Southern Cultures: The Help Special Issue Volume 20: Number 1 – Spring 2014 Table of Contents Front Porch, by Harry L. Watson "Lauded for her endless gifts and selfless generosity, Mammy is summoned from the kitchen to refute the critics of southern race relations; cruelly circumscribed and taken for granted, she silently confirms them all." The Divided Reception of The Help by Suzanne W. Jones The more one examines the reception of The Help, the less one is able to categorize the reception as divided between blacks and whites or academics and general readers or those who have worked as domestics and those who haven't. Black Women's Memories and The Help by Valerie Smith "Cultural products—literary texts, television series, films, music, theatre, etc.—that look back on the Movement tell us at least as much about how contemporary culture views its own racial politics as they do about the past they purport to represent, often conveying the fantasy that the United States has triumphed over and transcended its racial past." "A Stake in the Story": Kathryn Stockett's The Help, Ellen Douglas's Can't Quit You, Baby, and the Politics of Southern Storytelling by Susan V. Donaldson "Like The Help, Can't Quit You, Baby focuses on the layers of habit, antipathy, resentment, suspicion, attachment, and silence linking white employer and black employee, but in ways that are far more unsettling." "We Ain't Doin' Civil Rights": The Life and Times of a Genre, as Told in The Help by Allison Graham "Perhaps because the modern Civil Rights Movement and television news came of age together, the younger medium was destined to become an iconographic feature of the civil rights genre." Every Child Left Behind: Minny's Many Invisible Children in The Help by Kimberly Wallace-Sanders "The question arises: wouldn't the mammy characters be rendered more believable in their altruism if it extended beyond white children to all children?" Kathryn Stockett's Postmodern First Novel by Pearl McHaney "Pleasure and anger are dependent on one another for heightened authenticity. Discussing The Help with delight and outrage seems just the right action." Not Forgotten: Twenty-Five Years Out from Telling Memories Conversations Between Mary Yelling and Susan Tucker compiled and introduced by Susan Tucker "I am glad she used what the women told us and made something different from it. She made people listen. I know it is fiction, and I know not everyone liked it, but she made people not forget. What more can you want?" Mason-Dixon Lines Prayer for My Children poetry by Kate Daniels About the Contributors Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

In the Spring 2012 issue of Southern Cultures… Guest editor Marcie Cohen Ferris brings together some of the best new writing on Southern food for the Summer 2012 issue of Southern Cultures , which features an interview with TREME writer Lolis Elie and Ferris's own retrospective on Southern sociology, the WPA, and Food in the New South. The Food issue includes Rebecca Sharpless on Southern women and rural food supplies, Bernard Herman on Theodore Peed's Turtle Party, Will Sexton's "Boomtown Rabbits: The Rabbit Market in Chatham County, North Carolina," Courtney Lewis on how the "Case of the Wild Onions" paved the way for Cherokee rights, poetry by Michael Chitwood, and much more. Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

David Cecelski chronicles one of the most sustained and successful protests of the civil rights movement--the 1968-69 school boycott in Hyde County, North Carolina. For an entire year, the county's black citizens refused to send their children to school in protest of a desegregation plan that required closing two historically black schools in their remote coastal community. Parents and students held nonviolent protests daily for five months, marched twice on the state capitol in Raleigh, and drove the Ku Klux Klan out of the county in a massive gunfight. The threatened closing of Hyde County's black schools collided with a rich and vibrant educational heritage that had helped to sustain the black community since Reconstruction. As other southern school boards routinely closed black schools and displaced their educational leaders, Hyde County blacks began to fear that school desegregation was undermining--rather than enhancing--this legacy. This book, then, is the story of one county's extraordinary struggle for civil rights, but at the same time it explores the fight for civil rights in all of eastern North Carolina and the dismantling of black education throughout the South.

Finally, the defendant was called to testify. The air went from lighthearted post-lunch chatting to dour and intense. Judging from the sudden solemnity, one might have imagined that this trial was for drug trafficking or a violent crime. But it was about something that had much more profound implications: picking plants—specifically, wild onions." This article appears in the Summer 2012 issue of Southern Cultures. The full issue is also available as an ebook. Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

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.

In The Edible South, Marcie Cohen Ferris presents food as a new way to chronicle the American South's larger history. Ferris tells a richly illustrated story of southern food and the struggles of whites, blacks, Native Americans, and other people of the region to control the nourishment of their bodies and minds, livelihoods, lands, and citizenship. The experience of food serves as an evocative lens onto colonial settlements and antebellum plantations, New South cities and civil rights-era lunch counters, chronic hunger and agricultural reform, counterculture communes and iconic restaurants as Ferris reveals how food--as cuisine and as commodity--has expressed and shaped southern identity to the present day. The region in which European settlers were greeted with unimaginable natural abundance was simultaneously the place where enslaved Africans vigilantly preserved cultural memory in cuisine and Native Americans held tight to kinship and food traditions despite mass expulsions. Southern food, Ferris argues, is intimately connected to the politics of power. The contradiction between the realities of fulsomeness and deprivation, privilege and poverty, in southern history resonates in the region's food traditions, both beloved and maligned.

Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 best-selling novel The Help and its subsequent 2011 film center on the experiences of African-American domestic workers living in Jackson, Mississippi. Stockett’s sanitized portrayal of life in the Deep South where black women were charged with rearing white children while concurrently barred from sharing toilets and common eating areas with their employers simultaneously enthralled and disturbed readers and viewers alike. Notably, it is not the domestics themselves who render their tales but rather Eugenia Phelan, a white, twenty-something Mississippian with whom they hesitantly collaborate, who ultimately “voices” their stories of life during the harrowing early days of the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South. Essentially, these stories are articulated through the voice of a white woman; a fact that becomes even more complex when one acknowledges that this fictional tale of the inner life of black maids working in Jackson, Mississippi, one of the most notorious states in regards to racial atrocities suffered during the mid-twentieth century, is rendered through the words of a white southern writer. Despite the book’s positive public reception, its sentimental portrait of the lives of African-American domestic workers is troubling due to its heavy-handed use of dialect and “feel good” message about the admirable interventions of a white protagonist intent on alleviating some suffering while glossing over the vicious attacks on African-Americans during the Civil Rights era. The issue of visibility/invisibility is central in this text. At its most basic level, the text itself has lacked traditional critical visibility, as, currently, there has been a dearth of academic books focusing on this specific novel, although the novel and subsequent film received much attention in national newspapers and magazines, as well as significant critical debate in a wide variety of online venues. This collection considers why such sterilized versions of America’s complex racial history resonate so deeply in our contemporary timeframe. Essay topics range from examinations of the laboring black female body to the impact of domestic work on families, both black and white, to explorations of the connections between rhetoric, writing and race. Also included are several comparative pieces that draw connections between Stockett’s work and that of 1940s cartoonist Jackie Ormes, as well as filmic comparisons to Imitation of Life (1934 and 1959) and Black Girl (1966) by Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. With a “Preface” by Trudier Harris and the inclusion of several essays previously published in Southern Quarterly and Southern Cultures, this volume represents the first text dedicated solely to Stockett’s wildly popular novel and its subsequent film adaptation.