Introduction

As a child, Ann Pancake dreamed of escaping from West Virginia. Achieving this goal as a young adult, however, only served to strengthen her emotional and cultural bonds to the Mountain State. Over the last two decades, Pancake has become one of the leading Appalachian writers of her generation. Her work addresses many themes in its concern with the everyday lives of West Virginians and the making of regional and national identities. Pancake engages the history of Appalachia and its people, revealing the impact of deindustrialisation, rural poverty, and environmental destruction.

Published by the University Press of New England in 2001, Pancake's first collection of short stories,Given Ground, earned the praise of Elizabeth Judd in the New York Times for "depicting an ignored part of the country with a clear and admiring eye." Pancake, wrote Judd, possesses the "unusual gift for portraying difficult lives with a plain-spoken accuracy that makes them seem suddenly exceptional."1 Six years after Given Ground came Pancake's first novel, Strange as this Weather Has Been.2 Widely praised for its literary vision and striking language, the novel presents an unflinching portrait of a poor West Virginian family living in the shadow of a strip mine. Writing in the Iowa Review, Jeremy Jones declared Strange as this Weather Has Been to be "a true novel . . . brimmed with beauty and poetics but aimed at change and justice."3 Pancake's most recent collection of short stories, Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, arrived in 2015 to considerable acclaim; Publisher's Weekly recommended it as a "gritty, stylish assembly."4

Pancake's distinctive style and incisive portraits of Appalachian life have led to acclaim and awards. West Virginian novelist Jayne Anne Phillip characterised Pancake as "Appalachia's Steinbeck." Georgian writer and environmental activist Janisse Ray has described her writing as "shockingly pure, like holding gold in your hands." For critics such as Dan Chaon, Pancake's work is "astonishing . . . tender, alive, full of heart and empathy but never sentimental, full of clenched drama and secrets and surprises but always subtle."5 Pancake has received the Bakeless Literary Award for short story writing, a Whiting Award, an NEA grant, a Pushcart Prize, and creative writing fellowships from Washington, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Strange as this Weather Has Been won the 2007 Weatherford Award by the Appalachian Studies Association, was a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award, and was chosen as one of Kirkus Review's ten best fiction books of 2007. Most recently Pancake was chosen as the first recipient of the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer Fellowship at the University of Hawaii.

This interview considers the formative role of Pancake's childhood in Appalachia, and the impact of her time in college and working abroad on her literary aesthetic. Pancake considers her work from a variety of perspectives, tackling questions of violence, historical memory, race, and culture, before discussing the publication of her most recent collection and her plans for the future.

[This interview took place on Wednesday, March 9, 2016 with supplementary correspondence in July and October. It has been edited for clarity. Many thanks to Ann Pancake for being so generous with her time and her willingness to talk about her life and work. Thanks also to the Hagley Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, for providing the setting and the equipment for this discussion.]

Growing Up

JAMES: Hi Ann. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me. Perhaps you can start by offering a brief introduction to readers who might be unfamiliar with your life prior to the publication of Given Ground.

ANN: Sure. Until I was eight years old I lived in Summersville, West Virginia. That's in Nicholas County, an important coal producing part of the state. That was the period of my life in which I became aware of the coal industry and of strip mining, partly because we could see strip mining from our house, and my dad talked to me about strip-mining and the damage it caused. When I was eight we moved to Romney, West Virginia, which is where my dad's family has been for a couple hundred years, and it's agricultural—there's no coal up there. I lived in Romney until I was eighteen, and then I went to West Virginia University.

When I graduated with my BA at twenty-two, I went overseas, partly because I didn't think there was anything to write about in West Virginia, and also because I didn't have a job and the unemployment rate was really high in West Virginia. I got a job in Japan and taught there for a year. In my twenties I also taught in American Samoa for two years and I taught in Thailand for almost a year. I did a good bit of travelling in Asia and the South Pacific. I got my MA in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and shortly after, went into the doctorate program at the University of Washington, where I was from 1993 until 1998.

JAMES: I've read about your wanting to get away from West Virginia when you were growing up.

