Episode Seven: The South and the City

Gina Caison August 25, 2017

This week, we chatted with Jennie Lightweis-Goff about New Orleans, southern exceptionalism, urban plantations, and the lasting effects of Hurricane Katrina . We met with Jennie at her home in New Orleans to discuss why it’s important to imagine cities in the U.S. South, how urban areas of the U.S. South are as valid in their southern identity as rural areas, and what it means that New Orleans decided to take down its Confederate statues.

Benard de Marginy laid out the Marginy from land that had been his family's plantation just outside the old city limits of New Orleans. Today, we would consider this former plantation as squarely in the city.

Southern exceptionalism posits that the South is the exception to American exceptionalism while city exceptionalism imagines that cities are unlike their surrounding regions. New Orleans exceptionalism posits that the city is so different from the rest of the South (and country) that it can’t build stable connections to other places and people in the region. Jennie explains that frequently exceptionalism is a myth that we as people have to live by. It’s what makes one place feel like home more than any other. But it’s still a myth: “Every place is particular and no place is exceptional.”

Looking down the arpent line, which follows the lines that use to divide French plantations in New Orleans.

Jennie has lived in New Orleans on and off since 2003. After Hurricane Katrina hit, the housing landscape changed: the city introduced more housing vouchers and did away with public housing. While tourists flock to the Ninth Ward, where water hit houses they way trucks hit houses, Jennie notes the relationship between the city and the supposed wilderness make it difficult to see the devastation today.

The conversation comes back to the things that make New Orleans just like every other southern city dealing with poverty, sprawl, climate change, and gentrification. Jennie recounts how public systems such as education and housing have become more privatized since Katrina, and as those institutions fail, the prison industrial complex swells. Mentally ill, uneducated, and homeless people end up in jail as a solution to social problems.

Though this interview was conducted several weeks ago, we end up coming full circle and discussing Confederate monuments. This past May, Mayor Mitch Landrieu pulled down symbols of the Confederacy. For Jennie, the statues of Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Stonewall Jackson produced a “solid south” where there never was one. The mayor posits the monuments stand as a large footprint of a small portion of the city’s history, one that creates a story that never really belonged to New Orleans. No one knows yet what will happen to the empty pedestals. In the mean time, they hold space for those who say their history was derided in the removal.

The empty Jefferson Davis pedestal in New Orleans. Photo by Bart Everson via Wikimedia Commons.

Jennie Lightweis-Goff is an instructor of American and southern literatures at the University of Mississippi. Her book, Blood at the Root: Lynching as American Cultural Nucleus, is available through SUNY Press.

Episode Six: Golden

Gina Caison August 18, 2017

In this week’s episode, the About South team drove six hours to Ridgeland, Mississippi to attend Murder is Golden, a Golden Girls tribute and parody dinner theater put on by Mississippi Murder Mysteries and the Fringe Dinner Theatre. Gina, Adjoa, Kelly, and About South friend Shannon Finck talk about the power of community and community theater in a time where interaction is undervalued and, as we’ve seen recently, increasingly violent. By bringing people together over a show set in Florida, a state itself divided with exclusionary politics, the Fringe theater group inspires laughter, self-acceptance, and the opportunity for connection.

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Sitting with the cast as they ate their post-show dinner at Biaggi's, the About South team had the opportunity to ask each member a little bit about their character and how they related to The Golden Girls. A common theme was admiration for the characters who could proudly be themselves. Particularly, both the cast and Gina, Adjoa, Kelly, and Shannon found the depiction of the Golden Girls’ strong sexuality a radical move even by the standards of today. Older women displaying their sexuality is still taboo, although shows like Netflix’s Grace and Frankie are working towards normalizing older women as sexual beings with sexual agency. By owning their sexuality, the Golden Girls give the audience permission to accept themselves and, ultimately -- hopefully -- the people around them.

The cast and the About South team (who won the murder mystery game, in case you're wondering).

Although community theaters continue to close all over the nation and many more still are threatened by the lack of social and financial value placed in the arts, owner of Mississippi Murder Mysteries and Fringe Dinner Theatre Becky Martin understands the need for live theater. Being a member of an audience allows people to take themselves out of whatever is going on in their lives and experience something communal, delightful, and inherently radical.

So, what does this have to do with the South? Florida, when divided as either a part of the physical or cultural geography of the South, provides the setting for the Golden Girls to have these Florida-specific, yet southern-exclusive experiences. It is in this charged space that the characters, all transplants to the South save for Blanche Devereaux, exhibit their strong personalities. Participating as an audience member becomes then an act of politics-- it is political and it is personal.

Stereotypical representation of Florida.

We’d like to thank, again, the incredible cast members who sat down to talk with us: Becky Martin (Blanche), Jessica Wright (Rose), Tommy Kobeck (Dorothy), Sam Gregory (Sophia), Walt Herrington (Lawrence), and Dan Hawthorn (Lt. Theo Kovak), Also, big thanks to A-1; check out his album, After School Special.

From Instagram #goldengirls

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Episode Five: Cornbread, Cahaba Lilies, Criticism

Gina Caison August 11, 2017

When Jon Smith, a professor of southern studies at Simon Fraser University and one of the toughest critics in the field, told us that he would be visiting Atlanta in April, we invited him on the show to critique our first season. We discussed many of the things folks might identify as southern, including blue crayfish, cornbread, and Cahaba lilies. Our conversation highlights why talking about the south is important, and why it is sometimes necessary to dispense with manners in order to do it well.

Cahaba Lillies in bloom. Image from Carmichael Library via Wikimedia Commons.

We wanted to get right to the point and ask Jon what he thought of our first season. He responded with an overview about the strengths and weaknesses of the blue crayfish as a metaphor for the south. He argued that the south and southern identity consists of a belief that there is a south rather than any existing external traits of the region, and the blue crayfish may not adequately capture the element of desire in the way we construct the region. Ultimately, he argues, the blue crayfish wasn’t “invented” in the same way that the south was.

He also provided us with some excellent slogans for future About South merchandise including “I come from the land of blue crayfish,” “I’m proud to be a crayfish-person,” “Bitter Blue-Crayfisher,” and “Garden and Crayfish.”

