understudied, and forgotten oral, performed, and literary works of the Gulf and that reconnect the North American South with its porous historic geography and watery extensions. We encourage work that engages gulf-entanglements all along the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf Stream–its loop currents and flows of trade and diaspora: the literatures that took shape under Spanish and French and British conquest and that resurface in Texas and Louisiana and Gullah/Geechee coastlands in counterpoint to “City-on-a-Hill” modernity; their pre-contact roots and continuing transformations in indigenous symbologies and poetics, their myriad African shapings all along the Black Atlantic; literatures that range from the Bahamas to Mexico and throughout the Latin Gulf and Caribbean; swamp and marsh writings; Creole and Mestiza aesthetics; the literatures of contact zones such as Veracruz and Biloxi, New Orleans and Havana, Honduras and Florida; Cajun and Vietnamese Gulfs; Gulf engenderings of bodies and ecologies; female/feminine incarnations and incantations throughout the Gulf; literatures of the Mississippi and the Rio Grande; engulfments of trauma, Gulf abjection, the Gulf sublime; Gulf sexualities and spirit worlds; engulfments of tourism; Gulf water rituals, floods, hurricanes, and the deep horizons of Gulf oil ruptures.

Deadline for Submissions via [email protected]: October 20, 2013
Inquiries welcomed: Ruth Salvaggio, [email protected]; Keith Cartwright, [email protected]

Natasha Trethewey: Making Meaning of Memory, History, and Racial Identity in the U.S. South and the Nation
Society for the Study of Southern Literature
2013 South Atlantic Modern Language Association
November 8-10, 2013, Atlanta, GA
Deadline: June 1, 2013

In a recent interview with literary scholar Daniel Cross Turner, U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey states, “I walk through the world thinking always of what has come before, that it’s still present, and I think it’s my job as a poet to tend to that.” In Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), Native Guard (2006), Beyond Katrina (2010), and Thrall (2012), Trethewey tends to the complicated nexus of memory, history, race, and identity within the South (and within the United States, more broadly). We seek a variety of papers that, in turn, tend to Trethewey’s work—papers that offer in-depth explorations of the ways in which she excavates personal, regional, and national histories and re-presents them within poetic and/or narrative forms. Please submit abstracts by June 1st to Molly McGehee (Presbyterian College) at [email protected]

The Ellen Glasgow Society
American Literature Association
24th Annual Conference, May 23-26, 2013, Boston, Massachusetts

The Ellen Glasgow Society seeks paper proposals for two sessions at the 24th Annual American Literature Association Conference.

Session I: Virginia at 100
This session will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Virginia, Glasgow’s exploration of changing post-bellum Southern women’s lives and roles. All papers that place Virginia at the center will be considered, but of special interest are essays that address how well Virginia has agedas a feminist text (perhaps in comparison to other works by Glasgow’s contemporaries ), as a representative of Glasgow’s oeuvre, and/or in the critical discourse since its publication. Please submit 250- to 300-word proposals for 20-minute presentations as an attachment to an email at the address listed below

Session II: Open Forum on Ellen Glasgow’s Canon
Papers that explore any aspect or work in Glasgow’s canon are welcome, but essays that address lesser-known or lesser-regarded texts (even by the author herself) are particularly desirable. In the interest of the celebrating the diversity of Glasgow’s oeuvre and in an effort to practice innovative scheduling, please submit to the email address below 250- to 300-word proposals for presentations no shorter than 12, but no longer than, 20 minutes (6 to 10 pages, respectively). This session’s panel can be made up of up to five shorter presentations or a combination of longer and shorter presentations totaling 60 minutes of reading time and 20 minutes for questions and discussion. Upper-level undergraduate and graduate students welcome.

Mark Graves (Morehead State University (KY)) at [email protected]. All proposals must be submitted by 5 p.m. on January 7, 2013.

The Southern Literary Festival 2013
The Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians will host the Southern Literary Festival, March 28-30, 2013, at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. This year’s featured authors include Tim O’Brien, winner of the National Book Award and many other prizes; Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and current Poet Laureate of the United States; Kevin Wilson, author of The New York Times bestselling novel The Family Fang; Dan Albergotti, award-winning poet; and Jenny Spinner, co-author of the nofiction book Tell Them I Didn’t Cry.

The Southern Literary Festival is an organization of southern colleges and schools founded in 1937 to promote southern literature. Each year a different school hosts the Festival—which is, in effect, an undergraduate writing conference that entails writing workshops in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and playwriting; a writing competition in those areas as well as in formal essay and literary-arts magazine; and a venue in which the participating students, faculty, and general public attend readings by well known writers. The SLF has an illustrious history. Robert Penn Warren, then a professor at LSU, was one of the founders. He spoke at the conference on a number of occasions, as did Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Flannery O’Connor, who won an award at SLF as an undergraduate and later headlined the conference as a nationally prominent writer. To learn more about the 2013 Southern Literary Festival and to get your college/university involved, visit http://southernliteraryfestival.com/ or contact The Carson McCullers Center at [email protected].

Call for Submissions for the 2014 issue of the NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY REVIEW 
NCLR’s 2014 issue special feature topic is War in North Carolina Literature. We are particularly interested in articles on particular works of North Carolina literature that deal with war (particularly other than the Civil War) and interviews with the authors of such works. Queries and proposals for the special feature section may be emailed to the editor, Margaret Bauer ([email protected]). Submissions due by August 31, 2013. For formatting manuscripts for submission and online submission instructions, please consult our website: www.nclr.ecu.edu/submissions.

