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The Mississippi Freedom Vote of 1963 is no small thing. It is a complex historical and rhetorical phenomenon worthy of in-depth analysis. The Mississippi Freedom Vote of 1963 was an integrated citizens’ campaign to empower and promote agency for blacks within the state. With candidates Aaron Henry, a black pharmacist from Clarksdale, for governor and Reverend Edwin King, a white college chaplain from Vicksburg, for lieutenant governor, the Freedom Vote ran a platform aimed at obtaining votes, justice, jobs, and education for blacks in the Magnolia state. Though the actual campaign took place October 13 through November 4, the Freedom Vote’s impact far transcends those few weeks in the fall of 1963 and extends beyond the borders of Mississippi. Campaign manager Bob Moses was right to label the Freedom Vote “one of the most unique voting campaigns in American history.” It is precisely how the rhetorical forms employed by the Freedom Vote catalyze agency that is so appealing and unique. Educating people about citizenship and then providing an opportunity to practice this phronesis in real time created a groundswell of political activity in Mississippi. The Freedom Vote campaign employed the rhetorical tactics of image events to protest voting rights inequalities by executing a campaign that allowed participants to enact the very agency that was being criticized. The campaign turned protestors in to citizens, allowing local citizens to experience empowerment, and it allowed organizers to learn valuable lessons that they would employ time and time again.

While recent scholarship has amply demonstrated that Eudora Welty was a writer with cosmopolitan sensibilities and progressive politics, she continues to be categorized as a “regionalist” writer whose works valorize the white privilege from which she benefited. To assume this is Welty’s intention is to misread much of her work. This volume offers ways to navigate Welty’s sometimes complex prose and enriches readers’ understanding of Welty’s era and region. It offers teachers less simplistic approaches to the stories most frequently taught, and it steers them to less familiar texts. In addition, this book seeks to move Welty beyond a discussion of region to reflect new scholarship that “remaps” her work onto a larger canvas. Now more than ever, teachers need guidance in navigating the critical landscape and in preparing to introduce Welty texts to students in varied teaching settings and diverse classrooms. As the essays in this book demonstrate, Welty’s works are being read and taught across the globe. Her works enrich courses taught at many levels, from high school to community college to the university level. This book gives readers a window into the teaching practices of distinguished and veteran scholars as well as those at the beginning of their careers. Their work can guide instructors new to Welty as well as seasoned Welty scholars who are eager for fresh classroom approaches and new material to offer a new generation of students.

Media narratives in popular culture often ascribe interchangeable characteristics to childhood and old age. In the manner of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, the authors in this volume envision the presumed semblance between children and the elderly as a root metaphor that finds succinct articulation in the idea that “children are like old people” and vice versa. The volume explores the recurrent use of this root metaphor in literature and media from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The authors demonstrate how it shapes and is reinforced by a spectrum of media products from Western and East-Asian countries. Most the media products addressed were developed for children as their primary audience, and range from children’s classics such as Heidi to recent Dutch children’s books about euthanasia. Various authors also consider narratives produced either for adults (for instance, the TV series Mad Men, and the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) or for a dual audience (for example, the family film Paddington or The Simpsons). The diversity of these products in terms of geography, production date, and audience buttresses a broad comparative exploration of the connection between childhood and old age, allowing the authors to bring out culturally specific aspects and biases. Finally, since this book also unites scholars from a variety of disciplines (media studies, children’s literature studies, film studies, pedagogy, sociology), the individual chapters provide a range of methods for studying the connection between childhood and old age.

This book tells a distinct story of Indians in the Caribbean—one concentrated not only on archival records and institutions, but also on the voices of the people and the ways in which they define themselves and the world around them. The book explores previously marginalized Indians in the Caribbean and their distinct social dynamics and histories, including the French Caribbean and other islands with smaller South Asian populations. It pursues a comparative approach with inclusive themes that cut across the Caribbean. In 1833, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to the import of exploited South Asian indentured workers in the Caribbean. Today India bears little relevance to most of these Caribbean Indians. Yet, Caribbean Indians have developed an in-between status, shaped by South Asian customs such as religion, music, folklore, migration, new identities, and Bollywood films. They do not seem akin to Indians in India, nor are they like Caribbean Creoles, or mixed-race Caribbeans. Instead, they have merged India and the Caribbean to produce a distinct, dynamic local entity. The book does not neglect the arrival of nonindentured Indians in the Caribbean since the early 1900s. These people came to the Caribbean without an indentured contract or after indentured emancipation but have formed significant communities in Barbados, the US Virgin Islands, and Jamaica. The book contributes a thorough analysis of the Indo-Caribbean, among the first to look at the entire Indian diaspora across the Caribbean.

The supernatural remains extraordinarily popular in literature, television, and film. But one figure has remained in the shadow, the female ghost. Inherently liminal, often literally invisible, the female ghost has nevertheless appeared in all genres. Subversive Spirits presents a history of the figure in the United States and the United Kingdom from the 1920s to the present, focusing on the female ghost in heritage sites, theatre, Hollywood film, literature, and television in the United States and the United Kingdom. What holds these disparate female ghosts together is their uncanny ability to disrupt, illuminate, and challenge gendered assumptions and roles. As with other supernatural figures, the female ghost changes over time, especially responding to changes in gender roles. Comedic female ghosts in literature and film disrupt gender norms through humor (Topper and Blithe Spirit ). Terrifying and vengeful female ghosts in England and America draw on horror and death to present a challenge to restrictions on mothers (The Woman in Black and La Llorona). The female immigrant experience and the horrors of slavery provide the focus for ghosts who expose history’s silences (The Woman Warrior and Beloved ). Heritage sites use the female ghost as a friendly and inviting but structurally subordinated narrator (The Untold Story and The Ghost of the Castle ). In the twenty-first century, the female ghost expands her influence to become a mother and savior to all humanity (Being Human , U.K. and U.S.) Subversive Spirits brings this figure into the light, exploring her cultural significance in popular culture.

