bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Contrails to Chemtrails
Authors: Pryor Anne
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses how atmospheric scientists respond to challenging belief narratives, particularly the chemtrail theory. It starts with the work and legacy of the Weather Guys radio program at Wisconsin Public Radio presented by Steve A. Ackerman and Jonathan E. Martin. When relayed by a caller to the show, chemtrail narratives often tend to be condensed and referential while referring to the deep set of beliefs and assumptions without articulating the actual narrative. The chapter then notes that geoengineering has become an integrally linked concept, making it more difficult for scientists to easily refute the chemtrails narrative. It cites that Weather Guys provides a possible model for folklorists trying to forge a revised path related to legends that can be scientifically disproven and may cause social harm.
From Clockwork Weatherman to Atomic Environmentalist
Authors: Hanley Máirt
Published: January 2024

This chapter covers the interplay between folk beliefs and the church's theory and understanding of the weather. It presents religious minister Máirt Hanley's lived experiences and extracts from interviews with a bishop, a church environmentalist, and a successful farmer within the congregation. Parishioners have a habit of asking priests to pray for the weather for varying reasons, which leads to the realization that the prayers originate from the folk beliefs of the people in the pews. The chapter explains the development of a theology in line with the use of technology. It highlights that the weather is a very real and immanent part of working life and community involvement.
“The World of Sensible Seasons Had Come Undone”
Authors: Chapple Hannah
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the notion of climate change and regional folklore as featured in Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior. It notes the interplay between folklore and bioregionalism in an effort to address climate change. Kingsolver's novel showcases the potential implications of bioregional folklore and its merit for tracking potential folkloric disruption resulting from anthropogenic climate change. In Flight Behavior, Kingsolver addresses the impact of anthropogenic climate change on the folklore of the novel's rural Tennessee community. The chapter also explains that the novel highlights the group dynamics at play around the climate-change debate and how folklore and bioregional literary criticism can complement each other.
“I’ll Never Forget the Thunderstorm of 1960, I Think It Was”
Authors: Marander-Eklund Lena
Published: January 2024

This chapter explains that a storm story deals with the experience of thunderstorms and storms, most of which contain numerous characteristics that constitute a narrative. It discusses how people talk about their experiences by considering why they are often dramatic and emotional in character. Moreover, stories or the expression of recorded accounts can also be studied based on the story's stylistic or aesthetic dimensions. The chapter mentions that micronarratives are structurally cohesive accounts with clearly defined beginnings and endings, dramatic climaxes, and with past events presented as they were experienced. It notes that stories about storms largely deal with a situation in which a person's control is set aside.
Framing the Flood
Authors: Lovejoy Jordan
Published: January 2024

This chapter covers the strategic environmental storytelling of the flood in Appalachia. As with other marginalized groups in stigmatized places around the globe, Appalachians have long carried the violent weight of industrialization and carry the brunt of the climate crisis. Several Appalachian creators and residents employ flood imagery or use the metaphor of a flood to explore social life and environmental harm through vernacular artistic creation. Some creators aim for the connection through aesthetic representation to highlight that floods are not only disastrous and traumatic moments but also moments in which creative community survival strategies emerge. The chapter explains that floods are also reminders of endurance through altered circumstances.
It Always Rains on a Picnic
Authors: Bradley Kristen
Published: January 2024

This chapter notes the weatherlore and community narrative at St. Patrick's Irish Picnic and Homecoming. It explains that a good portion of the event's success is linked to the weather since the picnic takes place outdoors. Newspapers began to report the trend of the Irish Picnic always being held on a sunny day, which emphasizes that it never rained on that specific day for over a century. Thus, weather forecasting based on the lore became more common as decades progressed. The chapter explains that the lore associated with the Irish Picnic weather is closely tied to the identity of the community.
Canning for the Apocalypse
Authors: Schmidt Claire
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses the pop-cultural representations of the zombie apocalypse that resulted in an intimate response to personal food preservation. It also considers the impact of climate change on food systems, referencing how weather is a decisive factor in food availability and consumption. Moreover, canning as a folk response to climate change is fear management through in-home means that do not resist capitalism but do allow the idea of populist resistance to capitalism. Thus, the chapter discusses the role changing weather patterns play in how twenty-first-century Americans talk about, think about, and practice home canning. The chapter mentions that the aesthetics of canning became the aesthetics of weather-disaster preparedness.
Anglophone Caribbean Children’s Literature A Snapshot
Authors: Nies Betsy
Published: January 2024

