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Even Mississippi textbooks rarely mention the part Mississippi men and women played in World War I. Mississippians in the Great War presents in their own words the story of Mississippians and their roles. This body of work divides into five sections, each associated with crucial dates of American action. Comments relating to various military actions are interspersed throughout to give the reader a context of the wide variety of experiences. Additionally, where possible, Anne L. Webster provides information on the soldier or sailor to show what became of him after his service.Webster examined newspapers from all corners of the state for "e;letters home,"e; most appearing in newspapers from Natchez, Greenville, and Pontotoc. The authors of the letters gathered here are from soldiers, aviators, sailors, and relief workers engaged in the service of their country. Letter writing skills varied from citizens of minimal literacy to those who would later become published authors and journalists.These letters reflect the experiences of green, young Mississippians as they endured training camp, voyaged across the Atlantic to France, and participated in horrific battles leaving some scarred for life. To round out the picture, Webster includes correspondence from nurses and YMCA workers who describe drills, uniforms, parades, and celebrations.

During the early years of the Cold War, racial segregation in the American South became an embarrassing liability to the international reputation of the United States. For America to present itself as a model of democracy in contrast to the Soviet Union's totalitarianism, Jim Crow needed to end. While the discourse of anticommunism added the leverage of national security to the moral claims of the civil rights movement, the proliferation of Red Scare rhetoric also imposed limits on the socioeconomic changes necessary for real equality.Describing the ways anticommunism impaired the struggle for civil rights, James Zeigler reconstructs how Red Scare rhetoric during the Cold War assisted the black freedom struggle's demands for equal rights but labeled "e;un-American"e; calls for reparations. To track the power of this volatile discourse, Zeigler investigates how radical black artists and intellectuals managed to answer anticommunism with critiques of Cold War culture. Stubbornly addressed to an American public schooled in Red Scare hyperbole, black radicalism insisted that antiracist politics require a leftist critique of capitalism.Zeigler examines publicity campaigns against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s alleged Communist Party loyalties and the import of the Cold War in his oratory. He documents a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored anthology of ex-Communist testimonials. He takes on the protest essays of Richard Wright and C. L. R. James, as well as Frank Marshall Davis's leftist journalism. The uncanny return of Red Scare invective in reaction to President Obama's election further substantiates anticommunism's lasting rhetorical power as Zeigler discusses conspiracy theories that claim Davis groomed President Obama to become a secret Communist. Long after playing a role in the demise of Jim Crow, the Cold War Red Scare still contributes to the persistence of racism in America.

A challenge to the primacy of the Windrush generation as the sole founders of Caribbean literatureContributors: Edward Baugh, Michael Bucknor, Raphael Dalleo, Alison Donnell, Nadia Ellis, Donette Francis, Glyne Griffith, Kate Houlden, Evelyn O'Callaghan, Lisa Outar, Atreyee Phukan, Kim Robinson-Walcott, Faith Smith, and Michelle StephensThis edited collection challenges a long sacrosanct paradigm. Since the establishment of Caribbean literary studies, scholars have exalted an elite cohort of émigré novelists based in postwar London, a group often referred to as "the Windrush writers" in tribute to the SS Empire Windrush, whose 1948 voyage from Jamaica inaugurated large-scale Caribbean migration to London. In critical accounts this group is typically reduced to the canonical troika of V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and Sam Selvon, effectively treating these three authors as the tradition's founding fathers. These "founders" have been properly celebrated for producing a complex, anticolonial, nationalist literature. However, their canonization has obscured the great diversity of postwar Caribbean writers, producing an enduring but narrow definition of West Indian literature.Beyond Windrush stands out as the first book to reexamine and redefine the writing of this crucial era. Its fourteen original essays make clear that in the 1950s there was already a wide spectrum of West Indian men and women--Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean, and white-creole--who were writing, publishing, and even painting. Many lived in the Caribbean and North America, rather than London. Moreover, these writers addressed subjects overlooked in the more conventionally conceived canon, including topics such as queer sexuality and the environment. This collection offers new readings of canonical authors (Lamming, Roger Mais, and Andrew Salkey); hitherto marginalized authors (Ismith Khan, Elma Napier, and John Hearne); and commonly ignored genres (memoir, short stories, and journalism).J. DILLON BROWN, St. Louis, Missouri, is associate professor of English and African and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel. LEAH READE ROSENBERG, Gainesville, Florida, is associate professor of English at the University of Florida. She is the author of Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature.

