CONFERENCE PROGRAM

THE SOCIETY FOR STUDY OF SOUTHERN LITERATURE

EVERYBODY LOVES YOU WHEN YOU'RE DOWN AND SOUTH:

CULTURAL CAPITAL IN HARD TIMES

APRIL 8-11, 2010

PERE MARQUETTE HOTEL  NEW ORLEANS, LA

 

Thursday  April 8, 2010

SESSION 1 Thursday 1:00-2:15

Session 1-A THURSDAY 1:00-2:15  [Jelly Roll Morton]

Inventing the Post-Katrina City: New Orleans after the Flood

 

Chair: Mona Lisa Saloy, Dillard University

 

1.  C.W. Cannon, “Frowenfeld’s Ghost: George Washington Cable’s The Grandisimmes and Post-Katrina Representations of New Orleans,” Loyola University New Orleans

2.  Judith Kemerait Livingston, “Re-making Neighborhoods: Spatial Currents after the Flood,” Tulane University

3.  Lindsay Tuggle, “Memorializing Katrina: Diaspora, Closure Tourism and the Architecture of Amnesia,” The University of Sydney

 

Session 1-B  THURSDAY 1:00-2:15  [Sidney Bechet]

Freedom’s Hard Road: Constructions of Blackness since Emancipation

 

Chair:  Molly Mitchell, University of New Orleans

 

1.  Lisa Collins, “Racial Fictions: Reinventing Blackness in American Literature, 1850-1875,” Harvard University

2. Anthony Stanonis, “A Graveyard Mind: White Fear, Black Rebellion, and ‘Voodoo’ Music,” Queen’s University Belfast

3. Lynnell Thomas, "'Wasn’t Nothing Like That’: New Orleans Black Heritage Tourism & Counternarratives of Resistance,” University of Massachusetts, Boston

 

Session 1-C THURSDAY 1:00-2:15 [Mahalia Jackson]

Southern Writers and the Cold War

 

Chair: David McWhirter, Texas A&M University

 

1. Jordan Dominy, “Southern Studies as Area Studies: Faulkner’s Cultural Capital during the Cold War,” University of Florida

2.  Thomas F. Haddox, “Lillian Smith’s One Hour and the Problem of Southern Cultural Capital,” University of Tennessee, Knoxville

3.  Ted Atkinson, “Seeing Red in the Free State of Jones: Confederates, Communism, and Political Projections in Tap Roots,” Mississippi State University

 

Session 1-D THURSDAY 1:00-2:15  [Buddy Bolden]

Degraded Ecologies: Twenty-first Century Agrarianism

 

Chair: Eric Gary Anderson, George Mason University

 

1.  Cory Shaman, “Dark Ecology and the Gains of Environmental Trauma,” Arkansas Tech University

2.  Christopher Rieger, “’How can a man beat a machine?’: An Ecocritical Approach to Ernest Gaines’ A Gathering of Old Men,” Southeast Missouri State University

3.  Steven Knepper, “Deconstructing Some Unregenerate Southerners: Past Southern Agrarianism, Toward an Agro-ecological Critical Perspective,” University of Virginia

4.  Carol E. Newell, “’I don’t hate the South’: What Ambivalence in Southern Literature Can Teach the Environmental Movement,” New York University

 

Session 1-E THURSDAY 1:00-2:15 [Storyville 3]

Black Women, White Lenses

 

Chair: Candace Waid, University of California, Santa Barbara

 

1.  Deborah Wilson, “Historicizing Medusa in Southern Historical Fiction,” Arkansas Tech University

2.  Anne Hanahan Blessing, “Modern Mammies: Black Female Bodies as Landscape for White Spiritual Awakening and Projection in Contemporary Fiction,” College of Charleston

3.  Christina G. Bucher, “Depicting The Help: Black Domestic Workers through White Lenses,” Berry College

 

SESSION 2 Thursday 2:30-3:45 

 

Session 2-A  THURSDAY 2:30-3:45  [Jelly Roll Morton]

Faulkner and the Discovery of the Plantation Diary

 

1.  Sally Wolff-King, Emory University

2.  Susan Donaldson, College of William and Mary

3.  John Lowe, Louisiana State University

 

Session 2-B  THURSDAY 2:30-3:45  [Sidney Bechet]

“Trash”

 

Chair: Michael Bibler, University of Manchester

 

1.  Dina Smith, “Trailer Trash in the Wake of Katrina,” Drake University

2.  Sarah Robertson, “Invoking the Agrarians: Poor Whites and the Global Southern Community in Rick Bragg’s Memoir Trilogy,” University of the West of England

3.  Emilija Stanic, “’No sacrifice was too gret’: Whiteness and Whiteface in Harry Crew’s Body,” Florida Atlantic University

4. Renae R. Applegate House, “The Revolution of ‘Trash’ in Southern Women’s Writing: O’Connor, Allison, and Gillespie,” Shorter College

 

Session 2-C THURSDAY 2:30-3:45 [Mahalia Jackson]

Expanding the Canon of Southern Women Writers: In Memory of Dorothy M. Scura

 

Chair: Margaret Bauer, East Carolina University

 

1.  Tim Edwards, “Reflections on a Past, Reflections of a Self: Mirror as Metaphor in the Works of Evelyn Scott,” University of West Alabama

2.  Martha E. Cook, “Southern Women and the Hardships of the Civil War: Glasgow’s The Battle-Ground and Scott’s The Wave,” Longwood University

3.  Mark Alan Graves, “Female Identification and Idealization in Porter’s ‘Old Mortality’ and Glasgow’s The Sheltered Life,” Morehead State University

4.  Kristie L. Knotts, “’This Labor to Make Our Words Matter’: Female Stories in Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies and the Poetry of Kathryn Stripling Byer,” Westfield State College

 

Session 2-D THURSDAY 2:30-3:45 [Buddy Bolden]

Plantation Problematics

 

Chair: Lisa Hinrichsen, University of Arkansas

 

1.  Amy Clukey, “Plantation Gothic: Specters of the Caribbean in Thomas Nelson Page and Eric Walrond,” Florida Atlantic University

