In this stimulating study, Scott Romine explores the impact of globalization on contemporary southern culture and the South's persistence in an age of media and what he terms "cultural reproduction." Rather than being compromised, Romine asserts, southern cultures are both complicated and reconfigured as they increasingly detach from tradition in its conventional sense. In considering Souths that might appear fake -- the Souths of the theme restaurant, commercial television, and popular regional magazines, for example -- Romine contends that authenticity and reality emerge as central concepts that allow groups and individuals to imagine and navigate social worlds. Romine addresses a major critical problem -- "authenticity" -- in a fundamentally new manner. Less concerned with what actually constitutes an "authentic" or "real" South than in how these concepts are used today, The Real South explores a wide range of southern narratives that describe and travel through virtual, simulated, and commodified Souths. Where earlier critics have tended to assume a real or authentic South, Romine questions such assumptions and whether the "authentic South" ever truly existed. From Gone with the Wind, Civil War reenactments, and a tennis community outside Atlanta called Tara, to the work of Josephine Humphreys, the travel narrative of V. S. Naipaul, and the historical fiction of Lewis Nordan, Romine examines how narratives (and spaces) are used to fashion social solidarity and cultural continuity in a time of fragmentation and change. Far from deteriorating or disappearing in a global economy, Romine shows, the South continues to be reproduced and used by diverse groups engaged in diverse cultural projects.

In this stimulating study, Scott Romine explores the impact of globalization on contemporary southern culture and the South's persistence in an age of media and what he terms "cultural reproduction." Rather than being compromised, Romine asserts, southern cultures are both complicated and reconfigured as they increasingly detach from tradition in its conventional sense. In considering Souths that might appear fake -- the Souths of the theme restaurant, commercial television, and popular regional magazines, for example -- Romine contends that authenticity and reality emerge as central concepts that allow groups and individuals to imagine and navigate social worlds. Romine addresses a major critical problem -- "authenticity" -- in a fundamentally new manner. Less concerned with what actually constitutes an "authentic" or "real" South than in how these concepts are used today, The Real South explores a wide range of southern narratives that describe and travel through virtual, simulated, and commodified Souths. Where earlier critics have tended to assume a real or authentic South, Romine questions such assumptions and whether the "authentic South" ever truly existed. From Gone with the Wind, Civil War reenactments, and a tennis community outside Atlanta called Tara, to the work of Josephine Humphreys, the travel narrative of V. S. Naipaul, and the historical fiction of Lewis Nordan, Romine examines how narratives (and spaces) are used to fashion social solidarity and cultural continuity in a time of fragmentation and change. Far from deteriorating or disappearing in a global economy, Romine shows, the South continues to be reproduced and used by diverse groups engaged in diverse cultural projects.

"Drawing on his complete access to Green's papers and on interviews with surviving family members, John Herbert Roper covers all the important aspects of Green's life and career. By word and deed, Paul Green spread the faith of liberalism across the New South, which he insistently called the "Real South." Long after literary fashion had left him behind, he wrote daily and remained at the forefront of causes concerning race relations, militarism, women's and workers' rights, and capital punishment."--BOOK JACKET.

A record of all races and history of South Africa, featuring notable personalities and pivotal events.

Using cultural theory, author R. Bruce Brasell investigates issues surrounding the discursive presentation of the American South as biracial and explores its manifestation in documentary films, including such works as Tell about the South, bro•ken/ground, and Family Name. After considering the emergence of the region's biraciality through a consideration of the concepts of racial citizenry and racial performativity, Brasell examines two problems associated with this framework. First, the framework assumes racial purity, and, second, it assumes that two races exist. In other words, biraciality enacts two denials, first, the existence of miscegenation in the region and, second, the existence of other races and ethnicities. Brasell considers bodily miscegenation, discussing the racial closet and the southeastern expatriate road film. Then he examines cultural miscegenation through the lens of racial poaching and 1970s southeastern documentaries that use redemptive ethnography. In the subsequent chapters, using specific documentary films, he considers the racial in-betweenness of Spanish-speaking ethnicities (Mosquitoes and High Water, Living in America, Nuestra Communidad), probes issues related to the process of racial negotiation experienced by Asian Americans as they seek a racial position beyond the black and white binary (Mississippi Triangle), and engages the problem of racial legitimacy confronted by federally non-recognized Native groups as they attempt the same feat (Real Indian).

Named one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The South and West equally depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise a new birth of white male oligarchy, despite the guarantees provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by expansion. To reveal why this happened, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. "Movement Conservatives," led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy. Richardson's searing book seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.