Graduate Assistant Position(s) Available:
An Opportunity to Work on the Staff of the Award-Winning North Carolina Literary Review. The graduate programs at East Carolina University includes the opportunity to apply for an editorial assistantship with the award-winning North Carolina Literary Review (NCLR). NCLR editorial assistants help with editing the current issue, website development, grant applications, promotional activities, and/or developing a marketing plan. Candidates should have strong writing and proofreading skills and be proficient at using Macintosh computers and Microsoft Word. Desirable additional skills (or interest in learning) include Excel, Indesign (or other desktop publishing program), web publishing, and grant-writing.

For information about ECU’s graduate program, go to: http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cas/engl/graduate/degreesoptions.cfm. For more information about this award-winning journal, go to: http://www.nclr.ecu.edu. Students interested in working withNCLR should contact the editor, Dr. Margaret Bauer, via email ([email protected]) for more information.

36th Annual Appalachian Studies Conference
Communities in Action, Landscapes in Change March 22-24, 2013 Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina

We invite participation in the 36th annual Appalachian Studies Conference organized by the Appalachian Studies Association. This year’s theme is “Communities in Action, Landscapes in Change.” We encourage innovative proposals that explore all types of communities across the Appalachian region—historical, contemporary, and imagined ones—and the landscapes and environmental spaces that impact, and are impacted by, those communities. Formats might include: individual scholarly research papers and sessions; formed sessions; poster sessions presenting scholarly research OR documenting community work; panels and community presentations; performance or sharing of films, documentaries, videos, poetry, music, plays, art, and writing; roundtable conversations on contemporary issues, e.g. activism in the region, professional development, or a newcomer’s orientation to Appalachian studies.

Deadline: October 5, 2012. For more information, go to the ASA website: http://www.appalachianstudies.org/content/conference/

The 41st annual Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture since 1900 
University of Louisville, February 21-23, 2013.

Critical papers may be submitted on any topic that addresses literary works published since 1900, and/or their relationship with other Arts and disciplines (film, journalism, opera, music, pop culture, painting, architecture, law, etc). Work by creative writers is also welcome. Submissions may be in English, French, German, Italian or Spanish. Submissions will be accepted if received by 11:59 P.M. EST September 15, 2012.

Critical submissions: Send an email to [email protected] with two attachments in pdf, rtf or doc format. The first attachment is to consist of a 300-word abstract (double-spaced and titled) omitting all references to the submitter. The second attachment is to contain a cover page (see details below). Previously presented or published papers are not eligible. All submitters will receive a confirmation of receipt email from the conference within 5 business days of receipt of their submissions. Accepted submitters will receive notification via email in early December.

Critical panels: Panels pre-organized by participants are welcome. Panel proposals are to be emailed to [email protected] with two attachments in pdf, rft or doc format. The first attachment is to include: (a) copy of each abstract, (b) rationale for grouping papers including a suggested title for the panel, and (c) name, address, email address and phone number of panel organizer and/or panel chair. The second attachment is to contain a cover sheet for each participant. Panel presentation (ideally 3 papers) is not to exceed 90 minutes. Please submit all panel abstracts together within the same email.

Creative submissions: Send an email to [email protected] with two attachments in pdf, rtf, or word format. The first attachment is to contain poetry or short fiction/nonfiction selections suitable for 20-minute reading. The second attachment should contain a cover page. Submitter’s name to appear on the cover page only (see details below). Creative submissions may be published or unpublished works. Manuscripts cannot be returned. Creative panels are not accepted.

Submitters may submit both a critical paper and a creative work, not to exceed one entry in each category, sent together as separate attachments in the same email.
Submitter’s cover page to include:

• Name (as it will appear in the program)
• Address (preferably home address)
• E-mail address (necessary to confirm your acceptance)
• Telephone number
• Academic affiliation (if applicable)
• Title of paper/work (as it will appear in the program)
• National origin/genre of work discussed (please be specific)
• Personal biographical note (100-150 words)

Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas, July 21-25, 2013

A quarter-century ago the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference tackled the issue of “Faulkner and Race.” In 2013, the 40th annual conference seeks to build on and complicate this earlier work by exploring the relationships between Faulkner’s oeuvre and a hemispheric corpus of black writing, with a particular emphasis on African American literature and intellectual production, from slave narrative to the contemporary era of Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, John Edgar Wideman, Maryse Conde, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, David Bradley, Randall Kenan, Edouard Glissant, Erna Brodber, Jesmyn Ward, Edwige Danticat, and so many others. We hope to chart the lines of engagement, dialogue, and reciprocalresonance between Faulkner and this vital body of literature. Who are Faulkner’s most significant black precursors, his formative black literary and cultural influences? Who are his principal black cohorts, national and international? And who are his most formidable black successors and literary heirs? What common problems can we identify in these bodies of work, and what common—or, indeed, instructively divergent—approaches to those problems and strategies (discursive, figural, technical) for dealing with them? How has black literary production in the Americas affected how we read Faulkner’s work today? (How) does Faulkner’s oeuvre pose different challenges, rewards, and threats for black women writers than for their male counterparts—and what about the legacy of black women’s literature for him? How might this sort of comparative inquiry clarify or illuminate the ways in which writers of the Americas grapple with the impact of slavery and the plantation, colonialism, nationalism and empire, racial violence and terror, race-mixing, poverty and underdevelopment, Jim Crow, migration and diaspora, the Civil Rights Movement, and the role of the writer in collective life? How might it honor what Albert Murray identified as the fundamentally miscegenated quality of American (national and hemispheric) literature, culture, and life?

