Books published by University Press of Mississippi

Examines the historical and political context of acclaimed African American actor Paul Robeson's three portrayals of Shakespeare's Othello in the United Kingdom and the United States. All three of the productions, when considered together, provide an intriguing glimpse into Robeson's artistry as well as his political activism.

Places the once preeminent southern crop in historical perspective, showing how "cotton culture" was actually part of the larger culture of the United States despite the widespread perception of its cultivation and sources as hopelessly backward.

Creatively spent and politically irrelevant, the American horror film is a mere ghost of its former self - or so goes the old saw from fans and scholars alike. Taking on this undeserved reputation, the contributors to this collection provide a comprehensive look at a decade of cinematic production, covering a wide variety of material from the last ten years with a clear critical eye.

Essays on how women's history is written in the wake of The Southern LadyContributions from Laura F. Edwards, Crystal Feimster, Glenda E. Gilmore, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Darlene Clark Hine, Mary Kelley, Markeeva Morgan, Anne Firor Scott, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Deborah Gray WhiteAnne Firor Scott's The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 stirred a keen interest among historians in both the approach and message of her book. Using women's diaries, letters, and other personal documents, Scott brought to life southern women as wives and mothers, as members of their communities and churches, and as sometimes sassy but rarely passive agents. She brilliantly demonstrated that the familiar dichotomies of the personal versus the public, the private versus the civic, which had dominated traditional scholarship about men, could not be made to fit women's lives. In doing so, she helped to open up vast terrains of women's experiences for historical scholarship.This volume, based on papers presented at the University of Mississippi's annual Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History, brings together essays by scholars at the forefront of contemporary scholarship on American women's history. Each regards The Southern Lady as having shaped her historical perspective and inspired her choice of topics in important ways. These essays together demonstrate that the power of imagination and scholarly courage manifested in Scott's and other early American women historians' work has blossomed into a gracious plentitude.Elizabeth Anne Payne, Oxford, Mississippi, is professor of history at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women's Trade Union League and coeditor of vols. I and II of Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives.

Intellectual, cultural, and film historians have long considered neorealism the founding block of post-World War II Italian cinema. Neorealism, the traditional story goes, was an Italian film style born in the second postwar period. This collection brings together distinguished film scholars and cultural historians to complicate this nation-based approach to the history of neorealism.

Tennyson S.D. Joseph builds upon current research on the anticolonial and nationalist experience in the Caribbean. He explores the impact of global transformation upon the independent experience of St. Lucia and argues that the island's formal decolonization roughly coincided with the period of the rise of global neoliberalism hegemony.

The essays and panel discussions that make up Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect provide a comprehensive account of the man and his work, including discussions of his life, the shape of his career, and his place in American literature, as well as fresh readings of his novels.

This study of C.L.R. James's writings is the first to look at them as literature and not as theory. This sustained analysis of his major published works places them in the context of his less well-known writings and offers an encompassing critique of one of the African diaspora's most significant thinkers and writers.

A comprehensive appreciation of the fiction written by this Pulitzer Prize author This is the first book-length examination of the fiction written by Richard Ford, who gained critical acclaim for The Sportswriter, the story of suburbanite Frank Bascombe's struggle to survive loneliness and great loss. That novel, published in 1986, struck a chord with readers and reviewers alike, and Ford, a little-known writer who had for a time considered giving up the writing of fiction, was suddenly hailed in Newsweek as "one of the best writers of his generation."The Sportswriter, along with its 1995 sequel Independence Day, which became the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, made Ford's Frank Bascombe as much a part of the American literary landscape as John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom.With three other novels, a well-received volume of short stories, and a trilogy of novellas to his credit, Ford is now firmly established as a major figure among writers of the post-World War II generation.Perspectives on Richard Ford is the first collection of essays to study the body of Ford's fiction. The nine essays demonstrate that Ford, like few other writers of his time, powerfully depicts what it feels like to live in the secular late-twentieth-century world, a dangerous and uncertain place where human relationships are impoverished and where human existence is often characterized by emptiness, solipsism, and, above all, by a sense of alienation. The contributors tend to view Ford's narratives of alienation in a broad cultural context. His works dramatize the breakdown of the institutions of marriage, family, and community. His protagonists often typify the rootlessness and the nameless longing pervasive in a highly mobile, present-oriented society in which individuals, having lost a sense of the past, relentlessly pursue their own elusive identities in the here and now.The collection, which concludes with a compelling conversation between Ford and the editor, will prove to be an essential companion to the work of one our most intriguing contemporary writers.Huey Guagliardo is a professor of English at Louisiana State University at Eunice.