This chapter reviews the transition in children’s literature after the 1960s from colonialist to postcolonialist content as a framework for understanding contemporary Anglophone Caribbean children’s literature. Local voices integrated folklore into curricular material beginning in the 1930s, with far more expansive output after 1960. Writers offer historical and realistic fiction that countered colonialist paradigms. Waves of immigration to the US, Canada, and Great Britain (with its Caribbean Arts Movement) contributed to the rise of such literature, proliferating into children’s poetry, folklore, and rhyming books that integrating tastes of the region’s linguistic Creole-informed cadences. In the past two decades, festival awards, non-profit organizations, and local publishing houses have fostered the development of young adult literature that now treats problems common to the genre—emerging sexuality, mental health, sports, romance, and issues of identity. Writers address contemporary problems such as poverty, global warming, and political corruption through multiple genres popular among the age group including dystopian fiction, romance, mystery, and new realism, often laced with bits of Caribbean mythology.
Back to Backfire
Authors: Skeete Geraldine Elizabeth
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores how Backfire: A Collection of Caribbean Short Stories(1973) has made a valuable contribution to language and literary pedagogy in the Trinidad and Tobago classroom. Compiled by husband-and-wife editors Neville and Undine Giuseppi, it remains relevant as a supplementary text in some secondary schools but has also proven beneficial to younger readers at the primary level. As a curriculum resource, Backfire has helped to foster an appreciation in youth for reading and literature; for their mother tongue and the oral-scribal continuum related to Caribbean Creole languages; and, specifically, for the genre conventions of the Caribbean short story. The seventeen stories in the collection, augmented by illustrative drawings, comprise a wide range of thematic foci geared towards the targeted age groups and in keeping with what defines children’s literature. The chapter culminates with testimonials of its impact on those who have been teachers and students of Backfire.
Reading Words, Reading Worlds
Authors: Spencer Aisha T.
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the rigidities and possibilities associated with the situation of reading in Jamaican classrooms and demonstrates how an active, response-oriented approach to the teaching and use of Caribbean children’s literature for primary and lower secondary school students can enable deeper levels of connection and engagement with texts. The chapter also presents the views of a group of primary school teachers in Jamaica, offers classroom observations by the writer, and provides practical teaching suggestions for developing literary competence, through a focus on three Caribbean children’s books: Olive Senior’s Birthday Suit (2012), Janet Plummer’s A Long Way From Home (2014), and Diane Browne’s Abigail’s Glorious Hair (2018).
Seriously!
Authors: Bennett Consuella
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines and seeks to dismantle reductive images and portrayals of Caribbean characters and cultures that are shown on US television and in movies, while arguing that the American classroom should adopt literary texts for children and young adults that will promote inclusion and diversity and provide authentic representations of the Caribbean region. Texts evaluated include Andrew Salkey’s Hurricane (1964), Tracey Baptiste’s The Jumbies (2015), and Julia Alvarez’s Before We Were Free (2002). The chapter also examines the intersectionality of Caribbean and American cultures by discussing cross-cultural themes provided by Caribbean, Caribbean-American, and other US or international texts for children and young adults. The desired outcome is that these texts will serve as good examples of Caribbean literature that should be infused into elementary or middle school curricula in the US.
Creating Picture Books
Authors: Nies Betsy , Vega Melissa García
Published: January 2024

Three established and prolific writers with Caribbean roots in Haiti, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic discuss how they approach writing for children as distinct from writing for adults. In this chapter each writer responds to questions about their writing process. The writers and illustrators provide young readers with stories that invite reflections of their ancestral lineages, every day practices, and traumatic historical events. The discussion highlights the dynamic relationship between illustration in the picture book form with storytelling. All three writers express an appreciation for the opportunity to expose and inform readers of culture, language, and histories that reflect and honor individual identities. This chapter invites teachers and readers to examine how both young and adult audiences are similar through stories. The international role and importance of Caribbean children’s literature is evident throughout the discussion.
The Picture Book Is Political
Authors: Edward Summer
Published: January 2024

This essay provides an extensive overview of Caribbean picture books, middle grade, and young adult books by writers from the Caribbean. The chapter explores the politically engaged nature of children’s literature in literature written in or translated into English. Categories include anti-slavery and abolition, anti-colonialism and independence, labor organizing and workers’ rights, Pan-Africanism and black consciousness, civil rights, immigrant rights, environmentalism, poverty, communism and socialism, gender and sexuality, disability rights, and political orientation. An appendix breaks down the various books according to age level, providing a rich resource for educators and librarians interested in providing literature written by those from the region, culturally authoritative stories written by Caribbean people themselves. The selections have publication dates spanning from 1949 to 2019 and are all currently in print.
When Will “We” Be Free?
Authors: McMenamin Amanda Eaton
Published: January 2024

Analyzing Dominican American author Julia Alvarez’s historical fiction novel Before We Were Free, this chapter asserts that the perspective of her Dominican protagonist Ana de la Torre enables the US-born reader, the intended audience, to view the hostilities of the imperial interventions of their own nation through inquisitive, innocent eyes. Alvarez deploys Ana’s twelve-year-old self to shed light on the long shadow the US has cast over Dominican identity and liberty by contrasting the imperial education Ana receives in American schools (both in the US and the Dominican Republic) with a hard-earned, anti-institutional freedom of thought. In this first-person narration, she establishes her inner liberation and development of subjectivity (selfhood), primarily through her testimonio (testimonial) writing, a genre that works to expose ignored inequities by requiring reciprocity from the reader.
Vodou Illuminations, Diaspora Literacy, and Racial Violence in Ibi Zoboi’s Young Adult Novel American Street
Authors: Nies Betsy
Published: January 2024

