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Black Panther is one of the most financially successful and culturally impactful films to emerge from the American film industry in recent years. When it was released in 2018 it broke numerous records and resonated with audiences all around the world in ways which transcended the dimensions of the superhero film. In Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon author Terence McSweeney explores the film from a diverse range of perspectives, seeing it not only as a comic book adaptation and a superhero film, but also a dynamic contribution to the discourse of both African and African American studies. Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon argues that Black Panther is one of the defining American films of the last decade and the most remarkable title in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008-). The MCU has become the largest film franchise in the history of the medium and has even shaped the contours of the contemporary blockbuster, but the narratives within it have almost exclusively perpetuated largely unambiguous fantasies of American heroism and exceptionalism. In contrast, Black Panther complicates this by engaging in an entirely different mythos in its portrayal of an African nation—never colonized by Europe—as the most powerful and technologically advanced in the world. McSweeney charts how and why Black Panther became a cultural phenomenon and also a battleground on which a war of meaning was waged at a very particular time in American history.

A white woman living in segregated Georgia during the first half of the twentieth century, Lillian Smith surprised readers with stories of mixed-race love affairs, mob attacks on “outsiders,” and young female campers exploring their sexuality. Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith considers Smith’s evolution from a young girls’ camp director into a courageous artist engaging difficult topics with frankness and courage. She did not pull punches in her portrayals of the South, yet she devoted herself to the artist’s role as she saw it: to lead readers toward a better understanding of themselves and a more fulfilling existence. Smith’s writings cut to the core of the neurotic behaviors she observed and participated in as a Southerner. To draw readers into her exploration of those behaviors, she invites them into compelling stories, employing literary techniques that foster critical reconsideration of stubbornly dominant ideologies. With words as her medium, she sketches maps of fictionalized Southern places, in the process revealing the markers of wounds and disfunction. Smith offers readers an intimate glimpse into her own childhood as well as the psychological traumas that all Southerners experience and help to perpetuate. Comprised of seven essays by contemporary Smith scholars, Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith explores Smith’s writings in an attempt to yield a clear portrait of this charismatic figure, whose work was crucial in her own time and is profoundly relevant in the twenty-first century, as well.

Velma Pollard and Erna Brodber, two sister-writers born and raised in Jamaica, recreate imagined and lived homelands in their literature by commemorating the history, culture, and religion of the Caribbean. Velma Pollard was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica; by the time Velma Pollard was three, her parents had moved to Woodside, St. Mary, in northeast Jamaica, where her sister, Erna Brodber was born. They write about their homeland in a series of memories and stories of that lived and imagined experience in their many works: fictional, nonfictional, and poetic. They center on their home village, but occasionally move the settings of their writings to other regions of Jamaica and various Caribbean islands, as well as to other parts of the African diaspora in the United States, Canada, and England. The role of women in the patriarchal society of Jamaica and much of the Caribbean is also a subject of the sisters’ writing. Growing up in what Erna Brodber calls the kumbla, the protective but restrictive environment of many women in the Anglo-Caribbean, is also an important theme in their works. In her fiction, Velma Pollard discusses the gender gaps in employment and the demands of marriage and the special contributions of women to family and community. This study examines Erna Brodber’s work on a par with her sister Velma Pollard’s writing and is the first to do so, drawing upon original interviews.

In 2015 University Press of Mississippi published Mississippi Fiddle Tunes and Songs from the 1930s by Harry Bolick and Stephen T. Austin to critical acclaim and commercial success. Roughly half of Mississippi’s rich, old-time fiddle tradition was documented in that volume and Harry Bolick has spent the intervening years working on this book, its sequel. Beginning with Tony Russell’s original mid-1970s fieldwork as a reference, and later working with Russell, Bolick located and transcribed all of the Mississippi 78 rpm string band recordings. Some of the recording artists like the Leake County Revelers, Hoyt Ming and His Pep Steppers, and Narmour & Smith had been well known in the state. Others, like the Collier Trio, were obscure. This collecting work was followed by many field trips to Mississippi searching for and locating the children and grandchildren of the musicians. Previously unheard recordings and stories, unseen photographs and discoveries of nearly unknown local fiddlers, such as Jabe Dillon, John Gatwood, Claude Kennedy, and Homer Grice, followed. The results are now available in this second, companion volume, Fiddle Tunes from Mississippi: Commercial and Informal Recordings, 1920–2018. Two hundred and seventy musical examples supplement the biographies and photographs of the thirty-five artists documented here. Music comes from commercial recordings and small pressings of 78 rpm, 45 rpm, and LP records; collectors’ field recordings; and the musicians’ own home tape and disc recordings. Taken together, these two volumes represent a delightfully comprehensive survey of Mississippi’s fiddle tunes.