Along with first-season guest Scott Romine, Jon is currently working on a project about southern food, so we next turned our attention to cornbread. Citing a passage from The Southerner’s Handbook: A Guide to Living the Good Life, Jon demonstrates how contemporary southern food culture becomes a carrier of regional identity, attempting to construct a white southern identity that isn’t about slavery. He notes that until recently, “southern food” didn’t exist: it was just food. The way some southern publications discuss food today may appear, at first, racially inclusive, and invested in building a better south; however, the rhetoric is still invested in the fantasy of southern exceptionalism, which causes far more problems than it solves. Jon argues that if we want to make things better, we need to proceed from a realistic assessment of where we are, and popular forums about the south tend to willfully ignore foundational truths about the region.

Our conversation then turns to the Appalachian Trail and Cahaba National Wildlife Refuge. Jon was back in the south to visit national, state, and local parks for a research project he’s currently undertaking. Although the Appalachian Trail is over 2,000 miles long, Jon notes that, interestingly, knowing that someone lives close to the Appalachian Trail provides more useful information about their home than knowing that someone lives in “the south.” Moving on to the Cahaba Lily, a rare lily that only grows in the shoals of a few rivers in Alabama, Jon points out that Alabama is the fifth-most biologically diverse state in the country, and it is much more logical to be proud of Alabama for its nature—and the collective political action required to protect it—than it is for us to be proud of the south or southern heritage, which is based on a fiction. “We all know what’s bad about the south,” Jon states, “and that’s why we want to talk about cornbread instead, but why not talk about the Cahaba lily? Not as southern, but as part of what is amazing about Alabama.”

We also briefly discuss the relationship between Jon’s scholarship and southern manners. He describes how his scholarship changed after Patricia Yaeger’s book, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990 (published in 2000). While Yaeger’s text went on to become one of the most cited southern studies book published in the last twenty years, it did not immediately receive the field's highest accolades. Yaeger advocated that southern manners are designed largely to hide injustice, and in order to fight injustice, one can’t be polite. Jon took her lesson to heart, making a conscious decision to be more direct in his scholarship. He describes the desire to affect change in southern studies and in the south as an “impossible job”: “If you’re not direct enough, you get ignored. If you’re too direct, people call you irrationally angry, and blow you off for that reason.”

Patricia Yeager's Dirt and Desire. — Patricia Yeager's *Dirt and Desire*.

Jon Smith is a professor in the English Department at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Along with Riché Richardson, he is the series editor of the New Southern Studies Series from the University of Georgia Press. He’s also the author of Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies. We would like to extend our thanks to Jon for this week’s episode. Read an excerpt from his book here.

Episode Four: The Art of Everyday Strangers

Gina Caison July 27, 2017

This week, we traveled to Gadsby’s Tavern Museum in Alexandria, Virginia to talk with Lauren Frances Adams and Stewart Watson, artists and colleagues at the Maryland Institute College of Arts, about their art installation Centennial of the Everyday, which is currently on display in the museum.

Soda fired stoneware, looping video, plexiglass, walnut; Stoneware made in collaboration with Jani Hileman and Mat Karas at the Maryland Institute College of Art Ceramics Department; Baltimore Videos produced in collaboration with Jonathan Monaghan.… — **Soda fired stoneware, looping video, plexiglass, walnut; Stoneware made in collaboration with Jani Hileman and Mat Karas at the Maryland Institute College of Art Ceramics Department; Baltimore** **Videos produced in collaboration with Jonathan Monaghan.**
**Photo courtesy of the artists.**

While Gadsby’s Tavern is well-known for its connection to the “founding fathers,” Lauren and Stewart’s installation highlights the contributions of women, enslaved peoples, and other unnamed citizens to the important events that occurred in this space. Their artwork complicates simple narratives about what America was and what it is, inviting visitors to consider spaces as archives and to remember the many "strangers" in the periphery of historical texts.

Gadsby's Tavern in Alexandria, Virginia. Photo by Gina Caison.

To create this three-part installation, the artists conducted extensive research and created works in a variety of media, including furniture, stoneware and textiles, which are inserted around other historical exhibits on display in the museum. To create "A Particular Provenance" Lauren and Stewart collaborated with individuals connected to the history of Gadsby’s Tavern Museum, either through genealogical or organizational history. The installation includes furniture donated by these individuals -- Stephen Hammond, Tracy Loughlin, Laurie Sisson, Char McCargo Bah, Joan Sereysky Scarsdale, DeAnne Bryant, and Lex Powers -- and modified by the artists to reflect the owner’s connection to either John Gadsby, the tavern, or the museum. Lauren and Stewart describe how their collaboration with others gave them permission to open up the usually tight narrative around the tavern and its history to investigate more of it’s complexities and difficulties.

Installation view of "A Particular Provenance" in Gadsby’s Tavern Museum Ballroom. Photo by Vince Lupo. — **Installation view of "A Particular Provenance" in Gadsby’s Tavern Museum Ballroom.**
**Photo by Vince Lupo.**

"Not on View," a textile installation on a historic canopy bed in the museum’s East Bedchamber reflecting on the history of the Female Stranger, a local legend about a gravely ill woman who arrived at the hotel under mysterious circumstances in 1816 and passed away shortly after her arrival. The canopy is made out of custom-printed textiles and features silhouettes of anonymous women found in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A nearby stone vessel houses a speaker which plays an audio recording of a woman crying. The vessel bears an inscription from Alexander Pope’s “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady”: “Grieve for an hour, perhaps, then mourn a year.” The artists see these pieces as a testament to all of the unnamed people who have traversed this historical space and, more broadly, to all of the “strangers” who are part of American history, but have been forgotten or overlooked.

"Not on View" is a textile installation on a historic canopy bed in the East Bedchamber. Photo by Vince Lupo. — **"Not on View" is a textile installation on a historic canopy bed in the East Bedchamber.**
**Photo by Vince Lupo.**

We would like to thank Stewart, Lauren, everyone at Gadsby’s Tavern Museum and at Area 405 for hosting us in Alexandria, Virginia and Baltimore, Maryland. We hope that you will visit Gadsby’s Tavern Museum where the installation will be on display until September 3, 2017.