2.  Evelyn Scharf Hunter, “Returning and Reclaiming: Contemporary Visions of the Plantation,” Vanderbilt University

3.  Cindy Montgomery Webb, “Moving Midway and the Work of Reframing Sentient Architecture in Southern Literature,” University of North Carolina, Greensboro

 

Session 2-E   THURSDAY 2:30-3:45 [Storyville 3]

Eating in the Kitchen: Race, Foodways, and Southern Literature

 

Chair: Jessica Harris, Queens College

 

1.  Frederick Douglass Opie, “A Culinary Reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Marist College

2.  David A. Davis, “Integrating the Kitchen in Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby,” Mercer University

3.  Tara Powell, “’Nothing Can Gloss / Over Barbecue Sauce’: Foodways, Memory, and Race in Contemporary Southern Poetry,” University of South Carolina

 

SESSION 3 Thursday 4:00-5:15 

 

Session 3-A THURSDAY 4:00-5:15  [Jelly Roll Morton]

Shadows on the Canon: Interrogating Familiar Texts

 

Chair: Brooke Ethridge, Loyola University New Orleans

 

1.  Linda Chavers, “’You will have to stop me’: Re-enactment, Invention, and Negation as Affirmation in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” Harvard University

2.  Lori Bailey, “The Valet Digs for Gold: Nostalgic Humor in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Gold Bug,’” Emory University

3.  Heather Nelson, “’You Could be Judas’: A Black Slaveowner in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson,” Purdue University

4.  Wade Newhouse, “’A Temple in Which No One Worships’: Faith and Failure in Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Peace University

 

Session 3-B THURSDAY 4:00-5:15  [Sidney Bechet] 

Recasting Civil Rights in the Cultural Imagination

 

Chair: Harriet Pollack, Bucknell University

 

1.  Christopher Metress, “Seductive Irony: The Civil Rights Movement and the Rhetoric of Despair in Elliott Chaze’s Tiger in the Honeysuckle,” Samford University

2.  Andrew Banecker, “Welty’s Use of Force: ‘The Demonstrators’ as Williams’ ‘The Use of Force’ Recast in Southern Civil Rights Era Politics,” Louisiana State University

3.  Erich Nunn, “’Is this a minstrel show?’: Consumer Culture and Civil Rights in A Confederacy of Dunces,” Auburn University

 

Session 3-C THURSDAY 4:00-5:15 [Mahalia Jackson]  

Cuba es el sur

 

Chair: John Lowe, Louisiana State University

 

1.  Raquel Gonzalez Rivas, “An AlterLatina in New Orleans: Benitez-Rojo’s Woman in Battle Dress Speaks Southern,” University of North Florida

2.  Peter Hulme, “James Street and Cuba,” University of Essex

3.  John Lowe, “Southern Salsa: Cristina Garcia’s Miami,” Louisiana State University

4.  Ada Savin, “Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban and The Aguero Sisters,” University of Versailles

 

Session 3-D THURSDAY 4:00-5:15  [Buddy Bolden]  

Spectacular Southern Storytelling

 

Chair: Grant Bain, University of Arkansas

 

1.  Peter Schmidt, “Story-Selling: The ‘Command Performance’ Scene in Page, Harris, Chopin, and Dunbar,” Swarthmore College

2.  Kristina Bobo, “’That Dead Old Hole of New Orleans’: The City as Anachronism and the Local Color Conundrum,” Pennsylvania State University

3.  Bill Hardwig, “Unveiling the Body: The ‘Outing’ of Charles W. Chesnutt and Mary N. Murfree,” University of Tennessee, Knoxville

 

Session 3-E THURSDAY 4:00-5:15  [Storyville 3] 

Queer Ways to See the South

 

Chair: Gary Richards, University of Mary Washington

  

1.  Kevin Murphy, “New Orleans in the Queer Imagination: Schismatic Narratives in Jim Grimsley’s Boulevard,” Tulane University

2.  Michael P. Bibler, “Free Love and Sexual Property: Emotion and Identity in William Wells Brown’s Clotel,” University of Manchester 

3.  Katherine Henninger, “Southern Religion’s Sexual Charge and the National Imagination,” Louisiana State University

 

 

5:30-6:30  Welcoming Reception [Storyville Foyer and Storyville 1]

6:30-8:00 

Conference Welcome: John Lowe, Rebecca Mark, Barbara Ewell

A Reading by Cristina Garcia Author of Dreaming in Cuban and The Aguero Sisters

Introduction, Ana Lopez, Tulane University

[Storyville 2-3]

 

 

FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2010

    

SESSION 4 Friday 8:00-9:15

 

Session 4-A FRIDAY 8:00-9:15  [Jelly Roll Morton] 

Losing it: Southern Cultural Capital that (Almost) Got Away

 

Chair: C. W. Cannon, Loyola University New Orleans

 

1.  Jim Clark, “’The ghosts of minstrels thrive/That have no need to spend’: The Short Life, Hard Times, and Musical Resurrection of Georgia’s Farmer-Poet Byron Herbert Reece,” Barton College

2.  Charmion Gustke, “’It is either me or the horse’: The Empire of the South in Edna Ferber’s Giant,” Belmont University

3.  Lisa Hinrichsen, “Wanting Magic: Fantasy, Fiction and Cultural Capital in A Streetcar Named Desire,” University of Arkansas

4.  Katie Owens-Murphy, “Cormac McCarthy’s Dirty South: The Frontier Ethic Behind the Early Fiction,” Pennsylvania State University

 

Session 4-B FRIDAY 8:00-9:15 [Sidney Bechet]

Women on the Move: Reconfiguring Southern Womanhood

 

Chair: Anne Goodwyn Jones, Allegheny College

 

1.  Julie L. Lester, “From Hoodoo Women to Robber Queens: Breaking the Bounds of Female Subjectivity in Zora Neale Hurston’s Circum-Caribbean Marvelous Real,” University of Memphis

2.  Liz Thompson, “Saving the Southern Sister: Writing the ‘Trash” Survival Story in Bastard Out of Carolina and Ellen Foster,” University of Memphis