ANN: By the time I was a teenager I really wanted to see other parts of the world and get out of West Virginia. I thought the state was boring and very limited . . . at the same time, my whole life I'd had this highly complicated relationship with it because I was also much prone to homesickness. So I was both deeply attached to West Virginia but also feeling very much the pull to see places outside. I still have that conflicted relationship. Appalachia has an almost mysterious pull on people who grow up there, even on people who aren't native but who have lived there a long time. As a teenager, I felt very strongly the push/pull relationship with West Virginia I feel still.

JAMES: Do your siblings have the same fraught relationship with West Virginia?

ANN: Yes, I'd say the five of us who left the state do have a deep attachment that is also fraught. My only sibling who stayed is my brother who has a lot of addiction problems, which is why he will never leave. My sister, as I think you know, made a documentary film about mountaintop removal in West Virginia called Black Diamonds– she lived in Baltimore while she made it and lives in Philadelphia now, but she feels a profound connection to West Virginia like I do. We're all pretty attached to it. West Virginia is like no other place I've ever been, culturally. You can't find it or replicate it.

JAMES: One of your brothers is an actor and your sister is involved in film and documentary production.6 Did your parents encourage you to develop an interest in the arts as children and was that typical where you grew up?

ANN: My parents did encourage us in the arts, and it was not typical in our community, but my parents both went to college, which was also not typical. Only a small percentage of people in our home county finished college, even now, and that was even a smaller percentage in the 1970's. But my parents expected us to go to college, and we had access to many books, which a lot of families did not. My mom was an art teacher in high school so we were also given art materials from the time we were little. We were very fortunate that way. Most of us were born pretty creative, and I think it was wonderful to grow up playing all the time with these creative siblings because we could make up games and imagine things together. I believe this early kind of play was instrumental to how we later developed as artists, Sam and Catherine and I. At least it was for me. Growing up in West Virginia was poor in some ways, but it was rich in imaginative activity, and it was rich in its proximity to the natural world.

JAMES: What kind of literature did you read growing up?

ANN: Oh . . . stories about being outside. Books about dogs! Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, Sounder, that kind of thing.7 It wasn't that common to get kids' books that were set in rural areas, most seemed to be set in cities, so if I got my hands on books with rural settings, they resonated more. Where the Lilies Bloom was important to me. It was set in Appalachia. My Side of the Mountain was another one I really liked.8

JAMES: What kind of things would you write as a child?

ANN: When I began to write, I usually wouldn't finish things, but I would write the starts to disaster stories or adventure stories. I didn't understand what "literature" was or why you would read it, so as a teenager, I read authors like Stephen King. But by the time I was sixteen, along with the disaster stories and horror stories, I wrote a few pieces set in West Virginia, pieces that were realism and based on my own experiences. Even then, I knew that those stories felt different in my body.

JAMES: Living so close to the boundaries of other states, how did you identify as a West Virginian?

ANN: Growing up, many of us were very aware we were West Virginian. As a kid in West Virginia, you get a lot of messaging from the larger culture and from the states surrounding you that your place is more backwards, that you are hicks. And, of course, the media delivered that message all the time about "hillbillies." So I understood us as underdogs and I understood that others looked down on us. That sense of identity didn't come from my parents, it came more from the dominant culture. And anytime we ventured out of West Virginia (not that it was common) I was very aware of how West Virginia was different, and how people considered us lesser than them.

College and Travel

JAMES: Why did you decide to stay in West Virginia for college?

ANN: It was an economic thing. I didn't know how to get scholarships anywhere else, and my dad planned to pay for it, so he said we needed to go to school in state. I did get a good scholarship from WVU after my first semester.

JAMES: How was college? Was it strange being close to and yet apart from your family?

ANN: College was really difficult for me socially. I did fine academically, but going to Morgantown was a culture shock, even though it was only a hundred miles from Romney. Now I know a small college would have been much better for me. I don't know what WVU is like now, but at that time we had a large number of out of state students, partly because our tuition was so cheap, and the whole time I was there I only had one professor who was actually from Appalachia. I experienced a lot of culture clash at WVU and little sensitivity to that on the part of the faculty and the administration. I think it's different there now.