Derived from the nationalist writings of Jos Mart, the concept of Cubanidad (Cubanness) has always imagined a unified hybrid nation where racial difference is nonexistent and nationality trumps all other axes identities. Scholars have critiqued this celebration of racial mixture, highlighting a gap between the claim of racial harmony and the realities of inequality faced by Afro-Cubans since independence in 1898. In this book, Rebecca M. Bodenheimer argues that it is not only the recognition of racial difference that threatens to divide the nation, but that popular regional sentiment further contests the hegemonic national discourse. Given that the music is a prominent symbol of Cubanidad, musical practices play an important role in constructing regional, local, and national identities. This book suggests that regional identity exerts a significant influence on the aesthetic choices made by Cuban musicians. Through the examination of several genres, Bodenheimer explores the various ways that race and place are entangled in contemporary Cuban music. She argues that racialized notions which circulate about different cities affect both the formation of local identity and musical performance. Thus, the musical practices discussed in the book--including rumba, timba, eastern Cuban folklore, and son--are examples of the intersections between regional identity formation, racialized notions of place, and music-making.

Despite Puerto Rico being the hub of the United States' naval response to the German blockade of the Caribbean, there is very little published scholarship on the island's heavy involvement in the global conflict of World War II. Island at War brings together outstanding new research on Puerto Rico and makes it accessible in English.

Van Johnson's dazzling smile, shock of red hair, and suntanned freckled cheeks made him a movie-star icon. Among teenaged girls in the 1940s, he was popularized as the bobbysoxer's heartthrob. This solid, thoroughly researched biography traces the career and influence of a favourite star and narrates a fascinating, sometimes troubled life story.

Exploring the diverse functions of space in Faulkner's artistic vision, the eleven essays in Faulkner's Geographies delve deep into Yoknapatawpha but also reach beyond it, to uncover unsuspected connections and flows linking local, regional, national, hemispheric, and global geographies in Faulkner's writings.

Provides an indispensable and significant understanding of Eric Williams's contributions to the now independent nation of Trinidad and Tobago and his impact on the broader international understanding of the Caribbean. This book stands out because of its simultaneous investigation into Eric Williams as a scholar/intellectual, a political leader, and, most importantly, a key postcolonial figure.

Offers the first in-depth study of Guyanese musical life. It is also a richly detailed description of the social, economic, and political conditions that have encouraged and sometimes discouraged musical and cultural creativity in Guyana. The book contributes to the study of the interactions between the policies and practices by national governments and musical communities in the Caribbean.

Follows Brian De Palma's fortunes as he makes the difficult transition from underground filmmaker to celebrity auteur. In profiles and q&a interviews, he emerges as a fascinating figure of excess and ambivalence who is not afraid to share his opinions.

Brings together twenty-one interviews with an author known for chronicling gay culture. Ranging from a 1982 discussion of his early works to a new and unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews highlight White's predilections, his major achievements, and the pivotal moments of his long, varied career.

Brings together twenty-one interviews with an author known for chronicling gay culture. Ranging from a 1982 discussion of his early works to a new and unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews highlight White's predilections, his major achievements, and the pivotal moments of his long, varied career.

This collection of interviews traces Andre Dubus' career beginning in 1967 with the publication of his novel The Lieutenant, to his final interview given right before his death. In between are conversations that focus on his shift to essay writing during his long recovery period as well as those that celebrate his return to fiction with the publication of "The Colonel's Wife" in 1993.

Beyond Bombshells analyzes the cultural importance of strong women in a variety of current media forms. Action heroines are now more popular in movies, comic books, television, and literature than they have ever been. Their spectacular presence represents shifting ideas about female agency, power, and sexuality. Beyond Bombshells explores how action heroines reveal and reconfigure perceptions about how and why women are capable of physically dominating roles in modern fiction, indicating the various strategies used to contain and/or exploit female violence. Focusing on a range of successful and controversial recent heroines in the mass media, including Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games books and movies, Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novels and films, and Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies and comic books, Jeffrey A. Brown argues that the role of action heroine reveals evolving beliefs about femininity. While women in action roles are still heavily sexualized and objectified, they also challenge preconceived myths about normal or culturally appropriate gender behavior. The ascribed sexuality of modern heroines remains Brown's consistent theme, particularly how objectification intersects with issues of racial stereotyping, romantic fantasies, images of violent adolescent and preadolescent girls, and neoliberal feminist revolutionary parables. Individual chapters study the gendered dynamics of torture in action films, the role of women in partnerships with male colleagues, young women as well as revolutionary leaders in dystopic societies, adolescent sexuality and romance in action narratives, the historical import of nonwhite heroines, and how modern African American, Asian, and Latina heroines both challenge and are restricted by longstanding racial stereotypes.

