bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Publishing Children’s Literature in the Caribbean
Authors: Nies Betsy , Vega Melissa García
Published: January 2024

Four Caribbean authors of children’s literature—Diane Browne, María Teresa Marichal-Lugo, Ada Haiman, and Joanne Gail Johnson—engage in conversation regarding the publishing experience within the Caribbean. All women, these writers reflect on composing original stories for a specific young audience. Their work spans the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first century. Common themes across their individual perspectives draw attention to the need for readers, young and old, to see themselves in story as well as engage critically with one’s immediate location. Present within the contextualized conversation is an awareness of the historical lineage of the region cutting across languages and political status. Through these four voices emerges a rich picture depicting how stories for children and young adults empower and ignite the young Caribbean readers’ imagination to exist beyond the colony via authentic and often subversive storytelling.
Making Memories or Pesadillas ?
Authors: Myers Megan Jeanette
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses Dominican-American Junot Díaz’s first children’s book, Islandborn (2018), and the author’s attempt to make Dominican history and literature tangible for young readers. By considering bells hooks’ “politicization of memory,” the essay assesses how Islandborn, via the perspective of various members of the Dominican diaspora with whom the young protagonist engages, divulges the shared memory of an off-island Dominican community. Leo Espinosa's graphics offer a Caribbean versioning of the metropolitan New York streets, representing American multiculturalism or as Rudine Sims Bishop would say, a “mirror book” of the diversity of the city. Diaz depicts the Dominican Republic’s dark history—including the reign of the brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo—in ways that are palatable to young children, showing that even if you do not remember your place of birth, you still are a part of a broader community of remembrance and continuity.
Caribbean Disaster Narratives
Authors: Kuwabong Dannabang
Published: January 2024

Representations of the environment in Caribbean literature have explored predominantly in the study of adult texts. Very few studies have been done on Caribbean children’s literature, especially concerning environmental/ecological hazards and disasters, except for the exploration of their folkloric elements. This chapter engages disaster and trauma theories to explore the representations of Caribbean children’s participation in mitigating the risks of natural catastrophes such as hurricanes and floods in Andrew Salkey’s Hurricane (1964); Debbie Jacob’s Legend of the St. Ann’s Flood (2004), Francine Jacobs’ Shauna’s Hurricane (2008), Verna Allette Wilkins’ Hurricane (2004), and Esmeralda Santiago’s “San Felipe 1928” (2018). The chapter stresses the etiological, cultural, and cosmological specificities used to inscribe and ascribe meanings to Caribbean children’s narratives and disasters, and assert their centrality in educating Caribbean children about vulnerability, resilience, and recovery from disasters, and about the need of living in harmony between humans and non-humans.
Faulkner’s Future Americans
Authors: Nisetich Rebecca
Published: January 2024

“At the center” of Faulkner’s greatest novels of race, writes RebeccaNisetich, “miscegenation seems inextricably linked to death and destruction.” Yet at their margins, we find a younger generation of “racially liminal figures” who bring a “tentative optimism” to their texts, an optimism, however, that flirts problematically with untenable forms of what we now call postracialism. “Faulkner’s Future Americans” focuses on three of these marginal figures—Lena Grove’s baby in Light in August, Jim Bond in Absalom, Absalom!, and Roth Edmonds’s child with his mixed-race Beauchamp cousin in Go Down, Moses—to argue that Faulkner, like his precursor Charles W. Chesnutt, experiments with the idea of racial mixture as a path beyond the nation’s one-drop racial politics toward a raceless future.
“It Takes Two People to Make You”
Authors: Adams Josephine
Published: January 2024

Tracking the competing forms of desire that circulate within the Bundren family to propel the clan toward Jefferson and the reader toward narrative resolution, Josephine Adams argues that Addie Bundren “in all her forms—alive, dead, somewhere in between”—should not be considered “the narrative’s determining force” in Faulkner’s fifth novel. In this essay, Adams contends that young Vardaman Bundren’s interior monologues in particular are“haunted” by the absence of his brother Darl, institutionalized in Jacksonas the novel comes to a close. Adams traces across these monologues “asubconscious series of attempts to name and to fill the void” created byDarl’s loss.
Undutiful Daughters
Authors: Napolin Julie Beth
Published: January 2024

This essay finds in Sophocles’s Antigone the paradigmatic example of Napolin’s titular figure, the undutiful daughter and sister who defies both patriarchal power and the edicts of the state by burying and publicily mourning her exiled brother Polynices. In Absalom, Absalom!, Rose Coldfied, Judith Sutpen, and especially Clytie Sutpen all perform versions of the Antigone role. If Sutpen arrives in Yoknapatawpha County as “someone who has sworn to forget” thehistories of trauma both undergone in Virginia and inflicted in Haiti, the novel’s undutiful daughters introduce a rival “narrative economy” and temporality, a feminine one “defined by the insistence upon remembering,” and indeed upon grieving and monumentalizing, those victimized as collateral damage in the Sutpen Design.
When Will We Be Extinct?
Authors: Jackson Robert
Published: January 2024

