Böcker utgivna av University Press of Mississippi

Places the once preeminent southern crop in historical perspective, showing how "cotton culture" was actually part of the larger culture of the United States despite the widespread perception of its cultivation and sources as hopelessly backward.

Provides the first full-length study of John Edgar Wideman's entire oeuvre to date. Specifically, Tracie Church Guzzio examines the ways in which Wideman (b. 1941) engages with three crucial themes - history, myth, and trauma - throughout his career, showing how they intertwine.

Creatively spent and politically irrelevant, the American horror film is a mere ghost of its former self - or so goes the old saw from fans and scholars alike. Taking on this undeserved reputation, the contributors to this collection provide a comprehensive look at a decade of cinematic production, covering a wide variety of material from the last ten years with a clear critical eye.

Essays on how women's history is written in the wake of The Southern LadyContributions from Laura F. Edwards, Crystal Feimster, Glenda E. Gilmore, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Darlene Clark Hine, Mary Kelley, Markeeva Morgan, Anne Firor Scott, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Deborah Gray WhiteAnne Firor Scott's The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 stirred a keen interest among historians in both the approach and message of her book. Using women's diaries, letters, and other personal documents, Scott brought to life southern women as wives and mothers, as members of their communities and churches, and as sometimes sassy but rarely passive agents. She brilliantly demonstrated that the familiar dichotomies of the personal versus the public, the private versus the civic, which had dominated traditional scholarship about men, could not be made to fit women's lives. In doing so, she helped to open up vast terrains of women's experiences for historical scholarship.This volume, based on papers presented at the University of Mississippi's annual Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History, brings together essays by scholars at the forefront of contemporary scholarship on American women's history. Each regards The Southern Lady as having shaped her historical perspective and inspired her choice of topics in important ways. These essays together demonstrate that the power of imagination and scholarly courage manifested in Scott's and other early American women historians' work has blossomed into a gracious plentitude.Elizabeth Anne Payne, Oxford, Mississippi, is professor of history at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women's Trade Union League and coeditor of vols. I and II of Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives.

Intellectual, cultural, and film historians have long considered neorealism the founding block of post-World War II Italian cinema. Neorealism, the traditional story goes, was an Italian film style born in the second postwar period. This collection brings together distinguished film scholars and cultural historians to complicate this nation-based approach to the history of neorealism.

Tennyson S.D. Joseph builds upon current research on the anticolonial and nationalist experience in the Caribbean. He explores the impact of global transformation upon the independent experience of St. Lucia and argues that the island's formal decolonization roughly coincided with the period of the rise of global neoliberalism hegemony.

The essays and panel discussions that make up Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect provide a comprehensive account of the man and his work, including discussions of his life, the shape of his career, and his place in American literature, as well as fresh readings of his novels.

This study of C.L.R. James's writings is the first to look at them as literature and not as theory. This sustained analysis of his major published works places them in the context of his less well-known writings and offers an encompassing critique of one of the African diaspora's most significant thinkers and writers.

A comprehensive appreciation of the fiction written by this Pulitzer Prize author This is the first book-length examination of the fiction written by Richard Ford, who gained critical acclaim for The Sportswriter, the story of suburbanite Frank Bascombe's struggle to survive loneliness and great loss. That novel, published in 1986, struck a chord with readers and reviewers alike, and Ford, a little-known writer who had for a time considered giving up the writing of fiction, was suddenly hailed in Newsweek as "one of the best writers of his generation."The Sportswriter, along with its 1995 sequel Independence Day, which became the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, made Ford's Frank Bascombe as much a part of the American literary landscape as John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom.With three other novels, a well-received volume of short stories, and a trilogy of novellas to his credit, Ford is now firmly established as a major figure among writers of the post-World War II generation.Perspectives on Richard Ford is the first collection of essays to study the body of Ford's fiction. The nine essays demonstrate that Ford, like few other writers of his time, powerfully depicts what it feels like to live in the secular late-twentieth-century world, a dangerous and uncertain place where human relationships are impoverished and where human existence is often characterized by emptiness, solipsism, and, above all, by a sense of alienation. The contributors tend to view Ford's narratives of alienation in a broad cultural context. His works dramatize the breakdown of the institutions of marriage, family, and community. His protagonists often typify the rootlessness and the nameless longing pervasive in a highly mobile, present-oriented society in which individuals, having lost a sense of the past, relentlessly pursue their own elusive identities in the here and now.The collection, which concludes with a compelling conversation between Ford and the editor, will prove to be an essential companion to the work of one our most intriguing contemporary writers.Huey Guagliardo is a professor of English at Louisiana State University at Eunice.

Although the Vietnam conflict ended two decades ago, a fierce cultural war over how its literature is to be perceived continues to be waged. Warring Fictions charges American critics with twenty years of white-wash and reminds us that Vietnam was not just an American anguish and its fiction a rock-and-roll acid trip.

