Meet the Melungeons

We've been talking about some of the ways in which we mythologize the South--the narratives privileged and excluded, the complicated notion of "a simpler time," the way nostalgia can be a reductive practice, etc.  Last week, we read an essay by Jon F. Sensbach called "Before the Bible Belt: Indians, Africans, and the New Synthesis of Eighteenth-Century Southern Religious History."  Sensbach calls our attention to the fact that an evangelical Protestant "Bible Belt" was not at all a foregone conclusion in the American South. He situates the South as a transatlantic space, subject to market forces, myriad cultural interactions/confrontations and migrations of German, African, Native American, and French populations, etc., etc., etc.

In our efforts to complicate "the South" and begin looking at "Souths" that explode a seemingly monolithic tent, I thought I'd introduce you to another group of Southerners you may not be familiar with: the Melungeons.

"Melungeons" refer to groups of Appalachians with African, European, and Native American ancestries.

They were identified by some as Indian, Portuguese, mulatto, Creole, black, or white.  Whatever the case, they were--and still often are--called a very "mysterious" people, as their race(s) and "origins" are not easily pinned down.  Most were practitioners of various stripes of Protestantism (many were Baptist).  Speculations about these populations abound (we like for people and things to have easy and unchanging names, after all).  This trailer, apart from bad background music, gives you a sense of all the different ideas on how these groups should be identified:

The convergence of races and regions here offers a nice answer to why it's more than a little tricky to talk about "the South" as a singular experience.  Before--and after--something called "the Bible Belt" began to emerge, there were--and are--communities that complicate that very category.



If you want to find out more:
http://www.melungeon.org/node/4
http://www.melungeons.com/articles/jan2003.htm
http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mtnties/melungeon.html

There are lots of other sites too...have some fun with Google and Wikipedia.

Crimson White on Campus History

As promised: the article from The Crimson White on campus history and the men some buildings were named for...

Find that article, called "Building Names Reflect Different Era on Campus" here:

http://www.cw.ua.edu/2010/08/29/building-names-reflect-different-era-on-campus/

The response suggests that "History is history--and news should be objective."  In fact that's it's title.  Read it here: 

http://www.cw.ua.edu/2010/09/12/history-is-history-and-news-should-be-objective/

What do you think about the call for an "objective" view of "history?"  I'm wondering about the invocation of something called "the past" (when does such a thing begin and end?  at what point do we start drawing boundaries around it, etc?), and our relationship to it as people separated by time and context but with a shared region...  

Wanna go visit the Gorgas rock next class?  

Only the Conscious Counts?

A quick conversation starter...  Several posts on your own blogs and comments to this blog's posts have brought up the issue of performance.  We often rely on a distinction between "being" a certain way and "acting" a certain way...but I'm thinking that's a line that deserves some smudging.

Specifically: in comments about Trail Maids, etc., there's a running theme of what they're thinking about as they dress up, playing "dress up" in general, and whether or not they're knowingly hashing out issues of slavery.  Now, the Trail Maids and the issue of "southern womanhood" is just one example...Surely this question of consciously doing this or that can translate to all sorts of topics when discussing religion and the South.

SO, since that's the case, let me add the following (to the specific case of trail maids/femininity):

1. I would be pretty surprised if someone, as she puts on an antebellum dress, actively thinks while she picks up her parasol: "I am now choosing to be complicit in a social script steeped in the horrors of slavery."