From Instagram: #centennialoftheeveryday

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Episode Three: Gilded Souths & S-Towns

Gina Caison July 21, 2017

In this episode, we sit down with David Davis, a professor of English and Southern Studies at Mercer University, to discuss the telling of a southern reality in S-Town. With around 40 million downloads, Brian Reed’s hit podcast S-Town prevails in the American conscious and understanding of the south. We look at how Reed’s telling takes a real story of human complexity and frames it as quasi-fiction, buying into southern gothic tropes and obscuring the lives of his subjects with a thin layer of regional gold.

John B. McLemore's grave in Woodstock, Alabama. Photo by Kelly Vines.

All seven chapters of S-Town were released in March of 2017 to blockbuster success, two years after the suicide of the show’s main character. S-Town tells the story of John B. McLemore, a man living in a town that he likens to southern gothic landscapes like Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” Reed uses details about McLemore’s life such as his sexuality and masochistic behavior to create a character that is indeed reminiscent of archetypes from Flannery O’Connor and filled with his own tragic symbolism.

S-Town cover art by Valero Duval — *S-Town* cover art by Valero Duval

We like to call this episode a podcast about a podcast. While we spend most of our discussion on the consequences of S-Town for southern identity on a broader scale, we are interested in how McLemore both creates a caricature of himself and provides Reed with deeply intimate information. We consider several lingering questions about the podcast, including: where are the limits of informed consent, and did Reed abandon those limits? Does telling McLemore’s story perform something productive in the seemingly-endless narrative quest to document and unpack the south? Exotic and dysfunctional, the south in S-Town plays a familiar role as one held up and scrutinized for holes in authenticity. Ultimately, we ask can the constantly reproduced “real south” ever be a real landscape?

David Davis’s book, World War I and Southern Modernism, will be out from the University Press of Mississippi in late fall. Listen to him talk about his journey to southern studies here:

Episode Two: Dream a Different Dream

Gina Caison July 14, 2017

This week we talked with Monique Verdin -- an environmental activist, documentary filmmaker, and citizen of the United Houma Nation -- about how the oil and gas industries have affected her tribal community in southeastern Louisiana.

Monique tells this story in her documentary film, My Louisiana Love, which was directed by Sharon Linezo Hong. By following Monique’s family during the time between Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, the film reveals the contemporary dilemmas faced by the Houma Nation. Monique sat down with us on a rainy day in New Orleans to discuss the documentary, her environmental activism, and why we should all care about what’s happening in Louisiana.

The United Houma Nation is a mixed band of Indigenous people who are from and still live in the Mississippi River Delta. Monique explains that long before the colonization of what we now know as New Orleans, the area was a place for trade for several Indigenous peoples. The Houma originally lived in an area north of Baton Rouge, but as Monique describes, they moved south to avoid Removal: “I always say that we dodged the Trail of Tears by going deep into the Delta and living at the ends of the earth.” After the Houma were forced into the Delta, their land rights were taken from them by people who wanted to harvest mink, otter, and muskrat furs in the region. Monique sees a continuity between these colonizers, the plantation economy, and the oil and gas industries that followed, as they each continued to usurp Houma land rights.

Monique's grandmother, Matine, is a central figure in the documentary.

When asked about the current issues facing the Houma Nation, Monique explains how they are related to historical traumas. She also describes the complex relationship between the oil and gas industries and the Houma people: while oil companies dredge canals through wetlands and build oil waste pits in the backyards of indigenous communities, the Houma work force is nearly completely dependent on the oil and gas industries for jobs. Climate change also presents a major threat to Houma communities, as the sea level rises and tropical storms become stronger and more frequent. Even the plan for coastal restoration and “non-structural adaptation” depends on deep-water drilling, drawing its funding from the royalties that will be collected by Gulf states for offshore drilling beginning in 2018 through the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act (GOMESA). Funding via GOMESA also faces threats from the current administration, who propose routing royalties to the National Treasury.

The webs and pipelines of southeastern Louisiana. Cartography by Jakob Rosenzweig.

As Monique screens the documentary in locations outside of Louisiana, she interacts with people who question why southern Louisiana is facing the environmental challenges she explores in the documentary. Monique emphasizes that the current issues aren’t due to isolated events such as Hurricane Katrina or the BP oil disaster. Instead, they have been building over many decades. Southern Louisiana has made many sacrifices for the nation, but instead of recognizing those sacrifices, others tend to blame those who live in coastal areas for their difficulties without understanding the historical context.

A 3 minute trailer for the documentary film, MY LOUISIANA LOVE.

We encourage you to check out My Louisiana Love, which will be available to stream for free between July 18 and July 24 as part of the Vision Maker “40 Years, 40 Films” series, which celebrates 40 years of Indigenous cinema. During that week, it will also be airing on many local public television stations across the U.S.

From Instagram, #visionmakermedia

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Restore the Mississippi River Delta

Healthy Gulf Network

Louisiana Bucket Brigade

Episode One: A Journey to the End of the World

Gina Caison July 7, 2017

To kick off Season Two Gina and Kelly travel to the end of the world: Venice, Louisiana, which claims to be the southernmost point in Louisiana accessible by car. Traversing through landscapes reminiscent of True Detective, they find oil refineries, fishing communities, and estuary life — alligators, egrets, herons, spoonbills, ibises, and several other rare species of birds. They leave with questions about how our dependence on oil has transformed coastal wetlands into sacrificial spaces, as Louisiana continues to lose approximately 24-38 football fields of land every day.

Venice is just under two hours south of New Orleans, at the tip of Plaquemines Parish. Gina and Kelly are surprised by how quickly the cityscape of New Orleans gives way to suburban ranch homes and then to rural landscapes. They are also taken by the juxtaposition of industrial oil refineries on one side of the highway and wetlands on the other. As the road narrows to two lanes, coastal wildlife becomes more prevalent. After watching an egret catch a fish out of the road in front of them, they exit the car and wade through the water to make sure that it is passable.