Robert Jackson finds in “family estrangement,” a problem ubiquitous in Faulkner but nowhere more so than in Go Down, Moses, a conceptual tool that allows the author to interrogate “the model of the heteronormative, genealogically blood-obsessed family” that served as “the dominant template” of his regional society. This essay proposes a new concept, the family network, to get at the media properties of genealogy itself, the way that, for the blood-haunted families and communities of Faulkner’s South, genealogy serves as a system for the transmission and storage of crucial information across not only space but time. At the same time, Faulkner’s deeply dysfunctional, unconventional families—mixed, queered, splintered, involuted—disrupt this transmission process, pointing at once to “deeply problematic origins” and to “the prospect of their own extinction.”
Faulkner’s Subversive Genealogies
Authors: Thomas George Porter
Published: January 2024

Thomas takes the concept of “subversive genealogy” from Judith Shklar, by way of historian Michael Rogin, to remind us that “all genealogies begin with a crime,” an exercise of power that the bloodline is invoked, indeed constructed, to legitimate and explain. Yet the “backwards tracings” of descent lines inevitably lead us back to the crime, the “brutal origins” of the ruling class. Faulkner’s genealogies prove no exception. As a case study in genealogical form removed “from the more familiar content of the ‘white’ houses of Yoknapatawpha,” Thomas turns to the cycle of narratives surrounding theChickasaw chief Ikkemotubbe: Go Down, Moses, certainly, but also “Red Leaves,” “A Justice,” “A Courtship,” and the Compson Appendix from Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner volume of 1946.
Beasts in the Mississippi Jungle
Authors: Duvall John N.
Published: January 2024

This essay argues that the blandishments of a fetishized whiteness ultimately override the painful racial knowledge Ike Mcaslin gleans from the family plantation ledgers and lead him to fashion a lineage founded in Indigenous and animal kinship and in the “nonbiological homosocial” bonds of the hunting camp—in effect closing rather than balancing the books on the Black McClaslins and ethnically cleansing his own ancestry. As the author goes on to show, however, the nominally all-male, non-Black world that Ike seeks in the Big Woods proves far too unstable to prop up his project. Instead, it teems with unpredictable, uncontrollable energies, particularly in the intimacy between Boon Hogganbeck and the great hunting dog Lion.
“Faulkner Wasn’t ‘Our People’”
Authors: Bertholf Garry
Published: January 2024

In this essay, Bertholf recounts his efforts to learn more about a man whose name he encountered in Faulkner’s 1951 and 1954 wills. Lawrence Arenza McJunkins, known to Faulkner as Renzi, lived and worked on Greenfield Farm, the author’s 320-acre property in northeast Lafayette County, and was the subject of specific provisions in both wills concerning his living and farming arrangements there. These Greenfield memories, along with the archival materials Bertholf consulted in his research, suggest the need for “some shifting of sights in the study of William Faulkner,” toward “a more capacious history” of “the material foundations” of aesthetic production, one that stresses “collective labor” over authorial genius in the creation of canonical literary texts—the sort of labor, for example, provided by the Black minders who attended to Faulkner and cared for him while he relaxed and wrote on the farm.
Race and the Animated Bodyscape
Authors: Agnoli Francis M.
Published: January 2024

Race and animation are increasingly popular subjects within both scholarly and popular discourse. Race and the Animated Bodyscape offers a blueprint for studying the intersection between these two topics, utilizing Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-08) and The Legend of Korra (2012-14) as case studies. By introducing and illustrating the concepts of the “animated bodyscape” and the “planetary production model,” this book seeks to explore how and by what means a racialized identity can be constructed and ascribed in animation. Each chapter examines different production processes behind the creation and assemblage of the visual, aural, and narrative components. Major topics include character design, storyboarding, voice acting, screenwriting, background design and painting, fight choreography, calligraphy, music composition, and sound design. By assembling original and pre-existing interviews with cast and crewmembers, this book highlights how these individual artists functioned and made decisions within these production communities. Race is an important topic within animation studies, one that requires a rigorous approach. Using the concepts of the animated bodyscape and the planetary production model, this book demonstrates widely applicable tools for future research.
Introduction
Authors: Agnoli Francis M.
Published: January 2024

This introduction provides relevant theoretical and historical background information in order to help guide the reader through the remainder of this volume. Topics include: a brief history of discourse on race and animation, definitions of race and racialized identities, a summary of the development of a racialized Asian identity within U.S. popular culture, definitions for the concepts of the animated bodyscape and the planetary production model, and a brief history of U.S. television animation and of Nickelodeon leading up to the development of Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-08) and The Legend of Korra (2012-14). This introduction also outlines the contents and main arguments of the five chapters within this volume.
The Aural Components of the Animated Bodyscape
Authors: Agnoli Francis M.
Published: January 2024