2. I'm not sure if the fact of #1 matters though...  Or does it?  Tell me what you think.

3. Some theory for your reading/thinking pleasure (posted a shorter version of this in a comment to the trail maids, too):
In the chapter you read from McPherson's Reconstructing Dixie, McPherson suggests:
 "Central to constructions of southern femininity is a notion of masquerade or performance...In her 1929 essay 'Womanliness as a Masquerade,' [Joan] Riviere structures an equation between femininity/womanliness and masquerade, writing that 'the reader may ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the masquerade...they are the same thing'.  In [Mary Ann] Doane's analysis, such a formulation of femininity renders it 'in actuality non-existent' because 'it makes femininity dependent upon masculinity for its very definition'.  For Doane, femininity as masquerade is both normal and...pathological.  Such an understanding of normal or aberrant femininity as always a masquerade, a performance, echoes my own claim that femininity is a social and discursive construction, and thus its contours are always sketched in relation to other markers of difference.  But Doane's argument that this approach makes femininity always dependent on, derivative of, masculinity...enacts an erasure of the other social relations against which femininity takes shape and is performed (21-22).

McPherson wants to add to sexual difference the differences in race and region that also mark the masquerade, so she sees herself as adding to and expanding what Doane and Riviere do in psychoanalytic contexts.  Nonetheless, the central point is still one of whether or not social actors must be CONSCIOUSLY engaged in something in order to be identified as engaging in it.

There's an interesting debate to be had here, as there's surely something to be said for personal identification (I am able to mark myself or identify as this or that no matter what scholars or peers might say to the contrary).  At the same time, don't social frameworks and interests get stacked up or dismantled by our often unconscious behaviors?

Personally, I don't find a lot of use for talking about things like "intent" or the "unconscious."  I'm not telepathic, and I don't know what swims in the gray matter of others.  I do find a lot of use in talking about behavior and action, though.  And whether these things are "conscious" or not, they seem to have material consequences in a discursive and material world.

So does it matter whether we know what we're doing if we're still doing it?

123go!

The Politics of Parody

We ran out of time before I could show you this book (I'll bring it to class Monday), so I thought I'd give a quick note about it here.  Alice Randall (writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt U...I think she's still there?  someone correct me) wrote a novel called The Wind Done Gone, which Houghton Mifflin published in 2001.

Read a review here: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HST/is_3_3/ai_75121833/

The book is touted on the front cover as "A provocative literary parody that explodes the mythology perpetrated by a Southern classic."  It follows the story of Cynara (called Cindy), the daughter of a white plantation owner and the domestic worker we've known as Mammy.  Scarlett is her half-sister, and is called "Other" throughout.

Now, such a text (it explodes a mythology perpetrated by a classic, after all) is bound to have its controversies.  In fact, the estate of Margaret Mitchell (author of the "original" Gone with the Wind) sued Randall for copyright infringement.  I think that's hilarious, but anyone else want to have a go with a different reaction?  What it suggests is that Mitchell's "classic" epic is an untouchable tale, at least in literary venues, and that parodies/altered versions, etc., are laying claim to something unclaimable.  Don't screw up Scarlett.  Does this have any parallels to visions/versions of Southern nostalgia and memory in general?  Or not?  

Want to know how the suit finally settled?  Okay, I'll tell you.  The parties settled with the understanding that Houghton Mifflin would continue to print copies of the book as long as it made clear it was an "unauthorized parody" (hence the fun red stamp directly on the cover).  Mitchell's estate also asked the publisher to make a donation to Morehouse College in Atlanta (an all-male historically black college), which Houghton Mifflin did.  The book's publication/distribution was halted for a month when the suit was filed.  Both parties reserve their rights with future reproductions of the book...

Reviews of the book describe it as fiercely controversial and entirely wonderful.  I'm not sure it's either.  Nonetheless, it hit a nerve in regards to its play, its parody of something seemingly "classic" about the South.  What sorts of things does that fact suggest?

Mythologizing the "Southern Lady"

Poor Scarlett. That silly war ruins all the best parties:




Our readings this week talk about how we codify and memorialize something called "Southern identity."  *Gone with the Wind* is a perfect example of the nostalgic vision of a South that seems totally removed from the very infrastructure upon which it relied.