Finally, they pull up to a sign delineating that they have reached the southernmost point in Louisiana (though further investigation suggests that designation might rightly belong to Port Fourchon). They explore the town of Venice, following signs for a marina with a bar where fishermen go to wait out rainstorms.

* Not the southernmost point in Louisiana. Photo by Tony.

From a small pull-off on the side of the road, they can see rookeries with hundreds of ibises and egrets. Swimming around the perimeter of the rookeries, large alligators begin their own investigation of Gina and Kelly. In addition to the wildlife, the landscape is marked by groves of dead and dying trees rising out of the water.

Driving home, they discuss rising coastal waters and wetland loss. Gina remarks that she will be sad if this place disappears in her lifetime, and the two contemplate how much of the land might have been lost already. After returning home, many people ask Gina if the rapid pace of coastal erosion is due to Hurricane Katrina, trying to tie the changing landscape to the memorable event. However, coastal wetland loss was happening before Hurricane Katrina, which forces us to consider how our dependence on fossil fuels makes us culpable and how we might work to slow coastal wetland loss and protect these habitats for the people and wildlife who depend on them.

Ibis rookery (not pictured: Kelly's new alligator friends).

We would like to thank all of the people who made this episode possible: Ann for donating her map; Tony for offering guidance and taking photos of us at the end of the world; and Jennie and Chip Lightweis-Goff for their New Orleans hospitality.

Information on Louisiana's wetland lost:

Information from the U.S. Geological Survey about Louisiana coastal wetlands

Recent article on factcheck.org about Louisiana wetland loss, includes an interesting photo from NOAA comparing Louisiana’s coastline in 1932 with its coastline in 2011.

NOLA.com article about John Bel Edwards’ campaign to stop coastal erosion by declaring the vanishing state coastline an emergency on April 20, 2017.

From Instagram: #endoftheworld

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We're back! Season Two begins on July 7th.

Gina Caison June 22, 2017

Tune in to our second season on July 7th. Until then, enjoy a preview of what's to come:

Season Two Trailer

Episode Eighteen: Season Recap Part Two

Gina Caison December 2, 2016

Gina and Kelly discuss their favorite moments from the second half of season one. In this episode, we discuss Gina’s storied history as a majorette. We also catch up with Ali Arant. In an outtake, Tara Bynam and Gina discuss the inherent pleasure of righteous anger. We also discuss a possible spinoff: “About War Eagle,” and we investigate the motivations of humans and monsters in bonus clips from “Real Early South” and “The Faulkner Witch Project.” Rounding out the episode, Joey Kennedy provides insight about the incoming Attorney General, and Vice Mayor Seyram Selase tells us why it’s important to return to the South.

Lost and found art from our home, the Historic West End of Atlanta, GA.

We would like to thank our special guests for making this season a success—we could not have done this without you. We would also like to thank our listeners! We appreciate your kind ears and your support! Please follow us on social media, and help us spread the word by sharing your favorite episode from this season on your preferred social media platform.

Please join us for the About South Season One Wrap Party at Argosy in East Atlanta Village at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, December 9! We would love to raise a glass with you and hear your feedback about our first season! You can RSVP on Facebook or EventBrite.

We'll be back July 7th! Until then, listen to our new podcasting friends, Story of My Life.

Episode Seventeen: Season Recap Part One

Gina Caison December 2, 2016

Gina and Kelly discuss their favorite moments from the first half of season one. We discuss the crayfish names suggested by listeners and Lindsey Eckert’s loveable personality. We talk about butt transcendence from “Vampires on the Outside, Accountants on the Inside” and booty-shaking rhythm from “Southern Souls.” We share a surprising snake premonition from our trip to Pasaquan, and Monica Miller answers questions about southern belles and Georgia peaches. In bonus clips, LeAnne Howe and Kirstin Squint discuss Native American mascots, and Gina talks with Michael Bibler about gifts. We end this episode with a clip from our conversation about southern nostalgia and authenticity with Scott Romine.

A South Carolina peach. Is that a thing?

Our Episode Six guest, LeAnne Howe, on The Daily Show.

Fleetwood Mac, "Don't Stop"

Keep on listening to Part Two!

Announcment: Party People

Gina Caison November 22, 2016

Join us for a celebration of our first fall season!

Screen Shot 2016-11-22 at 3.01.39 PM.png

We'll be at Argosy in East Atlanta Village on December 9th. Party starts at 7:30pm. Come raise a glass with Gina, Kelly, many of this season's special guests, and your fellow listeners.

RSVP here.

Map here.

In the meantime, please be sure to share your favorite About South episode on your social media pages. We'll be back on December 2nd when we share all of our favorite moments from this season.

Episode Sixteen: Freedom

Gina Caison November 11, 2016

On Mother’s Day in 1961, the Klan attacked 13 Freedom Riders by firebombing their Greyhound bus outside of Anniston, Alabama. We close our first season by talking with Anniston Mayor, Vaughn Stewart, and Vice Mayor, Seyram Selase, about the Anniston Freedom Rider’s Memorial currently up for National Monument status. Stewart and Selase retell the story of the Freedom Riders and the bus burning and describe why recognizing this important landmark is significant for Anniston, the state of Alabama, and the nation.

The current mural beside the old bus station in Anniston, AL.

The current request for National Monument status includes two sites: a former Greyhound bus station built in 1952, and the bus-burning site, which is located four miles outside of the Anniston, on what used to be US Highway 78. The bus station advertised separate facilities—waiting rooms, restrooms, and lunch counters—for black and white customers. It ceased to operate in 1967, when a more modern station was built at another location. Currently, it's home to a vintage sign company, but the city has a sales contract to buy the building back from its current owners.

The bathroom in the current sign shop. Many of the fixtures, facilities, and features are unchanged.

While the bus depot is remarkably unchanged, the second location where the bus was bombed has been reconfigured. Some of the houses remain, but the Forsyth Grocery store where the bus pulled over is no longer there, and that portion of Highway 78 has been closed. Anniston officials are hoping to create a five-acre permanent memorial at the site.