Fred Schepisi is a crucial name associated with the ‘revival’ of the Australian film industry in the 1970s. This book traces the lead-up to Schepisi’s critical successes in feature-filmmaking via his earlier award-winning success as a producer in advertising commercials in the 1960s and the setting up of his own company. A minor biographical element considers Schepisi’s early education in a Catholic seminary, which he drew on in his semi-autobiographical film, The Devil’s Playground, the success of which launched him as an exciting new feature director. The book then charts Schepisi’s development as a director in demand in other countries, notably in the US and the UK, as well as continuing to make major films in Australia. His career is in this way symptomatic of Australian directors who have made their presence felt on the international stage. What follows here is a critical account of Schepisi’s film output and the context in which it has taken place, with the co-operation of Schepisi and some of his key collaborators. The book details production histories, an account of the finished films, and a sense of how the films were received (both critically and popularly). Author Brian McFarlane explores the recurring thematic, narrative, and visual elements that have helped to characterize Schepisi as artist and craftsman.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States extended its empire into the Philippines while subjugating Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. And yet, one of the most popular musical acts was a band of “little brown men,” Filipino musicians led by an African American conductor playing European and American music. The Philippine Constabulary Band and Lt. Walter H. Loving entertained thousands in concert halls and world’s fairs, held a place of honor in William Howard Taft’s presidential parade, and garnered praise by bandmaster John Philip Sousa—all the while facing beliefs and policies that Filipinos and African Americans were “uncivilized.” Author Mary Talusan draws on hundreds of newspaper accounts and exclusive interviews with band members and their descendants to compose the story from the band’s own voices. She sounds out the meanings of Americans’ responses to the band and identifies a desire to mitigate racial and cultural anxieties during an era of overseas expansion and increasing immigration of nonwhites, and the growing “threat” of ragtime with its roots in Black culture. The spectacle of the band, its performance and promotion, emphasized a racial stereotype of Filipinos as “natural musicians” and the beneficiaries of benevolent assimilation and colonial tutelage. Unable to fit Loving’s leadership of the band into this narrative, newspapers dodged and erased his identity as a Black American officer. The untold story of the Philippine Constabulary Band offers a unique opportunity to examine the limits and porousness of America’s racial ideologies, exploring musical pleasure at the intersection of Euro-American cultural hegemony, racialization, and US colonization of the Philippines.

In contrast to other literary genres, drama has received little attention in southern studies, and women playwrights in general receive less recognition than their male counterparts. This book addresses these gaps in its examination of the work of southern women playwrights, making the argument that representations of the American South on stage are complicated by difficulties of identity, genre, and region. Success in American drama is defined as having a play staged in the capital of theatre culture, New York City, the city that might be viewed as most antithetical to the South in terms of geography and ideology. Further, women playwrights, women playwrights of color, and those who express queer identities have been vocal about persistent inequities in American theatre which have created obstacles to their success. Drama creates unique problems for playwrights through its concentrated focus on place, dialect, and character; the multiple layers of authorship; the collective reception format; and the demand for exaggeration within production. These issues, as they interact with regional conditions and perceptions, pose problems for southern women playwrights in navigating how to represent a marginalized region on the stage. Through analysis of the dramatic texts, the rhetoric of reviews of productions, as well as what the playwrights themselves have said about their plays and its productions, this book delineates these challenges and argues that playwrights confront obstacles through various conscious strategies. These approaches lead audiences to reconsider monolithic understandings of northern and southern regions and ultimately, they create new visions of the South.