Here's an example from the film, where romance and religious ritual are bound up with racial subjugation and economic disparity:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorFyVS23ns&feature=related

In Tara McPherson's Intro to *Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South*, she talks early on about the myth of the "Southern Lady": "[The South] remains at once the site of the trauma of slavery and also the mythic location of a vast nostalgia industry. In many ways, Americans can't seem to get enough of the horrors of slavery, and yet we remain unable to connect this past to the romanticized history of the plantation, unable or unwilling to process the emotional registers still echoing from the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. The brutalities of those periods remain dissociated from our representations of the material site of those atrocities, the plantation home. Furthermore, the very figure who underwrote the widespread lynching of black southern men (and women) during the era of segregation in the South somehow remains collectible. The white southern lady--as mythologized image of innocence and purity--floats free from the violence for which she was the cover story..."

The romanticized version of something called Southern femininity relies on a firmly entrenched structure of economic access and race-based labor framework. Interestingly, Mammy becomes the voice of maternalistic morality, telling Scarlett to "behave" and to "act like a lady"...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4546UkGWSw&feature=related

We talked about this a little in class, but what do you make of Alabama's Azalea Trail Maids?

Here's a blurb about the controversy that ensued after their being asked to march in Obama's inaugural parade:
http://www.local15tv.com/news/local/story/Controversy-Over-The-Azalea-Trail-Maids/_log9pDFgk-nF4cuv1wq3Q.cspx

The father of one of the maids says in the article: "they've never represented slavery or racism.... only Alabama’s southern culture."  What's at stake or what are the implications of thinking of those as two separate and identifiable things?


More?  Okay, sure:
http://www.wsfa.com/Global/story.asp?S=9655036


So are these innocuous images based on popular culture's trips to the movies?  Should there be any responsibility attached to these representations?  What does this suggest about the politics of memory and memorializing?  

True Blood...True South?

U.S. pop culture (especially angsty teens) loves vampires again.  Not creepy "classical" sorts in the vein (pun intended) of Count Dracula and dank mansions.  Now instead of Counts, we've got Confederate Soldiers.  And instead of mansions, we've got bars and antebellum homes.  Well, at least in "True Blood."  The series is particularly interesting in its presentation of the South (takes place in Louisiana bayou country) vis-a-vis the presence of supernatural..."forces"?  Religion gets a not-so-subtle treatment in the show, especially in regard to us/them and good/evil social dichotomies.  But in a Southern context, this plays out in all sorts of (interesting?  troubling?  compelling?  ridiculous?) ways.

Since we can't spend a semester just on this one show (dry those eyes), just take a look-see at the opening credits:



Telling images, no?  There's an especially remarkable triangulation of space/setting, religious rituals, and sexuality.  We see a very specific South: one of marshes, old homes, abandoned cars, bars made of splintered boards, racial hatred and violence.  The religious overtones are pretty specific too: crosses, charismatic church services, prayers, baptism.  And then, lots and lots of sex.  Noticeably absent?  Vampires.  Not even vampire lore or archetypes.  Loads of jumping and writhing though (alongside a decomposing animal or two or three or five), and that ends up standing in for our more traditional images of the creepy sensuality that accompanies so many vampire narratives.  The juxtaposition of bodies in religious and sexual contexts is something that comes up again and again in the show itself.  And the stereotypes are pretty easy to identify.  So what do we make of the huge success and popularity of "True Blood"?  Marketing magic?  Just one more piece of the vampire craze?  Or is there anything to be said for the ways in which we understand religion alongside physicality in the South?  And if so, what might be said about it?

What Religion in the South Looks Like (?)

So if Scarlette O'Harlette and fried chicken (along with some maps, which, we'll certainly talk about--those aren't so innocuous either!) are the images that show up for a search of "southern," what happens when something called "religion" gets thrown into the mix?  Well, I'm glad you asked:

Hmm, so now we've got tiny churches, a lynching, the book "Baptized in Blood," and Jerry Falwell (among other things).  This offers a pretty specific brand of Protestantism to partner with images of the South.  Fair?  Unfair?  Falwellian?  (no, I'm not sure what that means)