Collects new essays on the work of the creator of the immensely popular Peanuts comic strip. Despite Schulz's celebrity, few scholarly books on his work and career have been published. This collection serves as a foundation for future study not only of Charles Schulz (1922-2000) but, more broadly, of the under-studied medium of newspaper comics.

Tells the story of Robert Kennedy's visit to the Mississippi Delta, while also examining the forces of history, economics, and politics that shaped the lives of the children he met in Mississippi in 1967 and the decades that followed. The book includes thirty-seven powerful photographs, a dozen published here for the first time.

Will D. Campbell writes about his life growing up poor in Amite County, Mississippi, during the 1930s alongside his older brother, Joe. Brother to a Dragonfly serves as a historical record. Though Will's love and dedication to his brother are the primary story, interwoven throughout the narrative is the story of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement.

Audre Lorde (1934-1992), the author of eleven books of poetry, described herself as a "Black feminist lesbian poet warrior mother," but she added that this phrase was inadequate in capturing her full identity. The interviews in this collection portray the many additional sides of the Harlem-born author and activist.

Critics in this volume reassess the prescient nature of Richard Wright's mind as well as his life and body of writings, especially those directly concerned with America and its racial dynamics. This edited collection offers new readings and understandings of the particular America that became Wright's focus at the beginning of his career and was still prominent in his mind at the end.

Tells a distinct story of Indians in the Caribbean - one concentrated not only on archival records and institutions, but also on the voices of the people and the ways in which they define themselves and the world around them. Through oral history and ethnography, Lomarsh Roopnarine explores previously marginalized Indians in the Caribbean and their distinct social dynamics and histories.

Sara Le Menestrel explores the role of music in constructing, asserting, erasing, and negotiating differences based on the notions of race, ethnicity, class, and region. She discusses established notions and brings to light social stereotypes and hierarchies at work in the evolving French Louisiana music field. She also draws attention to the interactions between oppositions such as black and white, urban and rural, differentiation and creolization, and local and global.Le Menestrel emphasizes the importance of desegregating the understanding of French Louisiana music and situating it beyond ethnic or racial identifications, amplifying instead the importance of regional identity. Musical genealogy and categories currently in use rely on a racial construct that frames African and European lineage as an essential difference. Yet as the author samples music in the field and discovers ways music is actually practiced, she reveals how the insistence on origins continually interacts with an emphasis on cultural mixing and creative agency. This book finds French Louisiana musicians navigating between multiple identifications, musical styles, and legacies while market forces, outsiders' interest, and geographical mobility also contribute to shape musicians' career strategies and artistic choices.The book also demonstrates the decisive role of non-natives' enthusiasm and mobility in the validation, evolution, and reconfiguration of French Louisiana music. Finally, the distinctiveness of South Louisiana from the rest of the country appears to be both nurtured and endured by locals, revealing how political domination and regionalism intertwine.

Michael Chabon (b. 1963) has become one of contemporary literature's most acclaimed novelists by pursuing his singular vision across all boundaries of genre and medium. Conversations with Michael Chabon collects eighteen revealing interviews with the renowned author. Spanning nearly twenty years, these interviews shed new light on the central concerns of Chabon's fiction.

French traditions in America do not live solely in Louisiana. Franco-American Identity, Community, and La Guianne travels to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and Prairie du Rocher, Illinois, to mark the Franco-American traditions still practiced in both these Midwestern towns. This Franco-American cultural identity has continued for over 250 years, surviving language loss, extreme sociopolitical pressures, and the American Midwest's demands for conformity. Ethnic identity presents itself in many forms, including festivals and traditional celebrations, which take on an even more profound and visible role when language loss occurs. On New Year's Eve, the guionneurs, revelers who participate in the celebration, disguise themselves in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century costume and travel throughout their town, singing and wishing New Year's greetings to other members of the community. This celebration, like such others as Cajun Mardi Gras in Louisiana, Mumming in Ireland and Newfoundland, as well as the Carnaval de Binche, belongs to a category of begging quest festivals that have endured since the Medieval Age. These festivals may have also adapted or evolved from pre-Christian pagan rituals. Anna Servaes produces a historical context for both the development of French American culture as well as La Guianne in order to understand contemporary identity. She analyzes the celebration, which affirms ethnic community, drawing upon theories by influential anthropologist Victor Turner. In addition, Servaes discusses cultural continuity and its relationship to language, revealing contemporary expressions of Franco-American identity.

Spanning twenty-five years, the conversations collected here reveal Steven Soderbergh to be as self-effacing and lighthearted in his later more established years as he was when just beginning to make movies. He comes across as a man undaunted by the glitz and power of Hollywood, remaining, above all, a truly independent filmmaker unafraid to get his hands dirty and pick up the camera himself.

Along with Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman, the Joker stands out as one of the most recognizable comics' characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on superheroes, very little has been done looking at supervillains. This edited collection attempts to fill this void. It is the first academic work to provide a comprehensive study of this villain, illustrating why the Joker appears so relevant to audiences today. Batman's foe has cropped up in thousands of comics, numerous animated series, and three major blockbuster feature films since 1966. Actually, the Joker first appeared in DC comics Batman 1 (1940) as the typical gangster, but the character evolved steadily into one of the most ominous in the history of sequential art. Batman and the Joker almost seemed to define each other as opposites, hero and nemesis in a kind of psychological duality. Over the years, the Joker's interpretation as a character in print and in motion pictures has changed in specific and often telling ways, which this collection probes. Scholars from a wide array of disciplines look at the Joker through the lens of feature films, video games, comics, politics, magic and mysticism, psychology, animation, television, performance studies, and philosophy. As the first volume that examines the Joker as complex cultural and cross-media phenomenon, this collection adds to our understanding of the role comic book and cinematic villains play in the world and the ways various media affect their interpretation. Indeed, we do get the monsters we need.

After the 2008 election and 2012 reelection of Barack Obama as US president and the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela as the first of several blacks to serve as South Africa's president, many within the two countries have declared race to be irrelevant. For contributors to this volume, the presumed demise of race may be premature.

Evangelicals and scholars of religious history have long recognized George Whitefield (1714-1770) as a founding father of American evangelicalism. But Jessica M. Parr argues he was much more than that. He was an enormously influential figure in Anglo-American religious culture, and his expansive missionary career can be understood in multiple ways. Whitefield began as an Anglican clergyman. Many in the Church of England perceived him as a radical. In the American South, Whitefield struggled to reconcile his disdain for the planter class with his belief that slavery was an economic necessity. Whitefield was drawn to an idealized Puritan past that was all but gone by the time of his first visit to New England in 1740.Parr draws from Whitefield's writing and sermons and from newspapers, pamphlets, and other sources to understand Whitefield's career and times. She offers new insights into revivalism, print culture, transatlantic cultural influences, and the relationship between religious thought and slavery. Whitefield became a religious icon shaped in the complexities of revivalism, the contest over religious toleration, and the conflicting role of Christianity for enslaved people. Proslavery Christians used Christianity as a form of social control for slaves, whereas evangelical Christianity's emphasis on "e;freedom in the eyes of God"e; suggested a path to political freedom. Parr reveals how Whitefield's death marked the start of a complex legacy that in many ways rendered him more powerful and influential after his death than during his long career.

For centuries, Spain and the South have stood out as the exceptional "e;other"e; within U.S. and European nationalisms. During Franco's regime and the Jim Crow era both violently asserted a haunting brand of national "e;selfhood."e; Both areas shared a loss of splendor and a fraught relation with modernization, and they retained a sense of defeat. Brittany Powell Kennedy explores this paradox not simply to compare two apparently similar cultures but to reveal how we construct difference around this self/other dichotomy. She charts a transatlantic link between two cultures whose performances of "e;otherness"e; as assertions of "e;selfhood"e; enact and subvert their claims to exceptionality. Perhaps the greatest example of this transatlantic link remains the War of 1898, when the South tried to extract itself from but was implicated in U.S. imperial expansion and nation-building. Simultaneously, the South participated in the end of Spain as an imperial power.Given the War of 1898 as a climactic moment, Kennedy explores the writings of those who come directly after this period and who attempted to "e;regenerate"e; what was perceived as "e;traditional"e; in an agrarian past. That desire recurs over the century in novels from writers as diverse as William Faulkner, Camilo Jose Cela, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Ralph Ellison. As these writers wrestle with ideas of Spain and the South, they also engage questions of how national identity is affirmed and contested. Kennedy compares these cultures across the twentieth century to show the ways in which they express national authenticity. Thus she explores not only Francoism and Jim Crow, but varied attempts to define nationhood via exceptionalism, suggesting a model of performativity that relates to other "e;exceptional"e; geographies.