The historical marker at the bus burning site.

Selase describes their project as an important way to preserve the overall story of the Anniston Civil Rights Trails, and to protect a sense of place. On the day before our interview, officials from the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior toured the two sites, listened to the stories of those who remembered the event: Hank Thomas, one of the Freedom Riders on the bus in Anniston; Mr. Emerson, a local resident who was on his porch that day and saw the attack, and Janie Forsyth McKinney, a young child who brought water to the wounded Riders. Stewart emphasizes that as the Freedom Rider generation is passing away, no one is going to have a memory of what happened unless we create a space to educate future generations. He argues that these places are important reminders of the dark path we once took, and provide a cautionary tale because bullies and hate-mongers still exist. Our guests note that Anniston’s nickname is the “Model City,” and after the attack, the community came together to create COUL, the Council on Unified Leadership, a biracial council to address violence and racial issues. They hope that gaining National Monument status will provide a model for how other communities might come together after horrific acts of violence to have real conversations and develop real solutions.

We would like to thank our special guests today, Anniston Mayor, Vaughn Stewart, and Vice Mayor, Seyram Selase. We wish them the best of luck in their endeavor to recognize these important landmarks. We encourage our listeners to visit the current Anniston Civil Rights & Heritage Trail. We'd also like to thank Jaye Price for the music.

Episode Fifteen: Red Buttons, Blue Dots, and Hey Mabels

Gina Caison November 4, 2016

This week, we met with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joey Kennedy to discuss this upcoming presidential election, southern politics, and the media. Joey was born in Texas, raised in south-central Louisiana, and moved to Alabama in 1977. He began writing for The Birmingham News in 1981, and he’s covered politics in the South across platforms for more than thirty years.

Political concepts of the South often aggregate the region into a solid mass of red states. Joey explains how, during the Nixon administration, politicians modeled after George Wallace used red button issues sway voters. Early on, those issues were centered around race relations, appealing to white voters. Since then, red button issues have included LGBTQ rights, immigration, and Islam. Joey figures the ideological “angry white man” as the southern base many politicians appeal to using fear. He notes that the angry white man isn’t a person; it’s an attitude. Using fear, some politicians, such as Donald Trump, scare voters with descriptions of evil Muslims and Mexican rapists.

Map of red states and blue states in the U.S.Red=The Republican candidate carried the state in all four most recent presidential elections (2000, 2004, 2008, 2012).Pink=The Republican candidate carried the state in three of the four most recent elec… — Map of red states and blue states in the U.S.
Red=The Republican candidate carried the state in all four most recent presidential elections (2000, 2004, 2008, 2012).
Pink=The Republican candidate carried the state in three of the four most recent elections.
Purple=The Republican candidate and the Democratic candidate each carried the state in two of the four most recent elections.
Light blue=The Democratic candidate carried the state in three of the four most recent elections.
Dark blue=The Democratic candidate carried the state in all four most recent elections.
Image via Wikimedia Commons, author Angr.

Despite the neo-confederate logic guiding white voters to act against their own best interests, Joey sees Donald Trump as perhaps the dying gasp of white supremacy in this nation. He believes that the Republican party must either adapt or split apart after this election, asserting that a party can no longer win national elections with an anti-immigration, anti-Muslim agenda.

Joey emphasizes how changing business models have affected the way that news is reported and the consequences of those changes on politics both regionally and nationally. He believes the media, through focusing on scandals, are culpable for the level of discourse in this election cycle. He partially blames a new click-based business model for sensationalized headlines, noting how few newspapers have examined the more serious accusations against Trump, opting instead for stories which will attract more traffic. He also notes that, on a local level, the press plays a vital role in exposing corruption. When newspapers can no longer assign staff members to cover city councils and other governing bodies, then politicians are more likely to engage in corruption because their constituents are less likely to notice.

We end today’s show with difficult questions about how to reach an audience that feels so disenfranchised, yet so distrustful toward the press, especially when politicians foster distrust. We also question how media corporations might place a greater emphasis on public service and documenting history in an increasingly market-driven industry.

Recent polls indicate that southern states may not be as solidly red as they have been in the past.

Please Vote.

Image by Dwight Burdette, Wikimedia Commons.

We would like to thank Joey and Veronica Kennedy and their wonderful pugs for welcoming us into their home in Birmingham. Joey worked at The Birmingham News for more than 33 years. He is currently a columnist at B-Metro magazine and Alabama Political Reporter. He also teaches English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing along with his colleagues Ron Casey and Harold Jackson for their series, “What They Won’t Tell You About Your Taxes.” He also publishes Animal Advocates of Alabama, and his creative nonfiction has been published in Redbook magazine and in several literary journals.

Curious about Alabama politics? Watch this:

'It's a Thick Book' is a political documentary about problems with Alabama's 1901 constitution by Lewis Lehe. Funny at times, and very informative. This video is recommended for anyone interested in politics, constitutional reform, tax reform, or Alabama history. Produced with help from Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform Foundation. Lewis J.

Note: Even though this episode airs on November 4, we recorded this conversation in mid-October, during an especially tumultuous election season. Therefore, we will not have covered any news events that might have happened in the intervening period.

We'd like to thank our special musical guest, Stuart McNair. Please visit his website, stuartmcnair.com, to purchase his music.

Please join us on November 6th at The Wren's Nest for their Blues and BBQ Fundraiser. Details can be found here.

Episode Fourteen: The Faulkner Witch Project

Gina Caison October 28, 2016

Ghost stories are frequently attached to a particular place—a house, a bedroom, a hallway, or a highway. The stories themselves even take on regional inflections, changing as they are told in different environments. To celebrate Halloween, we sat down with Eric Gary Anderson, Associate Professor at George Mason University to talk about Undead Souths.