This chapter traces the development of the aural components of the animated bodyscape, specifically of the vocal performance, which is sutured to the animated figure in order to create an animated performance. This process begins with casting voice actors and continues with recording sessions, editing, and synchronization. By following this journey, this chapter addresses how whitewashing, accents and dialects, and celebrity voice acting can impact the construction of racialized identities in Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-08) and The Legend of Korra (2012-14).
The Narrative Components of the Animated Bodyscape
Authors: Agnoli Francis M.
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines how fantasy world-building can project additional meanings – including racialized identities – into the animated bodyscapes of Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-08) and The Legend of Korra (2012-14). Focusing on the writing process, this account highlights how and by what means artists can transform real-world referents into fantastical counterparts for integration into an established diegesis, opening up discussions of cultural appropriation. In addition, this chapter studies the formation and function of production communities – namely, the writers’ room – in this process of fantasification and therefore their impact on the production of racialized identities in these two animated series.
Visual Worldbuilding and the Animated Bodyscape
Authors: Agnoli Francis M.
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses how animation productions build fantasy worlds visually, how the art department adapts real-world referents across various processes. Highlighted subjects include the background design and painting, martial arts choreography, and calligraphy of Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-08) and The Legend of Korra (2012-14). By studying these processes and their surrounding production narratives, this account interrogates the drive toward authenticity within these series and its impact on the construction and ascription of a racialized identity.
Aural Worldbuilding and the Animated Bodyscape
Authors: Agnoli Francis M.
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses how animation productions build fantasy worlds aurally, focusing on the production narratives surrounding the music composition and sound design of Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-08) and The Legend of Korra (2012-14). This account highlights how sound functions as an agent of mimesis, grounding the more fantastical elements of an animated texts to the real-world, by evoking either historical contexts or lived experiences. This tendency, in turn, helps authenticate the racialized identities of the associated animated bodyscapes in these two series.
Fire It Up!
Authors: Caldwell H. Zahra
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses the sharply segregated music industry and racialized media treatment that produced, in part, the limitations on Rick James's stardom and Prince's international success. The chapter examines the American racial and social environment that stood as a backdrop to the stardom of Prince and James, their childhoods, their multilayered musical and personal influences, the impact of their home cities on their music, their work as businessmen and producers, as well as the media treatment that seemingly made one a global super star and left the other trapped in “Black music ghettos.” Significantly, the chapter explores the racialized treatment of each artist by audiences, promoters, and venues of music promotion, such as MTV, and coverage of the press. Both made historic imprints on the American musical landscape of the 1980s and beyond. The chapter unpacks the parallels and impact of both artists at the zenith of their, initially, dueling careers, in the late 1970s and 1980s. Although Prince's legacy will far exceed both James's and these decades, both artists belong in the canon of pivotal Black musicians.
Haze and Rain
Authors: Calabria Ignatius
Published: January 2024

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of Jimi Hendrix and Prince—both guitar virtuosos—their playing style and personalities, shared qualities and influences, and key aspects of their music. Both Prince and Hendrix demonstrated an uncanny ability to transcend the music and use the guitar as a mouthpiece for their immediate thoughts and feelings. However, the most significant connection between Jimi Hendrix and Prince was not their African American heritage, their guitar solos, their wardrobe, or their showmanship but their extraordinary roles as musical innovators. One used six strings to abruptly and permanently alter rock music, sending shock waves still felt to this day. The other steadily made music that would inspire others to create new genres of music, testing and expanding the categories of American music.
Before the Revolution
Authors: Jeffries Judson L.
Published: January 2024

This chapter presents an interview of Prince's first female bandmate, Gayle Chapman. As someone who was there from the very beginning, Chapman's viewpoint is unique as she talks about, among other things, her experience as the only female member of Prince's band. In particular, the chapter looks at her experience on American Bandstand, when Prince made his television debut in late January of 1980. Chapman recounts how Prince told them not to smile or speak so that they would appear more intriguing. The chapter then considers her upbringing in Duluth, Minnesota, where she would get invited to play at religious institutions with friends to play guitar and sing. Besides the keyboard and guitar, Chapman also plays the piano. Her musical influences include Joni Mitchell and George Benson.
From the Early Days of Rock and Roll to the Minneapolis Sound and Beyond
Authors: Kiene Tony
Published: January 2024

This chapter offers an interview of Pépe Willie, Prince's first producer. It begins by recounting how Willie lost his record deal, after which he wrote some of the songs that would later make up much of the 94 East Album, Minneapolis Genius. The chapter then considers the controversy over the ownership of the song “One Man Jam,” before looking at the release of Prince's debut album For You. During that time, Willie decided to dedicate all his time toward whatever Prince needed and started to work closely with Prince's first manager. The chapter also discusses the creation of Prince's band and how his first professional gigs came about. Ultimately, Willie felt blessed “to have had the opportunity to help raise Prince” in the music industry. The industry has always been notoriously harsh on those that actually make the music, especially Black artists. Willie was happy to have witnessed everything that Prince achieved.
“The Ways He Could Live Different Lives”
Authors: Fulton Will
Published: January 2024

