Books published by University Press of Mississippi

A study of race and sexuality and their interdependencies in American literature from 1945 to 1955, Desegregating Desire examines the varied strategies used by eight American poets and novelists to integrate sexuality into their respective depictions of desegregated places and emergent identities in the aftermath of World War II.

Offers a broad-ranging critical reading of belles lettres - in both French and English - connected to and generally produced by the distinctive Louisiana Creole peoples, chiefly in the southeastern part of the state. The book covers primarily the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the flourishing period during which the term Creole had broad and contested cultural reference in Louisiana.

Searching for your Alabama ancestors? Looking for historical facts? Dates? Events? This book will lead you to the places where you'll find answers. Here are hundreds of direct sources - governmental, archival, agency, online - that will help you access information vital to your investigation.

This collection of essays is the first book to examine Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy as a trilogy, the first to read them as an integrated whole. Together these explorations of McCarthy's magnum opus serve as an ideal companion reader.

Presents a collection of essays that explore Oprah Winfrey's broad reach as an industry and media brand. Contributors analyse a number of topics touching on the ways in which her cultural output shapes contemporary America. The volume examines how Oprah has fashioned a persona that helps her popularize her blend of New Age spirituality, neoliberal politics, and African American preaching.

This collection includes 32 interviews given by John Updike to critics, scholars, talk-show hosts, reporters (national, international and local), a religious journal, a school student, and many more. They all combine to form a portrait of a novelist, short story writer and poet.

Collects the best interviews and profiles of America's most prominent African American filmmaker. The collection features interviews with such luminaries as Charlie Rose, Elvis Mitchell, Michael Sragow, and actor Delroy Lindo.

In our culture, which depends increasingly on images for instruction and recreation, it is important to ask how words and images make meaning when they are combined. Comics, one of the most widely read media of the twentieth century, serves as an ideal for focusing an investigation on the word-and-image question. This collection of essays attempts to give an answer.

Ranging from 1988 to 1999, this book includes interviews with the acclaimed Chinese director of such films as Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern. Several of these interviews appear in English for the first time. Zhang Yimou discusses all his films and speaks candidly about his work both as a cinematographer and an actor.

These essays by Brian Meeks, a noted public intellectual in the Caribbean, reflect on Caribbean politics, particularly radical politics and ideologies in the postcolonial era. But his essays also explain the peculiarities of the contemporary neo-liberal period while searching for pathways beyond the current plight.

On September 9, 1739, twenty Kongolese slaves armed themselves by breaking into a storehouse near the Stono River south of Charleston, South Carolina. They killed twenty-three white colonists, joined forces with other slaves, and marched toward Spanish Florida. The Stono Rebellion serves as a touchstone for Calling Out Liberty, an exploration of human rights in early America.

Presents an irreverent and humorous collection of conversations with the acclaimed documentary filmmaker. Morris (b. 1948) has created some of America's most innovative, lasting cinematic works. This volume features startling interviews from throughout his career, as well as intimate, never-before-published discussions.

Gathers over twenty of the most revelatory interviews with the acclaimed author. Within this collection Doctorow explores the themes of his work not only in the contexts of national and literary history but also in terms of disturbing trends in contemporary American culture.

Explores how fiction of the Reconstruction and the New South intervenes in debates over black schools, citizen-building, Jim Crow discrimination, and US foreign policy towards its territories and dependencies. The author urges a reexamination not only of the contents and formal innovations of New South literature but also its importance in US literary history.

Examines local Black Panther activities throughout the US. These essays shed new light on the Black Panther Party, re-evaluating its legacy in American cultural and political history. Just as important, this volume gives voice to those unsung Panthers whose valiant efforts have heretofore gone unnoticed, unheard, or ignored.

Traces the life of Albert Raymond Forbes Webber (1880-1932), a distinguished Caribbean scholar, statesman, legislator, and novelist. Using Webber as a lens, the book outlines the Guyanese struggle for justice and equality in an age of colonialism, imperialism, and indentureship.

In the past, scholars have looked at narratives of the African diaspora only to discover how these memoirs, poems, and fictions related to the West. The Trickster Comes West explores relationships among African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-British narratives of slavery and of New World and British oppression and what African influences brought to these diasporic expressions.

British comics writer Alan Moore (b. 1953) has a reputation for equal parts brilliance and eccentricity. Alan Moore: Conversations includes ten substantial interviews, beginning with Moore's first published conversation, conducted by V for Vendetta cocreator David Lloyd in 1981. The remainder cover nearly all of his major works.

Edited by comics scholar M. Thomas Inge, this volume collects the best interviews with Will Eisner from 1965 to 2004. Taken together, the interviews cover the breadth of Eisner's career with in-depth information about his creation of The Spirit and other well-known comic book characters, his devotion to the educational uses of the comics medium, and his contributions to the graphic novel.

Analyses ways in which popular and visual culture used humour to confront the attacks of September 11, 2001 and, more specifically, the aftermath. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from four countries to discuss the impact of humour and irony on both media discourse and tangible political reality.

Global in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, Creolization as Cultural Creativity explores the expressive forms and performances that come into being when cultures encounter one another. Creolization is presented as a powerful marker of identity in postcolonial creole societies, as well as a universal process that can occur anywhere cultures come into contact.

Eudora Welty, for nearly forty years the first lady of southern letters, has recreated most memorably in her short stories and novels the voices and the personalities of her fellow Mississippians and southerners. This collection explores topics ranging from serious appraisals of her writings to lighter comments about Miss Welty as a friend.

For the most part, this book draws on the opinions of the court from 1817-1875 for its basic source material. What emerges is a vivid portrait of a judicial body trained in the tradition of the common law but forced to serve the interests of a society at odds with the direction of history.

The concept of southern manners may evoke images of debutantes being introduced to provincial society or it might conjure thoughts of the humiliating behaviour white supremacists expected of African Americans under Jim Crow. The essays in Manners and Southern History analyse these topics and more.