We especially encourage full panel proposals for 75-minute conference sessions. Such proposals should include a one-page overview of the session topic or theme, followed by two-page abstracts for each of the panel papers to be included. We also welcome individually submitted two-page abstracts for 20-minute panel papers and individually submitted manuscripts for 40-minute plenary papers. Panel papers consist of approximately 2,500 words and will be considered by the conference program committee for possible inclusion in the conference volume published by the University Press of Mississippi. Plenary papers, which should be prepared using the 16th edition of the University of Chicago Manual of Styleas a guide, consist of approximately 5,000-6,000 words and will appear in the published volume.

Session proposals and panel paper abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2013, preferably through e-mail attachment. For plenary papers, three print copies of the manuscript must be submitted by January 31, 2013. Authors whose plenary papers are selected for presentation at the conference will receive a conference registration waiver. All manuscripts, proposals, abstracts, and inquiries should be addressed to Jay Watson, Department of English, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677-1848. E-mail: [email protected]. Decisions for all submissions will be made by March 15, 2013.

Southern Writers, Southern Writing Graduate Conference

The 19th Annual Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference is a University of Mississippi Graduate Student event held in conjunction with the university’s Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. Participants are encouraged to remain in Oxford after the SWSW Conference to attend the Faulkner Conference. More information about the 2013 Faulkner Conference will be available at http://www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner/.

The Graduate Students in the Department of English invite you to submit abstracts exploring Southern literature and writers. Accepted submissions will be presented in Oxford, Mississippi, 18-20 July 2013.  The keynote speaker will be Dr. Thadious M. Davis, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English at The University of Pennsylvania and most recently author of Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature.

The conference regularly features panels on authors William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Jean Toomer, and Eudora Welty, as well as contemporary writers like Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, Fannie Flagg, Larry Brown, and Lee Smith. Topics for papers or panels are not restricted to literature, however. We also invite creative submissions, including poetry, short stories, or novel excerpts that deal with Southern themes or settings.

We are happy to introduce a Faulkner Paper Prize this year in addition to the annual Colby H. Kullman Award for the top critical and creative submissions.

Please send a 200–300-word abstract of a critical work or an entire creative work to [email protected].The conference reading-limit for critical works is 15 minutes. Panel proposals that include three or four participants are also welcome. Please send your submissions as Word attachments and include your university affiliation, summer address, and e-mail address. The deadline for submissions is Monday, 1 April 2013.   For more information, please contact Amy K. King at [email protected].

RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Journal Articles

American Literary History

• Scales, Laura Thiemann. “Narrative Revolutions in Nat Turner and Joseph Smith.” American Literary History 24.2 (2012): 205-233.
• Li, Stephanie. “The Parallel Lives of Bill Clinton.” American Literary History 24.3 (2012): 509-522.
• Murphy, John M. “The Primary Colors of American Politics. American Literary History 24.3 (2012): 491-508.
• Smith, Sidonie. “‘America’s Exhibit A’: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History and the Genres of Authenticity.”American Literary History 24.3 (2012): 523-542.

American Literature

• Fiskio, Janet. “Unsettling Ecocriticism: Rethinking Agrarianism, Place, and Citizenship.” American Literature84.2 (2012): 301-325.
• Taylor, Matthew A. “The Nature of Fear: Edgar Allan Poe and Posthuman Ecology.” American Literature84.2 (2012): 353-379.

American Studies Journal

• Burrison, John A. “South Carolina’s Edgefield District: An Early International Crossroads of Clay.” American Studies Journal 56 (2012).
• Cobb, James C. “Before and After: The 2008 Election and the Second ‘Solid South.’” American Studies Journal 56 (2012).
• Collins, Brennan. “Raymond Andrews as Griot: Privileging Southern Black Communities through Oral Storytelling and Cultural History.” American Studies Journal 56 (2012).
• Franklin, Daniel P. “Will the South Rise Again? Monochromatic Politics and Political Clout in the Modern South.”American Studies Journal 56 (2012).
• Eskew, Glenn T. “Barack Obama, John Lewis, and the Legacy of the Civil Rights Struggle.” American Studies Journal56 (2012).
• McHaney, Pearl Amelia. “Race, Rights, and Resistance in Southern Literature in the Age of Obama.” American Studies Journal 56 (2012).
• Wagner, Dorit. “The American South: From Civil Rights Struggle to Civil Rights Tourism.” American Studies Journal56 (2012).
• West, Elizabeth J. “From David Walker to President Obama: Tropes of the Founding Fathers in African American Discourses of Democracy, or the Legacy of Ishmael.” American Studies Journal 56 (2012).