This chapter details the development of Prince's music-making process in the 1980s. It considers how technological autonomy led to the creation of performative characters and alter egos in seeming interaction. Prince used recording techniques such as pitch-shifting vocals to explore identity play while challenging identity and genre taxonomy. The chapter then analyzes the recordings on which Prince performed nearly every instrumental and vocal part, including “Let's Work” (recorded 1981), “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” “Bob George,” and “Adore” (all recorded 1986), and studies their production histories. It shows how Prince developed an industry based on solo recording by transforming the collective practices of R&B, while challenging racial, gender, and genre norms in a segregated music industry.
Erotic Cities
Authors: De Lima Brian Jude
Published: January 2024

This chapter focuses on Prince's use of sexually charged lyrics and his erotic stage histrionics. His use of sexual metaphors—which embody what can be considered as synthetic human ejaculation—is evident within many of his earlier compositions between the years of 1980 to 1984. Indeed, his music is rife with sexual innuendo and eroticism. Conversely, within these very same sexually charged frameworks, Prince also teases toward an opposing binary—that is, his reconciliation for praising of a higher power within sexually charged themes. The chapter proposes that Prince's musical arrangements are acting as surrogate human genitalia during coitus. It explores his journey of “ejaculation,” one that he channeled into many of his earlier musical works, while also negotiating this instrumental anthropomorphic sexuality to his audience.
Sign o’ the Times in D(Construction) Minor
Authors: Dibernardo Sabatino
Published: January 2024

This chapter provides a “lyrico-philosophical” examination of Prince's name change. It argues that in an implied performative act of renaming himself, Prince successfully carried out an inaudible speech act that sought to undo the legal copyright to his musical production and performance of labor. His enigmatic semiotic gesture sought to sever “Prince” per se from himself and his record label without destroying the artist-subject Prince. Although this nominal renunciation/renaming has often been reduced simply to a marketing or legal stunt by some eccentric musician who, perhaps, took himself way too seriously, this act of attempted self-erasure had the momentous effect of decomposing the “self”-identity of a composer by a non-musical composition that “deconstructed” this constructed subject-identity as a legal fiction that could be controlled, maintained, trademarked, and owned by a record label. Indeed, through this act, Prince would abandon his elite status as a first-name-only celebrity in favor of an unpronounceable symbol that would serve as the signifying mark of a subject that could only be named somewhat “improperly” ex post facto by what he had ceased to be: S (“The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”).
My Pop Life
Authors: Garfias Antonio
Published: January 2024

This chapter presents a reflection that incorporates Prince's work into a long and winding life journey that the author finds both mentally and intellectually illuminating. It begins by describing the author's musical tastes and habits. He did not start buying his own music until he was in his midteens, so he used to collect mixtapes. The author first heard Prince from the radio while he was driving down Columbus Avenue in East Chicago with his aunt in 1981/82. However, he was not one of those fans who was an instant devotee after hearing the first few seconds of a Prince song. The chapter then recounts the author's experience watching Purple Rain. Ultimately, he continued to support Prince after Purple Rain, becoming a Prince fan, buying the albums, collecting the singles, and discovering the B-sides.
Introduction A Primer on L. Frank Baum’s Queer Lexicon
Authors: Pugh Tison
Published: January 2024

Throughout his fiction, both his Oz novels and the many others he wrote under a variety of pseudonyms including Edith Van Dyne, Floyd Akers, Schuyler Staunton, Laura Bancroft, and Suzanne Metcalf, L. Frank Baum employed a surprising lexicon including several queer slang words. For example, his novel The Fate of a Crown includes the characters “Lesba” and “Figgot,” with these names tellingly suggestive of lesbian and the opprobrious epithet faggot. These and many other examples of Baum’s lexicon suggest, but cannot prove, his familiarity with queer slang and thus prompt readers to consider the likelihood of queer subtexts in his fictions. Certainly, Baum was an inveterate punster, and while many young readers of his fiction would overlook any such wordplay, the preponderance of these instances argues for his encoding of queer meanings in his fantasy and other fictions. The Introduction concludes with an overview of this volume’s chapters.
L. Frank Baum’s “Progressive Fairies” and the Queerness of Children’s Literature
Authors: Pugh Tison
Published: January 2024

L. Frank Baum’s novels coincide with the rise of progressivism in U.S. politics, and they evince many progressive themes, notably women’s enfranchisement. Progressivism’s chief moral failure arose in its embrace of racist policies, a liability mirrored in Baum’s fiction. Whereas the fantasyland of Oz mostly evades derogatory racial depictions, Baum’s pseudonymous novels, many of which are set in the contemporary United States, denigrate a range of non-White characters. These issues are mirrored in Baum’s treatments of sexuality and gender, which register as surprisingly progressive in many moments of his fiction, although counterbalanced by other depictions. As a genre, children’s literature frequently reflects such tensions, in which opposing sensibilities fracture any presumption that its constituent texts create an “innocent” space for children. The carnivalesque pleasure of children’s fiction, which often suspends adult authority, invites queer subversions of politics, gender, and sexuality that are rarely tamed by the tale’s end.
Trans Tales of Oz and Elsewhere
Authors: Pugh Tison
Published: January 2024

