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.

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.

The American South embodies a powerful historical and mythical presence, both a complex environmental and geographic landscape and a place of the imagination. Changes in the regions contemporary socioeconomic realities and new developments in scholarship have been incorporated in the conceptualization and approach of The New Encyclopedia of Sout...