Books published by University Press of Mississippi

Presents the history of the US's forgotten Dutch slave community and free Dutch-speaking African Americans from seventeenth-century New Amsterdam to nineteenth-century New York and New Jersey. This book also develops a provocative new interpretation of one of America's most intriguing black folkloric traditions, Pinkster.

The marvelous story of innovators C. C. Beck and Otto Binder and their mighty American hero

This revised and updated edition gathers interviews and profiles covering the entire forty-five year span of Woody Allen's career as a filmmaker, including detailed discussions of his most popular as well as his most critically acclaimed works. The present collection is a complete update of the volume that first appeared in 2006. In the years since, Allen has continued making movies, including Midnight in Paris and the Oscar-winning Blue Jasmine.While many interviews from the original edition have been retained in the present volume, ten new entries extend the coverage of Allen's directorial career through 2015. In addition, there are two new, in-depth interviews from the period covered in the first edition. Most of the interviews included in the original volume first appeared in such widely known publications and venues as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time Magazine the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. A number of smaller and lesser-known venues are also represented, especially in the new volume. Several interviews from non-American sources add an international perspective on Allen's work.Materials for the new volume include pieces focusing primarily on Allen's films as well as broader profiles and interviews that also concentrate on his literary talent. Perhaps Stephen Mamber best describes Allen's distinctiveness, especially early in his career: "Woody Allen is not the best new American comedy director or the best comedy writer or the best comedy actor, he's simply the finest combination of all three."Robert E. Kapsis, Great Neck, New York, is professor of sociology and film studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is author of Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation and editor of several volumes in the Conversations with Filmmakers Series. Currently, Kapsis is collaborating with the Museum of the Moving Image and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in developing a major career retrospective on Steve Martin.

Brings together nine of the best new works on the populist movement in the US South that grapple with several larger themes - the nature of political insurgency, the relationship between African Americans and whites, electoral reform, new economic policies and producerism, and the relationship between rural and urban areas - in case studies that centre on several states and at the local level.

Although food and stories may be two of the most prominent cultural products associated with the US South, the connections between them have not been thoroughly explored until now. This volume explores the relationship between food and literature and makes a major contribution to the study of both southern literature and of southern foodways and culture more widely.

The first study solely dedicated to exploring the power of African American haiku

In this follow-up volume to A Boy Named Sue, some of the leading authors in the field of country music studies reexamine the place of gender in country music, considering the ways country artists and listeners have negotiated gender and sexuality through their music and how gender has shaped the way that music is made and heard.

Since the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, launched him to fame, Michael Chabon (b. 1963) has become one of contemporary literature's most acclaimed novelists. Conversations with Michael Chabon collects eighteen revealing interviews with the renowned author that shed new light on the central concerns of Chabon's fiction.

In The Black Carib Wars, Christopher Taylor offers the most thoroughly researched history of the struggle of the Garifuna people to preserve their freedom on the island of St. Vincent.Today, thousands of Garifuna people live in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua and the United States, preserving their unique culture and speaking a language that directly descends from that spoken in the Caribbean at the time of Columbus. All trace their origins back to St. Vincent where their ancestors were native Carib Indians and shipwrecked or runaway West African slaves--hence the name by which they were known to French and British colonialists: Black Caribs.In the 1600s they encountered Europeans as adversaries and allies. But from the early 1700s, white people, particularly the French, began to settle on St. Vincent. The treaty of Paris in 1763 handed the island to the British who wanted the Black Caribs' land to grow sugar. Conflict was inevitable, and in a series of bloody wars punctuated by uneasy peace the Black Caribs took on the might of the British Empire. Over decades leaders such as Tourouya, Bigot, and Chatoyer organized the resistance of a society which had no central authority but united against the external threat. Finally, abandoned by their French allies, they were defeated, and the survivors deported to Central America in 1797.The Black Carib Wars draws on extensive research in Britain, France, and St. Vincent to offer a compelling narrative of the formative years of the Garifuna people.