In L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels, a boy named Tip learns that she is actually the lovely Empress Ozma of Oz and is magically transformed back to her true self. Although not a transgender character as readers might recognize one today, Ozma and her gendered adventures represent what we might term Baum’s “trans touches,” in the many characters who initially present as one gender but then reveal themselves to be another, as also occurs in The Enchanted Island of Yew, Queen Zixi of Ix, and John Dough and the Cherub. Baum also includes trans-ish characters in such pseudonymous works as Schuyler Staunton’s The Fate of a Crown and Edith Van Dyne’s Aunt Jane’s Nieces Abroad, thus demonstrating the potential of trans storylines for more realistic, if admittedly far-fetched, fictions. In Baum’s novels, the gender binary stands as a particularly fantastic construction of contemporary U.S. society that he repeatedly transgresses.
Queer Eroticisms in Oz and Elsewhere
Authors: Pugh Tison
Published: January 2024

In many of his novels, both those published under his own name and his pseudonymous works, L. Frank Baum includes many queerly inflected male characters whose masculinities subvert dominant cultural norms, including girl-haters, dandies, and mollycoddles. More so, Baum eschews depicting heterosocial couples and focuses instead on close homosocial friendships, including those, in a fantasy reformulation of a married couple, envisioning two men who share a single body. Of all Baum’s fiction, The Tin Woodman of Oz most forthrightly rejects the heteronormative imperative, in its questing storyline of the Tin Woodman seeking his lost fiancée and the many unexpected reasons precluding their romantic reunion. This chapter closes with a brief overview of Baum’s other odd and unexpected eroticisms, including his characters’ forays in fetishism and masochism. Children’s literature often eschews direct treatments of sexuality but Baum’s works deftly engage with the queer potential of homosocial friendships and other same-sex pairings.
The Queer Creatures of Oz and Elsewhere Eat One Another
Authors: Pugh Tison
Published: January 2024

Even if L. Frank Baum intended for the word queer to refer exclusively to the odd and the eccentric with no relation to matters of sexuality, it is striking that Oz’s eccentricity undoes its façade as a utopian realm and demarcates the impossibility of normativity for its eclectic range of marvelous creatures. This dynamic appears frequently in the question of eating and consumption in Oz and Baum’s other fantasy worlds, where a range of magical creatures daily face the possibility of cannibalism. Most societies view cannibalism as a particularly abhorrent act, and thus it demarcates the lines between civilization and primitivism. In Baum’s fictions, however, queerness and other enactments of antinormativity so characterize the social order that every meal sparks a potential crisis over who is consuming what—or whom. These dynamics demarcate Baum’s fantasylands as inherently queer spaces, for few norms, even against cannibalism, can function there.
Cultural Projection, Homosocial Adventuring, and the Queer Conclusions of Floyd Akers’s Boy Fortune Hunters Series
Authors: Pugh Tison
Published: January 2024

In. L. Frank Baum’s Boy Fortune Huntersseries, penned under the pseudonym Floyd Akers, the eponymous heroes, led by Sam Steele, travel across the globe in search of adventure and treasure. During their journeys to such destinations as Panama, Egypt, China, and the South Seas, the boys frequently disparage the native cultures with which they come into contact and conflict, with many scenes demonstrating their propensity to castigate others for traits they themselves evince. Deepening this trope of cultural projection, Baum also depicts the Boy Fortune Hunters denigrating the type of homosocial relationships and communities that they themselves embrace. Each of the series’ novels ends with the rejection of heteronormative romance, thus imbuing them with a queer subtext that fractures the binaries of cultural identity the boys otherwise uphold. From these converging perspectives, Baum establishes American boyhood and adventuring as inherently queer experiences.
“A Belly Full of Spaghetti and Ears Full of Song”: Felice Bryant and Country Music Songwriting in the 1950s
Authors: Bishop Paula J.
Published: January 2024

The country music industry has largely controlled the historical narrative of the genre, presenting it and its practitioners in a rustic authenticity that adheres to and upholds traditional, conservative values, particularly in regard to gender roles. This approach is particularly apparent when examining the history of country music through the 1950s, and it ignores the important creative contributions made by women who worked off the stage, such as Felice Bryant, who, along with her husband, Boudleaux, became the first professional songwriters in Nashville in the 1950s. To market the songs to artists, the Bryants invited them to their house and served spaghetti prepared by Felice. As Felice later noted, "a belly full of spaghetti and ears full of songs” made the artists more receptive to choosing their songs to record. Felice’s use of the domestic sphere allowed her to defy the gendered constraints of time, place, and industry to build a successful career, becoming what Mary Bufwack and Robert Oermann called the “woman who ignited the explosion of women writers on Music Row.”
Finding Hidden Women in the Feminist Narrative: Candie Carawan and Music in the Civil Rights Movement
Authors: Turner Kristen M.
Published: January 2024