JAMES: In what ways did you experience this culture clash?

ANN: Our accents marked us. You'd open your mouth, and others would make assumptions about your intelligence and class and politics and your level of sophistication. It made you want to keep quiet. I think now about interviews Catherine and I did for her documentary, and how people in southern West Virginia would preface things by saying, "Now, I can't talk good," and then they'd say something incredibly insightful. In their accent.

JAMES: Early in Strange as this Weather Has Been you describe the loneliness of your protagonist Lace at West Virginia University in a way that feels intensely autobiographical.9

ANN: Yeah it is very autobiographical. I mean, I stayed, I didn't quit, but yeah a lot of that is autobiographical.

JAMES: Lace ends up dropping out of West Virginia University to return to the mountains. Did you ever think about following that trajectory?

ANN: Oh yeah, I thought about dropping out, but again, the alternatives were worse. By that time in my life, I'd worked fast food and done line work and waited tables and worked in a grocery store—I realized that if I dropped out, those kinds of jobs would be my future.

JAMES: After college you just split for Japan.

ANN: Yeah [laughs]

JAMES: Why?

ANN: I heard about a job there from a friend, heard that the owner of a language school in Japan was coming to campus to interview, and I interviewed, and I got it. I had never, ever thought about going to Japan. But I was working at Wendy's, after graduating with my BA in English, no teaching certificate. Unemployment in West Virginia was 12% then. It could have been anybody that showed up, from Norway or South Africa, I think I would have gone.

JAMES: In terms of teaching abroad, particularly teaching English as a foreign language, do you feel that process of thinking about the construction of language had an impact on your own writing?

ANN: Hmm . . . that's a really good question. I think what had an impact was less the actual teaching of English than being in cultures that weren't American and weren't Appalachian. By being in such a radically different culture, I recognized that Appalachia itself had its own distinct and interesting culture, and I started to understand how different our language was from Standard English. It's hard to describe how mind-expanding it was to go from West Virginia to Japan. I'd not even been on a commercial airplane. As an artist and a writer from West Virginia living in Japan, I would feel like I had eyes opening all over my head. Also the Japanese relationship to art and to perception . . . their attentiveness and receptiveness to beauty in the everyday was something they gave to me.10

Language and Regional Dialect

ANN: When I first started writing about West Virginia, I wrote with dialect by default, more or less unconsciously, because I wasn't yet very aware that we spoke a dialect nor was I aware that our accent was as strong as it was. I became more aware of the dialect in my stories as I got older and left West Virginia. I write very intuitively. When I'm doing early drafts I hear the story in my head or I hear sounds in my head or the characters talking in my head, and if I'm writing about West Virginia, those voices and sounds naturally come as dialect. Over the decades I have come to think more consciously about the politics of dialect. Dialect in literature can be used in a demeaning way, to set aside the characters who use dialect as "less than" the writer, the reader, and the characters who don't use dialect. Or, one can use dialect in a culturally sensitive and less politically regressive way. I, of course, aim for the latter. I want to use dialect in ways that empower the people I write about and in ways that show how beautiful and inventive Appalachian language can be.

JAMES: It feels like there is a form of double movement here where, to teach English as a foreign language, you became very aware of your own dialect, and the pressure to mould your own patterns of language into a standardised form of English. How aware of that conflict were you?

ANN: When I first left West Virginia and was teaching ESL and then attending graduate school, I felt compelled to use Standard English exclusively and to clean up my accent. Once in Japan when teaching kindergartners, I walked in a classroom after six months or so and said "Good morning, how are you?" And they came right back with, "Fahhhn, Thank you." And I was kind of horrified, that without my knowledge, I had taught these forty, five-year-old Japanese kids English with an Appalachian accent without knowing I was doing that. So certainly during my twenties and during graduate school I tried to mask or change my accent. I don't worry about that so much anymore, although I know when I'm not home, my accent is much diminished. But I'm lucky because I can go back and forth, speak without the accent and speak with it, whereas some of my siblings have lost their accent and can't get it back.