Twenty-First Century Feminisms in Children’s and Adolescent Literature employs methodologies from material feminism to demonstrate how feminist thinking has influenced literature for the young in the last two decades. Material feminism provides people with ways of thinking about the interactions among discourse, embodiment, technology, the environment, cognition, and the ethics of caring. This book thus applies the principles behind material feminism and interrelated manifestations of feminism (such as Critical Race Theory and ecofeminism) to texts written for the young to demonstrate how shifting cultural perceptions of feminism affect what is happening both in publishing for the young and in the academic study of children’s and adolescent literature. The work begins with a specific focus on how language and the material interact before moving to an examination of race as an intersectionally-lived material phenomenon and a social construction. How embodied individuals interact with the environment is explored through ecofeminism and the dystopic; how people interact with each other involves romance, sexuality, and feminist ethics. In other words, the structure of the book moves from examinations of the individual to examinations of the individual in social groups, the individual and the environment, and the individual within relationships. Overall, the goal of this work is to interrogate how material feminism can expand our understanding of materiality, maturation, and gender—especially girlhood—as represented in narratives for preadolescents and adolescents.

When the United States entered World War I, parts of the country had developed industries, urban cultures, and democratic political systems, but the South lagged behind, remaining an impoverished, agriculture region. Despite New South boosterism, the culture of the early twentieth-century South was comparatively artistically arid. Yet, southern writers dominated the literary marketplace by the 1920s and 1930s. World War I brought southerners into contact with modernity before the South fully modernized. This shortfall created an inherent tension between the region’s existing agricultural social structure and the processes of modernization, leading to distal modernism, a form of writing that combines elements of modernism to depict non-modern social structures. Critics have struggled to formulate explanations for the eruption of modern southern literature, sometimes called the Southern Renaissance. Pinpointing World War I as the catalyst, this book argues southern modernism was not a self-generating outburst of writing, but a response to the disruptions modernity generated in the region. World War I and Southern Modernism examines dozens of works of literature by writers, including William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, and Claude McKay, that depict the South during the war. Topics explored in the book include contact between the North and the South, southerners who served in combat, and the developing southern economy. This book also provides a new lens for this argument, taking a closer look at African Americans in the military and changing gender roles.

This overview of the history of Canadian comics explores not only the few Canadian cartoonists who have received study, but many who have not. Contributors look at the myriad ways that English-language, Francophone, indigenous, and queer Canadian comics and cartoonists pose alternatives to American comics, to dominant perceptions, even to gender and racial categories. Specific works covered range from the earliest Canadian comic books to the work of contemporary creators. In contrast to the United States’ melting pot, Canada has been understood to comprise a social, cultural, and ethnic mosaic, with distinct cultural variation as part of its identity. This volume reveals differences that often reflect in highly regional and localized comics such as Paul MacKinnon’s Cape Breton-specific Old Trout Funnies, Michel Rabagliati’s Montreal-based Paul comics, and Kurt Martell and Christopher Merkley’s Thunder Bay-specific zombie apocalypse. The collection also considers some of the conventionally “alternative” cartoonists, such as Seth, Dave Sim, and Chester Brown. It offers alternate views of the diverse and engaging work of two very different Canadian cartoonists who bring their own alternatives into play: Jeff Lemire in his bridging of Canadian/US and mainstream / alternative sensibilities and Nina Bunjevac in her own blending of realism and fantasy as well as of insider / outsider status. Despite an upsurge in research on Canadian comics, there is still remarkably little written about most major and all minor Canadian cartoonists.This volume provides insight into some of the lesser-known Canadian alternatives still awaiting full exploration.

Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction focuses on moving beyond stereotypes to examine how Asian American children and adolescents define their unique identities. For these kids, being or considered to be American becomes a challenge in itself as they assert their Asian and American identities; claim their own ethnic identity, be they an immigrant or American-born; and negotiate their ethnic communities. Chapters focus on primary texts from many ethnicities, such as Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Japanese, Vietnamese, South Asian, and Hawaiian. Individual chapters crossing cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries revise the traditional white male bildungsroman to negotiate the complex terrain of Asian American children’s and teenagers’ identities. Chapters cover such topics as internalized racism and self-loathing; hyper-sexualization of Asian American females in graphic novels; the fluidity and ambiguity of the biracial or mestizo Filipino male and female’s ethnic and racial identities; interracial friendships between Japanese Americans and Americans of other ethnicities during the Japanese internment; transnational adoptions and birth searches by Korean Americans; food as a means of assimilation and resistance for first generation immigrant Vietnamese American girls; the hostile and alienating environment generated by the War on Terror for South Asian American teenagers; and commodity racism and the tourist gaze as well as self-authorship, interstitial identity, and the ambiguity of motherland in Hawaiian American literature.

This book examines the Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890 and argues that it became the crucible of change in the state, creating a cultural shift from a society based on class to one based on race, though both remained important in the culture. State leaders called the convention to address the threat from outside the state – the Lodge Elections Bill – as well as the rising violence within the state. The convention delegates created layers of qualifiers for voting: payment of the poll tax, literacy, the Understanding Clause, no felony convictions, and lengthy residency requirements. In addition, the delegates utilized reapportionment to further strengthen provisions to disfranchise not only African Americans, but also a number of poor white voters. The newly promulgated constitution then withstood attacks by Congress during the debates over the Lodge Elections Bill and appeals to the federal courts, especially with Williams v Mississippi. The delegates succeeded in their charge to disfranchise, but in doing so unleashed new violence and a struggle to control the state that held it back economically and politically for seven decades.