This essay offers Candie Carawan’s Civil Rights musical activism as an instructive example that brings to light women who skillfully maneuvered within the cultural dictates of their time and constructed a meaningful life without challenging, or even seriously questioning, the constraints created by a patriarchal society. Although Carawan performed most of her Civil Rights work as Guy’s partner, she wrote a Civil Rights text for a labor song called “They Went Wild Over Me” before she met Guy that demonstrates how she achieved her political objectives while working within Movement conventions and according to 1960s gender roles. Carawan’s song demonstrates how she approached social justice and connected emotionally and politically with her fellow activists. A close reading of Candie Carawan’s biography and music demonstrate that accounts of erasure and male oppression must be sufficiently nuanced to account for the ways in which individual choices and everyday compromises influence how history is written.
Imperiled Whiteness
Authors: Ingram Penelope
Published: January 2024

This bookexamines how media make race and how those racial makings shape and construct white Americans’ sense of their racial identity in a “postracial” era. Ingram argues that in the Obama-to-Trump era, a variety of media platforms, including film, television, news, and social media, turned white identity into a commodity that was packaged and disseminated to a white populace. The book demonstrates how media in its myriad forms coopted a postracial narrative, making whiteness a disenfranchised commodity and reviving white nationalist and neo-Nazi movements on the alt-right. In doing so, Ingram argues that media enabled the rise of an overt white identity politics, a sense of solidarity among white people, including those who espouse liberal or progressive political views. Ingram explores the convergence of entertainment, news, and social media in a digital networked environment, and traces how media’s renewed attention to “mainstream whiteness” has propelled a resurgence of rabid white nationalism. Reading popular film and television franchises (The Walking Dead, ThePlanet of the Apes reboot, and the Star Trek reboot)through the contemporary political flashpoints of immigration reform, gun control, and Black Lives Matter protests, Ingram demonstrates how media buttressed and exploited an affective experience among white audiences—a feeling or sense of vulnerability and loss. The book also analyzes how contemporary Black filmmakers utilize speculative fiction to intercede in and disrupt this shifting racial landscape, through an examination of Jordan Peele’s films Get Out and Us, and Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther.
Media Events, “Pandemic Tv,” and the Ruse of the Postracial
Authors: Ingram Penelope
Published: January 2024

This introductory chapter argues that television programs and films streamed during the 2020 lockdown, such as Tiger King, Waco, and Contagion etc., constitute a cycle of programming called “Pandemic TV,” which fed into other media discourses surrounding the pandemic, and informed audience views of and response to Covid-19 in real time. As part of the Covid-19 media event, programs in the “Pandemic TV” cycle created, shaped, and helped to reinforce prevailing fears of “us” and “them.” “Pandemic TV” buttressed and exploited an affective experience among a white populace, a feeling or sense of white vulnerability or loss--“Imperiled Whiteness.” Utilizing a convergence/transmedia approach, this chapter examines how popular entertainment media works in tandem with other forms of media, including news media and social media, as well as political discourse on the left and right to circulate meanings around race, culture, and difference in society at large.
We’re All Infected
Authors: Ingram Penelope
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines how racial or foreign otherness has become associated with contagion in a white imaginary. It argues that the language of pathology and disease is used in news and entertainment media in discourse about the immigrant/refugee/asylum seeker and examines the potential impact of that association on the attitudes and voting practices of Americans (DACA). Through a reading of The Walking Dead and Elysium, the chapter explores how both entertainment and news media contribute to a sense of imperiled whiteness and reinforce and magnify more extreme right-wing views like Replacement Theory and “White Genocide.” Elysium and The Walking Dead are examples of progressive, postracial programming, which, in their depiction of whiteness imperiled by invasion/contagion of the nation state, re-race whiteness and offer new versions of enduring representations of whiteness that develop and reinforce white identity politics.
Simian Flu or Ebola Redux
Authors: Ingram Penelope
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines how the implied zoonotic transmission from ape to human in 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes draws on the long-standing racist association of Africans and apes to portray the Black body as a biothreat. Via an analysis of the 1995 film Outbreak and the 2014 Ebola crisis, Ingram argues that white fear of African American advancement and the myth of African American exceptionalism is represented in Rise as an uncontainable (simian) virus with the capacity to destroy the (white) human population or render them mute. Consistent with its location in the “postracial” space of Obama’s presidency, the film obscures its racial politics by its employment of the familiar formulaic conventions of the contagion narrative and its clever, sympathetic imagining of the backstory to the original Apes movies.
Bioengineered Monsters
Authors: Ingram Penelope
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines racial allegory in science fiction, through a reading of the racial politics of Star Trek: Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond. It explores the whitewashing controversy surrounding the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan Noonien Singhand JJ Abrams’diversity initiative following #OscarsSoWhite. It argues that, like other science fiction programming, these Star Trek reboots reflect, but also help to construct America’s changing views on race as brown and Black people are represented as instruments of biological terror with the capacity to destroy the purity and superiority of whiteness. The chapter also examines recent debates about bioengineering and eugenics and argues that the films raise troubling, yet timely questions about bioengineering and biological warfare and reveal that white fears about biology and developments in genetic science are frequently tied to white fears about racial others.
Interlude
Authors: Ingram Penelope
Published: January 2024

