Thesis advisor: Christopher P. Wilson / For more than a century, the chain gang has been glamorized, criticized, abhorred, and often explained away as an economic necessity or natural byproduct of historical circumstances. After Emancipation, this centuries-old approach to punishing criminals offered an immediate palliative for southern plantation owners in need of field hands, northern coal and steel interests and railroad tycoons in search of blasters and miners, and eventually government officials who identified the South's antiquated infrastructure as its greatest barrier to integration into a regional and national economy. Heavily influenced by Hollywood, the blues, oral histories and folkways, archived photographs, and literary representations, many people now view the chain gang as a relic of a bygone era of southern prejudice and brutality. After all, history does not cast the men and women who served on chain gangs as heroic workers and, if they are acknowledged at all, they are only occasionally figured as victims of the political, social, and economic forces that led to their convictions and servitude. And yet, paradoxically, labor historians and others have argued convincingly that the chain gang, even with all its warts and abuses, actually made southern economic progress possible. Entering this still-vibrant, contested territory, "Restricted Movement" and Coordinates of Freedom focuses on depictions of chain gangs in selected literary works and films from 1901 to 2000, including Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and All the King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren and the films I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Defiant Ones (1958), and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). This dissertation attempts to make sense of a multitude of historical and social conditions that bear specifically on chain gangs and convict labor, including black criminality, white supremacy, the Good Roads Movement, race-based electoral politics, and industrialization. In addition to exploring these vexed arguments about servitude and progress, this dissertation also explores how the chain gang, real and imagined, serves as its own special form of segregation. Beginning with the work of Edward L. Ayers, Alex Lichtenstein, Matthew Mancini, and others in the 1980s and 1990s, a handful of southern and labor historians broadened the study of postbellum race, crime, and punishment to consider whether convict-leasing programs and chain gangs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries really did result in a form of "neo-slavery." In other words, these historians asked, did these practices actually "re-enslave" African Americans in the American South between 1865 and 1940? And if so, what were the social, political and cultural implications of this re-enslavement? How did these practices shape the experience and consciousness of both blacks and southern whites? Moreover, in a culture that speaks so often of slavery's terrible legacies, how might a deeper understanding of convict leasing and chain gangs offer its own particular lessons about race, history, and justice in the United States since the Civil War? My hope is that the methods and approaches laid out in this dissertation will invite other scholars to grapple with the ways in which chain gang history and cultural history inform one another. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Excerpt from Introduction" Social class is one of the fundamental analytical categories for studying southern cultures. Exploring southern society as the context for cultural life is an enduring concern of scholars from such disciplines as sociology, social history, anthropology, social psychology, and political science, among others, and this volume shows the vital public policy connections to scholarly issues of social class.

This dissertation investigates the place-making practices of African American lesbians in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1990 to 2010. For this project, I ask how African American lesbians claim space to examine how race, sexuality, and class shape their place-making practices. The study is situated in the city before and following the 1996 Olympic Games, which was a period of rapid social, economic, and political growth. The primary question posed in this study is as follows: How do African American lesbians claim space in Atlanta? This dissertation posits three arguments. First, African American queer spaces are transitory, reflecting the shrinking boundaries of black neighborhoods within the contemporary city. Second, these spaces are informed and forged by the sexual, racial, and classed identities of participants. Third, through their place-making practices, struggles, and contestations over public space, African Americans have transformed sites in the city into black queer cartographies. In this empirically informed study, I employ ethnographic research methods, participant observation, archival research, oral histories, and in-depth interviews. By positioning black queer cartographies within the larger schematic of African American life, this work extends current understandings of queer space and builds on the growing subarea of black queer geographies (McBride 2007; Bailey 2011; Eaves 2017). Multiple sites that reflect the transitory and clandestine nature of locating queer space are mentioned in the work. Within Atlanta’s neighborhoods of Midtown, Southwest Atlanta, and Westside, African American lesbians curated spaces that validated their identities and provided a sense of belonging during the period studied.

In this paper, I will examine works of Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers, three Southern women writers who wrote during the first half of the twentieth century. While these authors differ in a number of ways, each of them produced work that deals, often explicitly, with ideal Southern womanhood and the expectations this ideal places upon women. Additionally, each of these three authors uses the grotesque as a tool for examining ideal womanhood, most often represented through the ideal of the Southern Lady. This paper is concerned with analyzing the link between the grotesque and the ideal of the Southern Lady, specifically the ways in which O’Connor, Welty, and McCullers employ the grotesque as a tool for exposing the limiting and destructive nature of this ideal.

No abstract available. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1971.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the theme of alienation in selected fiction by Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, taking into consideration the geographic as well as ideological positions from which the two authors write, contextualizing their work in its portrayal as well as critique of the South. Firstly, the insular nature of the South is examined vis-à-vis ethnic and racial othering. The exclusionary social politics of Southern communities are satirized and subverted, as the two authors pit the xenophobic and racist tendencies of their provincial characters against a cultural landscape that fails to accommodate their narrow- minded world view. The gap between the Southern ideology and its contemporaneous reality can be partially accounted for due to the rise of consumer culture, which is discussed in its impact on race relations and social mobility as well as religion. The following chapter, entitled "Commodity Culture and the Americanization of the South," explores the conflation of religious and consumerist ideologies, negotiating the proclaimed adherence to Protestantism in the South with the rise of consumer behaviour as supplanting spirituality. The impact of a ritualistic adherence to capitalist structures is analyzed as promoting a culture of hyper-individualism, narcissism and alienation,...