3.  Donnie McMahand, “Alice Walker’s Open Heart and Footprints of a Global Black South,” Tulane University

4.  Ann Romines, “’Old Enough to Tell’ (and Sell): Welty, Douglas, and Late-life Autobiography as Cultural Capital,” George Washington University



 

Session 4-C FRIDAY 8:00-9:15  [Mahalia Jackson]

Documenting Katrina

 

Chair: Michael Mizell-Nelson, University of New Orleans

 

1.  Sean Heuston, “Troubling Waters: The Politics of Hurricane Katrina Documentaries,” The Citadel

2.  Ali Brox, “A Requiem for Nature: Environmental Justice and Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke,” University of Kansas

3.  Marline Otte, “The Mourning After: Languages of Loss and Grief in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” Tulane University

 

Session 4-D FRIDAY 8:00-9:15  [Buddy Bolden]

Southern Gothic Revisited

 

Chair: George Handley, Brigham Young University

 

1.  Joseph Farmer, “Ozark Gothic: ‘Living Ghosts’ in the Novels of Donald Harington,” University of Mississippi

2.  Peggy Dunn Bailey, “Capital Betrayal in Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides: Lila Wingo as a Contemporary Gothic Villain,” Henderson State University

3.  Grant Bain, “Home-made Gods: Making Meaning through the Gothic Mode,” University of Arkansas

 

Session 4-E FRIDAY 8:00-9:15  [Storyville 3] 

Southern Triptych: Sex, Violence, and Race

 

Chair: Keith Cartwright, University of North Florida

 

1.  Lindgren Johnson, “’Wolves’ in Sheep’s Clothing: Animal Welfare and the NAACP’s Campaign against Lynching,” University of Mississippi

2.  Summar C. Sparks, “Reclassifying Racial Violence: A Counter-narrative of Lynching,” University of North Carolina, Greensboro

3.  Anita Miller Garner, “Sex, Violence, and the Fictive Voice Noir in 21^st Century Southern Literature: ‘That’s What I Like about the South,’” University of North Alabama

 

 

9:30-10:45  [Storyville 1-2]

Keynote Address: “Writing in Hard Times, Adjusting to Schizophrenia after the American Century”

Thadious Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

Introduction, Rebecca Mark, Tulane University; Barbara C. Ewell, Loyola University

 

 

SESSION 5  Friday 11:00-12:15

 

Session 5-A FRIDAY 11:00-12:15  [Jelly Roll Morton]  

Eudora Welty in New Orleans

 

Chair: Harriet Pollack, Bucknell University

 

1.  Pearl McHaney, “Getting a Sense of the New Orleans Welty Knew,” Georgia State University

2.  Rebecca Mark, “Lost in the Streets: Welty’s New Orleans,” Tulane University

3.  Julia Eichelberger, “Dangerous Carnivals in Eudora Welty’s Letters and The Optimist’s Daughter,” College of Charleston

4.  Suzanne Marrs, “Taking the Rebel to N.O.,” Millsaps College

 

Session 5-B FRIDAY 11:00-12:15  [Sidney Bechet]   

Faulknerian Narratives, Southern Violence and Global Southern Capitalism

 

Chair: Jeffrey Stayton, University of Mississippi

  

1.  Melanie R. Anderson, “’Traces’ of a Southern Trauma: The Haunting of Joe and Violet in Toni Morrison’s Jazz,” University of Mississippi

2.  Pip Gordon, “Why Gay Faulkner Now: Notes Towards a New Perspective,” University of Mississippi

3.  Jeffrey Stayton, “Hemispheric Leaf Storms: Sawmill Lynchings and Banana Strike Massacres in the Global South,” University of Mississippi

 

Session 5-C FRIDAY 11:00-12:15 [Mahalia Jackson]    

Hurricane Katrina: Five Years After

 

Chair: Sharon Monteith, University of Nottingham

 

1.  Helen Taylor, “The Post-Katrina Cultural Revival of New Orleans,” University of Exeter

2.  Nahem Yousaf, “Regeneration through Genre: Romancing Katrina in Fox TV’s K-Ville,” Nottingham Trent University

3.  Derrick Price, “Photographing Dereliction and Disaster: The FSA Archive and the Katrina Exposed Exhibition,” Independent Scholar

4.  Allison Graham, “Free at Last: Post-Katrina New Orleans and the Future of Conspiracy,” University of Memphis

 

Session 5-D FRIDAY 11:00-12:15  [Buddy Bolden]   

Strangers in the South: Othering the Other

 

Chair: Patrick Horn, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

 

1.  Anthony Szczesiul, “Globalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Ethical Possibilities of Southern Hospitality,” University of Massachusetts, Lowell

2.  Frank Cha, “Red River Delta Blues: The Gulf South Vietnamese and Rewriting the Legacy of the ‘Invisible Tide,’” College of William and Mary

3.  Juanita Cabello, “Disfigured and Adrift in a 1940s South: Tennessee Williams’s ‘Rubio [and] Morena,’” Independent Scholar

4.  Wendy Kurant, “Y’all Come Back: Northern Superiority and Southern Characters in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction,” North Georgia College & State University

 

Session 5-E FRIDAY 11:00-12:15 [Storyville 3]   

Comics and the U.S. South

 

Chair: Qiana Whitted, University of South Carolina

   

1.  Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, “Men Who Could Draw: A Graphic Examination of the Editorial Cartoons of Norman E. Jennett and the Rise of White Supremacy in North Carolina,” University of Iowa

2.  Gary Richards, “Stuck Rubber Baby and the Anxieties of Racial Difference,” University of Mary Washington

3.  Anthony Dyer Hoefer, “A Re-Vision of the Record: The Demands of Reading Josh Neufeld’s AD: New Orleans After the Deluge,” Georgia Institute of Technology  

 

Respondent: Brannon Costello, Louisiana State University

 

LUNCH BREAK

 

12:15-2:00  SSSL Executive Committee Meeting [Louis Armstrong]

 

