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Abstract: In the summer of 2015, I was asked to teach a weeklong course for incoming students to acclimate them to a discussion-based liberal arts classroom. This was the same summer that Dylann Roof massacred nine people at Mother Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the media was filled with articles about the killer and his obsession with white nationalism and Confederate fetishization. I chose to focus the class on legacies of white supremacy, and we discussed ways in which Confederate memorialization continues to resonate in contemporary society, including monuments, Confederate emblems on state flags, and a political current of white supremacy. During one class, I asked the students if they had ... Read More PubDate: 2021-05-04T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The first day of teaching my course on OutKast, I played their song "Liberation" from the Aquemini album. The track opens with a softly played piano loop and a dominant rain stick, a sonically solemn foreshadow of the song's focus on what it means to be creatively, economically, and spiritually free. Students walked in with curious looks on their faces and wondered what to expect with the quietness of the song juxtaposed against a wailing Cee Lo Green and the chant "Shake That Load Off." "Liberation" is a testimony to OutKast's ascending to the top of hip hop culture while holding tight to their struggles with self-autonomy and their constantly evolving creative selves. In the classroom, "Liberation" offered a ... Read More PubDate: 2021-05-04T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In July 2016 Alton Sterling was murdered by police in Baton Rouge. I felt a combination of grief, rage, fear, and powerlessness. Alton could have been one of my students, or perhaps one of their fathers or uncles or brothers or godfathers or friends or neighbors, or he could have been any of those things to me. After his death, a photograph of Alton made the rounds on Facebook, and each time I scrolled past it I was struck by how familiar he was to me—the playful gap in his gold teeth, the tattoo on his arm relaxed at his side, bright-blue polo shirt tucked into pressed jeans hanging comfortably around his hips, heavy brass and leather belt buckle glinting in the sun. He looked like himself, unique and important. ... Read More PubDate: 2021-05-04T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In March 2017, I agreed to teach a literature course titled The Nation and Its Discontents, and, as is perhaps the case for many, I wrote a course description with only a vague idea of its ultimate content. While I knew I would approach the course from my (inter)disciplinary investment in black studies, through the end of July I was still undecided about whether the course would focus on the literature of black nationalism, southern nationalism, or some combination thereof. Then, while trying to make sense of white northerners bemoaning the loss of their Confederate heritage and antifascists punching Nazis, on August 13 my course discovered its subtitle: From Southern and Black Nationalism to the Alt Right and ... Read More PubDate: 2021-05-04T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: "Well," I say, "I believe that the truth about any subject only comes when all the sides of the story are put together, and all their different meanings make one new one. Each writer writes the missing parts to the other writer's story. And the whole story is what I'm after.""Well, I doubt if you can ever get the true missing parts of anything away from the white folks," my mother says softly, so as not to offend the waitress who is mopping up a nearby table; "they've sat on the truth so long by now they've mashed the life out of it."I have also realized that, for as many "imagined" Souths as I can conjure, there is the very real South that my students—and I—inhabit together.In her 1975 essay "Beyond the Peacock: ... Read More PubDate: 2021-05-04T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: On Tuesday April 28, 2015, CNN reporter Wolf Blitzer conducted a contentious interview with Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson. As the pair discussed the death of Freddie Gray and the peaceful and violent protests that erupted in Baltimore, Maryland, in response to the alleged involvement of police, a seemingly defiant Blitzer challenged McKesson about the nature of civil rights protests in the United States:In this contemporary moment, academics have been given an opportunity to help frame meaningful discussions around politically charged topics in the classroom.BLITZER:But at least 15 police officers have been hurt, 200 arrests, 144 vehicle fires, these are statistics—local police have put out 15 ... Read More PubDate: 2021-05-04T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In August 2016, I left Louisiana after a night that seemed decidedly and "naturally N'Awlins." Or "natural" to the New Orleans I had come to know in my years of teaching at Tulane University. Surrounded by my partner and friends at Bacchanal Wines, I felt a frisson of pleasure and subversion when a former student ran over to the table to proclaim that I was her best teacher ever and, after handshakes with those at the table, to express surprise that my partner is a man. "You'd never know," she said. "Professor LG says 'partner,' and she is so good with pronouns." She confirmed my lifelong goal to become a sexually illegible minor authority figure. Whatever they'd guess would scarcely capture the strange fits and ... Read More PubDate: 