Spanning the period 1853 to 1948, this study explores the nascence of literary activity among American black women and investigates the cultural climate which led some of the most prominent to use the marriage convention as a means of exploring wider questions of human social relations, sexuality and female subjectivity. The author attempts to go beyond the period study to offer a new paradigm for reading American black women's fiction.

The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction

Contemporary Human Trophic Relationships@@@The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. By Ira Berlin. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. x, 497. Paper, $16.95, ISBN: 0-674-00211-3; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-674-81092-9.) From the vantage point of the new millennium, W. E. B. Du Bois's famous prediction of 1903--that the "color line" would be the defining problem of the twentieth century--was all too painfully prescient. He might as well have extended his prediction into the twenty-first century. So thoroughly has racism remained America's bugaboo that scholars have felt a powerful moral urgency in their attempts to understand its tenacious hold on the present by explaining its origins in early America. One of the most enduring debates in colonial historiography regards the nature of the relationship between racism and slavery: how did they arise and which came first, or did they emerge entwined? With Many Thousands Gone, Ira Berlin has written the best overview to date of what we know about the complex origins and development of African slavery in early America and its influence on the development of the idea of race. The product of many years of research and writing, the book' s triumph lies in the author's admirable ability to absorb the massive body of literature on the subject and synthesize it with his own fresh interpretations. Berlin has capitalized better than most on the transformation in slavery studies since the early 1970s. Scholars of early America began to grasp the rich possibilities for pushing beyond the tired images of antebellum cotton plantations to study the emergence of slavery centuries earlier in a vastly different colonial world. Studies multiplied in every direction, including slave-labor economics, African origins and development of African-American cultures, master-slave relations, changes and differentiation in slavery over time and space, and, in a more recent cultural studies vein, the social and historical construction of racial identities. Berlin's book represents an amalgam of all these and more. The book's prologue, "Making Slavery, Making Race," is possibly the most elegant brief summary of the field now going. It conveys Berlin's sense that slavery probably had more to do with the creation of race than the other way around, though he emphasizes that as the two grew and mutated they inescapably transformed each other. Berlin strikes a balance in the recent literature by placing the slaves themselves at the center of the narrative and by showing not only what was done to slaves but also "what they did for themselves" (p. 2). The author's finely crafted language reflects his sensitivity to nuances of the power struggles between master and slave: "The minuet ... when played to the contrapuntal music of paternalism, was a constant, as master and slave continually renegotiated the small space allotted them. But the stylized movements--the staccato gyrations, the seductive feints, the swift withdrawals, and the hateful embraces--represented just one of many dances of domination and subordination, resistance and accommodation" (p. 4). The book's narrative plays out the minuet motif in three parts. In the first, Berlin shows that the dance of master and slave took place in a broad transatlantic and imperial context. He transcends traditional models that focus on British North America and demonstrates how the early North American Spanish, English, French, and Dutch colonies moved from being "societies with slaves" to "slave societies" (p. 10). The first handful of Africans in these settlements, which the author calls the "charter generations" (p. 12), were generally "Atlantic creoles" (p. 17). They were often the mixed-race, multilingual offspring of European traders and African women from the West African coast. Though enslaved, members of the charter generations benefited from the relatively fluid social conditions in the colonies by gaining various legal and ecclesiastical protections, and, occasionally, earning freedom. …

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (review)

Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature

Taking Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth. In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains one of the key goals of the book: to open up to scrutiny the literary and cultural practice that has come to be known as ""regionalism."" Part I, ""Surveying the Territory,"" theorizes definitions of place and region, and includes an analysis of southern literary regionalism from the 1930s to the present and an exploration of southern popular culture. In ""Mapping the Region,"" essayists examine different representations of rural landscapes and small towns, cities and suburbs, as well as liminal zones in which new immigrants make their homes. Reflecting the contributors' transatlantic perspective, ""Making Global Connections"" challenges notions of southern distinctiveness by reading the region through the comparative frameworks of Southern Italy, East Germany, Latin America, and the United Kingdom and via a range of texts and contexts, from early reconciliation romances to Faulkner's fictions about race to the more recent parody of southern mythmaking, Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone. Together, these essays explore the roles that economic, racial, and ideological tensions have played in the formation of southern identity through varying representations of locality, moving regionalism toward a ""new place"" in southern studies.

