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“Southern Fringes: Little Magazines and Larry Brown’s Early Short Fiction” seeks to revitalize and expand the scholarly field of the New Southern Studies, employing textuality, book history, and postcritique perspectives towards the study of literary events and objects. Whereas the New Southern Studies rightly problematizes and dismantles notions of the signifier southern named in connection with literary works, such approaches often ignore paratextual elements, including material and sociological features, that work to frame and support these narratives. This dissertation addresses such shortcomings, arguing that paratextual formations function as vital spaces for constructing senses of southernness in service of both bibliographic identity and readers’ literary discernments. Exploring public epitext in a variety of locations, as well as four cases of Larry Brown’s short stories appearing in Mississippi Review, The Greensboro Review, and The Chattahoochee Review, this dissertation demonstrates how Brown’s writing emerges as southern fringe: a joint presence of autobiographic, material, perceptual, and other paratextual elements that frame Brown’s writing in unique locales outside of the literary mainstream. This dissertation's implications include adopting a mode of reading and analysis, focusing on case studies and surface readings of paratext serving specific bibliographic documents, as a way to move beyond generalizing and broad claims about the nature, function, and interpretation of literature. Additionally, this dissertation focuses on little magazines, materiality, and paratext as expanded sites and perspectives for the continued growth and development of interdisciplinary humanities fields such as the New Southern Studies. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This dissertation employs concepts of sense of place, consumption, and terroir (a French term often translated “taste of place”) to evaluate the ways that nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century representations of southern agriculture – advertisements, art, events, landscapes, and material culture – jointly promote produce and place in and beyond the American South. Reconceiving terroir as a perception of place associated with various senses (including, but not limited to, taste) that circulates via non-edible forms, the project examines how Southern promoters used representations of agricultural goods, landscapes, and workers to market four specific products from their region—North Carolina tobacco, Virginia peanuts, Florida oranges, and South Carolina rice—to consumers across the United States. I explore how various groups and individuals developed advertisements, art, events, and material culture that evoked elements of southern terroir to sell consumers fantasies of the region’s produce and attractions. By analyzing the ways that companies used visual and material representations to convey place-specific sensory qualities of food to national buyers, this project models a new approach toward understanding the localized meanings of Southern foodstuffs and expands on work in foodways studies that has focused on the material qualities of comestibles themselves. I connect the South to post-Civil War and twentieth century national advertising trends, particularly the widespread use of racist caricatures and evocations of social class, and I illustrate the pervasiveness of regional imaginings within the visual and material worlds of commodified agriculture. I also consider how representations of tobacco, peanuts, oranges, and rice created by members of the localized communities in which these products were grown creatively contributed to, reclaimed, or contested place-based identities and memories as intertwined with agricultural output. Addressing creators and consumers who have come to these products from a variety of geographic, financial, cultural, and racial backgrounds, my project demonstrates that twentieth century promotional representations of Southern produce functioned on local, regional, and national scales. Ultimately the dissertation shows that southern agricultural promotions and commemorations have long revolved around the consumption of place itself. / 2024-11-02T00:00:00Z

This work expands the understanding of the "culture of honor" that social psychologists maintain exists in the American South. Social psychologists attribute the higher incidence of violent crimes, especially murder committed by white men in the South as compared to Northern white men, to this "culture of honor." While social psychologists have restricted their work to white men, this work explores how this distinct culture has impacted the Southern black community while uncovering deeper ways in which the culture has affected the Southern white community. Using historically-based literature and film by African Americans, the work provides a more comprehensive look at the Southern "culture of honor." In the "culture of honor" notions of honor involve the entire community, with the family as the central unit of honor. Male and female family members possess significant responsibilities in regards to carrying and protecting family honor. Once familial honor is compromised or lost, a violent retaliation occurs. Legal and social institutions support the culture by assuming an apathetic attitude towards violent acts committed in defense of honor. The four works selected for this study allow for an insightful look into the Southern "culture of honor." While each work presents various aspects of the "culture of honor," they all contribute to a unique understanding of the culture. In Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Bebe Moore Campbell illustrates the damaging affects the culture has on black and white families in the South. Ernest Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men depicts how Southern black men who, for decades, have been victims of violence at the hands of white men choose to assert their own toughness. The film Rosewood by John Singleton represents the film industry's contemporary depiction of strong, black male figures in the South. Finally, Michael Schultz's made for television film For Us, The Living celebrates the passion behind black men like Civil Rights' champion Medgar Evers, who refused to accept the violent "rule of retaliation" adhered to by Southern white men. From this study, the Southern "culture of honor" emerges as a much more complex institution than originally presented by social psychologists.

This dissertation offers an outlined proposal and a model for practicing queer oral history—a nuancing of oral history praxis. Queer oral history is rooted in performance studies’ call to consider everyday texts alongside Dwight Conquergood’s (1985) articulations of ethical and dialogic performance of the other. I propose that queer oral history exists as an alternative praxis to traditional oral history; in order for this distinction to emerge, a practitioner must accept two charges. The first is a commitment to destabilizing oral history through the inclusion of other diverse methodological practices. Further, the researcher must welcome the ethical imperative to reflexively question subjectivity through their own role in constructing an oral history. Queer oral history demands of its practitioners a different set of goals that grow from traditional oral history, but also carefully complicate the practice of oral history as a methodology in order to address the in-between role of the subject-researcher. This placement within the gaps—the in-between—renders queer oral history theoretically queer, opening up possibilities beyond simply an oral history about queer themes. Because of its focus on commitments as a way to lead practice, queer oral history could prove useful for other person-based qualitative research methods. In order to propose queer oral history, this document traces one specific performance—Bless Our Hearts: An Oral History of the Queer South—from intellectual inception through scripting, staging, performance, and reperformance. Offering theoretical precepts, a completed script, and deep discussions of choices in scripting and embodiment, this dissertation offers a model that shows one queer oral history—about the intersections of queer and Southern identities—as it moves from interview process to complete performance project.