2021-05-04T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: On a recent July evening, a small crowd assembled near Silent Sam, a Confederate monument installed in 1913 on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Over the next two hours, Omololu Babatunde led us through the growing dark, enfolded in smoldering sage, convening conversations around monuments and markers. A recent graduate of UNC, Babatunde enlivened a counterhistory of the campus in sites that have been crucibles of conflict over resurgent white nationalism, which lays claim to the public sphere through reimagined articulations of Confederate history. In this essay, through a study of pedagogical approaches to the public landscape at UNC, I attend to the rhythmic confrontations staged ... Read More PubDate: 2021-05-04T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: A couple of years ago, a fast food outlet on a well-known left-leaning university campus in the United Kingdom decided to go for a rebrand before the start of the new academic year. Evidently seeking to distinguish itself from other such eateries, it opted for the name "Deep South," with the tagline "Food with Soul" for good measure. Following objections from both staff and the mostly postgraduate students who remained on campus over the summer, it was promptly renamed again before the start of the academic year, and the majority of undergraduate students were unaware of the furor—not, however, those enrolled in a southern literature module, who were duly informed and invited to consider the issues involved as an ... Read More PubDate: 2021-05-04T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Australian university students can pick Abraham Lincoln out of a lineup. They know about Prohibition, they have at least heard of Frederick Douglass, and they are aware the Tea Party has two incarnations. Many of them have read at least some American literature and of my pop culture references, most—though not nearly enough—are appreciated. Teaching American history in Australia is great.Teaching racism and exploitation in southern history—or any field—requires pitching back and forth between making history familiar and making history strange.It gets better. When I teach a course called American Empire, Australian students are already aware—perhaps even more so than I am—that the United States was, and still is, an ... Read More PubDate: 2021-05-04T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: On August 11, 2017, a group of white supremacists wielding torches marched to show their opposition to Charlottesville, Virginia's plans to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Under the gaze of a statute of the University of Virginia's founder, Thomas Jefferson, the group shouted racist and nationalist epithets as they moved in the darkness of night. The next day, counterprotestors met the group and violence ensued, leading to numerous injuries and the murder of Heather Heyer. The violence that erupted in Charlottesville has deep roots seeping through the history of this nation, and the plant sprung from these roots continues to bear fruit. Thinking about this deep-seeded history, the conflicts ... Read More PubDate: 2021-05-04T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 2016 Memphis protesters stormed onto Interstate 40 as the spontaneous part of a larger protest of the police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. Instead of the military-style policing that characterized Ferguson and Baton Rouge, the protest, which held up traffic for hours, ended peacefully with the interim police chief literally walking arm and arm with protesters to deescalate rising tensions between police officers, motorists, and protesters. The next two days involved a contentious open forum with the mayor, protests outside Elvis Presley's Graceland, and, almost two years later, the removal of the statue of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest. As we help students ... Read More PubDate: 2021-05-04T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: For a recent issue of Mississippi Quarterly, editor Ted Atkinson asked me and several other members of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature's Emerging Scholars Organization to write short essays for a roundtable assessing the current state of southern studies. I wrote about the pressing need for the field to address environmental concerns, those with local and global ramifications. In that essay ("The Anthropocene"), I highlighted the relative dearth of ecocritical scholarship in southern studies, a shocking omission given the dire consequences that we are beginning to see in the region, from rising sea levels to ocean acidification, and from large-scale coal and gas extraction to vast carbon and ... Read More PubDate: 2021-05-04T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Course DescriptionIn 1995, Atlanta, GA, duo OutKast attended the Source Hip Hop Awards, where they won the award for best new duo. Mostly attended by bicoastal rappers and hip hop enthusiasts, OutKast was booed off the stage. OutKast member Andre Benjamin, clearly frustrated, emphatically declared what is now known as the rallying cry for young black southerners: "the South got something to say."For this course, we will use OutKast's body of work as a case study questioning how we recognize race and identity in the American South after the civil rights movement. Using a variety of post–civil rights era texts including film, fiction, criticism, and music, students will interrogate OutKast's music as the foundation ... Read More PubDate: 2021-05-04T00:00:00-05:00