Eric describes how, southern spookiness is expanding to encompass more than just Southern Gothic tales. The Southern Gothic describes creative works about self-contained, closed spaces: old, dark houses, for instance. Narratives linked what happened in the architectural interior to what happened in the psychic interior of the characters involved. The genre borrows from European and British traditions, and it focuses on the Civil War, plantations, slavery, airing out the white fears and anxieties associated with the South. While Eric emphasizes that there are some great Southern Gothic stories, the genre has its limits. Together with Taylor Hagood and Daniel Cross Turner, Eric developed Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture, an edited collection devoted to decentering the Southern Gothic, and interrogating the “undead souths,” or aspects of the South that rise up in troubling, creepy, supernatural, disturbing, or scary ways. Eric also explains that moving away from Southern Gothic provides space to expand beyond British and European genealogies to incorporate and examine Caribbean, Indigenous, and African texts as well.

Undead Souths from Louisiana State University Press. — *Undead Souths* from Louisiana State University Press.

True Blood, The Walking Dead, The Vampire Diaries, and American Horror Story: Coven are all filmed and set in the U.S. South, which leads us to question how the South functions as a receptacle for creepiness in contemporary supernatural television shows. While the surge might be partially due to economic reasons, Eric describes some of the questions these shows might raise. Specifically, he asks how the political empire, business ventures, and fundamentalist religious dynasties in True Blood might offer a commentary about the South.

The series follows Sookie Stackhouse, a barmaid living in Louisiana who can read people's minds, and how her life is turned upside down when the Vampire Bill, walks into her place of employment two years after vampires 'came out of the coffin' on national television.

We close our conversation by discussing a couple of Eric’s Halloween favorites. His favorite vampire is the titular Son of Dracula who travels to Georgia in a 1940s film, operating under the alias Count Alucard. Eric cites the blair witch from 1999’s The Blair Witch Project as his favorite southern witch.

Son of Dracula trailer 1943

"In October of 1994, three student film makers disappeared in the woods near Burkittesville, Maryland. One year later, their footage was found." Directed by: Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez.

We would like to thank our special guest this week, Eric Gary Anderson. Eric is an Associate Professor of English at George Mason University where he teaches Native and Southern Studies. In addition to his first book, American Indian Literature and the Southwest, he’s published more than twenty essays and edited volumes and journals. His most recent work includes contributions to Keywords for Southern Studies, Native South, and The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South. Together with Taylor Hagood and Daniel Cross Turner, he also edited Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture, which we discussed on today’s episode. We would also like to thank William Faulkner’s ghost for his brief guest appearance.

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Episode Thirteen: Real Early South

Gina Caison October 21, 2016

This week we sit down with American Studies scholar Angela Pulley Hudson about her book, Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians. Her book investigates the history of Warner McCary and Lucy Stanton. McCary was an ex-slave from Mississippi who refashioned himself Okah Tubbee, claiming to be the lost son of Choctaw chief Mushulatubbee. Stanton was a divorced white Mormon woman from New York who reinvented herself as a Delaware Indian named Laah Ceil. Angela describes how the couple used popular notions of "Indianness" to disguise their backgrounds, protect their marriage, and make a living.

Warner McCary was born into slavery in Mississippi in 1810 or 1811. When his master died in 1813, he freed the rest of Warner’s family. However, Warner remained enslaved to his two freed siblings, but he secretly earned a small income of his own through fishing, flute performances, and ventriloquism. In 1839, Warner was freed by his half-brother and became a militia fifer and flute player. He had already adopted an Indian persona when he met Lucy Stanton in 1845. He was baptized into the Mormon Church, and they were married. After their marriage, Warner adopted the Okah Tubbee alias, and began performing as a Choctaw flutist. Stanton also took an alias, performing as a Mohawk / Delaware Indian, Laah Ceil. When their musical career wanes, the two are able to support themselves through practicing medicine.

While no genealogical evidence exists to suggest that McCary was actually Choctaw, his racial identity is unknowable. Angela suggests that his heritage is irrelevant in many ways because he was never claimed by Choctaw people, and his performances were based on popular culture ideas of Choctaw people. According to Angela, the biography of Tubbee and Ceil is more important because of what it reveals about the region, the nation, and ideas of Indianness. She notes that once the two start performing as Indians together, they never perform farther south than Washington D.C. To Angela, the regional boundedness of their performances demonstrates how beliefs about Indians varied from place to place.

We would like to thank today’s special guest, Angela Pulley Hudson. Angela is an Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale in 2007, and she is the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants for her research on American Indian history, the cultural history of the U.S. South, and the intersection of African American and American Indian experiences. We would also like to thank the American Antiquarian Society for allowing us to host this conversation.

Buy Real Native Genius here.

Many thanks to UNC Press for the details for this week's post. Check out their complete catalogue of books, many of them focused on the greater South, here.

Episode Twelve: Drink the Region

Gina Caison October 7, 2016

This week we sit down with American Literature scholar Matt Dischinger to talk about drinking in the South. Matt contends that typical literary discussions about southern drinking tend to focus on major authors and larger-than-life stories, which are fascinating, but they can also leave out important aspects of southern drinking culture.

In many ways, the South is a temperance-inflected culture, but drinking is also hyper visible in the stories of famous authors, in the figure of the moonshiner, and in the proliferation of southern artisanal cocktails. Matt links this dual image to temperance—where legal restrictions became coded in the South as gender and racial restrictions on drinking, creating new centers and peripheries associated with the law, but also associated with broader cultural practices and beliefs. In the case of moonshine, part of its appeal derives from its illegality. Knowing how to procure moonshine demonstrates that the buyer is part of an “in” group. With moonshine, drinking and secrecy are intimately linked together.

From Discovery Channel's Moonshiners. Moonshine is made from a delicate balance of water, corn and sugar.

The rise in craft cocktail culture and local breweries can also be attributed to the easing of temperance laws in many southern counties and states, which opens up opportunities for entrepreneurs. The emphasis on artisanal and southern aspects of local cocktails and beers appeals to those who want to be part of an “in” group too. Bringing up the New Orleans Sazerac, Matt mentions that an important aspect of drinking, no matter the region, is knowing about the local drinking culture. Perhaps local alcohol purveyors hope to create the feeling of an authentic, local, southern drinking experience.

