US Southern Literature

Jubilate Pavo "Frequently the [pea]cock combines the lifting of his tail with the raising of hisvoice. He appears to receive through his feet some shock from the center of the earth, which travels upward though him and is released: Eee-ooo-ii! Eee-ooo-ii! To the melancholy this sound is melancholy and to the hysterical it is hysterical. To me it has always sounded like a cheer for an invisible parade."-Flannery O'Connor, "The King of the Birds" "One of the most arrogant of the O'Connor peacocks is "Limpy," who has been strutting with one foot for several years after refusing to yield to a mowing machine."-Conversations with Flannery O'Connor For I will consider my peacock, Limpy. For he flings his screams out day and night enough to drive my mother wild, while I am pleased by his praise of the dark & the light.

The drawing above is a cartoon published on the front page of the leading Democratic paper in Raleigh, North Carolina, the News and Observer, of October 9, 1898, created by the well-known cartoonist Norman Ethre Jennett. The cartoon is one of many in an unabashedly racist election campaign lead by N. C. Democrats in order to make up for the losses of the 1894 elections. Then, through a series of state and local elections, an organized Populist Party (mostly white) and a newly resurgent Republican Party (mostly black) had mobilized small farmers, mountaineers, workers, and virtually the entire African American voting population against the vested interests of wealthy Democrats who controlled the state.

The installation of a statue of Thomas Ruffin that stands at the entrance to the NC Court of Appeals was part of a long campaign to honor the heroes of the Jim Crow South in the early 20th century--part of the reification of the "Lost Cause" narrative." This history is hard to see now, but it remains: Judge Ruffin was author of the most notorious pro-slavery opinion in the entire body of slavery law.

Details a strategy for teachers wishing to prompt students to engage in a critical reading of Harper Lee’s immensely popular novel To Kill a Mockingbird. This strategy prompts students to discuss details in the novel that point to the work as a reaction to the pivotal 1954 Supreme Court decision on segregation in public schools.

... Edmonds," Introduction": 1) The" New South," led by entrepreneurs in the textile, tobacco, railroad and banking industry, made for rising profits but ... But while critics Sally Ann Ferguson and Trudier Harris attack Chesnutt for a-bandoning the blacker African Americans in favor of a ...

Boston I. "We are all brothers" 1 I n an interview reported in the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de São Paulo in August 1954, William Faulkner notes, "in my view, race is one of this continent's most pressing issues." Treating North and South America as one continent, he continues, "There is no reason why, in a continent as rich as ours, there should be social or economic distinctions between men. In the end, we are all brothers." 2 Speaking in Brazil three months after Brown v. Board of Education, Faulkner here appears to reiterate the aims of what is perhaps the most significant movement of the postwar period in the United States: the civil rights movement. But while that movement was and remains a somewhat foreign phenomenon in the context of Brazil-and Latin America more generally-we should remember that as Faulkner spoke, the most significant development of the same period in Latin America, the Cuban Revolution, was in its initial stages. Indeed, a year earlier, on 26 July 1953, Fidel Castro led the attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. Similarly concerned with the elimination of social and economic "distinctions," the successful revolution would, seven years later, affirm that "democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy" or "with discrimination against the Negro"; it would even protest "disturbances by the Ku Klux Klan," and, echoing Faulkner, proclaim that "the peoples of the world are brothers." 3 Nevertheless, what Faulkner and the revolution mean by "brothers" is not the same, and as we will see, it is this distinction that affords a more complete understanding of the relationship between Faulkner's modernism and the Latin American "boom" literatures of the 1960s. Many commentators have already discussed the debt that Latin American literature owes to Faulkner (as well as to other modernists like Virginia Woolf,

In 1950s Hollywood, films about the American South required a drawl. Reviewers praised so-called “Southerns” for their “authentic flavor” or “core of atmosphere.” The South was a different world from mainstream America, to be captured on celluloid and marketed on its exotic difference. Southerns also required music with an accent, which one composer mastered; in promotional materials for the 1959 adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, producer Jerry Wald claimed, “No one seemed better suited to capture and unify” this film than Alex North [1910–1991], with his “extraordinary feeling for the atmosphere of the modern South.” By that point, North had scored five of the six Southerns that he composed in the ’50s, the main period of his output of such soundtracks. My essay analyzes North’s “extraordinary feeling” for this filmic subgenre by showing how neatly he provided a sonic analog for a theoretical construct that sociologist Edgar J. Thompson called the “contrast conception” of Southern regionalism.

Thompson offered the term at a 1962 conference of social scientists gathered to examine “the directions, old and new, of Southern response to the forces of change” at mid-century. The conference’s contributors all adopted a contrast model for their explorations: white/black, rich/poor, Democrat/Republican, agrarian/industrial, and rural/urban were their principle heuristics, united under two umbrella binaries that were fundamental concepts for makers of filmic Southerns: South/Non-South and Past/Present.

These contrast conceptions shaped the films that North set, which in turn inspired starkly dualist soundtracks. I examine films from the beginning of North’s career until the end of his Southerns period. Through an analysis of the rare documentary The People of the Cumberland (1937), I show the roots of North’s musical conception of the South, designed in sympathy with the dialectic techniques of the Socialist Frontier Films Collective. On this set, North met Elia Kazan, who hired him for the 1950s’ most influential Southern, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), which featured a divided South, Old and New, delusionally romantic and grittily real. I use The Long Hot Summer (1958) as a final example whose soundtrack featured similar dualist tensions whereas its dramatic attitude is apparently less troubled. I thus elucidate how theories of region shaped soundtracks beyond inclusion of stereotypical folk elements and point the way toward future studies of the relationship between film music and human geography.