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After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding region in 2005, the city debated whether to press on with Mardi Gras or cancel the parades. Ultimately, they decided to proceed. New Orleans’s recovery certainly has resulted from a complex of factors, but the city’s unique cultural life—perhaps its greatest capital—has been instrumental in bringing the city back from the brink of extinction. Voicing a civic fervor, local writer Chris Rose spoke for the importance of Carnival when he argued to carry on with the celebration of Mardi Gras following Katrina: “We are still New Orleans. We are the soul of America. We embody the triumph of the human spirit. Hell. We ARE Mardi Gras”. Since 2006, a number of new Mardi Gras practices have gained prominence. The new parade organizations or krewes, as they are called, interpret and revise the city’s Carnival traditions but bring innovative practices to Mardi Gras. The history of each parade reveals the convergence of race, class, age, and gender dynamics in these new Carnival organizations. Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans examines six unique, offbeat, Downtown celebrations. Using ethnography, folklore, cultural, and performance studies, the authors analyze new Mardi Gras’s connection to traditional Mardi Gras. The narrative of each krewe’s development is fascinating and unique, illustrating participants’ shared desire to contribute to New Orleans’s rich and vibrant culture.

This volume brings together for the first time essays that cover all major (currently) spoken languages in the state, all major language research in Louisiana, and all sites of language activism.This allows for a cohesive, comparative understanding of the state's polyglot history and each language's place in it. The book presents work from academics and community members, providing both insider views and the views of outsider scholars with years of experience with the languages in question. The approachable style makes this appropriate for both the general public and scholars of the state and language trends.

This book proposes to answer the pressing philosophical as well as psychological question of why people repeat themselves. It redefines folklore as traditional knowledge that serves this need in human lives and develops a "practice theory" around this idea. Practice, more than other suggested keywords of performance or enactment in social theory, connects localized culture with the vernacular idea that "this is the way we do things around here." The term invites study of what people do repeatedly to understand what they have in "mind." Demonstrating the application of this theory in folkloristic studies, Bronner offers four provocative case studies of psychocultural meanings that arise from traditional "frames of action" and address issues of the day: labeling of boogiemen to express fear of sexual molestation, connecting "wild child" beliefs to school shootings, identifying the crisis of masculinity in adolescent expression. Turning his analysis to the analysts of tradition, Bronner uses practice theory to evaluate the agenda of folklorists in shaping perceptions of tradition-centered "folk societies" such as the Amish, unpacking the culturally based rationale of public folklore programming, interpreting the evolving idea of folk museums in a digital world, and assessing how the terms folklorists use and the things they do affect how people think about tradition. This is a book intended to think about what people do in the name of tradition, and why.

Race and Radio: Pioneering Black Broadcasters in New Orleans explicates the emergence of blacks in broadcasting in New Orleans. The racial integration of changed the medium making it a channel for African American discourse, the music and interviews of local black musicians, and innovative black rhetoric. O.C.W. Taylor was the city's first black radio announcer. He hosted an unprecedented talk show, the “Negro Forum,” on WNOE beginning in 1946 and continuing for 22 years. Doctors, journalists, owners of funeral homes, directors of non-profits, and other professionals spoke. Clergy from various denominations discussed topics such as practical applications of Biblical stories. The guests inspired linked fate among listeners who had never heard African American voices on radio and believed they could also achieve. In 1949, listeners heard the arrival of Vernon "Dr. Daddy-O" Winslow's smooth, articulate, and disk jockey creative voice. The Fitzgerald Advertising Agency hired him to sell Jax beer to the black market using his show “Jivin’ with Jax” broadcast on WWEZ. He interviewed African American artists and played their music. After arriving from Chicago in 1953, Larry McKinley began informing blacks over WMRY of local activities of the Civil Rights Movement in the city. In 1957, he moved to WYLD which morphed into WMRY. This thick historiography situates Race and Radio within theories of racism, ideological hegemony, and marginalization, concepts explaining of why whites locked blacks out of the production and dissemination of media content.

The matter of money touches the writer's life at every point:in the need to make ends meet, in daily dealings with agents, editors, and publishers, and in the choice of subject matter and the lineaments of the imagined world.William Faulkner was no exception.The people and communities he wrote about were deeply entangled in personal, local, regional, national, and even global networks of industry, commerce, and finance, as was the author himself, whose economic biography often followed, but occasionally bucked, the tumultuous economic trends of the twentieth century.This collection brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the economic contexts of Faulkner's life and work, to follow the proverbial money toward new insights into the Nobel laureate and new questions about his art.Essays address economies of debt and gift-giving in Intruder in the Dust; the legacies of commodity fetishism in Sanctuary and of twentieth-century capitalism's financial turn in The Town; the pegging of self-esteem to financial acumen in the career of The Sound and the Fury's Jason Compson; the representational challenges posed by poverty and failure in Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend tales; the economics of regional readership and the Depression-era literary market; the aesthetic, monetary, and psychological rewards of writing for Hollywood; and the author's role as benefactor to an aspiring African American college student in the 1950s.The Faulkner we meet in these pages is among modern literature's most incisive and encyclopedic critics of what one contemporary theorist calls the madness of economic reason.