An examination of how the works of five African-American writers reveal the power of communal bonds

Although the Vietnam conflict ended two decades ago, a fierce cultural war over how its literature is to be perceived continues to be waged. Warring Fictions charges American critics with twenty years of white-wash and reminds us that Vietnam was not just an American anguish and its fiction a rock-and-roll acid trip.

Provides a history of the most consequential 35mm motion picture camera introduced in North America in the quarter century following the Second World War: the Arriflex 35. It traces the North American history of this camera from 1945 to 1972 - when the first lightweight, self-blimped 35mm cameras became available.

Explores how traditional cultural forms may be critically appropriated by marginalized groups and used as rhetorical tools to promote deliberation and debate, spur understanding and connection, broaden political engagement, and advance particular social identities.

Exploring an overlooked era of Italian history roiled by domestic terrorism, political assassination, and student protests, Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s shines a new light on what was a dark decade, but an unexpectedly prolific and innovative period among artists of comics intended for adults.

Provides a window into the passion and significance of thirty-eight committed individuals who led a grassroots movement in a socially conservative state. The book is comprised of oral history narratives in which women activists share their motivation, struggles, accomplishments, and hard-won wisdom.

Examines how one pioneering interracial couple developed a love and a racial identity that carried them defiantly through the Jim Crow years. Through interviews and oral history collected from both sides of the Richardson family's racial divide, as well as archival research, The House at the End of the Road probes into the core of the issue of race in early twentieth-century America.

The invention of the cylinder phonograph at the end of the nineteenth century opened up a new world for cultural research. Indeed, Edison's talking machine became one of the basic tools of anthropology. This study of the early phonograph's impact shows traditional ethnography being transformed.

Reveals the strategies used by blues promoters and organisers in Mississippi, both African American and white, local and state, to attract the attention of tourists. In the process, Stephen A. King reveals how promotional materials portray the Delta's blues culture and its musicians.

This collection of six conference papers from the Eighth Annual Chancellor's Symposium in Southern History, held in 1982 at the University of Mississippi, seeks to assess the relationship of southern women in a world complicated by racial and class antagonisms.

Thirteen essays by scholars from four countries trace Walter Mosley's distinctive approach to representing African American responses to the feeling of homelessness in an inhospitable America. Essays explore Mosley's modes of expression, his testing of the limitations of genre, his political engagement in prose, his utopian/dystopian analyses, and his uses of parody and vernacular culture.

Historians have long agreed that women were instrumental in shaping the civil rights movement. Until recently, though, such claims have not been supported by easily accessed texts of speeches and addresses. With this first-of-its-kind anthology, Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon present thirty-nine full-text addresses by women who spoke out while the struggle was at its most intense.

In the Mississippi Delta, creativity, community, and a rich expressive culture persist despite widespread poverty. Over five years of extensive work in the region, author Ali Colleen Neff collected a wealth of materials that demonstrate a vibrant musical scene.

Explores the intersection of race, ethnicity, and sports and analyses the forces that shaped the African American and Latino sports experience in post-World War II America. Contributors reveal that sports often reinforced dominant ideas about race and racial supremacy but that at other times sports became a platform for addressing racial and social injustices.

Probes the difficult relationship between the press and organised labour in the South from the past to the present day. Written by a veteran journalist and first-hand observer of the labour movement and its treatment in the region's newspapers and other media, the text focuses on the modern South that has evolved since World War II.