Books published by University Press of Mississippi

Because of its diversity and openness to new cultures and religions, New Orleans provided fertile ground to nurture Spiritualism. Melissa Daggett focuses on Le Cercle Harmonique, the francophone seance circle of Henry Louis Rey (1831-1894), a Creole of colour who was a key civil rights activist, author, and Civil War and Reconstruction leader.

For fans of Peter Bagge (b. 1957) and his bracing satirical writing and drawing, this collection offers a perfect means to track how he describes his career choices, work habits, preoccupations, and comedic sensibility since the 1980s. This book delivers insightful, occasionally gossipy, sometimes funny, and often tart conversations.

Given the presumed dominance of American sport, many fans throughout the hemisphere find it difficult to envision the role of sport beyond the confines of their own continent. Rather than focusing on the Western Hemisphere, this collection of some of world sport's most heralded celebrities serves as a sort of passport to many places that make up our global sporting environment.

The mass media promotion of the feminist profile, according to Patricia Bradley, author of Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 1963-1975 proved to be a double-edged sword,. She argues that, although millions of women learned about feminism by way of the mass media, detrimental stereotypes emerged overnight.

A unique exploration of adaptation theory and how one dramatic visual style affects another

Ralph Ellison once said, "We're only a partially achieved nation." In The New Territory, scholars show how clearly Ellison foresaw and articulated both the challenges and the possibilities of America in the twenty-first century. Indeed, Ellison in these new essays appears more and more to be a cultural prophet of twenty-first century America.

Essays on the seemingly unstoppable writer, producer, director, actor, and entrepreneur Tyler PerryContributions by Leah Aldridge, Karen M. Bowdre, Aymar Jean Christian, Keith Corson, Rachel Jessica Daniel, Artel Great, Brandeise Monk-Payton, Miriam Petty, Paul N. Reinsch, Rashida Z. Shaw, Samantha N. Sheppard, Ben Raphael Sher, and Khadijah Costley WhiteFor over a decade Tyler Perry has been a lightning rod for both criticism and praise. To some he is most widely known for his drag performances as Madea, a self-proclaimed "mad black woman," not afraid to brandish a gun or a scalding pot of grits. But to others who watch the film industry, he is the businessman who by age thirty-six had sold more than $100 million in tickets, $30 million in videos, $20 million in merchandise, and was producing 300 projects each year viewed by 35,000 every week.Is the commercially successful African American actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, and producer "malt liquor for the masses," an "embarrassment to the race!," or is he a genius who has directed the most culturally significant American melodramas since Douglas Sirk? Are his films and television shows even melodramas, or are they conservative Christian diatribes, cheeky camp, or social satires? Do Perry's flattened narratives and character tropes irresponsibly collapse important social discourses into one-dimensional tales that affirm the notion of a "post-racial" society?In light of these debates, From Madea to Media Mogul makes the argument that Tyler Perry must be understood as a figure at the nexus of converging factors, cultural events, and historical traditions. Contrbutors demonstrate how a critical engagement with Perry's work and media practices highlights a need for studies to grapple with developing theories and methods on disreputable media. These essays challenge value-judgment criticisms and offer new insights on the industrial and formal qualities of Perry's work.TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Amherst, Massachusetts, is an assistant professor of English at UMass Amherst. Her work has been published in Cinema Journal's Teaching Media and the books Watching While Black and Game On, Hollywood! Samantha N. Sheppard, Ithaca, New York, is an assistant professor of cinema and media studies at Cornell University. Her work has appeared in Cinema Journal and the edited collection The L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema. Karen M. Bowdre, Radnor, Pennsylvania, is an independent scholar who has published in Black Camera; Cinema Journal; and Falling in Love Again: The Contemporary Romantic Comedy.

Presents the first collection of interviews with the renowned poet of Home/Bass and other much-admired works. Spanning thirty years and drawn from literary and scholarly journals and other media, these interviews offer insights into his poetic innovation of blues and jazz and his mastery of black vernacular in poetry.

