“Beasts of the Southern screen: race, gender, and the global South in American cinema since 1963,” explores the role that the Southern imaginary has played at the crux of national, media, and personal mythmaking. This dissertation argues that the Southern imaginary—here defined as filmic images of Southernness—has helped Americans manage a series of crises from the late Cold War period to the current moment. Repudiating an allegedly recalcitrant South allowed the United States to see itself as a democratic, progressive place (via downward comparison) even as events like the Civil Rights movement, feminism, and the Vietnam War imperiled the coherence of national identity. Imagined sojourns through the South have also helped filmmakers glimpse the alternative, unauthorized fantasies and fears that swirl just underneath “official narratives” of national and personal identity. Films set in the Southern imaginary are thus crucially important to processing the traumas that connect nation and subject. As a fantasy space, the Southern imaginary allows subjects to confront overwhelming events that can only be endured when “staring over the fence” into a region at once a part of and distinct from the nation. The first two chapters argue that filmmakers use images of an antiquated South to process Vietnam War-era traumas. Slavery epics like The Beguiled and Southern horror films including Deliverance allegorize white anxieties over the political influence of minority populations. Later chapters contend that Southern-set films continue to appropriate stories of marginalized peoples, but now under the mantle of tolerance. The third chapter argues that Hollywood films starring Southern, queer cowboys demonstrate the ascendancy of American progressivism even in the once-repressive South. However, these films often exclude minority subjects from their purportedly tolerant landscapes. The final chapter of this dissertation therefore turns to films made within Southern communities like Moonlight, analyzing how the filmmakers use silence and visual obscurity to resist the objectifying gaze of the camera. In the films analyzed, the Southern imaginary emerges as fertile site for trenchant social critique and fantasies that connect the personal to the political.

This dissertation consists of a collection of sixty pages of poetry of various styles and forms, predominately in free verse. Subject matter includes family and relationships, especially between women of different generations; history, both personal/family and public; language; means of handling grief and death; travel and return; and sense of place/home. As a writer, I often find myself taking moments from my own life and transforming them into poems. All language fascinates me, especially words that are closely tied to the culture from which they emerge. Several poems in the collection rely on unusual, untranslatable, or forgotten words. These poems explore the relationships between place, history, culture, and language. All of these are intertwined, and it is often difficult to extract one element and study it discretely from the rest. Additionally, history, both collective and personal, often provides a stimulus for my poems and is useful in bridging the gap between personal memories and associations and those of the reading audience. I often approach the past through photographs, physical objects, or landscapes, or share stories of my own family’s history. Many of these poems are about questioning one’s own ancestry. I create myths about myself and others, often my own family and ancestors, building a story around a particular truth. In these poems, I rewrite my own history and experiences.

Originally published as the author's Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington University, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [189]-205).

Originally published as the author's Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington University, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [189]-205).

"Retro" is a novel which attempts to depict the psychological reality of the spiritually isolated individual characterized in traditional gothic novels, in this case the alienated individual in the contemporary American South. The novel follows the doctrine set down by Roland Barthes, Frank Kermode, and other postmodern critics, which holds that, as Kermode puts it, "all closure is in bad faith." Therefore, rather than offering resolution to the problems and events presented in the text, the novel attempts instead to illustrate the psychological effects its main character experiences when confronted with a world that offers only irresolution and uncertainty. The novel's strategy is to depart from conventional, realistic modes of narration and to adopt instead certain characteristics of satire, surrealism, and the type of grotesque often associated with the gothic novel.

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

This narrative chronicles the dissemination of sacred music from the eastern seaboard to the West and South spanning a time frame from the colonial era to the latter part of the Early Nationalist Period (1700-1820). Musical culture in its migration away from the eastern seaboard also parallels the greater western and southern expansion of the United States from its initial configuration of localized regional subgroups to the beginnings of a larger national identity. From this conceptual base, sacred music becomes a vehicle for understanding not only religious and musical changes over time, but also the broader maturity of a nation. Focusing on this period allows for inquiries both into the development of hymnody in the Middle Atlantic, and the subsequent developments of the West and South. These chronological delimitations allow for a discussion of musical practice beginning with formative sacred music developments and continuing to the incorporation of techniques shaped by reform-minded musicians from the eastern seaboard. The following topics guided the construction of this thesis: explicating how the Middle Atlantic region shaped compositional trends, aesthetic, and performance practice of the American West and South; identifying the various southern cultures as understood by eighteenth and nineteenth-century southerners and their application to sacred music practice; understanding how nineteenth-century Americans distinguished between the West and the South; understanding how southern and western music relates to individual denominations and cultures within these areas; and understanding performance practice common to the evangelical and non-evangelical branches of individual sects. Identifying patterns of development in American sacred music of the South and West involves documentation of performance practice, denominational aesthetics, and tunebook bibliography. The study of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century material by twentieth-and-twenty-first-century writers has falsely defined cultural borders of this region according to a post-bellum conceptualization of the boundaries of the North and South. Prior to 1850, writers defined their borders according to a different set of geographic boundaries than today. Consequently, this thesis differs in terms of geographic and cultural definitions of the North and South from current scholarship because of this writer’s application of colonial and Early Nationalist understandings of American culture.

This creative thesis is comprised of five original short stories and a critical preface. The preface discusses the changing cultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic landscape of the modern American South and the effects-positive, negative, and neutral-these changes have had on the region's contemporary literature, including the short stories contained within.

Greek immigration to the United States occurred in two distinctive waves: the first wave from the 1890s-1920s and the second wave from the 1960s-1980s. This thesis explores the regional diversity of the Greek immigrant experience in the Southern United States through the case study of the Greek community in Richmond, Virginia. The first chapter introduces the history of Greek immigration to the United States, discusses major scholars of Greek American studies, and explains the Southern Variant theory. Chapter two examines the experiences of the first wave of Greek immigrants in Richmond. The third chapter incorporates oral history to explain the experiences of second wave Greek immigrants in Richmond. Chapters two and three examine factors including language, church activity, intermarriage, and community involvement, in order to demonstrate a Southern Variation in the experiences of Greek immigrants in Richmond in comparison to their counterparts elsewhere in the United States.