This essay unpacks the underlying Vodou epistemologies of Ibi Zoboi’s young adult novel American Street. Set in Detroit, the book features a Haitian immigrant teen who lives with her cousins and aunt while her mother is detained by immigration. Fabiola Touissant, a name indicative of her spiritual power, navigates an urban world of racial and economic oppression that fuels the death of yet another young black male by police. The essay charts the protagonist’s spiritual and emotional development via her faith to reveal her movement beyond dualistic thinking to a historical relativist position that recognizes context as central to subjectivity. The author transforms American media versions of Vodou—zombies and witch doctors—into a grounded representation of the religion. Zoboi’s characters serve as iterations of spirits or loas, creating a lens for understanding the contemporary effects of the US’s long history of racism that began with slavery.
Ecopedagogy and Aesthetics in Caribbean Children’s Literature
Authors: Vega Melissa García
Published: January 2024

Caribbean children’s literature reflects an ecological Caribbean aesthetic, as well as a historically inherited force of dynamics that includes imperialistic politics. Through textual analysis of a Caribbean-based picture book, this chapter examines the role of nature in relation to an ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) theoretical framework. The Black Lake (2014) by Grace Achoy and illustrated by Jade Achoy is one example of story bearing key characteristics of Caribbean environmental children’s literature such as mythical figures connected to the natural landscape. Through stories for children there are opportunities for cultivating ecoliteracy alongside an appreciation and consciousness of the environmental culture of the region. This chapter examines how an eco-perspective reflects factors that inform the current Caribbean region and support a deeper understanding of the imprint of humanity on the environment.
Whiteness, Childhood, and Faulknerian Gothics in “That Evening Sun” and Sally Mann
Authors: Henninger Katherine
Published: January 2024

Katherine Henninger takes up the convergence of the Gothic genre and the figure of the child as technologies of racial disavowal that, in the hands of William Faulkner and his fellow southern artist Sally Mann, can be wielded against themselves to expose the workings of a white supremacy they elsewhere collude to sublimate. This essay faults Southern Gothic in its more spectacular manifestations (including Absalom, Absalom!) for overrepresenting the nation’s constitutive racial traumas to the point of rendering them utterly alien or, worse, enjoyable in their monstrosity. At the same time, the genre displaces national legacies of racial violence and haunting onto regional ground, acknowledging the work of American racism inthe South while disclaiming it elsewhere. Within the familial dramas onwhich so many Southern Gothic texts hinge, childhood becomes a vehiclealternately for the ascription of racial innocence and for the explorationof fault lines in the massive labor of unknowing on which such ascriptions rest.
Across the Ditch
Authors: Hines Maude
Published: January 2024

Maude Hines focuses on the Southern Gothic child, whom she finds to be “a palimpsestic figure haunted by the past and focused on futurity,” at once “a repository of inherited pain and guilt” and “a haunting evocation of the continuation of those injuries.” This essay follows figures like Jason Compson of “That Evening Sun” and Joe Christmas of Light in August as they “undergo an iterative assimilation of white supremacy’s violence” and the “complex and oppressive social machinery” through which it imposes itself on their lives. Touched by racism in very personal ways, Faulkner’s white children quickly, and tragically learn to deflect its threat by projecting it onto others.
The Jefferson Outbreak
Authors: Cassity Maxwell
Published: January 2024

Maxwell Cassity’s thought experiment is to take seriously the textual and critical troping of the Snopes family’s incursions into the economy and society of Yoknapatawpha County as a plague or scourge, “a contagious pattern of infection, assimilation, and corruption.” This essay pulls together data visualization tools from the Digital Yoknapatawpha project, close reading techniques, and contextual analysis into “a metaphorical and methodological framework” for following the Snopeses separately and together “across and between texts,” from cameo appearances in As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary to central roles in The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion. What this methodology reveals is “an epidemiological epistemology” at work throughout the Yoknapatawpha writings—from “civilian epidemiologists” like V. K. Ratliff and Gavin Stevens, to the larger contingent of Snopes-watchers that monitors the movements and machinations of Flem and his kinsmen against the overall health of the community, and outward to interpellate the Faulkner reader aswell—framing the Snopeses “as contagious ‘others,’ outsiders who, intheir invasion of structures and hierarchies of upwardly mobile whiteness, defy and disrupt social norms.”
Conclusion
Authors: Agnoli Francis M.
Published: January 2024