https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1037&context=bookshelf

South to A New Place: Region, Literature, Culture

In the southern United States, there remains a deep need among both black and white writers to examine the topic of race relations, whether they grew up during segregation or belong to the younger generation that graduated from integrated schools. In Race Mixing, Suzanne Jones offers insightful and provocative readings of contemporary novels, the work of a wide range of writers--black and white, established and emerging. Their stories explore the possibilities of cross-racial friendships, examine the repressed history of interracial love, reimagine the Civil Rights era through children's eyes, herald the reemergence of the racially mixed character, investigate acts of racial violence, and interrogate both rural and urban racial dynamics. Employing a dynamic model of the relationship between text and context, Jones shows how more than thirty relevant writers--including Madison Smartt Bell, Larry Brown, Bebe Moore Campbell, Thulani Davis, Ellen Douglas, Ernest Gaines, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Reynolds Price, Alice Walker, and Tom Wolfe--illuminate the complexities of the color line and the problems in defining racial identity today. While an earlier generation of black and white southern writers challenged the mythic unity of southern communities in order to lay bare racial divisions, Jones finds in the novels of contemporary writers a challenge to the mythic sameness within racial communities--and a broader definition of community and identity. Closely reading these stories about race in America, Race Mixing ultimately points to new ways of thinking about race relations. "We need these fictions," Jones writes, "to help us imagine our way out of the social structures and mind-sets that mythologize the past, fragment individuals, prejudge people, and divide communities." "A valuable treatment of race and racial relations in the modern South as depicted in contemporary southern literature. No other scholarly work has covered this ground so thoroughly. Historically sound, theoretically sophisticated, and characterized by insightful readings of previously understudied novels, Race Mixing fills a real need in southern literary studies." --Fred Hobson, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "Suzanne Jones is a subtle and nuanced writer, with a profound engagement with issues of race and gender, never oversimplifying the complex relationship between the two. There is a strong theoretically--and politically--informed intelligence at work here, and this exploration of black-white relations and the dialogues across racial and national lines is certain to become a classic. The range of writers discussed; the insistent working away at theme and literary detail throughout; and the consistent attention to socio-political as well as literary history: all testify to a scholar working at the height of her powers."--Helen Taylor, University of Exeter "Suzanne Jones's new study is a generous portrait of the landscape of recent, post-Civil Rights, Southern fiction. Meditative and insightful, Race Mixing will make it easier for the rest of us to mark our own trails through that complex, varied landscape. It will become one of the places to start to understand Southern fiction of the last quarter of the twentieth century."--Noel Polk, The University of Southern Mississippi

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Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties

Writing the Woman Artist is a collection of essays that explore the ways women writers portray women painters, sculptors, writers, and performers.

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Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture

In your father's day all the farmers around here were doing fine. Now they have to work night shifts at the Kmart to keep up their mortgages. Why is that? They work just as hard as their parents did, and they're on the same land, so what's wrong? --Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer At the same time some southern studies scholars are positioning the U.S. South in a larger cultural, historic, and economic region that encompasses the Caribbean and Latin America, some southern environmentalist writers, such as long-time essayist and novelist Wendell Berry and activist-turned-memoirist Janisse Ray, are finding a pressing need to focus on smaller bioregions and the locatedness of the human subject. (1) These writers believe that agribusiness and consumer ignorance are driving small farmers out of business and that clear-cutting timber and farming practices dependent on chemicals are threatening local ecosystems. (2) Best-selling novelist Barbara Kingsolver has joined their ranks. With her most recent novel Prodigal Summer (2000), Kingsolver returns to her home region and her academic roots to explore both the crucial ecological issues that most interest the South's environmentalist writers and some of the transnational questions that currently preoccupy literary critics. Setting her novel in southern Appalachia, (3) where she grew up and where she now owns a cabin, she fictionalizes problems that she has since published impassioned essays (4) about: failing family farms, fragmented communities, ecosystems out of balance, and rural-urban, insider-outsider tensions. In Prodigal Summer Kingsolver's academic training in evolutionary biology and ecology, her abiding concern for community and family, and her intimate knowledge of a particular place combine to produce no less than a blueprint for saving the small family farm and for restoring ecological balance in a southern Appalachian bioregion that is struggling to survive. Kingsolver, who is at the height of her verbal powers in this novel, employs elaborate Darwinian conceits to link human and natural worlds, both to show how they are connected and how they are similar in needing variety to sustain the health of a complex interdependent ecosystem. Near the end of the novel, Kingsolver places an important Darwinian principle in the mouth of the organic apple grower, Nannie Rawley: "There is nothing so important as having variety. That's how life can still go on when the world changes" (390). And the world of southern Appalachia has changed dramatically. The majestic chestnut trees that once provided a livelihood for some and shelter for many have succumbed to an Asian fungal blight, farming can no longer be relied on to support a family, rural people commute long hours to work in factories or to supplement meager farm income, and their children know little about the ecosystem they inhabit. Kingsolver thinks of place in much the same way as Arif Dirlik, who has argued that to focus on the groundedness of places through ecology and topography is "not to return to some kind of geographic determinism or bounded notion of place" or to posit an "immutable fixity." For Dirlik, place is the "location," "where the social and the natural meet, where the production of nature by the social is not clearly distinguishable from the production of the social by the natural" (18). He argues that "[a] place suggests groundedness from below, and a flexible and porous boundary around it, without closing out the extralocal, all the way to the global" (22). As Darwin pointed out, difference becomes an important resource for survival. In Prodigal Summer Kingsolver employs non-native human and animal species to suggest solutions to local economic and ecological problems in southern Appalachia. At the same time Kingsolver reveals how introducing exotic species into the southern landscape can harm the nonhuman ecosystem, she demonstrates that not all exotics are necessarily invasive--thereby providing biological background for the human social parallel that she sets up. …