Appalachian Heritage

• Brosi, George. “Mark Powell’s Auspicious Entry into the Regional Literary.” Appalachian Heritage 40.1 (Winter 2012).
• Clabough, Casey. “Willed into Being: The Fiction of Mark Powell.”Appalachian Heritage 40.1 (Winter 2012).
• Duval, Peter. “Travels with Mark Powell.” Appalachian Heritage 40.1 (Winter 2012).
• Loving, Denton. “The Indictment of Mark Powell.” Appalachian Heritage 40.1 (Winter 2012).
• Rash, Ron. “Mark Powell: An Appreciation.” Appalachian Heritage 40.1 (Winter 2012).
• Ballard, Sandra L. “Harriette Simpson Arnow: A Biographical Sketch.” Appalachian Heritage 40.2 (Summer 2012).
• Black, Kate. “Harriette Simpson Arnow Papers.” Appalachian Heritage 40.2 (Summer 2012).
• Billips, Martha M. “Harriette Simpson Arnow’s First Novel: A New Look at Mountain Path.” Appalachian Heritage 40.2 (Summer 2012).
• Boggess, Carol. “Why College Students Should Read Harriette Simpson Arnow.” Appalachian Heritage 40.2 (Summer 2012).
• Brosi, George. “Harriette Simpson Arnow: A Remembrance.” Appalachian Heritage 40.2 (Summer 2012).
• Crabtree, Lynn. “The Harriette Simpson Arnow Conference at Somerset Community College.” Appalachian Heritage 40.2 (Summer 2012).
• Cortner, Amy Tipton. “Why the America of Mattie Ross Needs to Read Harriette Simpson Arnow.” Appalachian Heritage 40.2 (Summer 2012).
• Lang, John. “On Reading The Doll Maker in the Twenty-First Century.” Appalachian Heritage 40.2 (Summer 2012).
• Locklear, Erica Abrams. “On Teaching Harriette Simpson Arnow.” Appalachian Heritage 40.2 (Summer 2012).
• Whitehead, Sharon Faye. “Harriette Simpson Arnow: Out of the Shadows.” Appalachian Heritage 40.2 (Summer 2012).
• Edwards, Grace Toney. “Breece D’J Pancake: A Life Too Short.” Appalachian Heritage 40.3 (Fall 2012).
• Douglas, Thomas E. “Rereading the Stories of Breece D’J Pancake.” Appalachian Heritage 40.3 (Fall 2012).
• Johnson, Lee. “The Poems of Breece D’J Pancake.” Appalachian Heritage 40.3 (Fall 2012).
• Ogle, Donna. “Breece D’J Pancake: Appalachian Writer Who ‘Gets it Right.’” Appalachian Heritage 40.3 (Fall 2012).
• Seyber, B. R. “He’ll Always Be a Part of Us: Folklore in the Stories of Breece D’J Pancake.” Appalachian Heritage 40.3 (Fall 2012).
• Wilson, David. “Masculine (Dis)order: Malignant Discrimination in the Stories of Breece D’J Pancake.” Appalachian Heritage 40.3 (Fall 2012).

Appalachian Journal

• Creasman, Boyd. “‘The Place You Go to Tell the Truth’: Gender in Irene McKinney’s Vivid Companion.” Appalachian Journal 39.1-2 (Fall 2011/Winter 2012): 92-105.
• Eads, Martha Greene. “Industrialization’s Threat to Vocational Calling in Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven.”Appalachian Journal 39.1-2 (Fall 2011/Winter 2012): 56-70.
• Staley, Kathryn. “Gay Liberation Comes to Appalachian State University (1969-1979).” Appalachian Journal 39.1-2 (Fall 2011/Winter 2012): 72-91.

Big Muddy

• Kolin, Philip. “‘A River Flows Through It’: Tennessee Williams and the Mighty Mississippi.” Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley 12.1 (Spring 2012): 7-38.

Callaloo

• Boggs, Nicholas. “A Grammar of Little Manhood: Ralph Ellison and the Queer Little Man at Chehaw Station.” Callaloo35.1 (2012):  245-266.
• Davis, Thadious M. “Olympia Vernon’s Children of Opinion.” Callaloo 35.1 (2012): 120-135.
• Karapetkova, Holly. “‘Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and I’: Reading Anne Spencer in the White Literary Tradition”Callaloo 35.1 (2012): 228-244.
• Larkin, Leslie. “Reading and Being Read: Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place as Literary Agent.” Callaloo 35.1 (2012): 193-211.
• Maier, Brennan. “The Road to Don Cornelius is Paved with Good Intentions: The Crisis of Negro Nationalism in Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Criticism.” Callaloo 35.1 (2012): 267-292.
• Naimou, Angela. “I Need Many Repetitions”: Rehearsing the Haitian Revolution in the Shadows of the Sugar Mill.Callaloo 35.1 (2012): 173-192.
• Roye, Susmita. “Toni Morrison’s Disrupted Girls and Their Disturbed Girlhoods: The Bluest Eye and A Mercy.” Callaloo35.1 (2012): 212-227.
• Allen, Jessica L. “Pringle’s Pruning of Prince: The History of Mary Prince and the Question of Repetition.” Callaloo35.2 (2012): 509-519.
• Botkin, Frances R. “Revising the Colonial Caribbean: ‘Three-Fingered Jack’ and the Jamaican Pantomime.” Callaloo35.2 (2012): 494-508.
• Corbin, Laurie. “The Voicing of Desire: The Quest for History in Heremakhonon and The Women of Tijucopapo.”Callaloo 35.2 (2012): 425-441.
• Fehskens, Erin M. “Accounts Unpaid, Accounts Untold: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and the Catalogue.” Callaloo 35.2 (2012): 407-424.
• Prescott, Laurence E. “Liberating Blackness: The Theme of Whitening in Two Colombian Short Stories.” Callaloo 35.2 (2012): 475-493.
• Tachtiris, Corine. “Of Male Exiles and Female Nations: ‘Sexual Errancy’ in Haitian Immigrant Literature.” Callaloo35.2 (2012): 442-458.
• Watson, Sonja Stephenson. “Poetic Negrism and the National Sentiment of Anti-West Indianism and Anti-Imperialism in Panamanian Literature.” Callaloo 35.2 (2012): 459-474.
• Eckard, Paula Gallant. “The Entombed Maternal in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills.” Callaloo 35.3 (2012): 795-809.
• Leonard, Keith D. “‘Which Me Will Survive’: Rethinking Identity, Reclaiming Audre Lorde.” Callaloo 35.3 (2012): 758-777.
• McIntire, Gabrielle. “Toward a Narratology of Passing: Epistemology, Race, and Misrecognition in Nella Larsen’sPassing.” Callaloo 35.3 (2012): 778-794.