SESSION 6  FRIDAY 2:00-3:15

 

Session 6-A FRIDAY 2:00-3:15 [Jelly Roll Morton]

Hearing the Music in Southern Literature

 

Chair: Joel Dinerstein, Tulane University

 

1.  Clay Motley, “Rockin’ the Renaissance: Southern Music as Part of the Literary Renaissance,” Western Kentucky University

2.  Courtney George, “Popular Music and the Global South in Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox,” Columbus State University

3.  Amy K. King, “’I’m the only family you got’: The Blues as a Healing Space in Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan,” University of Mississippi

 

Session 6-B  FRIDAY 2:00-3:15  [Sidney Bechet]

Faulkner’s Dark Side

 

Chair: Ted Atkinson, Mississippi State University

  

1.  David Kidd, “Rebirthing Thomas Dixon Jr.: William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell,” College of William and Mary

2. Alison Arant, “Rotten Old Maids: (Re)producing Race and Region as Cultural Capital in Faulkner’s Light in August and Absalom, Absalom,” University of South Carolina

3.  Aimee E. Berger, “’A Fur Piece to Go’: Lena Grove’s Migration as (In)security Study,” University of North Texas.

 

Session 6-C FRIDAY 2:00-3:15  [Mahalia Jackson]

“Cheating the Stillness: The World of Julia Peterkin” (2009)

Screening of documentary film

Commentators:

1.  Susan Millar Williams, Consultant and Peterkin biographer, Trident Technical College

2.  Gayla Jamison, Producer, Lightfoot Films

 

Session 6-D FRIDAY 2:00-3:15  [Buddy Bolden]

Making Memories Count: Ernest Gaines

 

Chair: Nghana Lewis, Tulane University

 

1.  Adrienne Akins, “’What people like Miss Jane remember’: Memory and Education as Cultural Capital in Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” Baylor University

2.  Reggie Scott Young, “The Reinscription of Cultural Knowledge in the Works of Ernest J. Gaines,” University of Louisiana at Lafayette

3.  Terrence Tucker, “Miss Jane’s South: Southern Literature, Intertextuality, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” University of Arkansas

 

Session 6-E FRIDAY 2:00-3:15  [Storyville 1]

A Pedagogical Roundtable on the Pleasures and Pitfalls of Teaching about the U.S. South

 

1.  Martyn Bone, University of Copenhagen

2.  Sarah Gleeson-White, University of Sydney

3.  Margaret T. McGehee, Presbyterian College

4.  Kathryn McKee, University of Mississipppi

5.  Riché D. Richardson, Cornell University

               

Session 6-F FRIDAY 2:00-3:15  [Storyville 3]

Mentoring the Southern Scholar: A Roundtable Discussion in Memory of Dorothy M. Scura

 

Chair: Martha E. Cook, Longwood University

 

1.  Margaret D. Bauer, East Carolina University

2.  Paul C. Jones, Ohio University

3.  Martha E. Cook, Longwood University

 

SESSION 7 Friday 3:30-4:45 

 

Session 7-A FRIDAY 3:30-4:45  [Jelly Roll Morton]

Global Exchanges: Eudora Welty’s Connections to the World

 

Chair: Pearl McHaney, Georgia State University

 

1.  Mae Miller Claxton, “New Orleans, Consumer Culture, and Eudora Welty’s The Robber Bridegroom,” Western Carolina University

2.  Candace Waid, “Africanist Welty: A Thousand Years of Slavery in the Hemispheric South,” University of California, Santa Barbara

3.  David McWhirter, “Part of Some Larger Continuity: Welty’s Journeys,” Texas A&M University

4.  Jason Dupuy, “’The Piano Player at the Picture Show’: Art and the Culture Industry in Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples,” Louisiana State University

 

Session 7-B FRIDAY 3:30-4:45  [Sidney Bechet]

How Kitschsy Can You Get? Southern Film Noir

 

Chair: Robert Bell, Loyola University New Orleans

 

1.  Melissa Jane Hardie, “The Staircase: Gothic Kitsch and Documentary Style in Hard Times,” University of Sydney

2.  Kristopher Mecholsky, “’He holds his guitar like a tommy gun’: Noir, Rocksploitation, and the South in Michael Curtiz’s King Creole,” Louisiana State University

3.  Allen H. Redmon, “’Damn! We’re in a tight spot’: The Coen Brothers’ Response to the Plight of the Postmodern Filmmaker,” Texas A&M University, Central Texas

 

Session 7-C FRIDAY 3:30-4:45  [Mahalia Jackson]

Consumption and Temptation: The South’s Struggle with Modernity

 

Chair: Sarah W. Walden, University of Mississippi

 

1.  Katharine A. Burnett, “Tracing Blood from George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes to Alan Ball’s True Blood,” University of Tennessee, Knoxville  

2.  Tara L. Mclellan, “’Count Your Many Blessings’: Selling the Faith and the South’s Struggle with Modernity,” University of Mississippi

3.  Sarah W. Walden, “Reading Regional Economies and Identities: The Role of the Recipe in Civil War Literature and Culture,” University of Mississippi

 

Session 7-D FRIDAY 3:30-4:45  [Buddy Bolden]

Selling Civil Rights

 

Chair: Kathy Amende, Alabama State University

 

1.  Joan Wylie Hall, “Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Louisiana: Race, Sex, and Style at the Maple Hill Restaurant,” University of Mississippi 

2.  Dorothy Stringer, “The New ‘New South,’ the Global, and Traumatic Time in Richard Wright’s The Long Dream,” Temple University  

3.  Ryan Crider, “’That’s the whole point about magic’: The Narrative Function of Magical Realism in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle,” University of Louisiana at Lafayette 

 

Session 7-E FRIDAY 3:30-4:45  [Storyville 3]

Transatlantic Takes: Southern Culture from International Perspectives

 

Chair: Michelle Kohler, Tulane University

 

1.  Owen Robinson, “A New Union of Our Choice: New Orleans and the South in W. Adophe Roberts’ Brave Mardi Gras,” University of Essex 

