Cobb, "surveys the remarkable story of southern identity and its persistence in the face of sweeping changes in the South's economy, society and political structure."--dust jacket.

Southerners love to talk food, quickly revealing likes and dislikes, regional preferences, and their own delicious stories. Because the topic often crosses lines of race, class, gender, and region, food supplies a common fuel to launch discussion. Consuming Identity sifts through the self-definitions, allegiances, and bonds made possible and strengthened through the theme of southern foodways. The book focuses on the role food plays in building identities, accounting for the messages food sends about who we are, how we see ourselves, and how we see others. While many volumes examine southern food, this one is the first to focus on food’s rhetorical qualities and the effect that it can have on culture. The volume examines southern food stories that speak to the identity of the region, explain how food helps to build identities, and explore how it enables cultural exchange. Food acts rhetorically, with what we choose to eat and serve sending distinct messages. It also serves a vital identity-building function, factoring heavily into our memories, narratives, and understanding of who we are. Finally, because food and the tales surrounding it are so important to southerners, the rhetoric of food offers a significant and meaningful way to open up dialogue in the region. By sharing and celebrating both foodways and the food itself, southerners are able to revel in shared histories and traditions. In this way individuals find a common language despite the divisions of race and class that continue to plague the South. The rich subject of southern fare serves up a significant starting point for understanding the powerful rhetorical potential of all food.

This exploration of Richmond's burial landscape over the past 300 years reveals in illuminating detail how racism and the color line have consistently shaped death, burial, and remembrance in this storied Southern capital. Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, holds one of the most dramatic landscapes of death in the nation. Its burial grounds show the sweep of Southern history on an epic scale, from the earliest English encounters with the Powhatan at the falls of the James River through slavery, the Civil War, and the long reckoning that followed. And while the region's deathways and burial practices have developed in surprising directions over these centuries, one element has remained stubbornly the same: the color line. But something different is happening now. The latest phase of this history points to a quiet revolution taking place in Virginia and beyond. Where white leaders long bolstered their heritage and authority with a disregard for the graves of the disenfranchised, today activist groups have stepped forward to reorganize and reclaim the commemorative landscape for the remains of people of color and religious minorities. In Death and Rebirth in a Southern City, Ryan K. Smith explores more than a dozen of Richmond's most historically and culturally significant cemeteries. He traces the disparities between those grounds which have been well-maintained, preserving the legacies of privileged whites, and those that have been worn away, dug up, and built over, erasing the memories of African Americans and indigenous tribes. Drawing on extensive oral histories and archival research, Smith unearths the heritage of these marginalized communities and explains what the city must do to conserve these gravesites and bring racial equity to these arenas for public memory. He also shows how the ongoing recovery efforts point to a redefinition of Confederate memory and the possibility of a rebirthed community in the symbolic center of the South. The book encompasses, among others, St. John's colonial churchyard; African burial grounds in Shockoe Bottom and on Shockoe Hill; Hebrew Cemetery; Hollywood Cemetery, with its 18,000 Confederate dead; Richmond National Cemetery; and Evergreen Cemetery, home to tens of thousands of black burials from the Jim Crow era. Smith's rich analysis of the surviving grounds documents many of these sites for the first time and is enhanced by an accompanying website, www.richmondcemeteries.org. A brilliant example of public history, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City reveals how cemeteries can frame changes in politics and society across time.

What does "redneck" mean? What's going to happen to the southern accent? What makes black southerners laugh? What is "real" country music? These are the kinds of questions that pop up in this collection of notable essays from Southern Cultures, the journal of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Intentionally plural, Southern Cultures was founded in 1993 to present all sides of the American South, from sorority sisters to Pocahontas, from kudzu to the blues. This volume collects 27 essays from the journal's first fifteen years, bringing together some of the most memorable and engaging essays as well as some of those most requested for use in courses. A stellar cast of contributors discusses themes of identity, pride, traditions, changes, conflicts, and stereotypes. Topics range from black migrants in Chicago to Mexican immigrants in North Carolina, from Tennessee wrestlers to Martin Luther King, from the Civil War to contemporary debates about the Confederate flag. Funny and serious, historical and contemporary, the collection offers something new for every South-watcher, with fresh perspectives on enduring debates about the people and cultures of America's most complex region. Contributors: Derek H. Alderman, East Carolina University Donna G'Segner Alderman, Greenville, North Carolina S. Jonathan Bass, Samford University Dwight B. Billings, University of Kentucky Catherine W. Bishir, Preservation North Carolina Kathleen M. Blee, University of Pittsburgh Elizabeth Boyd, Vanderbilt University James C. Cobb, University of Georgia Peter A. Coclanis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Joseph Crespino, Emory University Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University franklin forts, University of Georgia David Goldfield, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Larry J. Griffin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Adam Gussow, University of Mississippi Trudier Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Patrick Huber, University of Missouri-Rolla Louis M. Kyriakoudes, University of Southern Mississippi Melton McLaurin, University of North Carolina at Wilmington Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina Steve Oney, Los Angeles, California Theda Perdue, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Dan Pierce, University of North Carolina at Asheville John Shelton Reed, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Mart Stewart, Western Washington University Thomas A. Tweed, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Timothy B. Tyson, Duke University Anthony Walton, Bowdoin College Harry L. Watson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Charles Reagan Wilson, University of Mississippi C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999)

The essays in Rethinking Media Change center on a variety of media forms at moments of disruption and cultural transformation. The editors' introduction sketches an aesthetics of media transition—patterns of development and social dispersion that operate across eras, media forms, and cultures. The book includes case studies of such earlier media as the book, the phonograph, early cinema, and television. It also examines contemporary digital forms, exploring their promise and strangeness. A final section probes aspects of visual culture in such environments as the evolving museum, movie spectaculars, and "the virtual window." The contributors reject apocalyptic scenarios of media revolution, demonstrating instead that media transition is always a mix of tradition and innovation, an accretive process in which emerging and established systems interact, shift, and collude with one another.

Cobb suggests that the Brown decree and the civil rights movement accomplished not only more than certain critics have acknowledged but also more than the hard statistics of black progress can reveal.

A panorama of past and contemporary southern society are captured in Bridging Southern Cultures by some of the South's leading historians, anthropologists, literary critics, musicologists, and folklorists. Crossing the chasms of demographics, academic disciplines, art forms, and culture, this exciting collection reaches aspects of southern heritage that previous approaches have long obscured. Virtually every dimension of southern identity receives attention here. William Andrews,Thadious Davis, Sue Bridwell Beckham, Richard Megraw, and Joyce Marie Jackson offer engaging reflections on art, age, race, and gender. Bertram Wyatt-Brown delivers a startling reading of Faulkner, revealing the tangled history of southern modernism. Daniel C. Littlefield, Henry Shapiro, and Charles Reagan Wilson provide important assessments of Africanisms in southern culture, Appalachian studies, and the blessing and burden of southern culture. John Shelton Reed probes the humorous and awkward aspects of the South's midlife crisis. John Lowe shows how the myth of the biracial southern family complicated plantation-school narratives for both white and black writers. Showcasing the thought of preeminent southern intellectuals, Bridging Southern Cultures is a timely assessment of the state of contemporary southern studies.