Contributions by Barbara Bennett, Thomas Ærvold Bjerre, Erik Bledsoe, Linda Byrd Cook, Thomas E. Dasher, Robert Donahoo, Peter Farris, Richard Gaughran, William Giraldi, Rebecca Godwin, Joan Wylie Hall, Marcus Hamilton, Gary Hawkins, David K. Jeffrey, Emily Langhorne, Shawn E. Miller, Wade Newhouse, L. Lamar Nisly, bes Stark Spangler, Joe Samuel Starnes, and Scott Hamilton SuterEssays in Rough South, Rural South describe and discuss the work of southern writers who began their careers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They fall into two categories. Some, born into the working class, strove to become writers and learned without benefit of higher education, such writers as Larry Brown and William Gay. Others came from lower- or middle-class backgrounds and became writers through practice and education: Dorothy Allison, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Silas House, Jill McCorkle, Chris Offutt, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Brad Watson, Daniel Woodrell, and Steve Yarbrough. Their twenty-first-century colleagues are Wiley Cash, Peter Farris, Skip Horack, Michael Farris Smith, Barb Johnson, and Jesmyn Ward.In his seminal article, Erik Bledsoe distinguishes Rough South writers from such writers as William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Younger writers who followed Harry Crews were born into and write about the Rough South. These writers undercut stereotypes, forcing readers to see the working poor differently.The next pieces begin with those on Crews and Cormac McCarthy, major influences on an entire generation. Later essays address members of both groups--the self-educated and the college-educated. Both groups share a clear understanding of the value of working-class southerners. Nearly all of the writers hold a reverence for the South's landscape and its inhabitants as well as an affinity for realistic depictions of setting and characters.Jean W. Cash, Broadway, Virginia, is professor emerita of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Flannery O'Connor: A Life; coeditor with Keith Perry of Larry Brown and the Blue Collar South: A Collection of Critical Essays; and author of Larry Brown: A Writer's Life, which won the Eudora Welty Prize and the C. Hugh Holman Award. Keith Perry, Ringgold, Georgia, is associate professor of English at Dalton State College. He is the author of The Kingfish in Fiction: Huey P. Long and the Modern American Novel.

Dark novels, shows, and films targeted toward children and young adults are proliferating wildly. It is even more crucial now to understand the methods by which such texts have traditionally operated and how those methods have been challenged, abandoned, and appropriated. Reading in the Dark fills a gap in criticism devoted to children's popular culture by concentrating on horror.

The eleven essays that make up this volume, including a paper written by the acclaimed novelist William Kennedy, explore the place of "the unbuilt world" in William Faulkner's fiction. They give particular attention to the social, mythic, and economic significance of nature, to the complexity of racial identity, and to the inevitable clash of gender and sexuality.

The book Jazzmen (1939) claimed New Orleans as the birthplace of jazz and introduced the legend of Buddy Bolden as the "e;First Man of Jazz."e; Much of the information that the book relied on came from a highly controversial source: Bunk Johnson. He claimed to have played with Bolden and that together they had pioneered jazz. Johnson made many recordings talking about and playing the music of the Bolden era. These recordings have been treated with skepticism because of doubts about Johnson's credibility. Using oral histories, the Jazzmen interview notes, and unpublished archive material, this book confirms that Bunk Johnson did play with Bolden. This confirmation, in turn, has profound implications for Johnson's recorded legacy in describing the music of the early years of New Orleans jazz. New Orleans jazz was different from ragtime in a number of ways. It was a music that was collectively improvised, and it carried a new tonality--the tonality of the blues. How early jazz musicians improvised together and how the blues became a part of jazz has until now been a mystery. Part of the reason New Orleans jazz developed as it did is that all the prominent jazz pioneers, including Buddy Bolden, Bunk Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, and Kid Ory, sang in barbershop (or barroom) quartets. This book describes in both historical and musical terms how the practices of quartet singing were converted to the instruments of a jazz band, and how this, in turn, produced collectively improvised, blues-inflected jazz, that unique sound of New Orleans.