This thesis seeks to understand the South as a space through which the contested bodies of two literary characters and the men who authored them can be more fully explored: the Ex- Colored Man in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Nicholas Worth in Walter Hines Page's The Southerner; each appearing within an early twentieth-century novel masquerading as an autobiography. These bodies serve to help us understand how the regional Other of the South has inflicted itself on individuals living in the South and caused an irreparable fracture to the characters' identities forcing them into passing roles in lives they do not see as their own. This passing allows the characters to adopt a new persona in the communities that they inhabit, but never permits them to inhabit new bodies themselves. They are always left with the perception that they do not corporeally belong and the anxiety that the "truth" about their body might be exposed at any moment. Ultimately, the thesis also challenges the notion of passing as merely racial and explores other forms of passing, especially ones dealing with geography (i.e. a Southerner passing as a Northerner) and explains that the New Southern Studies needs to find ways to examine the South that are not dependent on racial binaries.

The present MA thesis discusses Eudora Welty's short fiction and the author's engagement with the plantation memory. The introductory chapter defines the concept of plantation memory as a flux of the normative plantation binaries, the plantation mythology obscuring the ante-bellum Southern reality, the linguistic and phenomenal evidence of the prevailing oppression, and the ability of the text and its creator to subvert the official narratives and to liberate the individuals' silenced voices. Applying an interdisciplinary approach, the thesis examines the processes in which the particular selves are confronted with the plantation order and in which their identities are consolidated, either resisting or crumbling under the social pressure. The three analytical chapters of the thesis discuss nine of Welty's short stories that were selected from The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty on the basis of the typology and criteria outlined in the introduction. Without claiming that the nine stories present the sum of Welty's artistic achievement, the texts attempt to demonstrate general tendencies and narrative strategies that the author applies in her short fiction, writing about and within the plantation memory. The selection includes as many different texts as possible and contains three stories and three...

Constituting a proposal for a book talk associated with the scholarly title Foreign-Born American Patriots: Sixteen Volunteer Leaders of the Revolutionary War, the presenter of this session (and author of the book) will introduce the scholarly work to participants for the purpose of highlighting research based in contribution, rather than interpretation. The author will detail the means by which the investigation of human experience and work product, storylines/patterns, and social cause may provide the context for creative scholarly works. The author will also reveal the unique contribution of Foreign Born American Patriots to historical and Southern Studies discourse, the book serving, up through the date of this proposal, as the only collective work regarding those foreigners who helped the newly formed United States defeat the British Army (many battles fought in the Southern States).

The sociocultural mythology of the South homogenizes it as a site of abjection. To counter the regionalist discourse, the dissertation intersects queer sexualities with gender and race and focuses on exploring identity and spatial formation among Black lesbian and queer women. The dissertation seeks to challenge the monolith of the South and place the region into multiple contexts and to map Black geographies through an intentional intersectional account of Black queer women. The dissertation utilizes qualitative research methods to ascertain understandings of lived experiences in the production of space. The dissertation argues that an idea of Progress has been indoctrinated as a synonym for the lgbtq civil rights movement and subsequently provides an analysis of progress discourses and queer sexualities and political campaigns of equality in the South. Analyses revealed different ways to situate progress utilizing the public contributions of three Black women interviewed for the dissertation. Moreover, the dissertation utilizes six Black queer and lesbian women to explain the multifarious nature of identities and their construction in place. Black queer and lesbian women produce spaces that deconstruct the normativity of stasis and physicality, and the dissertation explores the consequential realities of being a body in space. These consequences are particularly highlighted in the dissertation by discussions of the processes of racialization in the bounded and unbounded senses of space and place and the impacts of religious institutions, specifically Christianity. The dissertation concluded that no space is without complication. Other considerations should be made in the advancement of alleviating oppression deeply embedded in United States landscapes. Black women’s geographies offer epistemological and ontological renderings that enrich analyses of space, place, and landscape. The dissertation also concludes that Black women’s bodies represent sites for the production of geographic knowledge through narrating their spaces of material trajectories of interlocking, multiscalar lives.

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation analyzes the sixty-four (64) page handwritten ledger of Mrs. Goldleana Harris (also known as Mrs. Mosley Abraham Gibbs, 1920–1986), kept between 1944 and 1960. Harris is a Black woman born in Longstreet, Louisiana DeSoto Parish. She lived in Shreveport, Louisiana from 1949–1986. Using a case study approach and close reading analysis of Mrs. Goldleana’s writings, I document a Black woman’s lived experience and the historical significance of Hollywood, a segregated Black neighborhood in Shreveport, Louisiana and related gathering spaces within the Deep South region of the United States between 1944 and 1960. These spaces include five areas of significant and overlapping importance: The Family House, The School House, The Church House, The Labor (Work) House, & The Play (Leisure) House. </p>