Daedalus

• Ferris, William. “Southern Literature: A Blending of Oral, Visual & Musical Voices.” Daedalus 141.1 (Winter 2012): 139-153.

Early American Literature

• Navakas, Michele Currie. “Liquid Landscape: Possession and Floridian Geography.” Early American Literature 47.1 (2012): 89-114.
• “‘Hidden in Plain Sight’: Colloquy with Annette Gordon-Reed on The Hemingses of Monticello.” Early American Literature 47.2 (2012): 443-459.
• Moore, Dennis D. “Introducing the Conversation.” Early American Literature 47.2 (2012): 443-444.
• Levine, Robert S. “The Hemingses of Monticello as an African American Novel.” Early American Literature 47.2 (2012): 444-447.
• Bassard, Katherine C. “No Place like Home: A Mediation on Family Ties and Property Relations in The Hemingses of Monticello.” Early American Literature 47.2 (2012): 447-449.
• Foster, Frances Smith. “Unraveling the Strands.” Early American Literature 47.2 (2012): 449-451.
• Gordon-Reed, Annette. “Focusing on Slaves as Well as on Slavery.” Early American Literature 47.2 (2012): 451-454.
• Hoffman, Ronald. “A Powerful and Compelling Story.” Early American Literature 47.2 (2012): 454-456.
• Stern, Julia. “Not Just in the Great House, but in the Quarters.” Early American Literature 47.2 (2012): 456-459.

European Journal of American Culture

• Allen, David. “Seeing Double: Disney’s Wilderness Lodge.” European Journal of American Culture 31.2 (2012): 123-144.
• Tunc, Tanfer Emin. “‘Ashley Wilkes Told Me He Likes to See a Girl with a Healthy Appetite’: Food and Drink in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.” European Journal of American Culture 31.2 (2012): 85-105.

Faulkner Journal

• Dobbs, Cynthia. “Vernacular Kinship, the Creole City, and Faulkner’s ‘New Orleans.’” Faulkner Journal 26.1 (2012): 57-73.
• Ladd, Barbara. “Faulkner’s Paris: State and Metropole in A Fable.” Faulkner Journal 26.1 (2012): 115-129.
• Lester, Cheryl. “‘Same as a Nigger on an Excursion’: Memphis, Black Migration, and White Flight inSanctuary.” Faulkner Journal 26.1 (2012): 37-55.
• Lurie, Peter. “Introduction: Faulkner and the Metropolis.” Faulkner Journal 26.1 (2012): 3-16.
• Moffitt, Anne Hirsch. “The City Specter: William Faulkner and the Threat of Urban Encroachment.” Faulkner Journal 26.1 (2012): 17-36.
• Smith, Phil. “’The Megaphone’s Bellowing and Bodiless Profanity’: If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem and the Culture of Cacophony.” Faulkner Journal 26.1 (2012): 75-96.
• Zeitlin, Michael. “Pylon and the Rise of European Fascism.” Faulkner Journal 26.1 (2012): 97-114.

Hollins Critic

• Clabough, Casey. “Quick-Change Artist: The Merry-Go-Sorry Fiction of Cary Holladay.” Hollins Critic 49.4 (October 2012): 1-15.

James Dickey Review

• Turner, Daniel Cross. “From Blue Ridge to Blue Sea: On Teaching a Southern Literature/History Travel Immersion Course.” James Dickey Review 28.2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 8-19.
• Walker, Sue Brannan. “The Dance of Deep Ecology in James Dickey’s ‘The Lyric Beasts.’” James Dickey Review 28.2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 25-34.

Journal of American Culture

• Atkins, Jennifer. “Class Acts and Daredevils: Black Masculinity in Jazz Funeral Dancing.” Journal of American Culture35.2 (June 2012): 166-180.
• Inge, M. Thomas. “Walt Disney’s Song of the South and the Politics of Animation.”  Journal of American Culture 35.3 (September 2012): 219-230.

Journal of American Studies

• Bennett, Bridget.  “Home Songs and the Melodramatic Imagination: From ‘Home, Sweet Home’ to The Birth of a Nation.” Journal of American Studies 46.1 (Feb 2012): 171-187.
• Atkinson, Ted. “‘Blood Petroleum’: True Blood, the BP Oil Spill, and Fictions of Energy/Culture.” Journal of American Studies. FirstView Article. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021875812001247.  31 July 2012.