As a border city Baltimore made an ideal arena to push for change during the civil rights movement. It was a city in which all forms of segregation and racism appeared vulnerable to attack by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's methods. If successful in Baltimore, the rest of the nation might follow with progressive and integrationist reforms. The Baltimore branch of the NAACP was one of the first chapters in the nation and was the largest branch in the nation by 1946. The branch undertook various forms of civil rights activity from 1914 through the 1940s that later were mainstays of the 1960s movement. Nonviolent protest, youth activism, economic boycotts, marches on state capitols, campaigns for voter registration, and pursuit of anti-lynching cases all had test runs. Remarkably, Baltimore's NAACP had the same branch president for thirty-five years starting in 1935, a woman, Lillie M. Jackson. Her work highlights gender issues and the social and political transitions among the changing civil rights groups. In Borders of Equality, Lee Sartain evaluates her leadership amid challenges from radicalized youth groups and the Black Power Movement. Baltimore was an urban industrial center that shared many characteristics with the North, and African Americans could vote there. The city absorbed a large number of black economic migrants from the South, and it exhibited racial patterns that made it more familiar to Southerners. It was one of the first places to begin desegregating its schools in September 1954 after the Brown decision, and one of the first to indicate to the nation that race was not simply a problem for the Deep South. Baltimore's history and geography make it a perfect case study to examine the NAACP and various phases of the civil rights struggle in the twentieth century

Provides a history of the most consequential 35mm motion picture camera introduced in North America in the quarter century following the Second World War: the Arriflex 35. It traces the North American history of this camera from 1945 to 1972 - when the first lightweight, self-blimped 35mm cameras became available.

Explores how traditional cultural forms may be critically appropriated by marginalized groups and used as rhetorical tools to promote deliberation and debate, spur understanding and connection, broaden political engagement, and advance particular social identities.

Exploring an overlooked era of Italian history roiled by domestic terrorism, political assassination, and student protests, Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s shines a new light on what was a dark decade, but an unexpectedly prolific and innovative period among artists of comics intended for adults.

Provides a window into the passion and significance of thirty-eight committed individuals who led a grassroots movement in a socially conservative state. The book is comprised of oral history narratives in which women activists share their motivation, struggles, accomplishments, and hard-won wisdom.

Examines how one pioneering interracial couple developed a love and a racial identity that carried them defiantly through the Jim Crow years. Through interviews and oral history collected from both sides of the Richardson family's racial divide, as well as archival research, The House at the End of the Road probes into the core of the issue of race in early twentieth-century America.

The invention of the cylinder phonograph at the end of the nineteenth century opened up a new world for cultural research. Indeed, Edison's talking machine became one of the basic tools of anthropology. This study of the early phonograph's impact shows traditional ethnography being transformed.

Reveals the strategies used by blues promoters and organisers in Mississippi, both African American and white, local and state, to attract the attention of tourists. In the process, Stephen A. King reveals how promotional materials portray the Delta's blues culture and its musicians.

This collection of six conference papers from the Eighth Annual Chancellor's Symposium in Southern History, held in 1982 at the University of Mississippi, seeks to assess the relationship of southern women in a world complicated by racial and class antagonisms.

Thirteen essays by scholars from four countries trace Walter Mosley's distinctive approach to representing African American responses to the feeling of homelessness in an inhospitable America. Essays explore Mosley's modes of expression, his testing of the limitations of genre, his political engagement in prose, his utopian/dystopian analyses, and his uses of parody and vernacular culture.

Historians have long agreed that women were instrumental in shaping the civil rights movement. Until recently, though, such claims have not been supported by easily accessed texts of speeches and addresses. With this first-of-its-kind anthology, Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon present thirty-nine full-text addresses by women who spoke out while the struggle was at its most intense.

In the Mississippi Delta, creativity, community, and a rich expressive culture persist despite widespread poverty. Over five years of extensive work in the region, author Ali Colleen Neff collected a wealth of materials that demonstrate a vibrant musical scene.

Explores the intersection of race, ethnicity, and sports and analyses the forces that shaped the African American and Latino sports experience in post-World War II America. Contributors reveal that sports often reinforced dominant ideas about race and racial supremacy but that at other times sports became a platform for addressing racial and social injustices.

Probes the difficult relationship between the press and organised labour in the South from the past to the present day. Written by a veteran journalist and first-hand observer of the labour movement and its treatment in the region's newspapers and other media, the text focuses on the modern South that has evolved since World War II.

A reassessment of the African American novelist and her position in the canonCONTRIBUTORSJohn Charles, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Bill V. Mullen, Rachel Peterson, Paula Rabinowitz, Rachel Rubin, James Smethurst, Melina Vizcaíno-AlemánThe essayists in Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left examine Ann Petry's relationship to left-wing political circles in the years following World War II. Anthologies dedicated to African American writing, even those that consider the African American literary left, often exclude Petry (1908-1997). These essayists demonstrate how Petry's literary art, as well as her engagement in various community struggles, landed her squarely in a variety of progressive communities.Through analyses of Petry's three novels, her short fiction, and her nonfiction, scholars identify her literary forms and aesthetics, including pulp fiction, Marxist analysis, literary naturalism, and the realism Petry used to explore early Cold War racial, sexual, and class politics. Although Petry is not readily placed in leftist circles, the essays collected here show her engagement in a number of events centered in post-WWII Harlem, such as the Bronx Slave Market protest concerning treatment of African American female domestic workers and her role as contributor to Harlem's radical periodical, the People's Voice. Essays show that Petry's writing provides an important link between the Popular Front of the 1930s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s.Alex Lubin, assistant professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico, is the author of Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954, published by University Press of Mississippi.

When record men first travelled from Chicago or invited musicians to studios in New York, these entrepreneurs had no conception how their technology would change the dynamics of musical performance. 78 Blues covers a revolution in performance perception through close examination of hundreds of key "hillbilly" and "race" records released between the 1920s and World War II.

Through an examination of various couples who were forced to live in slavery, Rebecca J. Fraser argues that slaves found ways to conduct successful courting relationships. In its focus on the processes of courtship among the enslaved, this study offers further insight into the meanings that structured intimate lives.