This conclusion summarizes and synthesizes the content and arguments of the preceding chapters in this volume regarding the construction and ascription of racialized identities in Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-08) and The Legend of Korra (2012-14). It also suggests potential avenues of research using the concepts of the animated bodyscape and the planetary production model beyond these two shows. The approaches illustrated in this book can be amended for a range of other case studies.
Zoot Suits and New Jack Swing
Authors: Turman Karen
Published: January 2024

This chapter begins by examining the concept of dandyism. Popular media tend to recognize the dandy as an elegantly dressed person who may distinctively accessorize or manipulate the traditional cut of a three-piece suit. However, dandyism goes beyond the superficial sartorial level when one acknowledges the power of clothing and image through historical contextualization of the dandy figure. While Prince himself exemplifies the dandy figure, the chapter explores the definition of dandyism through a cultural history perspective, examining the stylistic relevance of one of the most celebrated of Prince's side projects, The Time. Through sociocultural and historical analysis of Black dandyism, the zoot suit, and the dance aesthetic and roots of New Jack Swing, the chapter dissects the philosophical underpinnings of sartorial rebellion as a profound statement of power and assertion of agency in the character Morris Day's caricature of dandyism.
Clouds, Colors, and the Wonder of U
Authors: Shaheen Fred Mark
Published: January 2024

This chapter evaluates the influence of Joni Mitchell on Prince. A handful of musical figures loom large over Prince's formation; not as immediately obvious, but no less significant is Joni Mitchell, the musician, the songwriter, the painter. Prince was inspired by Joni's use of color as a means of expression in both the literal and figurative sense. She also influenced Prince's use of space and silence in his musical arrangements. At times, both Joni Mitchell and Prince connected brilliantly with audiences. Both artists have also been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Even when their work was not well received, neither artist deemed it a failure; neither Joni Mitchell nor Prince defined artistic success solely in terms of commercial sales or critical recognition.
Conclusion
Authors: Jeffries Judson L. , Reinhoudt Molly , Cochran Shannon M.
Published: January 2024

This concluding chapter reviews how Prince captivated America by being different. Many have argued that Prince was an original, to which the answer is, yes and no. Prince learned from others, borrowed from others, and was impacted by others. That Prince chose not to credit Rick James with influencing his style and music does not change the fact that from James, Prince appropriated a thing or two. He often dismissed those who saw the impact that Jimi Hendrix had on him, yet the similarities are glaring. With his myriad blend of genres that touch on some of society's most pressing issues, Prince has challenged the minds as well as captivated the hearts of millions of listeners. It has been more than seven years since Prince's untimely death, yet one can think of no artist (dead or alive) whose life, work, and legacy continues to garner the attention of the academic community. The chapter concludes that the book provides a unique lens through which to view Prince, resulting in a richer and more nuanced understanding of one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
John R. Neill
Authors: Pugh Tison
Published: January 2024

John R. Neill (12 Nov. 1877–19 Sept. 1943) illustrated all of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels except the first, as well as such works as John Dough and the Cherub and Sky Island. In this role he was charged with aligning his drawings to Baum’s texts, which in several notable instances included depicting their latent or blatant queerness. Following Baum’s death, Neill penned four books in the Oz series—The Wonder City of Oz, The Scalawagons of Oz, Lucky Bucky in Oz, and The Runaway in Oz—and these novels demonstrate his efforts to maintain continuity with the series while refreshing it for new readers decades after Baum’s death. Throughout his roughly forty years of illustrating Oz, Neill contributed his unique sense of its wonders and erotic subtexts to complement Baum’s, both by harmonizing texts and images, as well as by adumbrating their frequent engagement with queer themes.
Listen to the “Poor Girl Story”: (Re)Considering Southern Femininity in Early Old-Time Music
Authors: Prince April L.
Published: January 2024

Rosa Lee Carson and Roba Stanley’s songs “Poor Girl’s Story,” “Texas Blues,” “Going to the County Fair,” “Single Life,” and “Devilish Mary” contain plenty of contradictions. Simultaneously commercial and folk, moral and transgressive, modern and old, rural and urban, middle class and hillbilly, caricature and sincere—these records encapsulate the many tensions at the heart of southern women’s roles in the early recording industry. Carson and Stanley were ushered into the musical world by their famous Georgian fiddling fathers, and both made cuts that contained a range of musical influences: old tin pan alley tunes, traditional folk songs, blues, drama skits, and even a few self-composed numbers. Not only is their soundscape diverse and at times unpredictable, and their expressions of feminine identity both conform to and reject the boundaries long placed around women in country music.
Song and Sentiment in an Appalachian Woman’s Private Lyric Notebook
Authors: Stimeling Travis D.
Published: January 2024