The African colonization movement plays a peculiar role in the study of racial equality in the United States. For white colonizationists, the movement was positioned as a compromise between slavery and abolition. For free blacks, colonization offered the hope of freedom, but not within America’s borders. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard shows how politics and identity were negotiated in middle of the public discourse on race, slavery, and freedom in America. Operating from a position of relative power, white advocates argued that colonization was worthy of support from the federal government. Stillion Southard analyzes the speeches of Henry Clay, Elias B. Caldwell, and Abraham Lincoln as efforts to engage with colonization at the level of deliberation. Between Clay and Caldwell’s speeches at the founding of the American Colonization Society in 1816 and Lincoln’s final public effort to encourage colonization in 1862, Stillion Southard explores the speeches and writings of free blacks who grappled with colonization’s conditional promises of freedom. The book examines an array of discourses to explore the complex issues of identity facing free blacks who attempted to meaningfully engage in colonization efforts. From a peculiarly voiced Counter Memorial against the ACS, to the letters of wealthy black merchant Louis Sheridan negotiating for his passage to Liberia, to the civically-minded orations of Hilary Teage in Liberia, Peculiar Rhetoric brings into light the intricacies of blacks who attempted to meaningfully engage in colonization.

Working in Europe during the 1930s, mainly for Germany’s UFA studios, and then in America in the 1940s and ’50s, Douglas Sirk brought to all his work a distinctive style that has led to his reputation as one of the 20th century cinema’s great ironists. He did things his own way: for him, rules were there to be broken, whether they were the decrees of Nazi authorities trying to turn film into propaganda or of studios insisting that characters’ problems should always be solved and that endings should always restore order, providing what Sirk used to call “emergency exits” for audiences. This study of Sirk is the first comprehensive critical overview of the filmmaker’s entire career, examining the ’50s melodramas for which he has been rightly acclaimed – films such as All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels and Imitation of Life – and instructively looking beyond them at his earlier work, which includes musicals, comedies, thrillers, war movies and westerns. Offering fresh insights into all of these films and situating them in the culture of their times, the book also incorporates extensive interview material drawn from a variety of sources, including the author’s own conversations with the director. Furthermore, it undertakes a detailed reconsideration of the generally overlooked novels and plays that served as sources for Sirk’s films, as well as providing a critical overview of previous Sirk commentary, from the time of the director’s “rediscovery” in the late 1960s to the present day.

Folklore in Baltic History: Resistance and Resurgence is a study of how the discipline of folklore studies was treated under the totalitarian rule of the USSR in the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from 1945 to 1991 and what role the study of folklore has played since independence in 1991. It is a “dramatic history” of what happened to folklorists, folklore archives and folklore departments in the universities under the Soviet rule. On the one hand was a coercive and brutal state and on the other peoples conscious of their national, cultural and linguistic identity as comprised in their folklore. On the one hand, scholars and archivists fell in line and on the other, continued to subvert the coercion by devising ingenious ways of communicating among themselves. When freedom came in 1991 they were ready to create the record of undocumented brutality by documenting life stories and oral history. Sadhana Naithani juxtaposes the work of folklore scholars in the Baltic countries between 1945 and 1991 to the life of the people in the same period to reach an evaluation of the Baltic folkloristics. She concludes that the study of folklore has been an act of resistance and has aided in the resurgence of freedom and identity in the post-Soviet Baltic countries.

Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work and Sex in the South is about southern modernist fictions centered on the imagined lives of black folk workers from the 1930s to the 1960s. This period encompasses the clashes surrounding New Deal-era policy reforms and their legacies as well as a surge in Popular Front artistic expressions from the Depression, to World War II, to the Civil Rights era and following. Labor Pains sets out to show that black working-class representations of the Popular Front have not only been about the stakes of race and labor but also call upon an imagined black folk to do other work. The book considers tropes of black folk workers across genres of southern literature to demonstrate the reach of black radicalism and how the black folk worker was used to engage the representative feelings we think we know and the affective feelings that remained unsaid. Labor Pains emphasizes feeling, namely the sensual and the sexual, imbued in narratives by George Wylie Henderson, William Attaway, Eudora Welty, and Sarah Elizabeth Wright. Each employs tropes of black folk workers to get a fuller picture of gender and desire during this time. As a result, a glimpse into feminist and gender-aware aspects of the outgrowths of black radicalism come into view.

Implied Nowhere: Absence in Folklore Studies talks about things folklorists don’t usually talk about. It ponders the tacit aspects of folklore and folklore studies, looking into the unarticulated expectations placed upon people whenever they talk about folklore and how those expectations necessarily affect the folklore they are talking about. The book’s chapters are wide-ranging in subject and style, yet they all orbit the idea that much of folklore, both as a phenomenon and as a field, hinges upon tacit or absent assumptions about who we are and what it is that we do. The authors articulate theories and methodologies for making sense of these absences, and, in the process, they offer critical new insights into discussions of race, authenticity, community, folklore and literature, popular culture, and scholarly authority. Taken as a whole, the book represents a new and challenging way of looking into the ways that groups come together to make meaning. In addition to the main chapters, the book also includes eight “interstitials,” shorter chapters that consider understudied and under-appreciated aspects of folklore. These discussions, which range from a consideration of knitting in public to the ways that invisibility shapes an internet meme to Bob Dylan, are presented as questions more than answers, encouraging readers to think about what folklore and folklore studies might look like if practitioners only chose to look at the subject from a slightly different angle.