This chapter introduces the section on Postracial Resistance which pivots away from cinematic and televisual texts that foreground whiteness and turns to the ways Black directors, Jordan Peele and Ryan Coogler, “trouble” prevailing representations of Blackness in the realm of cinema. It argues that the expectation of racial veracity in realist film limits the artistic range of Black filmmaking, produces normative discourses about Black life, and appears to make Black lived experience and subjects knowable to (white) audiences. This chapter foreshadows the arguments made in chapters eight and nine that Peele and Coogler utilize speculative fiction to disrupt the realist visual field in which Black life has been presented as knowable and consumable. SF enables Black filmmakers to forego the responsibility and weight of having to represent the “truth” of Black life and experiences.
Introduction
Authors: Small Stephen
Published: January 2024

This introductory chapter outlines the history of slave cabins and their contemporary deployment in the Natchitoches heritage industry. The twenty-first-century southern heritage tourism offered powerful insights into the nature of representations and discourses of slavery. The insights examined the role of the state in the management, organization, and funding of contemporary southern heritage tourism sites. The chapter acknowledges that antebellum slave cabins, huts, houses, hovels, shacks, and ruins of twenty-first-century Natchitoches are the physical and institutional embodiment of social forgetting and social remembering. Moreover, tactics of evasion, erasure, and euphemism enabled sites to avoid addressing dimensions of slavery that may leave some visitors uncomfortable.
Slavery and Heritage in Natchitoches
Authors: Small Stephen
Published: January 2024

This chapter provides an overview of the brief history of slavery and slave cabins in Natchitoches. It includes the changing role of cabins in the postbellum period and later, while detailing their incorporation into heritage tourism in the 1970s through 1990s. Antebellum slavery in Louisiana and Natchitoches shared much in common with slavery elsewhere in the US South. However, the most distinguishing feature of antebellum slavery is the prevalence of chattel slavery and the economic exploitation of enslaved Black labor. The chapter also looks into the emergence of heritage tourism and slave cabins at the start of the twenty-first century.
Oakland Plantation
Authors: Small Stephen
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the slave cabins found within Oakland Plantation. It explains that Oakland Plantation is one of the two sites in Natchitoches owned and operated by the National Park Service to convert it into a national historic site. Heritage tourism at Oakland Plantation had several distinctive features, such as its impressive range of buildings and structures and being held in the hand of the Prud'homme family. The chapter looks into the treatment of slavery and slave cabins when the ownership continues to be unbroken. It highlights how Oakland Plantation slavery and the slave cabins were incorporated into the main representations of heritage tourism.
Magnolia Plantation
Authors: Small Stephen
Published: January 2024

This chapter looks into the buildings at Magnolia Plantation, which is one of the two sites in Natchitoches owned and operated by the National Park Service. The chapter explains that the cabins and other spaces in which the slaves slept or lived at Magnolia were incorporated into heritage tourism. Magnolia Plantation offered several opportunities for self-guided or guided tours of various outbuildings, which included a plantation store, the slave hospital/overseer's house, the blacksmith shop, and the gin barn. The chapter also considers the relationships between the Hertzog family, who owned Magnolia Plantation. and the Prud'homme family, who owned Oakland Plantation. It mentions that Magnolia Plantation received far less information and visitors compared to Oakland.
Melrose Plantation
Authors: Small Stephen
Published: January 2024

This chapter evaluates the buildings at Melrose Plantation, which is the most popular of all the heritage plantation sites in the Natchitoches region. The popularity of the plantation site correlates to the lives of Marie Thérèse Coin Coin, Cammie Henry, and Clementine Hunter. Narratives of these people were enriched by portraits, paintings, and images, but heavily saturated by several factors like Spanish and French cultures and Catholicism. The chapter details the incorporation of Melrose Plantation into heritage tourism in the 1970s and its management by a nonprofit organization. It also elaborates on the social and physical organization of heritage tourism at the site, while paying particular attention to the five slave cabins and considering their different treatment compared to the other plantations.
Conclusion
Authors: Small Stephen
Published: January 2024

This concluding chapter reflects on some of the key issues for Natchitoches. It covers how slavery and twenty-first-century antebellum slave cabins were presented in heritage tourism at Oakland Plantation, Magnolia Plantation Complex, and Melrose Plantation. The heritage sites are considered to be the physical and institutional embodiment of social forgetting and social remembering of the subordinated and exploited status of enslaved Black people. The chapter introduces the concept of a continuum of coerced accommodations that provides greater insights into the web of unequal relations between owners and the enslaved on the plantations. It details the tactics of evasion, erasure, and euphemism used to marginalize, neglect, or erase Black people.
Introduction
Authors: Smith Caroline J.
Published: January 2024