The recent discovery of a handwritten notebook filled with popular song lyrics complicates the common depiction of rural industrial Appalachia as a homosocial masculine environment. Kept by Mary Olivia Smith (1911-1988), the daughter of a logger from rural Giles County, Virginia, over a period of more than a decade, the lyric book contains the texts of several dozen contemporary popular songs, as well as sacred compositions, and sheds important light on the ways that a young girl with limited educational resources used radio, film, and print media to fashion a respectable, working-class white female identity. This study offers a close reading of the Smith lyric book as both a collection of individual song texts and as a material culture object. Moreover, this reading is situated within the context of Smith’s personal journey from girlhood on a rural Virginian farm and in the timber camps of Virginia and West Virginia to life as a domestic servant in a major Appalachian urban center and a young wife in a series of rural West Virginian coal camps.
White Identity Politics
Authors: Ingram Penelope
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the rise of “hard” and “soft” white identity politics in the Obama and Trump eras. Ingram demonstrates how the convergence of digital platforms, networked media, and 24 hour “always on” news cycles participate in forms of race-making and how race and racial meanings are “prodused,” circulated and consumed across these media platforms. It argues that strategies of fandom (including performance and brand identification cultivated in entertainment franchises) are utilized by different kinds of media outlets, including mainstream news, social media platforms, and alt-right partisan news programming, and can cross over and become operable in political and racial identity movements. A transmedia and convergence culture approach is used to show how media narratives about three political flashpoints (DACA, #BLM, and gun control) were interpreted through stories about vulnerable whiteness represented in entertainment media.
When the Looting Starts, the Shooting Starts
Authors: Ingram Penelope
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the racist association of African Americans with criminality and lawlessness and how that association has justified and authorized excessive policing and impacted legislative and policy conversations regarding gun control. It looks at the political and cultural context surrounding the release of 2014’s Dawn of thePlanet of the Apes, which included an unprecedented number of Black deaths at the hands of white police, and the ensuing #BLM protests, including those over the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice. Ingram argues that the timing of the franchise’s release and its representation of violent, lawless apes, who seek revenge on humans for injustices done to them, cement a long-standing, racist association of blackness with animality and lawlessness, and justify and naturalize the incarceration of African Americans.
“Animals” with Guns
Authors: Ingram Penelope
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines how guns and their valorization and use in The Walking Dead work to uphold white racial politics and underscore a prevailing narrative in white America, exploited by Trump, that white culture is vulnerable to attacks from non-white others, and must be defended. Airing during a time of unprecedented mass shootings and efforts by Democrats to impose gun control, The Walking Dead utilizes a right-wing rhetoric that upholds a Second Amendment narrative justifying violence against the “Other,” variously defined. Ingram argues that the overt and constant scenes of violence against zombies occlude the racial violence that takes place on an intra group level, between white and Black survivors. In the first five seasons of the show, The Walking Dead promotes a survivalist, doomsday prepper culture that glorifies white masculinity at the same time as representing white men as victims that need to “take back” their country.
Of Chimeras and Men
Authors: Ingram Penelope
Published: January 2024

This chapter returns to the scientific questions raised in the Apes films, specifically those related to chimeras and germline manipulation. Produced and released when social and ethical concerns about bioengineering were heating up in the media and in the political and scientific communities, the new Planet of the Apes franchise films express an anxiety and ambivalence about enhancing animals through biotechnology which can be seen to intersect with white anxieties about the genome, and racial difference and its permanence. In these films, just as in the 1960s-70s franchise, the fear of enhanced apes, or advanced apes who can no longer be kept in their place, mirror white fear about the empowerment of Blacks. Drawing on the work of social scientists, geneticists, bioethicists, journalists, and cultural studies scholars, the chapter argues that monstrous themes and imagery in popular science fiction productions are racialized in the context of the resurgence of white supremacy and Neo-Nazi movements.
Black Horror
Authors: Ingram Penelope
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the generic elements of Get Out and Us and the underexamined role that form can play in an analysis of the politics of Black film. It argues that the horror genre offers a unique space for Jordan Peele to disrupt the visual representation of Blackness and to “trouble” the racial field in a way that allows for alternative possibilities for Black representation, and a way to make apparent the white investment in Black bodies. In both Get Out and Us, Peele draws attention to a white rendering of Black bodies by parodying the rendering itself and exposing the meaning of Blackness in a white field of vision. Ingram argues that while Black horror, like realist film, depicts Black suffering, its capacity to elicit an affective response from the white viewer produces a form of viewer engagement not witnessed in realist films or other kinds of horror films.
Animals with Technology
Authors: Ingram Penelope
Published: January 2024

This chapter argues that Ryan Coogler uses Afrofuturist concepts and conceits to reimagine Black power in ways that trouble and enhance the canonical white Marvel Cinematic Universe. Black Panther asks us to consider how the kind of world-making central to the fantastic provides new possibilities for Black identity at both a political and ontological level. In addition to its political critique of racism in America, the film offers a significant philosophical meditation on Blackness, and a revision of the divisions that have shaped colonial logic and excluded Black life from categories of the human. More than a projection of aspirational what-ifs, Black Panther posits an Africa and Wakanda so clearly fantastical that it illustrates through its cosmological and ontological beliefs and practices an alternative conception of Black being in America. The film unsettles prevailing conceptions of bestialized, thingified Black humanity, and challenges Afro-Pessimist conceptions of Black being as void.
Media Matters
Authors: Ingram Penelope
Published: January 2024