2.  Catherine Seltzer, “Deadbeats and Dead Mules, Redux: Paradoxes of Prosperity in the Work of Lydia Peelle and Roddy Doyle,” Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

3.  Julia Sattler, “From Onkel Toms Hutte to The Spirit of Georgia: The American South in German Popular Culture,” Technische Universität Dortmund 

4.  Mary Kemp Davis, “From the ‘garden of chattel’ to the Garden of the Gnomes: South African Zakes Mda’s Take on Southern History in Cion (2007),”  Florida A and M University

 

Reception and Plenary Address

 

5:00-5:30 PM Buses to Tulane/Loyola

5:30-6:45 PM Reception (Cudd Hall,Tulane University)

 

7:00-8:30 PM

Plenary address:  "The Carceral Landscape: Slaves, Fields, Forests, Swamps, Horses, and Dogs"

Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

Introduction, Sylvia Frey, Tulane University

(Nunemaker Auditorium, Loyola University)

 

8:30-9:00 PM Buses return to Pere Marquette Hotel

 

 

SATURDAY APRIL 10, 2010

 

SESSION 8 Saturday 8:00-9:15 

 

Session 8-A SATURDAY 8:00-9:15 [Jelly Roll Morton]

Coyotes, Tricksters, and Rednecks: Going beyond Southern Stereotypes

 

Chair: Kevin Murphy, Tulane University

 

1.  Shirley A. (Holly) Stave, “Coyote Sisters and Their Young: The Family in Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer,” Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University of Louisiana

2.  Gretchen Martin, “The Lucrative Business of Stereotype Sabotage: Twain Tricksters Close in on the ‘Beast,’” University of Virginia’s College at Wise

3.  Lorie Watkins Fulton, “You Might be a Redneck if...: Stereotypes of Class in Bastard Out of Carolina,” William Carey University

 

Session 8-B SATURDAY 8:00-9:15  [Sidney Bechet] 

Southern Archives: New Resources

 

Chair: Alan Taylor, Boston University

 

1.  Thomas Douglass, “Stuart Wright Southern Literature Collection,” East Carolina University

2.  Mark Cave, “Reconstructing Tennessee Williams,” The Historic New Orleans Collection

 

Session 8-C SATURDAY 8:00-9:15  [Mahalia Jackson]   

The Cultural Capital of Southern Foodways

 

Chair: Kelila Jaffe, New York University

 

1.  Kelila Jaffe, “Big City Barbeque: The Adoption and Adaptation of Barbecue in New York City,” New York University

2.  Jamie Png, “The Writing and Selling of Southern Cookbooks,” New York University

3.  Scott Alves Barton, “Class Jumping: A Profile of Four African American Men,” New York University

4.  Christy Spackman, “A History of Culinary Dopplegangers: Crab Lanterns and Fried Pie,” New York University

 

Session 8-D SATURDAY 8:00-9:15  [Buddy Bolden]

Hard Times Squared: Literary Appalachia

 

Chair: Susanne Dietzel, Ohio University

 

1.  Ted Olson, “From Literary Outsider to Honorary Appalachian: The South as Second Home Site and as Sanctuary in Sherwood Anderson’s Life and Work,”  East Tennessee State University

2.  Katherine Edwards, “Reclaiming the Normal: Language and Otherness in Chris Offutt’s Kentucky Straight,” University of Edinburgh  

3.  Sharon E. Colley, “Creating Cultural Capital: Frank X Walker’s Affrilachia,” Macon State University

4.  Randall Shawn Wilhelm, “Hard Times in the Mountain World of Ron Rash,” University of Tennessee

 

Session 8-E SATURDAY 8:00-9:15  [Storyville 3]

Yankees, Tourists, and Hollywood: Southern Cities as Cultural Capitals

 

Chair: Nancy Dixon, University of New Orleans

 

1.  Mary Ann Wilson, “Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and the Politics of Literary Tourism,” University of Louisiana at Lafayette 

2.  Laura Caton-David, “Almost Hollywood: The Sad Tale of Jacksonville, Florida’s Rise and Fall as ‘The Winter Film Capital of the World,’” University of North Florida

3.  Kirby Pringle, “The Last Confederate Picture Show: Silent Film in Columbia, Tennessee, 1905-1923,” Loyola University, Chicago

4.  H. Collin Messer, “Come Hell or High Water: The Beautiful Nightmare of Pat Conroy’s Charleston in South of Broad,” Grove City College

 

SESSION 9  Saturday 9:30-10:45 

 

Session 9-A SATURDAY 9:30-10:45  [Jelly Roll Morton]

Re-navigating the Mississippi River

 

Chair: Ryan Crider, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

 

1.  Christopher Bundrick, “Getting Back to Routes: National Identity and the River in Huck Finn,” University of South Carolina, Lancaster

2.  Deighton Zerby, “The Father of Waters: Pastoral Ideology and the Materiality of Experience in Nineteenth Century Imaginings of the Mississippi River,” Louisiana State University

3.  Oliver A. Houck, “Down on the Batture,” Tulane University

 

Session 9-B SATURDAY 9:30-10:45 [Sidney Bechet]

Migrating, Immigrating, Emigrating: Globalizing Southern Culture

 

Chair: Andrew Banecker, Louisiana State University

 

1.  Sophie Croisy, “Barbara Kingsolver’s Envisioning of Southerners’ Capacity for Cultural Regeneration in The Poisonwood Bible,” Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

2.  Amy Schmidt, “’Gone Southern Again’: Zelda Fitzgerald’s and Richard Wright’s Critical Exposures of Global Jim Crow,” University of Arkansas

3.  Martyn Bone, “Neo-Slavery, Immigrant Labor, and Casino Capitalism in Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox,” University of Copenhagen

 

Session 9-C SATURDAY 9:30-10:45  [Mahalia Jackson]

Sacraments of Blood: African, Native, and Ecological Repudiation and Redemption

 

Chair: Melanie R. Benson, Dartmouth College

 

1.  Keith Cartwright, “’White Women Have Never Known What to Do with Their Blood’: On Looking up Women’s Dresses, Caddy Compson’s Drawers and the Gulf-South’s Naked Truth,”  University of North Florida