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The Southern Family Farm as Endangered Species: Possibilities for Survival in Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer

Over the years American writers have perceived Appalachia differently depending on how America has perceived itself. While those who have approved of the American way of life have looked down on mountain life, those who have disapproved have seen Appalachia as an alternative culture from which America might take a lesson (Appalachia, 65). In 1873 the journalist William Harney and the editors of Lippincott Magazine "discovered" Appalachia, and historian Henry Shapiro argues that since then America has thought of this mountainous portion of eight southern states as a discrete region, "in but not of America" (Appalachia, 4). In the 1870's writers caught up in what they saw as America's progress saw Appalachia as behind the times. For vacationers and local-color writers, who looked with wonder at colorful people, quaint customs, and picturesque scenes, Appalachia was a measure of how far America had come. At the turn of the century when writers of "uplift literature" accompanied the missionaries and teachers to the region, America's success became a measure of how far Appalachia had to go. These outsiders viewed Appalachians as ignorant, isolated hillbillies, poor, shiftless, and easily provoked. (1) World War I, however, and the depression that followed not only changed America's view of itself but altered its perception of Appalachia. For the first time America saw Appalachia not as unAmerican but as more nearly American--conserving old English folk culture and preserving American pioneer individualism. The mountaineer's way of life seemed to be the very heritage the war was fought to safeguard but a heritage that was slipping away. These outsiders viewed Appalachians as sturdy, independent folk, who enjoyed a noble life. In her recent novel Oral History Lee Smith uses the perspectives of two outsiders, upper class Richard Burlage from Richmond and middle class Jennifer Bingham from Abingdon, to examine the causes and consequences of typical twentieth-century perceptions of Appalachia. Smith, who grew up in southwestern Virginia, is adept at revealing the naivete and the condescension that often characterize the outsider's perception of mountain people. She relates the Cantrell family legend through the tales of four generations of friends and enemies, insiders and outsiders, to Hoot Owl Holler. The multiple perspectives Smith uses indicate that she is just as interested in the varying perceptions of Appalachia as she is in the actual place and its people. Smith frames her novel in the present when Jennifer Bingham returns to her dead mother's home in Hoot Owl Holler to collect oral history for a class project. Taught by her upwardly mobile father and stepmother to look down on her real mother's family, Jennifer now sees her relatives from another perspective--that of her "Yankee" folklore professor who finds Jennifer's tales of the haunted Cantrell homeplace and Hoot Owl Holler lore fascinating material. Through Jennifer, Smith satirizes amateur folklorists--the latest breed of curiosity seekers in Appalachia. Although their collection of oral history and analysis of mountain culture is supposed to be objective, Smith suggests otherwise. While Jennifer, like some amateur folklorists, tries to prove that a pastoral past still lives in the present, Smith is at pains to paint a more complex picture, making sure that for every cotton quilt there is an aluminum lawn chair and for every log cabin there is a custom painted van. The first mountain character we meet, however, is a folklorist's dream come true; Jennifer calls him a "real treasure" (11). Little Luther Wade, dressed in western shirt and cowboy boots, sits on the porch strumming his dulcimer while his wife Ora Mae makes an afghan in the star pattern. But when the rest of the family arrives on the scene, any reader who like Jennifer had hopes of an Appalachian time warp is pulled back into the present. For along with the rest of America, the people of Hoot Owl Holler learn their culture from the television and their manners from the movies. …

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Suzanne W. Jones

Papers

South to A New Place: Region, Literature, Culture

Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties

Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture

The Southern Family Farm as Endangered Species: Possibilities for Survival in Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer

City Folks in Hoot Owl Holler: Narrative Strategy in Lee Smith's Oral History