Although Amanda Wingfield, Blanche DuBois, and Maggie Pollitt are examined frequently in scholarship on Tennessee Williams's plays, many critics assume that the three women's Southern femininity translates to fragility and that their nostalgia for the Confederate past constitutes delusion. Distancing our perceptions of the three women from the common connotations of Southern femininity--frailty, selflessness, and domesticity—and leaning into the more disagreeable facets of Lost Cause nostalgia reveals the classist and racist ideologies that motivate their quests for upstanding Southern aristocratic lives. Critics have been slow to read Amanda, Blanche, and Maggie as rational socioeconomic actors, but this reading emphasizes the three women's socioeconomic desires, thus de-romanticizing Southern femininity and expounding on its problematic ideological positionalities. Blanche DuBois, Amanda Wingfield, and Maggie Pollitt have been evaluated in terms of their "monstrous" femininity. However, they become less monstrous and more familiar when we recognize the clear race- and class-based motivations for clinging so fiercely to their Southern identities. When we assume that their Southernness is defined by their literal proximity from and ideological relationships to ethnic and racial Others and people from lower socioeconomic classes, their motivations lose some of their critical abstraction and gain a new level of complexity. / Master of Arts / Tennessee Williams is known for crafting complex female protagonists in his dramas. Although Amanda Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie, Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire, and Maggie Pollitt of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are examined frequently in scholarship on Tennessee Williams's plays, many critics assume that the three women's Southern femininity stems from inherent fragility and that their nostalgia for the Confederate past constitutes mental instability. Reorienting our perceptions of these women away from the common connotations of Southern femininity--frailty, selflessness, and domesticity—and leaning into the more disagreeable facets of Lost Cause nostalgia reveals the classist and racist ideologies that motivate the three women's quests for upstanding Southern aristocratic lives. Critics have been slow to read Amanda, Blanche, and Maggie as rational socioeconomic actors, but this reading emphasizes the three women's socioeconomic desires, thus de-romanticizing Southern femininity and expounding on its problematic ideological positionalities—namely, extreme racism and classism. Although Blanche DuBois, Amanda Wingfield, and Maggie Pollitt have been evaluated previously in terms of their "monstrous" femininity, they become less monstrous and more familiar when we recognize the clear race- and class-based motivations for clinging so fiercely to their Southern identities. When we assume that their Southernness is defined by their literal proximity from and ideological relationships to ethnic and racial Others and people from lower socioeconomic classes, their motivations become more tangible, more complex—and more menacing.

The house at 45 King St. in Charleston, South Carolina is more than a home. It is a story of the home. A story told through history, through a vision exhibited in architectural drawings, and through the social heritage closest to my heart. 45 King is a story for the South; the story of its grandeur, its climate, its natural beauty, its hospitality, its comfort, and its veils. It is a story that was told yesterday and one that is still told today. Like an oral history, the telling of it may change over time. The story changes as people change. The economy changes, the land develops, technology rolls ahead, and the story which was informed by a heritage of living history begins to take a modern form. 45 King is today's story of the Southern home. / Master of Architecture

The present MA thesis focuses on the development of the archetype of the Southern Belle in the selected works of American fiction, namely John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn, William Faulkner's Sanctuary and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. The main task is to explore how the archetype of the Southern Belle was constructed and (if) transgressed at different times in the American literary tradition from the period of antebellum South to the era of the Southern Renaissance. Since the archetype of the Southern Belle is connected with the white upper class society it will be also discussed in this respect. By comparing texts from different historical periods I want to compare the different nature of cultural and social conditions that contributed and informed the meaning and the function of the Southern Belle. Moreover, by selecting Southern woman writer and Southern male writers respectively I want to compare female and male perspective on the literary representation of the Southern Belle. The first chapter briefly addresses the development of the American South as a region with a distinct social structure and cultural values and attempts to position the figure of the Southern Belle within that socio-historical context. Chapters three, four and five introduce and analyze the archetype of the...

This dissertation examines the life and complicated career of Sir James Wright (1716-1785), in an effort to better understand the complex struggle for power in colonial Georgia. Specifically, this project will highlight the contest for autonomy between four groups: Britains and Georgians (core-periphery), lowcountry and backcountry residents, whites and Natives, and Rebels and Loyalists. An English-born grandson of Chief Justice Sir Robert Wright, James Wright was raised in Charleston, South Carolina following his father’s appointment as that colony’s chief justice. The younger Wright attended Gray’s Inn in London and served South Carolina in a variety of capacities, most notably as their attorney general and colonial agent prior to his appointment as governor of Georgia in 1761. Additionally, he had a voracious appetite for land and became colonial Georgia’s largest landowner, accumulating nearly 26,000 acres, worked by no less than 525 slaves. As governor, Wright guided Georgia through a period of intense and steady economic growth and within a decade of his arrival, no one could still claim Georgia to be a “fledgling province” as it had become intricately engaged in a transatlantic mercantilist economy resembling South Carolina and any number of Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Moreover, Governor Wright maintained royal authority in Georgia longer and more effectively than any of his counterparts. Although several factors contributed to his success in delaying the seemingly inexorable revolutionary tide, his patience and keen political mind proved the deciding factor. He was the only of Britain’s thirteen colonies to enforce the Stamp Act of 1765. He also managed to stay a step or two ahead of Georgia’s Sons of Liberty until the spring of 1776. In short, Sir James Wright lived a transatlantic life, taking advantage of every imperial opportunity which presented itself. He earned numerous important government positions and amassed an incredible fortune, totaling over £100,000 sterling. His long imperial career, which delicately balanced dual loyalties to Crown and colony, offers important insights into a number of important historiographic fields.