2.  Melanie R. Benson, “Blood Vengeance and Killing Greed: Replenishing the Native South,” Dartmouth College

3.  George B. Handley, “Ecology, Metaphysics, and Redemption in McCarthy’s The Crossing,” Brigham Young University

 

Session 9-D SATURDAY 9:30-10:45  [Buddy Bolden]

Picturing the South in the Work of Robert Penn Warren

 

Chair: Terrence Tucker, University of Arkansas

 

1.  Pat Bradley, “Robert Penn Warren, the Weight of Agrarianism, and the Popular Audience: Choosing Sides during the Culture Wars of the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s,” Middle Tennessee State University

2.  Joseph Millichap, “Robert Penn Warren and Depression Era Photography,” Western Kentucky University

3.  Lynn Cowles, “Jack Burden, Green Imagery, and Southern Progress in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men,” University of Texas, Austin

 

Session 9-E SATURDAY 9:30-10:45  [Storyville 3]

Roundtable: Judith L. Sensibar’s ‘Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art’ (2009)

 

Chair: Minrose Gwin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

 

1.   Thadious Davis, University of Pennsylvania 

2.   Minrose Gwin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

3.   M. Thomas Inge, Randolph-Macon College

4.   Deborah McDowell, University of Virginia

 

Respondent: Judith L. Sensibar, Arizona State University

 

SESSION 10  Saturday 11:00-12:15 

 

Session 10-A SATURDAY 11:00-12:15  [Jelly Roll Morton] 

The Sounds of Southern Music: From Slave Songs to Hip-Hop

 

Chair: Nick Spitzer, Tulane University

 

1.  William Sakamoto White, “’And If You Wonder How We Doin’, Short Version’s We Gettin’ There’: Post-Katrina New Orleans Music as Reflections on Post-Katrina New Orleans Culture,” Texas A&M University, Central Texas

2.  Hettie V. Williams, “Saggin,’ Braggin,’ and Survivin’: Survival Capital in the ‘Dirty South’ or Southern Hip Hop Culture,” Monmouth University

3.  Ruth Salvaggio, “The Poetic Work of Slave Songs—Charleston and New Orleans,” University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

 

Session 10-B SATURDAY 11:00-12:15  [Sidney Bechet]

Crossing Color Lines

 

Chair: Judith Kemerait Livingston, Tulane University

 

1.  Monica Pearl, “Black in the South; White in the North,” University of Manchester

2.  Angela Winand, “Can You Be Creole in Second Life?: New Orleans as Virtual Reality,” University of Illinois, Springfield

3.  Suzanne W. Jones, “Growing Up White, Embracing Black, Becoming Creole: Bliss Broyard’s Journey to New Orleans,” University of Richmond

 

Session 10-C SATURDAY 11:00-12:15  [Mahalia Jackson]

Cultural Functions of Hollywood’s Down-and-Out South in Contemporary Film

 

Chair: Andrew Leiter, Lycoming College

 

1.  Scott Combs, “The Screen Kallikak: White Trash for White Guilt in Post-Vietnam American Films,” St John’s University

2.  Landon Palmer, “Gender, Regional Identity, and the Civil War: Politics of the North and South in Sweet Home Alabama and Junebug,” Independent Scholar

3.  Amy Corbin, “Multiculturalism and Melodrama: Southern White Heroines of the 1980s and 1990s,” Muhlenberg College

4.  Andrew Leiter, “’That Old-Timey Music’: Nostalgia and the Southern Tradition in O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Lycoming College

 

Session 10-D SATURDAY 11:00-12:15  [Buddy Bolden]

Southern Modes of the Carnivalesque

 

Chair: Dawn Trouard, University of Central Florida

  

1.  Bill Phillips, “Coping Mechanisms for a New Age: Humor and Despair in Percy’s The Moviegoer,” University of Tennessee, Knoxville

2.  Bert Emerson, “Carnivalizing the Durnd Fool: Sut Lovingood’s Democratic Socialities,” Claremont Graduate University

3.  Jerrilyn McGregory, “From ‘Back of Town’: Boxing Day in the African Diaspora,” Florida State University

4.  Natalie Smith Mahaffey, “The Grotesque Nature of Big Fish,” Clemson University

 

Session 10-E SATURDAY 11:00-12:15  [Storyville 3]

Roundtable: “How Can We Renew Studies of the Nineteenth-Century South?”

 

1.  Michael P. Bibler, University of Manchester

2.  Sherita L. Johnson, University of Southern Mississippi

3.  Eric Gary Anderson, George Mason University

4.  Coleman Hutchison, University of Texas, Austin

 

12:30-1:45      LUNCH BREAK

 

 

12:45-1:30    Roundtable: Foodways and Southern Literature 

[Frederick Douglass Opie, Tara Powell, David Davis, and Jessica Harris]

Location: Southern Food & Beverage Museum (in the Riverwalk Marketplace, Julia Street & the River; lunch available in Food Court)

 

 

12:30-1:30 SSSL Bibliography Committee Meeting [Sidney Bechet]

Chair: Lorie Fulton, William Carey University

 

SESSION 11  Saturday 2:00-3:15 

 

Session 11-A SATURDAY 2:00-3:15  [Jelly Roll Morton]

Strategic Forgetting: How the South Was (Almost) Lost

 

Chair: Joan Wylie Hall, University of Mississippi

 

1.  Katie Rawson, “’Violence Caused by the Bounty’: Food Abundance, Hardship, and Memory in the U.S. South,” Emory University

2.  Monica Miller, “When the Ghosts Have Gone: The Post-Mythic South in Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend,” University of Tennessee, Knoxville

3.  Matthew Sutton, “The Old Waif’s Tale: Louis Armstrong and the Orphan Narrative,” College of William and Mary

 

Session 11-B SATURDAY 2:00-3:15  [Sidney Bechet]

Controlling the Discussion: Southerners Challenging Their Identity Inside and Outside the Region

 

Chair: Jay Szczepanski II, Florida State University

 

