Books published by University Press of Mississippi

On January 10, 1966, Klansmen murdered civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer in Forrest County, Mississippi. Despite the FBI's growing conflict against the Klan, recent civil rights legislation, and progressive court rulings, the Imperial Wizard promised his men: "e;no jury in Mississippi would convict a white man for killing a nigger."e; Yet this murder inspired change. Since the onset of the civil rights movement, local authorities had mitigated federal intervention by using subtle but insidious methods to suppress activism in public arenas. They perpetuated a myth of Forrest County as a bastion of moderation in a state notorious for extremism. To sustain that fiction, officials emphasized that Dahmer's killers hailed from neighboring Jones County and pursued convictions vigorously. Although the Dahmer case became a watershed in the long struggle for racial justice, it also obscured Forrest County's brutal racial history.Patricia Michelle Boyett debunks the myth of moderation by exploring the mob lynchings, police brutality, malicious prosecutions, and Klan terrorism that linked Forrest and Jones Counties since their founding. She traces how racial atrocities during World War II and the Cold War inspired local blacks to transform their counties into revolutionary battlefields of the movement. Their electrifying campaigns captured global attention, forced federal intervention, produced landmark trials, and chartered a significant post-civil rights crusade. By examining the interactions of black and white locals, state and federal actors, and visiting activists from settlement to contemporary times, Boyett presents a comprehensive portrait of one of the South's most tortured and transformative landscapes.

After the 2008 election and 2012 reelection of Barack Obama as US president and the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela as the first of several blacks to serve as South Africa's president, many within the two countries have declared race to be irrelevant. For contributors to this volume, the presumed demise of race may be premature.

David O. Russell (b. 1958) boasts a diverse body of work as a writer and director, spanning multiple genres and featuring radically differing aesthetic styles. This career-spanning volume features conversations with scholars and journalists as well as filmmakers, revealing Russell's evolving writing and directing process, and opening his life to reveal how a remarkable body of work has come to be.

Documents the struggle for equity in health and health care by African American citizens and physicians in Mississippi and the United States. Dr. Richard D. deShazo and the contributors to the volume trace the dark journey from a system of slave hospitals in the state, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights era, to the present day.

Based on extensive archival research, The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Timo Muller uses sonnets to open up fresh perspectives on African American literary history, and examines the inventive strategies African American poets devised to occupy and reshape a form overwhelmingly associated with Europe.

Kerry D. Soper reminds us of The Far Side's groundbreaking qualities and cultural significance in this book. In this first full study of Larson's art, Soper follows the arc of the cartoonist's life and career, describing the aesthetic and comedic qualities of his work, probing the business side of his success, and exploring how The Far Side connected with its core readers.

Repeatedly and powerfully throughout Cuban history, the mulata, a woman of mixed racial identity, features prominently in Cuban visual and performative culture. Tracing the figure, Alison Fraunhar looks at the representation and performance in both elite and popular culture. She also tracks how characteristics associated with these women have accrued across the Atlantic world.

Both comics studies and adaptation studies have grown separately over the past twenty years. Yet there are few in-depth studies of comic books and adaptations together. Available for the first time in English, this collection pores over the phenomenon of comic books and adaptation, sifting through comics as both sources and results of adaptation.

Literary scholar Michael A. Chaney examines graphic novels to illustrate that in form and function they inform readers on how they ought to be read. His arguments result in an innovative analysis of the various knowledges that comics produce and the methods artists and writers employ to convey them. Theoretically eclectic, this study attends to the lessons taught by both the form and content of today's most celebrated graphic novels.Chaney analyzes the embedded lessons in comics and graphic novels through the form's central tropes: the iconic child storyteller and the inherent childishness of comics in American culture; the use of mirrors and masks as ciphers of the unconscious; embedded puzzles and games in otherwise story-driven comic narratives; and the form's self-reflexive propensity for showing its work. Comics reveal the labor that goes into producing them, embedding lessons on how to read the "e;work"e; as a whole.Throughout, Chaney draws from a range of theoretical insights from psychoanalysis and semiotics to theories of reception and production from film studies, art history, and media studies. Some of the major texts examined include Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis; Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth; Joe Sacco's Palestine; David B.'s Epileptic; Kyle Baker's Nat Turner; and many more. As Chaney's examples show, graphic novels teach us even as they create meaning in their infinite relay between words and pictures.

Offers the first collection of interviews with former United States Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin (b. 1927). Spanning almost six decades of conversations, the collection touches on such topics as Merwin's early influences, his location within the twin poles of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, his extraordinary work as a translator, and his decades-long interest in environmental conservation.

In comic books, superhero stories often depict working-class characters who struggle to make ends meet, lead fulfilling lives, and remain faithful to themselves and their own personal code of ethics. Working-Class Comic Book Heroes examines working-class superheroes and other protagonists who populate heroic narratives in serialized comic books.

From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885-1915) to the Negro Leagues (1920-1960), black baseball was a long-standing staple of African American communities. While many of its artifacts and statistics are lost, black baseball figured vibrantly in films, novels, plays, and poems. In Invisible Ball of Dreams, Emily Ruth Rutter examines wide-ranging representations of this history.

Presents twelve essays that explore this posthumanism's relevance in young adult literature. Contributors to the volume explore ideas of posthumanism, including democratization of power, body enhancements, hybridity, multiplicity/plurality, and the environment, by analysing recent works for young adults.

Like Art Spiegelman or Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware stands out as an important crossover artist who has made the wider public aware of comics as literature. Editor Jean Braithwaite compiles interviews displaying both Ware's erudition and his quirky self-deprecation. They span Ware's career from 1993 to 2015, creating a time-lapse portrait of the artist as he matures.

Brings together more than twenty interviews with the acclaimed author, from the mid-1970s to the present. Throughout the volume, Robbins discusses his working methods, his fusion of Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, the need for wit and humour in serious fiction, and the ways living in the Pacific Northwest has fuelled his work.

A bewitching convocation of Dixie's most frightening ghost tales. Shadows and Cypress: Southern Ghost Stories is a Dixie seance that summons ghost tales from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

Early in 1998, Margaret Shackelford invited the National Audubon Society to open its state headquarters at her home in Holly Springs and to begin working at Strawberry Plains, the plantation where she lived four miles north of town. Strawberry Plains Audubon Center: Four Centuries of a Mississippi Landscape documents the unique and complex history of the land encompassed by the centre.

The first collection of writings on African-American topics by this internationally influential pan-African thinker