In Chocolate Surrealism, Njoroge Njoroge highlights connections among the production, performance, and reception of popular music at critical historical junctures in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The author sifts different origins and styles to place socio-musical movements into a larger historical framework.Calypso reigned during the turbulent interwar period and the ensuing crises of capitalism. The Cuban rumba/son complex enlivened the postwar era of American empire. Jazz exploded in the Bandung period and the rise of decolonization. And, lastly, Nuyorican Salsa coincided with the period of the civil rights movement and the beginnings of black/brown power. Njoroge illuminates musics of the circum-Caribbean as culturally and conceptually integrated within the larger history of the region. He pays close attention to the fractures, fragmentations, and historical particularities that both unite and divide the region's sounds. At the same time, he engages with a larger discussion of the Atlantic world.Njoroge examines the deep interrelations between music, movement, memory, and history in the African diaspora. He finds the music both a theoretical anchor and a mode of expression and representation of black identities and political cultures. Music and performance offer ways for the author to re-theorize the intersections of race, nationalism and musical practice, and geopolitical connections. Further music allows Njoroge a reassessment of the development of the modern world system in the context of local, popular responses to the global age. The book analyzes different styles, times, and politics to render a brief history of Black Atlantic sound.

Critics in this volume reassess the prescient nature of Richard Wright's mind as well as his life and body of writings, especially those directly concerned with America and its racial dynamics. This edited collection offers new readings and understandings of the particular America that became Wright's focus at the beginning of his career and was still prominent in his mind at the end.

Few other writers have exerted as profound an influence on literature as Faulkner. Prominent literary scholar M. Thomas Inge documents the scope of his influence in the twentieth century through the words of those writers themselves. This collection of essays offers a survey attempting to capture exactly what Faulkner meant to his literary peers and colleagues both in the US and abroad.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in Trinidad and Tobago, What She Go Do demonstrates how the increased access and agency of women through folk and popular musical expressions has improved inter-gender relations and representation of gender in this nation.

Why do so many American college students tell stories about encounters with ghosts? In Haunted Halls, the first book-length interpretive study of college ghostlore, Elizabeth Tucker takes the reader back to school to get acquainted with a wide range of college spirits.

Bertrand Tavernier (b. 1941) is widely considered to be the leading light in a generation of French filmmakers who launched their careers in the 1970s, in the wake of the New Wave. In this collection, containing numerous interviews translated from French and available in English for the first time, he discusses the arc of his career.

A book featuring miniature dioramas that translate the Vietnam war into art and self-therapy for the artist

A critical biography of the novelist and champion for mental health issues

Peter Kuper (b. 1958), one of America's leading cartoonists, has created work recognized around the world. Among the works examined here are his books The System, Sticks and Stones, Stop Forgetting to Remember, Diario de Oaxaca, and adaptations of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

A book about Vodou flags and flagmakers that is a striking revelation of the gods (Iwa) that inhabit the Vodou spirit world. The sequined works pictured here combine and juxtapose African symbols with images from Europe and the Americas and form a rich mosaic of ritual art.

William Faulkner remains a historian's writer. A distinguished roster of historians have referenced Faulkner in their published work. They are drawn to him as a fellow historian, a shaper of narrative reflections on the meaning of the past; as a historiographer, a theorist, and dramatist of the fraught enterprise of doing history; and as a historical figure himself, especially following his midcentury emergence as a public intellectual after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. This volume brings together historians and literary scholars to explore the many facets of Faulkner's relationship to history: the historical contexts of his novels and stories; his explorations of the historiographic imagination; his engagement with historical figures from both the regional and national past; his in uence on professional historians; his pursuit of alternate modes of temporal awareness; and the histories of print culture that shaped the production, reception, and criticism of Faulkner's work.Contributors draw on the history of development in the Mississippi Valley, the construction of Confederate memory, the history and curriculum of Harvard University, twentieth-century debates over police brutality and temperance reform, the history of modern childhood, and the literary histories of antislavery writing and pulp fiction to illuminate Faulkner's work. Others in the collection explore the meaning of Faulkner's fiction for such professional historians as C. Vann Woodward and Albert Bushnell Hart. In these ways and more, Faulkner and History offers fresh insights into one of the most persistent and long-recognized elements of the Mississippian's artistic vision.

In ten essays from the 1998 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held at the University of Mississippi, Faulkner in America looks closely at the exchange between William Faulkner the writer and his national affiliation. Collectively, the essays ask which American ideas, identities, and conflicts we should associate with Mississippi's Nobel Laureate.

"He again tops the crowd - he surpasses himself, the old iron brought to the white heat of simplicity." So said Robert Lowell of the poetry of Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006). The interviews contained in this volume touch on aesthetic motifs in his poetry, the roots of his work, his friendships, his interactions with Lowell and Theodore Roethke, and his comments on a host of poets.

Since the publication of Serena in 2008 earned him a nomination for the PEN/Faulkner fiction prize, Ron Rash (b. 1953) has gained attention as one of the South's finest writers. Conversations with Ron Rash collects twenty-two interviews with the award-winning author and provides a look into Rash's writing career from 1994 to 2015.

Since its origins in 1967, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival has gained worldwide recognition as a model for the research and public presentation of living cultural heritage and the advocacy of cultural democracy. Curatorial Conversations brings together for the first time in one volume the combined expertise of the Festival's curatorial staff - past and present.

On Saturday, September 5, 1964, the family of Albert W. "e;Red"e; Heffner Jr., a successful insurance agent, left their house at 202 Shannon Drive in McComb, Mississippi, where they had lived for ten years. They never returned. In the eyes of neighbors, their unforgiveable sin was to have spoken on several occasions with civil rights workers and to have invited two into their home. Consequently, the Heffners were subjected to a campaign of harassment, ostracism, and economic retaliation shocking to a white family who believed that they were respected community members.So the Heffners Left McComb, originally published in 1965 and reprinted now for the first time, is Greenville journalist Hodding Carter's account of the events that led to the Heffners' downfall. Historian Trent Brown, a McComb native, supplies a substantial introduction evaluating the book's significance. The Heffners' story demonstrates the forces of fear, conformity, communal pressure, and threats of retaliation that silenced so many white Mississippians during the 1950s and 1960s. Carter's book provides a valuable portrait of a family who was not choosing to make a stand, but merely extending humane hospitality. Yet the Heffners were systematically punished and driven into exile for what was perceived as treason against white apartheid.

Collects interdisciplinary essays that examine the crucial intersection between whiteness as a privileged racial category and the various material practices (social, cultural, political, and economic) that undergird white ideological influence in America. Contributors examine whiteness from several disciplinary perspectives, including history, communication, law, sociology, and literature.

In this biography, the first to examine General John C. Pemberton's life and career in full scope, Michael Ballard credits Pemberton for military prowess that previous Civil War scholars have denied him. Here his strength is shown to be in administration, not in the theater of combat.

A key concern in postwar America was "e;who's passing for whom?"e; Analyzing representations of passing in Hollywood films reveals changing cultural ideas about authenticity and identity in a country reeling from a hot war and moving towards a cold one. After World War II, passing became an important theme in Hollywood movies, one that lasted throughout the long 1950s, as it became a metaphor to express postwar anxiety.The potent, imagined fear of passing linked the language and anxieties of identity to other postwar concerns, including cultural obsessions about threats from within. Passing created an epistemological conundrum that threatened to destabilize all forms of identity, not just the longstanding American color line separating white and black. In the imaginative fears of postwar America, identity was under siege on all fronts. Not only were there blacks passing as whites, but women were passing as men, gays passing as straight, communists passing as good Americans, Jews passing as gentiles, and even aliens passing as humans (and vice versa).Fears about communist infiltration, invasion by aliens, collapsing gender and sexual categories, racial ambiguity, and miscegenation made their way into films that featured narratives about passing. N. Megan Kelley shows that these films transcend genre, discussing Gentleman's Agreement, Home of the Brave, Pinky, Island in the Sun, My Son John, Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, Rebel without a Cause, Vertigo, All about Eve, and Johnny Guitar, among others.Representations of passing enabled Americans to express anxieties about who they were and who they imagined their neighbors to be. By showing how pervasive the anxiety about passing was, and how it extended to virtually every facet of identity, Projections of Passing broadens the literature on passing in a fundamental way. It also opens up important counter-narratives about postwar America and how the language of identity developed in this critical period of American history.