1.  Darien Andreu, “The Longing for Florida in Flannery O’Conner’s Fiction,” Flagler College

2.  Tatia Jacobson Jordan, “African American Contemporary Fiction: Recurring Lore from the American South, Africa, and the Caribbean,” Florida State University

3.  Jay Szczepanski II, “Outside Themselves: Portrayals of Southerners in American Television Sitcom, 1962-1972,” Florida State University

4.  Peggy Wright Cleveland, “Seraph on the Suwanee and the American Dream: The Need for Hard Times in the American South,” Florida State University

 

Session 11-C SATURDAY 2:00-3:15  [Mahalia Jackson]

New Fiction Writers: Readings

 

Chair: Nancy Rowe, Loyola University New Orleans

 

1.  Minrose Gwin, The Queen of Palmyra, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

2.  Barbara Johnson, More of This World or Maybe Another, University of New Orleans

 

Session 11-D SATURDAY 2:00-3:15  [Buddy Bolden]

Racial and Cultural “Otherness” in the Work of Kate Chopin

 

Chair: Christina G. Bucher, Berry College

 

1.  Dagmar Pegues, “Limits of Representation of Racial ‘Otherness’: Grotesque Portrayals of the Mammy Stereotype in Kate Chopin’s Fiction,” Metropolitní Univerzita, Praha

2.  Correna Catlett Merricks, “’With an Inward Agony...She Witnessed the Scene of Torture’: Childbirth and Class in The Awakening,” University of Mississippi

3.  Thomas Bonner, Jr., “Kate Chopin’s Louisiana Writing as Travel Literature,” Xavier University of Louisiana

 

Session 11-E SATURDAY 2:00-3:15 [Storyville 3]

Reconstructing Southern Studies

 

Chair: Susan Donaldson, College of William and Mary

 

1.  Scott Romine, “Glorified by Disaster, or How the White South Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Reconstruction,” University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

2.  Joseph Letter, “Inventing the South in the Early National Historical Imagination,” Tulane University

3.  John T. Matthews, “An End to Southern Studies?” Boston University

 

SESSION 12  Saturday 3:30-4:45 

 

Session 12-A SATURDAY 3:30-4:45  [Jelly Roll Morton]   

Performing Southern Desires

 

Chair: Judith Sensibar, Arizona State University

 

1.  Gina Caison, “The Little Lie of Little Tree: What Asa Carter Says about the Nation’s Desire for the South,” University of California, Davis

2.  Martine Kei Green, “Intention vs. Impact of the Theatrical Presentation of Gullah Culture in Porgy, Porgy & Bess, and Yellowman,” Kenyon College

3.  Laura Sloan Patterson, “’But the one I most wanted to be was Tragedy’: The Cultural Capital of Self-Denial in Lee Smith’s On Agate Hill,” Seton Hall University

4.  Diana Shahinyan, “Legal Rhetoric to Combat Hard Times: The Case of Faulkner’s Knight’s Gambit,” University of Sydney

 

Session 12-B SATURDAY 3:30-4:45  [Sidney Bechet]

The South Online: Research and Teaching

 

Chair: Lorie Fulton, William Carey University

 

1.  Allen Tullos, “Writing for the Internet: Southern Spaces and Southern Literature,” Emory University

2.  John Padgett, “Faulkner 2.0,” Brevard College

3.  Katherine Henninger, “Axes of Affiliation: The Southern Women Authors Project,” Louisiana State University

 

Session 12-C SATURDAY 3:30-4:45  [Mahalia Jackson]  

Films for Hard Times: The 1930s and Beyond

 

Chair: Robert Jackson, University of Tulsa

 

1.  Michael Kreyling, “Do You Want to Be a Millionaire? Hard Times and Gone With the Wind,” Vanderbilt University

2.  Robert Jackson, “New Deal Disaster Response: Pare, Lorentz and the Elements of Documentary,” University of Tulsa

3.  Sarah Gleeson-White, “Hard Times in Hollywood: William Faulkner and the Screenplay,” University of Sydney

 

Session 12-D SATURDAY 3:30-4:45 [Buddy Bolden]  

The Native South: Histories of Hard Times and Survivance

 

Chair: Kirstin L. Squint, Southern University, Baton Rouge

 

1.  Eric Gary Anderson, “The Mysterious Case of the Fork in the River, or How to Write the History of the Not-so New Native Southern World,” George Mason University

2.  Kirstin L. Squint, “Colonial Impact on Native Trade Economies in the Novels of LeAnne Howe,” Southern University, Baton Rouge

3.  Annette Trefzer, “Violent Winds: Sherman Alexie’s and Eudora Welty’s Hurricanes,”  University of Mississippi

 

Session 12-E SATURDAY 3:30-4:45 [Storyville 3]

American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary

 

Chair: Kathryn McKee, University of Mississippi

 

1.  Riché Richardson, “’It Jus’ Ain’t Fittin’: Mammy’s Rules and Mules,” Cornell University

2.  Leigh Anne Duck, “Bodies and Expectations: Chain Gang Discipline,” University of Memphis

3.  Sharon Monteith, “Exploiting Civil Rights Struggles: Pulp Movies and the South in the 1960s,”  University of Nottingham

4.  Briallen Hopper, “The City that Déjà vu Forgot: Memory, Mapping, and the Americanization of New Orleans,” Princeton University

 

 

 

5:00-7:00

Featuring New Orleans Capital Culture: Poetry and Performance [Storyville 1 & 2]

 

Kalamu ya Salaam, Poet, playwright, editor, music producer, activist

“WHERE WE AT!—New Orleans Reflections & Projections” 

 

Cherice Harrison-Nelson, Musician and performance artist

“If You Don’t Like What the Big Queen Say. . . “

 

Introduction, Rebecca Mark, Tulane University; Barbara C. Ewell, Loyola University

 

 

 

 

SUNDAY APRIL 11, 2010

 

SESSION 13   Sunday 8:30-9:45 

 

Session 13-A SUNDAY 8:30-9:45  [Jelly Roll Morton]

Louisiana Insiders and Outsiders

 

