American Cinema And The Southern Imaginary

"Placing the New Southern Studies in conversation with film studies, this book is simply the best edited collection available on film and the U.S. South.---Grace Hale. University of Virginia --

"Placing the New Southern Studies in conversation with film studies, this book is simply the best edited collection available on film and the U.S. South.---Grace Hale. University of Virginia --

Hollywood films have been influential in the portrayal and representation of race relations in the South and how African Americans are cinematically depicted in history, from The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) to The Help (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013). With an ability to reach mass audiences, films represent the power to influence and shape the public's understanding of our country's past, creating lasting images -- both real and imagined -- in American culture. In Southern History on Screen: Race and Rights, 1976--2016, editor Bryan Jack brings together essays from an international roster of scholars to provide new critical perspectives on Hollywood's relationships between historical films, Southern history, identity, and the portrayal of Jim Crow--era segregation. This collection analyzes films through the lens of religion, politics, race, sex, and class, building a comprehensive look at the South as seen on screen. By illuminating depictions of the southern belle in Gone with the Wind, the religious rhetoric of southern white Christians and the progressive identity of the "white heroes" in A Time to Kill (1996) and Mississippi Burning (1988), as well as many other archetypes found across films, this book explores the intersection between film, historical memory, and southern identity.

Within the realm of American culture and its construction of its citizenry, geography, and ideology, who are southerners and who are queers, and what is the South and what is queerness? Queering the South on Screen addresses these questions by examining the intersections of queerness, regionalism, and identity depicted in film, television, and other visual media about the South during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Southern queers on screen often reflect the fantasy of cultural stereotypes. Editor Tison Pugh contends that when southern queers appear in films and on television, and when southern queers watch these portrayals, the inherent contradictions of these cultural depictions reveal the fault lines of gender, geography, and desire. These underlying schisms point to the infinite, if infrequently portrayed, possibilities of actual queer southern life. Examining a range of materials, including gothic horror films and drag queens on public-access television, the contributors show that queer southerners have always expressed desires for distinctiveness in the making and consumption of visual media. Read together, the introduction and twelve chapters deconstruct premeditated labels of identity such as queer and southern. In doing so, they expose the reflexive nature of these labels to construct ideological fantasies of southerners regardless of the complexity of their lives.

The Routledge History of the American South looks at the major themes that have developed in the interdisciplinary field of Southern Studies. With fifteen original essays from experts in their respective fields, the handbook addresses such diverse topics as southern linguistics, music (secular and non-secular), gender, food, and history and memory. The chapters present focused historiographical analyses that, taken together, offer a clear sense of the evolution and contours of Southern Studies. This volume is valuable both as a dynamic introduction to Southern Studies and as an entry point into more recent research for those already familiar with the subfield.

Southern Screens: Cinema, culture and the global South adopts a transversal south-south approach to the study of screen culture across national and cultural territories. It examines the conditions by which screen culture participates in the generation, sharing, and circulation of new knowledge that is both southern and about the global South. The contributors, all of them residents of the world’s southernmost nations, examine new and traditional media that manifests an affinity with southern cultural imaginaries and territories identifiable through the sociological category of "Global South." Some of their chapters engage in analysis linked to specific national contexts, others follow comparative approaches to screen culture across national, regional, and socio-historical borders. Sketching a new tapestry of references to other areas of southern social science and cultural theory, Southern Screens traces a critical genealogy that here finds a productive place within an emerging, comparative discussion of the screen cultures of the Global South. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies.

This Companion maps the dynamic literary landscape of the American South. From pre- and post-Civil War literature to modernist and civil rights fictions and writing by immigrants in the 'global' South of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars explore the region's established and emergent literary traditions. Touching on poetry and song, drama and screenwriting, key figures such as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, and iconic texts such as Gone with the Wind, chapters investigate how issues of class, poverty, sexuality and regional identity have textured Southern writing across generations. The volume's rich contextual approach highlights patterns and connections between writers while offering insight into the development of Southern literary criticism, making this Companion a valuable guide for students and teachers of American literature, American studies and the history of storytelling in America.

As early as 1909, African Americans were utilizing the new medium of cinema to catalogue the world around them, using the film camera as a device to capture their lives and their history. The daunting subject of race and ethnicity permeated life in America at the turn of the twentieth century and due to the effect of certain early films, specific television images, and an often-biased news media, it still plagues us today. As new technologies bring the power of the moving image to the masses, African Americans will shoot and edit on laptop computers and share their stories with a global audience via the World Wide Web. These independently produced visions will add to the diverse cache of African American images being displayed on an ever-expanding silver screen. This wide range of stories, topics, views, and genres will finally give the world a glimpse of African American life that has long been ignored and has yet to be seen. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1400 cross-referenced entries on actors, actresses, movies, producers, organizations, awards, and terminology, this book provides a better understanding of the role African Americans played in film history. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about African American cinema.