This conclusion returns to two of the franchises discussed in this book, The Walking Dead and Planet of the Apes. Both continue into the Trump era, yet the recent installments differ in significant ways from the earlier iterations, offering an alternative to the racialized fears stoked by media in the Obama era. In the persons of Negan and The Colonel, both The Walking Dead and War for the Planet of the Apes develop characters emblematic of the kind of fascist masculinity and right-wing extremism voiced by Trump and embodied in the neo-Nazi politics pervading his administration. However, instead of glorifying the violent oppressive tactics both men deploy, seasons 7-10 of The Walking Dead and the third film in the Planet of the Apes franchise offer Negan and The Colonel as a portent of what awaits an America supportive of and manipulated by the oppressive tyranny of leaders like Trump.
In the Shadows of the Big House
Authors: Small Stephen
Published: January 2024

In the midst of calls for the removal of Confederate monuments across the South, tens of thousands of museums, buildings, and other historical sites currently comprise a tourist infrastructure of the southern heritage industry. Louisiana, one of the most prominent and frequently visited states that benefit from this tourism, has more than sixty heritage sites housed in former slave plantations. These sites contain the remains, restorations, reconstructions, and replicas of antebellum slave cabins and slave quarters. This is the first book to tackle the role, treatment, and representation of slave cabins at plantation museum sites in contemporary heritage tourism. The book describes and analyzes sixteen twenty-first-century antebellum slave cabins currently located on three plantation museum sites in Natchitoches, Louisiana: Oakland Plantation, Magnolia Plantation Complex, and Melrose Plantation. The book traces the historical trajectory of plantations and slave cabins since the Civil War and explores what representations of slavery and slave cabins in these sites convey about the reconfiguration of the past and the rearticulation of history in the present. Considering such themes as the role of white ethnic identity in representations of elite whites and the extent and significance of Black voices and Black visions of representations of these plantations, the book asks what these sites reveal about social forgetting and social remembering throughout Louisiana and the South. It further explores the ways that gender structures the social organization of current sites and the role and influence of the state in the social organization and representations that prevail today.
Epilogue
Authors: Small Stephen
Published: January 2024

This chapter details the developments surrounding plantation heritage sites since 2011. It focuses on the research that provides insights into how the changing economic and political context in the United States has influenced the sites. The research also mentions the continuing tensions and the state of the cabins. The chapter explains how the developments primarily showcase the resistance to fundamental change and the continued prevalence of southern gentility, elite white lifestyles, paternalism, and romance as the dominant frames for representations at the sites. It also mentions the developments in US politics and society to address the legacy of US slavery.
Afterword
Authors: Small Stephen
Published: January 2024

This chapter considers the ever-present legacy of slavery and the Civil War in the United States. It explains that times have changed since then as the significant sites have been critiqued, changed, and documented professionally. However, plantation heritage sites continue to play a significant role in the dominant narratives of Southern history. Despite noticeable improvements since 1994, plantation sites still fail to tell a full or balanced story as several sites are still committed to symbolic annihilation and enthralled with southern gentility. Black people in the United States do not particularly have the resources to fundamentally challenge and shape museums and memorials as they face more immediate priorities than slave cabins, such as mass incarceration, police violence, and gun violence.
The Banjo Players
Authors: Allsbrook Jr. William C.
Published: January 2024

This section, at the beginning of Part 2, consists of biographies of each of the thirty-two banjo players interviewed, including three women.
Earliest Memories of Music
Authors: Allsbrook Jr. William C.
Published: January 2024

This chapter overviews the earliest memories of music from the interviewees. Earliest memories of music date from childhood, including family and friend gatherings, as well as church. Radio, records, TV, CD’s, and LP’s were most common. The Grand Ol’ Opry was important for older banjo players.
The Appeal of the Banjo
Authors: Allsbrook Jr. William C.
Published: January 2024

It was not easy for the banjo players to describe the “appeal” of the banjo. All loved the “sound.” Some mentioned “a lot going on,” others mentioned “driving rhythm.” Some liked the fact that it often played the lead. One described it as “commanding,” another “fun” and another said that it “grabs” you. Some liked “That Half Barbaric Twang” (book title, authored by Karen Linn).
Practice
Authors: Allsbrook Jr. William C.
Published: January 2024

All interviewees practiced diligently. Most, including all in the older age group, were single minded or “consumed” by learning to play. A few “muted” their banjo at night so that they could continue to practice after their parents went to bed. A few reported “drooling” on their banjo or going to sleep while practicing. At times a technically demanding portion of a song would suddenly “fall into place.” Enthusiasm for practicing was usually long lived. A few dreamed of a technical problem or tune and would wake up and practice it while it was in their mind.
The Future
Authors: Allsbrook Jr. William C.
Published: January 2024

Chapter 14 is an appraisal of the future of the banjo in Haywood County. “Makin’ Music” is a major cultural phenomenon in Haywood County. There have been many changes over the lifetimes of the banjo players that have diluted its in-home folkway roots, but these changes are not all bad. This chapter examines these changes and their significance. The future will be shaped by how this remarkable mountain culture continues to adapt to these challenges.
Pieces of Freedom
Authors: Timreck Lee Ann
Published: January 2024

Pieces of Freedom: The Emancipation Sculpture of Edmonia Lewis and Meta Warwick Fuller argues that material culture, and specifically the sculptures of nineteenth-century African American sculptors, Mary Edmonia Lewis (1844-1909) and Meta Warrick Fuller (1877-1968), are important historical artifacts of the Black emancipation experience. Through the Black bodies of the newly emancipated, Lewis and Fuller rendered both an artistic visualization of the Black emancipation experience and a historical counternarrative to the Lost Cause. As fine art, Lewis’s Forever Free and Fuller’s Emancipation statues are permanent images of a people’s strength and agency in the face oppression; as pieces of history, they tell the compelling story of the injustices and sacrifices, as well as accomplishments, made by so many in their pursuit of freedom. Their work also delivers a strong gendered narrative on the contributions and sacrifices made by newly-emancipated Black women, reflective of Lewis’s and Fuller’s own experiences with race and gender discrimination. Lewis and Fuller’s emancipation sculpture can teach us much about the social, economic, and political history of African Americans after emancipation. By integrating the artists’ visual and historical narrative of Black emancipation with the personal stories of the newly-freed, we see a lived history of ordinary Black Americans who accomplished extraordinary things in their pursuit of freedom. Their stories, told through the artistic legacy of Edmonia Lewis and Meta Warrick Fuller, are the heart of this book.
Thenceforward, and Forever Free”
Authors: Timreck Lee Ann
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the nation’s failure to deliver on the promises of emancipation, the rise of Jim Crow and segregation, and the impact on the lives on the newly freed. After the Civil War, the exuberance of the newly emancipated—the joy of being free, reuniting with family, legally marrying, and starting new ones—was soon tempered by the economic and racial realities of the post–Civil War South. Presenting this painful history through the stories and voices of nineteenth-century African Americans deepens our understanding of the world they lived in and how this shaped Lewis’s and Fuller’s artistic vision for their emancipation sculptures.
Alex Bostic, American Artist
Authors: Timreck Lee Ann
Published: January 2024

The afterword reestablishes the importance of Meta Warrick Fuller and Edmonia Lewis and their artwork and advocates for including their art in our nation’s history.
Plush, Plastic, and Plato: Purpose and Being in The Velveteen Rabbit and Toy Story
Authors: Hurley Melanie
Published: January 2024

The Velveteen Rabbit and the Toy Story films share four key motifs that develop sophisticated but markedly different philosophical perspectives. Through these motifs, Williams’s classic picture book employs a model of reality and knowledge similar to that which Plato constructs across his Republic, Symposium, and Phaedo, while the Toy Story films take a position that is similar to, yet distinct from, Camus’s position in “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Pixar’s existential commentary continues with WALL-E, showing that humans must struggle against hostile forces, most notably our trash, if we are to maintain life on earth. It is Toy Story, in abandoning idealist philosophy and idealistic storytelling, that takes the toy narrative in its necessary direction for the future.
“For Nursery Magic Is Very Strange and Wonderful”: The Queer Space of the Nursery in The Velveteen Rabbit
Authors: Herndon Karlie
Published: January 2024

The Boy’s late-Victorian nursery can be read as a queer space that allows for the Boy—a nameless stand-in for all boys—to play in whatever way he likes, particularly in bed, testing the boundaries of adult-sanctioned rules of gender and sexuality. The medicalization of nonnormative sexuality plays out here in the removal of the Rabbit from the nursery. This chapter continues the recovery work of queer theory, celebrating a space in which the rules of heteronormative adult gender and sexuality, particularly pleasurable activities, are transgressed to such an extent that the most loved toy is saved from the fire that seeks to eradicate Boy’s “unhealthy” bed-play. In this instance, the child’s intense love for the Rabbit queers the adult heteronormative notions of pleasure through rewarding the Rabbit with a real body, in which to seek out his own flesh-and-blood pleasures.
The Rational and the Irrational: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Excavation of Whiteness, 1935–1960
Authors: McLeod Lisa J.
Published: January 2024