Chair: Ronald Dorris, Xavier University of Louisiana

 

1.  Margaret D. Bauer, “Tim Gautreaux’s Next Step in the Dance: ‘taking pride in Cajun culture,’” East Carolina University

2.  Peter Schmidt, “George Washington Cable’s 1918 Novel About New Orleans, Lovers of Louisiana (To-Day),” Swarthmore College

3.  James Weldon Long, “How a Yankee Views New Orleans: U.S. Hemispheric Nation-Building in J. H. Ingraham’s Early Works,” Louisiana State University

4.  Sarah Klotz, “Contagious Bodies and Problems of Race in The Mysteries of New Orleans,” University of California-Davis

 

Session 13-B SUNDAY  8:30-9:45  [Sidney Bechet] 

Visualizing the South

 

Chair: Evelyn Scharf Hunter, Vanderbilt University

 

1.  Margaret O. Killinger, “The Garden Artists: Suburban Art for Recessionary Times,” University of Maine

2.  Rhonda Jenkins Armstrong, “Signs and Spectacles in Bobby Ann Mason’s Feather Crowns,” Augusta State University

3.  Donika Ross, “Framing the Subject in Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia,” Vanderbilt University

 

Session 13-C SUNDAY  8:30-9:45  [Mahalia Jackson]   

Commodifying Poverty in 20^th Century Southern Folk Music

 

Chair: Kevin Rabalais, Loyola University New Orleans

 

1.  Scott L. Matthews, “The Power of Poverty and Place in the Popularization of East Kentucky Musician, Roscoe Holcomb,” Georgia State University

2.  Lauren Tilton, “Appalshop’s Appalachia: Poverty and Performance in Appalshop’s Records and Films,”  National World War II Museum, New Orleans

3.  Steven Garabedian, “National Uplift in the Low-Down South: The Search for Black Vernacular Music by Lawrence Gellert and Sam Charters,” Marist College

4.  Jesse Graves, “Waltzing through the Mysterium: Music as Meaning in the Poetry of David Bottoms,” East Tennessee State University

 

Session 13-D SUNDAY  8:30-9:45  [Buddy Bolden]

Primitivism and the U.S. South

 

Chair: Daniel Cross Turner, Siena College

  

1.  Melanie R. Benson, “Savage Economies: Cashing in and Selling out in Cherokee, North Carolina,” Dartmouth College

2.  Daniel Cross Turner, “Endless Echoes: Aural Resonances and Primitive Existentialism in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” Siena College

3.  Anthony Wilson, “Swamp vs. Schoolhouse: Nature, Primitivism, and Education in Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece,” Lagrange College

 

Session 13-E SUNDAY  8:30-9:45 [Storyville 3]    

On Location in New Orleans

 

Chair: Valerie Loichot, Emory University

 

1.  Ruth Caillouet, “Southerners Have Culture Too: Sookie Stackhouse, Lost in Translation or How Not to Eat Crawfish,” Clayton State University

2.  Carolyn G. Kolb, “Recherche des ‘Bon-Temps’ Perdue: Frances Parkinson Keyes and Crescent Carnival,” Tulane University

3.  W. Reginald Rampone, Jr., “Class and Sexuality as Ideological Lens for Social Commentary in Greg Herren’s Murder in the Rue Chartres in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” South Carolina State University

4.  Maria Hebert-Leiter, “From Blue Ribbon Balls to the Blue Book: Sex and Gender in the City that Care Forgot,” Pennsylvania College of Technology

 

SESSION 14  Sunday 10:00-11:15

 

Session 14-A SUNDAY 10:00-11:15  [Jelly Roll Morton]   

Women on the Margins: Re-imagining Community as Cultural Capital 

 

Chair: Erica Abrams Locklear, University of North Carolina, Asheville

 

1.  Erica Abrams Locklear, “Exploring the Forsaken and the Unspoken: Racial Identity in Charles Chesnutt’s Mandy Oxendine,” University of North Carolina, Asheville

2.  Gwen Ashburn, “What Cultural Capital?: Marginalized Southern Mothers Who Live Hard and Then They Die,” University of North Carolina, Asheville

3.  Sarah Judson, “’I was a Nasty Branch Child’: Southern Women’s Memories of Community from the Urban Renewal Era,” University of North Carolina, Asheville

 

Session 14-B SUNDAY 10:00-11:15  [Sidney Bechet]

Making Fun: The South as Pop Culture

 

Chair: Cherry Levin, Louisiana State University

 

1.  Brannon Costello, “Geeking Out in the U.S. South: Reconsidering Popular and Southern Cultures in Contemporary Fiction,” Louisiana State University

2.  Jenise Hudson, “The Comedic Punch Line: Unpacking Scenes of Domestic Violence-as-humor in Tyler Perry Films,” Florida State University

3.  Martha Pitts, “Theorizing Black Women’s Labor: Disney’s Princess and the Frog,” Louisiana State University

 

Session 14-C SUNDAY 10:00-11:15  [Mahalia Jackson] 

Southern Exploitations: Violence and Film

 

Chair: Jarret Lofstead, Loyola University New Orleans

 

1.  James H. Watkins, “Written on the Lam: Sensationalism, Social Criticism, and Testimonial Power in I am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang,” Berry College

2.  M. Thomas Inge, “Black Snake Moan as Postsouthern Fable,” Randolph-Macon College

3.  Julie Tyler, “Deliverance from Novel to Film: Narrative and Dialogic Violence and the South’s Adaptive Survival,” University of Tennessee, Knoxville

 

Session 14-D SUNDAY 10:00-11:15 [Buddy Bolden] 

George Washington Cable and Lafcadio Hearn: Two Friends’ Competing Visions of the Circumcaribbean

 

Chair: William Boelhower, Louisiana State University

 

1.  Veronica Makowsky, “Cable’s New Orleans,”  Connecticut University

2.  John Lowe, “Hearn and the Tropical Sublime,” Louisiana State University

3.  Valerie Loichot, “Lafcadio Hearn’s Creolization Theory from New Orleans to Martinique,” Emory University