This collection of twenty-one essays takes an interdisciplinary look at the flowering of satire and its influence in defining new roles in black identity. Contributors look at the ways in which contemporary African American satire engages in a broad ranging critique that exposes fraudulent, outdated, absurd, or otherwise damaging mindsets and behaviours.

The Last Lawyer is the true, inside story of how an idealistic legal genius and his diverse band of investigators and fellow attorneys fought to overturn a client's final sentence. Ken Rose has handled more capital appeals cases than almost any other attorney in the United States. The Last Lawyer chronicles Rose's decade-long defense of Bo Jones, a North Carolina farmhand convicted of a 1987 murder. Rose called this his most frustrating case in twenty-five years, and it was one that received scant attention from judges or journalists. The Jones case bares the thorniest issues surrounding capital punishment. Inadequate legal counsel, mental retardation, mental illness, and sketchy witness testimony stymied Jones's original defense. Yet for many years, Rose's advocacy gained no traction, and Bo Jones came within three days of his execution. The book follows Rose through a decade of setbacks and small triumphs as he gradually unearthed the evidence he hoped would save his client's life. At the same time, Rose also single-handedly built a nonprofit law firm that became a major force in the death penalty debate raging across the South. The Last Lawyer offers unprecedented access to the inner workings of a capital defense team. Based on four-and-a half years of behind-the-scenes reporting by a journalism professor and nonfiction author, The Last Lawyer tells the unforgettable story of a lawyer's fight for justice.

No city in America knows how to mark death with more funerary panache than New Orleans. The pageants commemorating departed citizens are often in themselves works of performance art. A grand obituary remains key to this Stygian passage. And no one writes them like New Orleanian John Pope. Collected here are not just simple, mindless recitations of schools and workplaces, marriages, and mourners bereft. These pieces in Getting Off at Elysian Fields are full-blooded life stories with accounts of great achievements, dubious dabblings, unavoidable foibles, relationships gone sour, and happenstances that turn out to be life-changing.To be sure, there are stories about Carnival monarchs, great philanthropists, and a few politicians. But because New Orleans embraces eccentric behavior, there are stories of people who colored way outside the lines. For instance, there was the doctor who used his plasma to make his flowers grow, and the philanthropist who took money she had put aside for a fur coat to underwrite the lawsuit that desegregated Tulane University. A letter carrier everyone loved turned out to have been a spy during World War II, and a fledgling lawyer changed his lifelong thoughts about race when he saw blind people going into a Christmas party through separate doors--one for white people and another for African Americans. Then there was the punctilious judge who got down on his hands and knees to edge his lawn--with scissors.Because New Orleans funerals are distinctive, the author includes accounts of four that he covered, complete with soulful singing and even some dancing. As a popular, local bumper sticker indisputably declares, "e;New Orleans--We Put the Fun in Funeral."e;

The life and times of the Kewpie doll and its fascinating socially conscious creator

Brings together contributions from established and emerging scholars about the comics of Chicago-based cartoonist Chris Ware (b. 1967). This collection addresses the range of Ware's work from his earliest drawings in the 1990s and his acclaimed Jimmy Corrigan, to his most recent works-in-progress, "Building Stories" and "Rusty Brown".

Elizabeth Spencer is captivated by Italy. For her it has been a second home. A one-time resident who returns there, this native-born Mississippian has found Italy to be an enchanting land whose culture lends itself powerfully to her artistic vision. This is a collection of her Italian tales.

As the fastest growing African-based religion in the United States, Santeria has stimulated many publications, but none prior to this book noted the special significance of its art and artists. In Santeria Garments and Altars, two distinguished folklorists and practitioners of the faith focus upon the artistry of garments and altars that are intrinsic to the worship.

Lying in a hospital bed, Jose P. Ramirez, Jr. (b. 1948) almost lost everything because of a misunderstood disease. Titled for the sliver of a window through which persons with leprosy in medieval times were allowed to view Mass but not participate, Squint tells a story of love and perseverance over incredible odds.