Analyzing W.E.B. Du Bois’s books Black Reconstruction, Dusk of Dawn, and the Black Flame trilogy,Lisa McLeod explains how he employed rigorous academic research and philosophy, the crafting of historical narrative, and the deployment of creative expression through protest literature to mount sophisticated assaults on whiteness’s perpetuation of innocence, especially as liberal individualism gained more political traction towards the end of his life. Du Bois’s later work examined the psychological and social structures that normalize white entitlement, and he offered portraits of “well-meaning white people” that exposed the often shameful opacity of white Americans to the harm white supremacy causes. This chapter traces Du Bois’s evolving belief that reasoned argument with such an obtuse population is not effective in the struggle against white supremacy; it also demonstrates that he nevertheless worked to investigate that obtuseness with an antiracist eye toward its eradication.
The Dharma of Socialism: How Hindu Thought Influenced W. E. B. Du Bois’s Vision for Afro-Asian Solidarity
Authors: Balaji Murali
Published: January 2024

Murali Balaji reveals how Lala Lajpat Rai, an Indian nationalist leader and one of the leading voices of Arya Samaj, a reform movement in Hinduism that called for a return to living life according to the Vedas, shaped and inspired Du Bois’s thinking about Afro-Asian solidarity. For Du Bois, Rai’s faith—and his willingness to sacrifice himself for a cause greater than himself—profoundly stirred a newfound political awakening. Balaji shows how the Hindu concept of dharma, or righteous action, which Rai and Gandhi claimed as an underpinning their approaches to resisting British imperialism, influenced Du Bois merging his ideals of anti-colonialism and socialism. Through a close reading of Du Bois’s correspondence with Indian intellectuals and works like his novel Dark Princess,Balaji maps out how the dharma of socialism through Hindu conceptions of selflessness, sacrifice, and communalism inspired his attempts to foster Afro-Asian solidarity.
Blessed Are the Peacemakers, for They Shall Be Called Communists: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Religious Culture, 1935–1963
Authors: Sinitiere Phillip Luke
Published: January 2024

Phillip Luke Sinitiere examines the intellectual history of W.E.B. Du Bois’s dialectical analysis of American Christianity during his last three decades. This chapter reveals how Du Bois understood the interrelationship of religion and culture in the United States from the 1930s to the early 1960s. It explores the creative ways that his Black radicalism fostered an idiosyncratic, nuanced assessment of religion’s political and social significance. It also documents Du Bois’s abiding attention to how the ruling class wielded a spiritualized anticommunism that used religion to silence dissent and subvert freedom. Finally, Sinitiere’s study catalogs the reception of Du Bois’s materialist explorations of religion amongst religious professionals and ordinary people while disclosing ways that Du Bois, through thoughtful considerations of religion and culture, conceptualized and practiced freedom at a critical stage of his late career life.
W. E. B. Du Bois’s UnAmerican End, Reconsidered
Authors: Melamed Jodi , Monson Tyler
Published: January 2024

Jodi Melamed’s chapter, a revision with Tyler Monson of her 2006 African American Review essay on Du Bois’s posthumously published Autobiography, places Du Bois’s critique of capitalism alongside of the nascent democratic liberalism of the Cold War era. The authors explain how in revisiting the essay in the Trump era it was the criminalization of Du Bois for his witness for communism—and thus, according to the protocol of his witness in the Autobiography, for his critical consciousness of racial capitalism—that stands out. Melamed and Monson ask how Du Bois’s anticapitalist legacy orients the radical possibility of a “hermeneutic of disloyalty” in the era of Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump’s authoritarian administration. They also consider how the story Du Bois tells in the Autobiography, of coming into a critical consciousness about the role of race in capitalism, can inform contemporary struggles to actualize anti-racial capitalist thinking and politics.
“Texas Jack” (1937–1941)
Authors: Allen Paul V.
Published: January 2024

Chapter 2 focuses on the ways Jack worked to lay the groundwork for a career as a cartoonist. These include the invention of an alter ego, “Texas Jack,” and regular correspondence with established cartoonists such as Tom McNamara, Milton Caniff, and George Herriman. The chapter also discusses Jack’s early work, including having an idea used in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, drawing caricatures, working as a staff artist at an insurance company, and becoming an assistant to Elmer Woggon on the syndicated strip Big Chief Wahoo.
Love Is Ageless, Deathless … and Penniless (1951–1953)
Authors: Allen Paul V.
Published: January 2024

Chapter 5 is largely concerned with Jack’s attempts to find love. First the chapter details how Jack used the financial windfall to build a house in the King William neighborhood near the San Antonio River, and to purchase a piano. It also discusses how Jack used language and wordplay in King Aroo. That’s followed by the story of his failed courtship of actress Leigh Allen, and a whirlwind romance and marriage to writer Juliet Bridgman, which ended in divorce and heartbreak.
Junie and Jack Jr. (1953–1957)
Authors: Allen Paul V.
Published: January 2024

This chapter focuses on King Aroo’s declining commercial fortunes even while hitting a creative high point. Despite the publication of a paperback collection of strips, and the daily comic reaching levels of absurdity worthy of Lewis Carroll, King Aroo failed to grow its audience. Chapter 5 also details how Jack met, courted, and married reporter June Kilstofte. The two would welcome a son, John Wellington Kent Jr, in 1955.