In 1833 Maria W. Stewart told a gathering at the African Masonic Hall on Boston’s Beacon Hill, “African rights and liberty is a subject that ought to fire the breast of every free man of color in these United States.” She held that the founding principles of the United States must extend to all people, otherwise they are merely the hypocritical expression of an ungodly white power. This first-ever biography of a profoundly significant writer explores her early life as an indentured servant in Hartford, Connecticut. Later, she defied adversity, journeying to Boston where she met and married a wealthy commercial agent and former seaman and became a powerful force within the lively black community on Beacon Hill’s North Slope. Between 1831-1833 Stewart’s “intellectual productions” ranged across topics including true emancipation for African Americans, abolition, the hypocrisy of white Christianity, black liberation theology, and gender inequity. Along with David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, (1829), her body of work constitutes a significant foundation for black radical politics.

Literature that recounts the history of nineteenth-century Southern higher education includes Civil War-related issues as part of a larger, longitudinal narrative. In cases concerning the war years (1861-1865), existing publications focus on the closure, destruction, and reformation of regional colleges and universities due to student enlistment, the burning of buildings by Union troops, campus conversions to military barracks or army hospitals, etc. Few, however, focus completely on the Civil War South—even fewer provide detailed case examples that extol the persistence of some Southern colleges during the fray. Though most Southern institutions of higher education did close during the war, a handful of academies remained open, weathering the storm and providing instruction to remaining students. While related literature provides interesting insights regarding college student military service, the role some professors played as Confederate officers, and the reemergence of Southern higher education following the war, this text showcases how some colleges and universities remained open while battles rages in nearby fields, towns, and ports via in-depth case “episodes” of eleven Southern institutions of higher education: South Carolina Military Academy (The Citadel), Wofford College, Mississippi College, Spring Hill College, Tuskegee Female College, (present-day Huntingdon College), Mercer University, Wesleyan College, the University of Virginia, the Virginia Military Institute, the University of North Carolina, and Trinity College (now known as Duke University). This volume provides pertinent information that underscores events that occurred at each institutional site prior to, during, and after the deadliest internal conflict in American history.

Is there jazz in socialist Vietnam? The answer is “yes,” even though jazz was once perceived as “music of the enemy.” Playing Jazz in Socialist Vietnam tells the story of saxophonist, Quyền Văn Minh, who helped to give jazz a place in socialist Vietnam. This is an intimate account of a life in jazz under socialism in Vietnam, set in the broader contexts of radical social revolution, war, and uncertainty of political change when peace returned.  After accidentally encountering jazz on the transistor radio as a child, Minh embarked on a life-long quest to learn and play the music. From a self-taught musician who played at wedding gigs, he rose to become a respectable professional musician in successive song and dance troupes. Minh’s desire to play jazz motivated him to present the genre in socialist Vietnam’s public sphere, which inadvertently led to a teaching career at the national conservatoire. In 1994, he premiered three original jazz compositions in the first jazz concert performed by Vietnamese musicians at the Hà Nội Opera House. Releasing his debut jazz album, Birth ’99, Minh helped to give shape to the nascent genre of “Vietnamese jazz.” Eventually, he founded Minh’s Jazz Club to create a space for musicians to play jazz and Vietnamese audience to learn about jazz.   Written in a creative melange of autoethnography, analytical interventions, and broad contextualizations that faithfully projects the voice of the protagonist, readers could see how the complex political and social contexts of socialist Vietnam are actually experienced by real people. Through the story of Minh, we show how jazz in socialist Vietnam, as we believe in many other Asian countries and formerly socialist Eastern European countries, is mediated by passion, tenacity, and innovation of devoted musicians who saw in jazz the power of artistic self-expression. 