This chapter introduces the key themes of Season to Taste. It presents readers with an historical account of the rise in US-Americans’ interest in food culture, particularly food writing, in the early twenty-first century. The study focuses on food memoirs with recipes, written by women.
“A Woman’s Most Rewarding Way of Life”
Authors: Smith Caroline J.
Published: January 2024

The discourse of the Second Wave feminist movement is the focus of Chapter 2. In the early 1960s, this movement’s rhetoric polarized the roles of feminist and housewife and encouraged middle to upper-class, white, US-American women to exchange the private sphere of the home for the public sphere of the workforce. The focus of this chapter, Reichl’s memoir Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table (2001), was published during the early 21st century, but in it, Reichl details her experiences in the late 1970s as she rises to food writing fame from her position as a restaurant critic at New West magazine to her work for The Los Angeles Times as a restaurant critic and food editor. In the spirit of Second Wave feminist discourse, Reichl strives to clearly establish herself as a professional. She aligns her text with the literary tradition of the memoir rather than that of the cookbook.
Winking While we Bake
Authors: Smith Caroline J.
Published: January 2024

Chapter 3 begins with a broad analysis of the rhetorical strategies of Third Wave feminist publications such as Bitch and BUST. Unlike the rhetoric of the Second Wave feminist movement, the Third Wave feminist movement (the feminist movement of the 1990s) does not characterize the home as a place of imprisonment. Central to this chapter is my examination of the way in which racial politics plays a role in this return to the kitchen. This chapter foregrounds the work of black food blogger Jocelyn Delk Adams (Grandbaby Cakes) who adopts the persona of Friedan’s “happy housewife heroine,” recoding the image for contemporary viewers. In doing so, she calls into question the stereotypical representations that we see of black women in this space while simultaneously lifting up the food work of past generations of black women in order to remedy the incomplete and often false narrative that US-American viewers and readers often receive about black women in the space of the kitchen.
Kitchen Spaces
Authors: Smith Caroline J.
Published: January 2024

Chapter 4 focuses on two food memoirs – Giulia Melucci’s I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti: A Memoir of Good Food and Bad Boyfriends (2009) and Kim Sunée’s Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home (2010) – which challenge assumptions about women’s relationships with the food that they prepare and eat as well as the relationships that these women have with their bodies. Both I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti and Trail of Crumbs resist the standard, often negative, messaging that women receive about their relationships with food. US-American popular culture often encourages women to serve as the nurturers of others, eschewing the food that they prepare. This messaging reinforces the idea that women need to suppress their own appetites and be fastidious managers of their consumption. Sunée’s and Melucci’s memoirs serve as a site of resistance; the authors’ preparation of food and the enjoyment of it are a vital component to these women writers’ growth and development.
The Gender Politics of Meat
Authors: Smith Caroline J.
Published: January 2024

Chapter 5 focuses on Julie Powell’s second memoir, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession (2009). While Powell is most well known for her blog and subsequent book, Julie and Julia, Cleaving has been given less attention even though it is, arguably, the more interesting of the two. The book chronicles Powell’s extramarital affair, her separation from her husband, and her attempts to heal herself through an apprenticeship to a family-owned butcher in the Catskills. In Cleaving, Powell attempts to deconstruct not only her earlier memoir but the genre of the “foodie romance.” Cleaving responds to these texts by detailing the dissolution of a marriage (not the fairytale romance) simultaneous with Powell’s learning the very grisly art of butchering. Powell adopts the tools of the butcher and carves out a narrative in opposition to the foodie romances that have come before it.
Blog Her
Authors: Smith Caroline J.
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the genre of food blogging, looking specifically at the work of Molly Wizenberg (author of the blog Orangette) and Shauna James Ahern (author of the blog Gluten-Free Girl). Unlike most of the published food writing analyzed previously, these food memoirs are self-published; these bloggers post stories and recipes on a daily or weekly basis to their own blog sites. On one hand, their work resembles the more traditional genres of the diary and cookbook. Yet, their blogs also contain features that are not representative of those respective genres. These blogs, then, become a hybrid form of food writing – one which draws upon both the private tradition of diary writing and the public traditions of the food memoir and the cookbook. By structurally transgressing narrative conventions, Wizenberg and Ahern contribute a new chapter to the history of women and food writing.
AfterWord
Authors: Smith Caroline J.
Published: January 2024

Ruth Reich’s later work is the topic of the Afterword. In recent years, Reichl’s work has responded to American women’s changing relationships with the kitchen. Reichl’s later work, such as her novel Delicious! (2014) and My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes that Saved My Life (2015), responds to these shifts in cultural consciousness, revealing and resolving for herself some of the historical tensions between home/work, private/public, housewife/feminist.