We end today’s show by sampling a few different moonshines, and by sharing our favorite southern drinks. We begin with an authentic home-brewed, locally sourced moonshine acquired from a friend of the show. We then try two flavored faux moonshines sourced from the local Kroger. Matt then describes two of his favorite southern drinks, a Ramos Gin Fizz, and a mint julep. Kelly’s selection, the Aviation, wasn’t invented in the South, but was first served to her at a local Atlanta bar. Gina mentions her Southern Comfort punch, which she only made in Milwaukee. Taken together, our favorite drinks gesture toward an idea of southern culture as a combination of lived experiences and creative imaginings.

Map showing dry (red), wet (blue), and mixed (yellow) counties in the United States. Wikimedia Commons,

We would like to thank today’s special guest, Matt Dischinger. Matt is a Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology He teaches courses in multiethnic literatures, American Literature, critical theory, and writing. His research examines contemporary U.S. literature in the South. Along with Conor Picken, he is currently editing a forthcoming collection entitled Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South.

#sazerac on Instagram:

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Episode Eleven: The Pleasures of John Marrant (and Baltimore)

Gina Caison September 29, 2016

This week we talk to scholar of early African American literature, Tara Bynum. When Tara tells people that she researches African American pleasure in the eighteenth century, they often respond with puzzled looks, but Tara asserts that interrogating pleasure re-centers the focus on black cultural production and uncovers the ways in which African American people make meaning in their own lives. We discuss eighteenth-century Methodist minister, John Marrant, a free black man who found pleasure through practicing his Christian faith. Marrant’s experiences challenge traditional constructions of southern geographies and literary histories and invite us to rethink the role of Christianity and pleasure in the lives of African Americans in the eighteenth century.

Born in 1755, John Marrant was a well-established itinerant minister. After moving with his mother to Charleston, he converted to Christianity, left his family at age 13, and lived in the wilderness before being captured by Cherokee Indians. According to the ordination narrative he published in 1785, he succeeded in converting several members of the tribe before he returned to Charleston. His narrative, published in 1785, is subsequently published 15 times, making it the most popular early African American narrative and one of the earliest extant narratives by a free black person.

The Fourth Edition of Marrant's Narrative

Academics often (and accurately) view Christianity in the early South as a tool used by the planter class to bolster enslavement. However, John Marrant’s experience as a free black man who derived pleasure from practicing his Methodist faith demonstrates that early African American people understood and practiced Christianity in ways that provided them with comfort and pleasure. Tara explains that refocusing our attention on black pleasure offers a model wherein blackness is no longer analyzed in relation to whiteness; it is instead the center of its own story.

John Marrant’s story also reminds us that the South moves, which is particularly important for Tara, who grew up in Baltimore, a city whose southernness is often contested. We end today’s conversation discussing the ways in which the South travels, particularly as people move and take cultural objects (e.g. quilts) to new places. These objects remind us that there are other ways outside of geography to be connected to the South, even if we are not always aware of those connections.

Baltimore, MD. Photo: Fletcher 6, Wikimedia Commons

We would like to thank today’s special guest, Tara Bynum. She is a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Long-Term Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston in the Departments of English and African American Studies. We would also like to thank the American Antiquarian Society for allowing us to host this conversation.

Episode Ten: No More Book Babies

Gina Caison September 23, 2016

Ali Arant, English Professor at Wagner College on Staten Island, joins us this week for a conversation about old maids from the South and elsewhere. Ali’s research focuses on the trope of the old maid in regional literature, examining work by William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, Katherine Anne Porter, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison among others.

However, she has also found the figure in surprising places. For instance, the term is also used to describe an un-popped kernel of popcorn at the bottom of a bowl and the single, unmatchable card in a game similar to Go Fish. An old maid lurks in the lyrics of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” as the (typically) female speaker’s “maiden aunt” with a “vicious mind.” Our conversation investigates how cultural anxieties are embodied in this tragicomic character.

The original from Neptune's Daughter Neptune's Daughter is a 1949 musical romantic comedy film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer starring Esther Williams, Red Skelton, Ricardo Montalbán, Betty Garrett, Keenan Wynn, Xavier Cugat and Mel Blanc. It was directed by Edward Buzzell, and features the Academy Award winning song Baby, It's Cold Outside by Frank Loesser.

According to Ali, old maids are typically past the typical age of being married, and they seem unlikely to ever be married. They are usually busybodies, overly interested in other people’s sexuality, and they retain the worst aspects of youth and age. They are childish and immature with aging, "gross" bodies. She presents Rosa Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom! whose “female old flesh [was] long embattled in virginity” as an embodiment of the trope.

Old maids represent reproductive potential gone wrong, and they can express and/or mock anxieties about changing cultural landscapes. For example, old maids appearing in early twentieth-century southern literature might reflect an Agrarian anxiety that the South with cease to be what it once was. The figure appears in conjunction with agricultural anxiety about crop exhaustion and concerns about miscegenation. Ali describes how women come to stand in for larger cultural anxieties in the late twentieth century as well, noting that Jeffrey Eugenides cites the decline of the automobile industry as the inspiration for his 1993 novel, The Virgin Suicides.

We would like to thank our special guest this week, Ali Arant, who also provided music for this week’s episode. Ali’s research focuses on regionalism, gender, and critical race studies, and she is completing two book projects, an edited collection on Flannery O’Connor with Jordan Cofer, and a second book on old maids and regionalism. We would also like to congratulate Ali and her husband, Tyler, on their recent marriage. We hope their future includes all the happiness in the world (and ample space for bookshelves).

Buy Ali Arant's album, June/July here.

Episode Nine: More Estrogen in Football

Gina Caison September 15, 2016

This week, we have assembled an all-star team of football fans (all of whom happen to be women). Friends of the show, Kris Townsend, Alex Patafio, and Stephanie Rountree, join host Gina Caison and co-producer Kelly Vines to have a conversation about what it’s like to be a woman who loves football in the South.

Opening weekend at Auburn versus Clemson.

Our conversation covers topics big and small: our childhood connection to the sport, our experiences with other fans, prescribed roles for women on game day, toxic masculinity, mansplaining, and regional performance. While it may seem like just a game, our discussion demonstrates the complex issues associated with our favorite fall pastime.