MELUS

• Anderson, Karyn H. “Dangerously Smooth Spaces in Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox.” MELUS 37.1 (2012): 199.

Mississippi Quarterly

• Agriro, Thomas Robert. “Miss Emily After Dark.” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 445-465.
• Bonner Jr., Thomas. “Becoming Cajun, Becoming American: The Acadian in American Literature from Longfellow to James Lee Burke.” Mississippi Quarterly 64.3-4 (2011): 611-613.
• Bonner Jr., Thomas. “The Functions of Ambiguity: A Response to ‘Miss Emily After Dark.’” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 491.
• Caison, Gina. “Claiming the Unclaimable: Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree, and Land Claim in the Native South.” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 573-595.
• Camastra, Nicole J. “‘Waters of the Fountain Salmacis’: Metamorphosis and the Ovidian Subtext in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary.” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 323-340.
• Claxton, Mae Miller. “Inside/Outside the Tent: Native Americans and African Americans on Display in Eudora Welty’s ‘Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden.’” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 549-563.
• Fowler, Sigrid Hanson. “Lennie Snopes, a Closer Look.” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 423-438.
• Godden, Richard. “Roundtable on ‘Miss Emily After Dark’: What’s in a Hymen?” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 467.
• Haynes, Jane Isbell. “A Note on Faulkner and The Stagolee/Faust Legends.” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 439-442.
• Inge, M. Thomas. “Black Snake Moan as Postsouthern Fable.” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 565-572.
• Kartiganer, Donald M. “‘Tobe! Show these gentlemen out.’” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 480.
• Matthews, John T. “All Too Thinkable? Thomas Argiro’s ‘Miss Emily After Dark.’” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 475.
• McHaney, Pearl Amelia. “Eudora Welty: American Artist Abroad and ‘The Burning.’” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 502-523.
• McLaughlin, Don James. “Eudora Welty’s Sleeping Medusa.” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 525-548.
• Pearson, Erin. “Faulkner’s Cryptic Closet: Forbidden Desire, Disavowal, and the ‘Dark House’ at the Heart of Absalom, Absalom!” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 341-367.
• Piacentino, Ed. “New Explorations of Antebellum Southern Humor.” Mississippi Quarterly 64.3-4 (2011): 597-610.
• Romine, Scott. “How Many Black Lovers Had Emily Grierson?” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 483.
• Ryan, Maureen. “Composing Selves: Southern Women and Autobiography.” Mississippi Quarterly 64.3-4 (2011): 614-616.
• Tipton, Nathan. “Rope and Faggot: The Homoerotics of Lynching in William Faulkner’s Light in August.” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 369-391.
• Vanderwerken, David L. “Faulkner’s Oblique Presentations of John Browns.” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 409-422.
• Wilhelm, Randall. “Framing Joe Christmas: Vision and Detection in Light in August.” Mississippi Quarterly 64:3-4 (2011): 393-407.

MFS: Modern Fiction Studies

• Wyatt, Jean. “Failed Messages, Maternal Loss, and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 58.1 (2012): 128-151.
• Bibler, Michael P. “How to Love Your Local Homophobe: Southern Hospitality and the Unremarkable Queerness of Truman Capote’s ‘The Thanksgiving Visitor.’” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 58.2 (2012): 284-307.
• Palladino, Mariangela. “Aphrodite’s Faces: Toni Morrison’s Love and Ethics.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 58.2 (2012): 334-352.

Mosaic

• Turner, Daniel Cross. “Dying Objects/Living Things: The Thingness of Poetry in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Talking Dirty to the Gods.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 45:1 (2012): 137-154.
• Cardell, Kylie and Victoria Kuttainen . “The Ethics of Laughter: David Sedaris and Humour Memoir.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 45.3 (2012).

Neohelicon

• Oklopcic, Biljana. “Sensual Women of Yoknapatawpha County: A Bakhtinian Approach.” Neohelicon 39.1 (2012): 135-147.

Nineteenth-Century Literature

• Hurh, Paul. “‘The Creative and the Resolvent’: The Origins of Poe’s Analytical Method.” Nineteenth-Century Literature. 66.4 (March 2012): 466-493.

North Carolina Literary Review

• Avery, Laurence G. “Paul Green and the Movies.”North Carolina Literary Review 21 (2012).
• Benfey, Elisabeth. “Discovering the Story: A Film Adaption of Randall Kenan’s ‘The Foundations of the Earth.’”North Carolina Literary Review 21 (2012).
• Frazier, Charles. “A Degree of Commitment.”North Carolina Literary Review 21 (2012).
• Froula, Anna. “Whitewashed Captivity Narrative.” North Carolina Literary Review 21 (2012).
• Grimsley, Jim. “In the Same Gesture.”North Carolina Literary Review 21 (2012).
• Hart, William B. “The Case of the Missing Interracial Romance: An Ideological Critique of Kiss the Girls.”North Carolina Literary Review 21 (2012).
• Hovis, George.“Ten North Carolina Stories that Ought to Be Films.”North Carolina Literary Review 21 (2012).
• Roberts, Terry L. “reflections on a screen”: John Ehle and Film.”North Carolina Literary Review 21 (2012).
• Slide, Anthony. “Thomas Dixon, Filmmaker.” North Carolina Literary Review 21 (2012).
• Tise, Larry E. “The Lost Colony Film”: A Mixed Message of Violence and Peace. North Carolina Literary Review 21 (2012).
• Tyson, Timothy B. “History v. Hollywood: Civil Rights Meet Silver Screen; or, “writing history with lightning.”North Carolina Literary Review 21 (2012).
• Whiteside, Tom. “Finding ‘The Lost Colony Film.’”North Carolina Literary Review 21 (2012). 

rWp: An Annual of Robert Penn Warren Studies

• Millichap, Joseph. “Robert Penn Warren and Photography.” rWp: An Annual of Robert Penn Warren Studies XII (2012): 1-15.

Sewanee Review

• Buffington, Robert. “A Great Seizure of Poems.” Sewanee Review 120.1 (Winter 2012): 62-75.
• Clabough Casey. “A Father’s Son: George Garrett and the Art of Dying.” Sewanee Review 120.1 (Winter 2012): 124-129.
• Lacy, Robert. “When Country Was Country.” Sewanee Review 120.1 (Winter 2012): 151-156.
• Strout, Cushing. “Crisis in Camelot: Mark Twain and the Idea of Progress.” Sewanee Review 120.2 (Winter 2012): 336-340.

Studies in American Culture

• McGehee, Margaret T. “Dynamiting the Levees: The South in Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun.” Studies in American Culture35.1 (October 2012): 78-92.

South Carolina Review

• Boleman-Herring, Elizabeth. “James Dickey: The Toad in the Word-Garden.” The South Carolina Review 44.2 (2012): 10-13.
• Lensing, George. “Why Poetry Matters.” The South Carolina Review 44.2 (2012): 3-9.
• Turner, Daniel Cross. “James Dickey and the Lifework of Fathers.” The South Carolina Review 45:1 (2012): 49-56.

Southern Cultures

• Ferris, Marcie Cohen. “‘The Deepest Reality of Life’: Southern Sociology, the WPA, and Food in the New South.”Southern Cultures 18.2 (Summer 2012): 6-31.
• Franklin, Sara B. “Tradition, Treme, and the New Orleans Renaissance: Lolis Eric Elie.” Southern Cultures 18.2 (Summer 2012): 32-44.
• Harvey, Shannon. “Vimala Cooks, Everyone Eats.” Southern Cultures 18.2 (Summer 2012): 96-103.
• Herman, Bernard L. “Theodore Peed’s Turtle Party.” Southern Cultures 18.2 (Summer 2012): 59-73.
• Lewis, Courtney. “The Case of the Wild Onions: The Impact of Ramps on Cherokee Rights.” Southern Cultures 18.2 (Summer 2012): 104-117.
• Sexton, Will. “‘Boomtown Rabbits’: The Rabbit Market in Chatham County, North Carolina, 1880-1920.” Southern Cultures 18.2 (Summer 2012): 74-95.
• Sharpless, Rebecca. “‘She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes’: Southern Women and Rural Food Supplies.” Southern Cultures 18.2 (Summer 2012): 45-58.

Southern Literary Journal

• Arant, Allison. “‘A Moral Intelligence’: Mental Disability and Eugenic Resistance in Welty’s ‘Lily Daw and the Three Ladies’ and O’Connor’s ‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own.’” Southern Literary Journal 44.2 (Spring 2012): 69-87.
• Desmond, John. “Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy and the Demonic Self.” Southern Literary Journal 44.2 (Spring 2012): 88-107.
• Gorman, Gene I. “‘Awakening a Dormant Appetite’: Captain McBane, Convict Labor, and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition.” Southern Literary Journal 44.2 (Spring 2012): 1-18.
• Graves, Mark A. “Regional Insularity and Aesthetic Isolationism: Ellen Glasgow’s The Builders and the First World War.” Southern Literary Journal 44.2 (Spring 2012):19-37.
• Haddox, Thomas F. “Lillian Smith, Cold War Intellectual.” Southern Literary Journal 44.2 (Spring 2012): 51-68.
• Miller, Shawn E. “Returning to Faulkner’s ‘Two Soldiers.” Southern Literary Journal 44.2 (Spring 2012): 38-50.
• Polk, Noel. “Inside Agitators: Civil Writes in Mississippi: Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ.” Southern Literary Journal44.2 (Spring 2012): 108-121.
• Ramsey, William M. “Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey: Contemporary Black Chroniclers of the Imagined South.” Southern Literary Journal 44.2 (Spring 2012): 122-135.

Southern Quarterly

• Belcher, Philip. “More Than Tourists to Their Woe: Southern Poets of Atonement and the Cultural Legacy of Racism.”Southern Quarterly 49.2-3 (Winter 2012): 10-36.
• Henderson, LeAnne Davis. “‘Your Own Born Granmammy Doctored with Rattleroot’: Folk Medicine in Harriette Simpson Arnow’s Hunter’s Horn.” Southern Quarterly 49.2-3 (Winter 2012): 55-73.
• Orejel, Keith. “The Federal Government’s Response to Medgar Evers’s Funeral.” Southern Quarterly 49.2-3 (Winter 2012): 37-54.
• Rodgers, Tommie. “Kate Freeman Clark: A Mississippi Artist.” Southern Quarterly 49.2-3 (Winter 2012): 75-81.

Texas Review

• Drew, George. “A Not So Ordinary Light: The Crafty Cajun Art of Darrell Bourque.” Texas Review 33.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 65-75.
• Winship, Robert. “On the Autobiography of Mark Twain.” Texas Review 33.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2012):101-113.
• Clabough, Casey. “‘Beyond Any Kind of Imagining’: The Literary Youth of George Garrett” Texas Review 33.3 (Fall/Winter 2012): 80-91.

Texas Studies in Language and Literature

• Leigh, Philip. “Literary Forensics: Fingerprinting the Literary Dialects of Three Works of Plantation Fiction.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 54.3 (Fall 2012): 357-380.

Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

• Hudder, Cliff. “‘A day of most heartfelt sorrow’: Death and Texas in Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself.’” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 29.3 (Winter 2012): 66-80.
• Wilkenfeld, Jacob. “Re-Scripting Southern Poetic Discourse in Whitman’s ‘Longings for Home.’” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 29.3 (Winter 2012): 47-65.

Recent Books

University of Alabama Press

• Baker, Barbara A. Lewis Nordan: Humor, Heartbreak, and Hope. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2012.
• Stout, Janis P. South by Southwest: Katherine Anne Porter and the Burden of Texas History. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2013.
• Weaver, Lila Quintero. Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2012.

Cambridge University Press

• Hayes, Kevin J., ed. Edgar Allan Poe in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012.
• Monteith, Sharon, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012.
• Roynon, Tessa. The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012.

University of Georgia Press

• Gwin, Minrose. Remembering Medger Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2013.
• Harvey, Paul. Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2012.
• Milian, Claudia. Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2013.
• Pollack, Harriet, ed. Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2013.
• Taylor, Melanie Benson. Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2012.
• Watson, Jay. Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2012.

Louisiana State University Press

• Kennedy, J. Gerald and Jerome McGann, eds. Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012.
• Powell, Tara. The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012.
• Reed, John Shelton. Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012.
• Shloss, Carol. Flannery O’Connor’s Dark Comedies: The Limits of Inference. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012.

Mercer University Press

• Wood, Gerald C. and Marion Castleberry, eds. The Voice of an American Playwright: Interviews with Horton Foote. Macon: Mercer UP, 2012.

University Press of Mississippi

• Blade, Robert. Tupelo Man: The Life and Times of George McLean, a Most Peculiar Newspaper Publisher. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012.
• Fuller, Stephen M. Eudora Welty and Surrealism. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2013.
• Gray, Jonathan W. Innocence by Association: Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2013.
• Lee, Judith Yaross. Twain’s Brand: Humor in Contemporary American Culture. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012.
• Nelson, Jack. Scoop: The Evolution of a Southern Reporter. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2013.
• Nisly, L. Lamar, ed. Conversations with Tim Gautreaux. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012.
• Unrue, Darlene Harbour, ed. Selected Letters of Katherine Anne Porter: Chronicles of a Modern Woman. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012.

University of Missouri Press

• Langdale, John J. Superfluous Southerners: Cultural Conservatism and the South, 1920-1990. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2012.

University of North Carolina Press

• Eubanks, Georgann. Literary Trails of Eastern North Carolina: A Guidebook. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2013.
• Noonan, Ellen. The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2012.
• Simpson, Bland. Two Captains from Carolina: Moses Grandy, John Newland Maffitt, and the Coming of the Civil War: A Nonfiction Novel. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2012.
• Wise, Benjamin E. William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2012.

Ohio State University Press

• Hoefer, Anthony Dyer. Apocalypse South: Judgment, Cataclysm, and Resistance in the Regional Imaginary. Chicago: Ohio State UP, 2012.

Oxford University Press

• Hanlon, Christopher. America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.

Palacky University

• Arbeit, Marcel and M. Thomas Inge, eds. The (Un)Popular South. Olomouc, Czech Republic: Palacky University, 2012.

Praeger (ABC-CLIO, LLC)

• Booker, Keith M. ed. Blue Collar Pop Culture: From NASCAR to Jersey Shore. Volume 1: Film, Music, and Sports. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012.

Salem Press

• Artuso, Kathryn, ed. Critical Insights: William Faulkner.  Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2013.
• Warren, Nagueyalti, ed. Critical Insights: Alice Walker. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2012.

University of South Carolina Press

• Carpenter, Brian and Tom Franklin, eds. Grit Lit: A Rough South Reader. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2012.
• Maun, Caroline. Mosaic of Fire: The Work of Lola Ridge, Evelyn Scott, Charlotte Wilder, and Kay Boyle. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2012.
• Moltke-Hansen, David, ed. William Gilmore Simms’s Unfinished Civil War: Consequences for a Southern Man of Letters. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2012.

University of Tennessee Press

• Dagbovie-Mullins, Sika A. Crossing B(l)ack: Mixed-Race Identity in Modern American Fiction and Culture. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2013.
• Turner, Daniel Cross. Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory and the Transcultural South. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2012.

Vanderbilt University Press

• Veteto, James R. and Edward M. Maclin, ed. The Slaw and the Slow Cooked: Culture and Barbecue in the Mid-South. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2012.

University of Virginia Press

• Bernier, Celeste-Marie. Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012.
• Crable, Bryan. Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: At the Roots of the Racial Divide. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012.
• Fowler, Doreen. Drawing the Line: The Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright, O’Connor, and Morrison.  Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2013.
• Hardwig, Bill. Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2013.
• McDonald, Robert M.S., ed. Light and Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012.
• Stanton, Lucia. “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012.
• Thomson, Keith. A Passion for Nature: Thomas Jefferson and Natural History. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012.
• Thorsson, Courtney. Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2013.