This unique and accessibly written study discusses the relationship between the blues, rock, folk, jazz, and poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but it is anchored in the 1960s, when a concentration of artists transformed modes of popular music from entertainment to art-that-entertains. The authors (a professional musician and a literary historian) synthesize a wide range of writing about music—biographies, histories, articles in popular magazines, personal reminiscences, and a selective smattering of academic studies—and examine the development of a relatively new literary genre that they call poetic song verse. Poetic song verse was nurtured in the 50s and early 60s by the blues and in Beat coffee houses, and matured in the mid-to-late 60s in the art of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Gil Scott-Heron, and others who used voice, instrumentation, arrangement, and production to foreground semantically textured, often allusive, and evocative lyrics that resembled and engaged poetry. Among the topics Mattison and Suarez consider are: What, exactly, is this new genre? What were its origins? And how has it developed? How do we study and assess it? To answer these questions, the authors engage in an extended discussion of the roots of the relationship between blues-based music and poetry, and address how it developed into a distinct literary genre. The book balances historical details and analysis of particular songs with readability to create a lively, intelligent, and cohesive narrative that will provide a wide range of readers with an overarching perspective on the development of an exciting, relatively new literary genre.

Through ruined monuments and museums, storied traditions of food and music, Southern oratory and racism, architecture and brotherhood, the Southern United States is a powerful resource for reckoning with historical trauma on a global scale. Moss and Inabinet present a reconstruction of the South from this viewpoint, asking how a more diverse set of texts and voices, a more inclusive notion of geography, and a more critical analysis of power moves this reckoning forward. Toward this end, the book advances in three sections: a disruption of nostalgia, a decentering of old martyrs to carve out new archetypal identities, and communicative interventions to heal wounds against the marginalized. The South becomes not an exceptional, unique place, but a model for reinterpretation of regional rhetorics and who gets to speak for their place and time.

As with countless other black leaders whose life stories have disappeared from the historical record, much of Isaac H. Anderson’s unique story has been shrouded in silence. His story is a microhistory of black religious and political experience after Emancipation, and a recovery of the life of a minister, politician, and former slave. His narrative begins with his white father and master, William Jackson Anderson, and with the system of slavery that provided the economic fuel by which William Jackson built his wealth and became a merchant prince of Fort Valley in Houston County. It progresses to Anderson winning and serving in his white father’s seat in Georgia’s legislature during Reconstruction even though he and William Jackson represented opposite political parties and perspectives. During his time in Georgia, Anderson actively opposed the rise of the apprenticeship system, targeting Black children, and the convict leasing system, which re-enslaved many Black men. His story gives understanding into the formation of the Black Church as the only space in which enslaved and free blacks could survive, and even contend with, the oppression of whites. Leaders like Anderson fostered spiritual and physical safe spaces for parishioners, and his story provides a fuller accounting of a history that has often been dismissively recast and retold by those who mistake subtle but sustained defiance as subservient survival, and thereby miss many of the nuances of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church’s beginnings. Anderson’s unique story also exposes the intra-racial tension that existed in and around the small denomination, and the strategies adopted by black leaders in dealing with a society that was often antithetical to them.

Stand-up comedians have a long history of walking a careful line between serious and playful engagement with social issues: Lenny Bruce questioned the symbolic valence of racial slurs, Dick Gregory took time away from the stage to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr. , and—more recently—Tig Notaro challenged popular notions of damaged or abject bodies. Stand-up comedians deploy humor to open up difficult topics for broader examination, which only underscores the social and cultural importance of their work. Taking a Stand: Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians as Public Intellectuals draws together essays that contribute to the analysis of the stand-up comedian as public intellectual since the 1980s. The chapters explore stand-up comedians as contributors to and shapers of public discourse via their live performances, podcasts, social media presence, and political activism. Each chapter highlights a stand-up comedian and their ongoing discussion of a cultural issue or expression of a political ideology/standpoint: Lisa Lampanelli’s use of problematic postracial humor, Aziz Ansari’s merging of sociology and technology, or Maria Bamford’s emphasis on mental health, to name just a few. Taking a Stand offers a starting point for understanding the work stand-up comedians do as well as its reach beyond the stage. Comedians influence discourse, perspectives, even public policy on myriad issues, and this book sets out to take those jokes seriously.

A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou focuses on the influence of the kingdoms of Dahomey, Allada, and Hueda in the emergence of central rites in Haitian Vodou. Connecting four centuries of political, social, and religious history with fieldwork and language documentation, this book analyzes Haitian Vodou’s African origins, transmission to Saint-Domingue, and promulgation through song in contemporary Haiti. The African chapters focus on history, economics and culture in Dahomey, Allada, and Hueda while scrutinizing the role of Europeans in fomenting tensions. The political, military, and slave trading histories of the kingdoms in the Bight of Benin reveal the circumstances of enslavement, including the geographies, ethnicities, languages, and cultures of enslavers and enslaved. The study of the spirits, rituals, and music of the region’s religions sheds light on important sources for Haitian Vodou. Having royal, public, and private expressions, Vodun spirit-based traditions served as cultural systems that supported or contested power and enslavement. At once suppliers and victims of the European slave trade, Aja, Fon, and Yoruba people deeply shaped the emergence of Haiti’s creolized culture. The Haitian chapters focus on Vodou’s Rada Rite (from Allada) and Gede Rite (from Abomey) through the songs of Rasin Figuier’s Vodou Lakay and Rasin Bwa Kayiman’s Guede, rasin compact discs released on Jean Altidor’s Miami label, “Mass Kompa Records.” All the Vodou songs on the discs are analyzed with a method dubbed “Vodou hermeneutics” that harnesses history, religious studies, linguistics, literary criticism, and ethnomusicology in order to advance a scholarly approach to Vodou songs.

Transforming Girls: The Power of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence refocuses the history of the girls’ book and female adolescence through a comparative analysis of forgotten bestsellers aimed at adolescent girls in the United States and Germany. While these stories rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy, they also provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves and the girl’s essentially good nature neutralize the girl’s own anxieties about maturity. These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. Adolescence—a category that continues to engage and perplex us—is defined in these novels as a celebration of fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self. Through insightful readings of best-selling novels, Transforming Girls explores the origins of the young adult novel, mothering as a communal enterprise, the teaching of gender identity, the girls’ book as a model for narratives of nation building, and homesickness as an antidote to nostalgia. It provides access to a forgotten group of texts that reframe our understanding of the history of the girls’ book, young adult literature, and the possibilities of adolescence. The awkward adolescent girl—so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls—remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them.

Jeanne Pitre Soileau vividly presents children’s voices in What the Children Said: Child Lore of South Louisiana. Including over six hundred handclaps, chants, jokes, jump-rope rhymes, cheers, taunts, and teases, this book takes the reader through a fifty-year history of child speech as it has influenced children’s lives. What the Children Said affirms that children's play in south Louisiana is acquired along a network of summer camps, schoolyards, church gatherings, and sleepovers with friends. When children travel, they obtain new games and rhymes and bring them home. The volume also reveals, in the words of the children themselves, how young people deal with racism and sexism. The children argue and outshout one another, policing their own conversations, stating their own prejudices, and vying with one another for dominion. The first transcript in the book tracks a conversation among three related boys and shows that racism is part of the family interchange. Among second-grade boys and girls at a Catholic school, another transcript presents numerous examples in which boys use insults to dominate a conversation with girls, and girls use giggles and sly comebacks to counter this aggression. Though collected in the areas of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette, Louisiana, this volume shows how south Louisiana child lore is connected to other English-speaking places: England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the rest of the United States.

All regions and places are unique in their own way, but the Ozarks have an enduring place in American culture. Studying the Ozarks offers the ability to explore American life through the lens of one of the last remaining cultural frontiers in American society. Perhaps because the Ozarks were relatively isolated from mainstream American society, or were at least relegated to the margins of it, their identity and culture are liminal and oftentimes counter to mainstream culture. Whatever the case, looking at the Ozarks offers insights into changing ideas about what it means to be an American and, more specifically, a special type of southerner. Thomas Michael Kersen explores the people who made a home in the Ozarks and the ways they contributed to American popular culture. He argues the area attracts and even nurtures people and groups on the margins of the mainstream. These include UFO enthusiasts, cults, musical troupes, and back-to-the-land groups. Kersen examines how the Ozarks became a haven for creative, innovative, even nutty people to express themselves—a place where community could be reimagined in a variety of ways. Chapters examine real and imagined identity and highlight how the area has contributed to popular culture through analysis of the Eureka Springs energy vortex, fictional characters like Li’l Abner, cultic activity, environmentally minded communes, and the development of rockabilly music and near-communal rock bands such as Black Oak Arkansas.