We begin by talking about our relationship to football growing up and our current allegiances. Kelly—currently a Georgia Tech fan getting her Ph.D. at LSU—grew up listening to UGA games with her grandfather. Stephanie’s father was in sports licensing when she was a child, and they rooted for the Florida Gators at home. She became a competitive cheerleader and learned more about the game, then eventually attended Florida State who she now supports. Kris’s parents met at Florida State and visited the school frequently during Kris’s childhood. Competing in track led her to UGA, though she originally wanted to attend FSU. She now roots primarily for Florida State, but also for UGA and other teams in the SEC. Alex grew up a Penn State fan and developing a love for football in middle and high school, she became a cheerleader. Gina came to love football through her mother, an NC State season ticket holder. She learned about the sport by going to NC State games with her family before becoming a majorette in high school.

While discussing our biographical information, we also talk about some of the issues we’ve had attending games. Kris and Kelly mention some negative experiences with other fans. Gina also brings up her experience after one particularly heartbreaking Auburn game against Alabama, which was mentioned in Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer, and suggests that perhaps we can all get too caught up in our fan allegiances.

After the halftime break, we discuss some issues female football fans face in the South. Gina laments that she cannot watch football in a bar without men looking at her like she’s a dog riding a bicycle. Kris offers her own experience to contrast with Gina’s; as someone who appears more androgynous, she can blend in and enjoy the game without necessarily being subjected to the "male gaze." Alex connects the difficulties of being a woman who is interested in football to the more traditional views of a “woman’s place” in southern culture.

Then we turn our attention to some of the more serious events covered by the media, including the Penn State and Jameis Winston scandals. These news stories prompt us to question whether or not team allegiances enable us to defend inexcusable behavior so that we can continue to participate in an activity we enjoy. In response to Gina’s question if, as women, we could we move the needle from the inside, Alex describes her sister’s UGA tailgates. Exclusively attended by women, they’re a place of empowerment. She asserts that if women felt more empowered instead of anomalous, then maybe we could be more involved with the sport, working for the NCAA and calling games. Gina observes how women in football relates to larger concerns about gender performance, citing Erin Andrews and the burden female sportscasters feel to look a certain way. Despite their talent, female sportscasters are still relegated to the sidelines.

Erin Andrews field reporting at USC vs. Oregon game, 2010. Neon Tommy, Wikimedia Commons.

We then tackled our experiences with "mansplainers," and Gina questions why we still go to games after experiencing firsthand the problematic way in which women are treated. Panelists mention a few reasons: we love our respective teams, we feel that it provides us with an important connection to our history and others at the game with us, and it provides an important escape from the hamster wheel of work involved in everyday life. Stephanie also mentions the vicarious and visceral response fans have to the game. Football especially provides women with an amazing sublimation of anger. However, on the other hand, we all lament male announcers who talk about penetration and our several negative experiences with other fans. It then becomes difficult to separate the game from gender performance and interpolation.

Stephanie mentions how football is tied up in regional identification too. She notes that the SEC is held up as the seat of all brilliance in college football, despite being dethroned many times. She wonders if it isn’t part of the same southern myth assigning glory to the region based on perception rather than hard facts.

We close this week’s show with our predictions about who will win the National Championship and who we hope will not.

The top ten ranked teams as of Friday, September 15, 2016. Will our predictions pan out?

We would like to think our special guests this week, Stephanie Rountree, Kris Townsend, and Alex Patafio. We'd also like to thank Jen Welter for inspiring us all.

Episode Eight: Real Pie

Gina Caison August 26, 2016

This week we traveled to North Carolina to talk with Scott Romine, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, about moon pies, grits, and soft drinks. Returning to one of the central questions guiding this podcast, we also talk with Scott about what we might mean when we talk about the “real South.”

We began this podcast with three questions: What is the South? Is it real? And what’s so special about it? Given that Scott wrote a book titled The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction, we thought he might be able to provide us with an answer to our first two questions or at least point us in the right direction. While he describes the South as an intersection between an idea and a social reality, he also says that he tends to approach the South as more of an idea, or an “imagined community.” He describes how people generally have a positive or negative idea about the South, and he asserts that one’s opinion can lead to a confirmation bias where new information is filtered out and the extraordinarily complex region is oversimplified.

Scott describes how current projects related to southern food relate to his work on the South as an idea. He notes that Southern Living started the year after the Civil Rights Act was passed. He accounts for Southern Living as an attempt to find a new, noncontroversial way to consume the South. After all, as he points out, no one is really going to fight a Civil War over barbecue, sweet tea, or grits. However, while publications like Southern Living successfully make the South more palatable, they also presented distorted representations of the material realities of actual people. For instance, romanticized images of the “Great Southern Table” in southern periodicals obscure the stark racial divisions and inequalities characterizing domains of food production and consumption domain. In many southern households, labor is distributed across gender lines as well, where women are primarily responsible for preparing and cleaning up after meals.

We end this week’s episode with a conversation about moon pies, a fairly new (first introduced in 1917) mass-produced, but still somehow quintessentially “southern” dessert. Scott says he started researching moon pies after Bill Ferris made the odd claim that moon pies anchor southerners to their culture and history. According to Scott, Ferris’s connection works because of an ability to invoke a southern imaginary. Ferris’s comment also highlights the fact that “authenticity” and “tradition” are always changing and demonstrates the necessity of meeting “authenticity” claims with skepticism.

Big Bill Lister, who toured with Hank Williams and was billed as "Radio's Tallest Singing Cowboy". Texan Big Bill Lister is best known for his early 1950s stint as Hank Williams' opening act and rhythm guitarist.

We would like to thank our special guest this week, Scott Romine. Scott is a Professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His second book, The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction continues to be a core text in the field of southern studies. He recently co-edited Keywords for Southern Studies with Jennifer Rae Greeson.

Scott's book suggestions:

Jennifer Rae Greeson - Our South: Graphic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature

Leigh Anne Duck - The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism

Jon Smith - Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies

Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner - Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture