Bøker utgitt av University Press of Mississippi

Analyses ways in which popular and visual culture used humour -in a variety of forms - to confront the attacks of September 11, 2001, and, more specifically, the aftermath. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from four countries to discuss the impact of humour and irony on both media discourse and tangible political reality.

Jack Butler's Jujitsu for Christ--originally published in 1986--follows the adventures of Roger Wing, a white born-again Christian and karate instructor who opens a martial arts studio in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, during the tensest years of the Civil Rights era. Ambivalent about his religion and his region, he befriends the Gandys, an African-American family--parents A. L. and Snower Mae, teenaged son T. J., daughter Eleanor Roosevelt, and youngest son Marcus--who has moved to Jackson from the Delta in hopes of greater opportunity for their children.As the political heat rises, Roger and the Gandys find their lives intersecting in unexpected ways. Their often-hilarious interactions are told against the backdrop of Mississippi's racial trauma--Governor Ross Barnett's "e;I Love Mississippi"e; speech at the 1962 Ole Miss-Kentucky football game in Jackson; the riots at the University of Mississippi over James Meredith's admission; the fieldwork of Medgar Evers, the NAACP, and various activist organizations; and the lingering aura of Emmett Till's lynching.Drawing not only on William Faulkner's gothic-modernist Yoknapatawpha County but also on Edgar Rice Burroughs's high-adventure Martian pulps, Jujitsu for Christ powerfully illuminates vexed questions of racial identity and American history, revealing complexities and subtleties too often overlooked. It is a remarkable novel about the civil rights era, and how our memories of that era continue to shape our political landscape and to resonate in contemporary conversations about southern identity. But, mostly, it's very funny, in a mode that's experimental, playful, sexy, and disturbing all at once.Butler offers a new foreword to the novel. Brannon Costello, a scholar of contemporary southern literature and fan of Butler's work, writes an afterword that situates the novel in its historical context and in the southern literary canon.

Paul Auster (b. 1947) is one of the most critically acclaimed and intensely studied authors in America today. His varied career as a novelist, poet, translator, and filmmaker has attracted scholarly scrutiny from a variety of critical perspectives. This volume - the first of its kind on Auster - provides penetrating self-analysis and a range of biographical information and critical commentary.

Beauty pageants are wildly popular in the US Virgin Islands, capturing the attention of the local people from toddlers to seniors. Local beauty contests provide women opportunities to demonstrate talent, style, the values of black womanhood, and the territory's social mores. This title offers a comprehensive look at the centuries-old tradition of these expressions in the Virgin Islands.

A history of the alliance between black farmers, sharecroppers, and the People's Party

Essays that reveal the public slide into disrepute of oncecherished male sports iconsEssays by Lisa Doris Alexander, Gregory J. Kaliss, Jeffrey Lane, Thabiti Lewis, Robert F. Lewis II, Shelley Lucas, Roberta J. Newman, C. Oren Renick and Joel Nathan Rosen, and Sherrie L. WilsonFame to Infamy: Race, Sport, and the Fall from Grace follows the paths of sports figures who were embraced by the general populace but who, through a variety of circumstances, real or imagined, found themselves falling out of favor. The contributors focus on the roles played by athletes, the media, and fans in describing how once-esteemed popular figures find themselves scorned by the same public that at one time viewed them as heroic, laudable, or otherwise respectable.The book examines a wide range of sports and eras, and includes essays on Barry Bonds, Kirby Puckett, Mike Tyson, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, Branch Rickey, Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, and Jim Brown, as well as an afterword by noted scholar Jack Lule and an introduction by the editors. Fame to Infamy is an interdisciplinary volume encompassing numerous approaches in tracing the evolution of each subject's reputation and shifting public image.David C. Ogden, Pacific Junction, Iowa, is associate professor of communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Joel Nathan Rosen, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is assistant professor of sociology at Moravian College. He is the author of The Erosion of the American Sporting Ethos: Shifting Attitudes toward Competition.

A probing of the many ways Faulkner interacted with the world's economiesWith contributions from Melanie R. Benson, Manuel Broncano, Keith Cartwright, Leigh Anne Duck, George B. Handley, Jeff Karem, Mario Materassi, John T. Matthews, Tierno Monénembo, Elizabeth Steeby, and Takako TanakaToday, debates about globalization raise both hopes and fears. But what about during William Faulkner's time? Was he aware of worldwide cultural, historical, and economic developments? Just how interested was Faulkner in the global scheme of things?The contributors to Global Faulkner suggest that a global context is helpful for recognizing the broader international meanings of Faulkner's celebrated regional landscape. Several scholars address how the flow of capital from the time of slavery through the Cold War period in his fiction links Faulkner's South with the larger world. Other authors explore the literary similarities that connect Faulkner's South to Latin America, Africa, Spain, Japan, and the Caribbean. In essays by scholars from around the world, Faulkner emerges in trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific contexts, in a pan-Caribbean world, and in the space of the Middle Passage and the African Atlantic. The Nobel laureate's fiction is linked to that of such writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Wole Soyinka, Miguel de Cervantes, and Kenji Nakagami.

Percival Everett (b. 1956) writes novels, short stories, poetry, and essays, and is one of the most prolific, acclaimed, yet under-examined African American writers working today. In this volume, scholars engage all of his creative production. These essays examine issues of identity, authenticity, and semiotics, in addition to postmodernism and African American and American literary traditions.

The statement, "The Civil Rights Movement changed America", though true, has become something of a cliche. Civil rights in the White Literary Imagination seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary possibilities of four iconic American writers: Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, and William Styron.

Reflects the fascinating diversity of regional and grassroots music in the United States. The book covers the diverse strains of American folk music - Latin, Native American, African, French-Canadian, British, and Cajun - and offers a chronology of the development of folk music in the United States.

In the wake of the Civil War, Constance Fenimore Woolson became one of the first northern observers to linger in the defeated states from Virginia to Florida. This volume's sixteen essays are intent on illuminating, through her example, the neglected world of Reconstruction's backwaters in literary developments that were politically charged and genuinely unpredictable.

Since its inception in the early 1830s, southern frontier humour (also known as the humor of the Old Southwest) has had enduring appeal. The onset of the new millennium precipitated an impressive rejuvenation of scholarly interest. Southern Frontier Humor represents the next step in this revival, providing a series of essays with fresh perspectives and contexts.

Using the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass, as well as the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama, Ronda C. Henry Anthony examines how women's bodies are used in African American literature to fund the production of black masculine ideality and power.

Presents the first full-length biography of Charles S. Johnson (1893-1956). Although he called himself a "sidelines activist", his advocacy for racial equality was never watered-down or half-hearted. His strategy was to work indirectly, sometimes behind the scenes, to influence public policy and to mobilize groups with special concerns, especially black sharecroppers.

Olden times take on a nostalgic glow in these "pen pictures" of early days in Northeast Mississippi. The chivalry, the tall tales, the Indian lore, the social customs, and the local characters portrayed here provide intimate descriptions of how people lived in Lee and Itawamba counties during antebellum times and during Reconstruction.

Offers the first comprehensive study of John Edgar Wideman and his novels, and shows him to be a writer emerging as a major figure in black and American literature. It shows him too as a writer whose progress has been to move away from such modernist masters as Eliot, Faulkner, and Joyce into the rich world of black culture, while retaining modernist techniques.

This is the first book entirely dedicated to one of the most influential music labels of the twentieth century. Written with label president and cofounder Don Pierce (1915-2005), this book traces the label's origins in 1953 through the 1968 Starday-King merger. Interviews with artists and their families, employees, and Pierce contribute to the stories behind famous hit songs.

It is well known that New Orleans has its dark underside as well as its glowing visible delights. The journey that Julia Garrett, an intelligent, attractive, but psychically driven girl, makes through the city's hidden labyrinth shapes the movement of this riveting novel.

Four-time winner at the Cannes Film Festival, Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan began his career while still at the University of Toronto. The interviewscollected here reveal Egoyan's unique themes, and his individual, independent approach to filmmaking. He discusses his development as a director, his interest in opera and museum installations, and the expectations he has for his audience.

As a key force in the "Africanizing" of American culture, the black middle class has been both a shaper and a mirror during the past three decades. This study of that era shows that the fruits of integration have been at once sweet and bitter. This history of a pivotal group in American society will cause reflection, discussion, and debate.

As a cultural critic, biographer, essayist, and novelist, Albert Murray has had a wide-ranging and profound influence on American art in the decades since the Second World War. Yet this is the first book devoted to Murray himself. It brings together twenty interviews with Murray conducted over the last twenty-four years, concluding with a previously unpublished interview with the editor.

In the pages of this putative autobiography the author poses as a slave for the purpose of bringing attention to the injustice of slavery. The actual author Mattie Griffith, passing as a black, wanted her book to horrify and shame the nation. Pseudo-slave narratives like Griffith's appeared over the course of the abolitionist movement, and this is the only one now in print.