JAMES: Do you worry about losing your accent? How does your accent relate to your identification with West Virginia?"

ANN: I have worried about it. But I know now it's not going to be lost because I'm fifty-three and if I go home I can go right back into it. It's not as strong as when I was little, but it's still in there.

JAMES: And after Japan you returned to the States, and then went to teach in American Samoa?

ANN: Yes, after Japan, I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico for a year. After that, I taught in American Samoa. This was again economic necessity and also a desire for adventure.

JAMES: Did living in American Samoa affect the way you felt about yourself as an American?

ANN: That's a good question. In American Samoa, I lived for the first time in a place that had been colonized by the United States. I became acutely aware of colonization in the South Pacific and also more aware of the relationship between the US and other countries, the way America exerts power over other countries and exploits them.

JAMES: Did you see similarities or connections between class inequalities or exploitation in West Virginia, and American Samoa as part of a larger colonial project?

ANN: I did, I did. The connections became even more clear to me when I started living in parts of the US that weren't Appalachia, and as I began to understand dominant middle class white culture in the US. As I came to recognize the class discrepancies within the U.S. and realized how little economic and political power Appalachia had, I saw the relationship between Appalachia and exploited non-Western countries. I realized how Appalachia can be seen as a resource colony for the larger United States. And those connections became more defined during graduate school when I started to read postcolonial theory and post-Marxist theory. The only places I've seen people as poor as they are in parts of southern West Virginia was in Indonesia and Thailand.

JAMES: Did that experience impact your direction in graduate school?

ANN: Yes. I wrote my master's thesis on a Samoan writer, Albert Wendt, using postcolonial theory. The driving question of my PhD dissertation was how Americans sustain their delusion that we have essentially a classless society given the glaring economic disparity in this country. I explored that question through nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and film. When Americans can't blame class discrepancy on racism, they often explain poverty as temporary. The idea is that the lower classes will eventually catch up, in time. This has been used to explain the "Appalachian problem," when Appalachia's poverty is not attributed to how dumb and lazy we are.

JAMES: Alongside your dissertation were you still writing fiction?

ANN: I was writing fiction whenever I could. That usually meant during breaks between quarters. While I was writing so much intellect-driven scholarly work, the pressure to write intuitive fiction would build, so when I had a break, the fiction would kind of come boiling out.

Early Work and Literary Style

JAMES: Your first published collection Given Ground was released not too long after you finished graduate school. Was that writing you had been collecting and publishing over a period of time?

ANN: Yes. The oldest story in that book, "Getting Wood,"I wrote in 1987. Those stories were not written as a collection but pulled together over a period of years.

JAMES: How did you pick the stories you wanted to put into the collection?

ANN: I pulled together Given Ground when I needed to publish a book for tenure. I put into it every story I'd written that seemed finished enough, and then received feedback from a few friends. I jettisoned one story, then wrote "Redneck Boys" to complete the book. Half of the stories had been published in literary journals already, so that was a kind of confirmation that they were solid enough to put into the collection. However, if I hadn't had the pressure of tenure, I wouldn't have tried to publish that book because I didn't think it was strong enough to find a publisher. Not yet.

JAMES: Did the reaction to the book surprise you? Or is critical acclaim not something you really put a lot of weight on?

ANN: The award, the Bakeless Prize, was a huge surprise. And I was surprised, too, by how the book has been received. It's not an easy book in a lot of ways. The sensibility and style are idiosyncratic, I think. The subject matter is dark. I've come to understand that it's not ever going to reach a broad audience, but those readers it does reach, it reaches deeply, and that's fine with me.

JAMES: To what extent can that idiosyncrasy be traced back to West Virginia? Or, to your broader nomadic experience as a young adult?

ANN: The idiosyncrasy in my writing is mostly rooted in having grown up in WV, although I may not have recognized those idiosyncratic parts without the perspective of having lived in wildly different cultures outside West Virginia. But part of the idiosyncrasy I think I was just born with.

JAMES: You've been praised for moving away from a literary tradition rooted in formula and caricature, and for the complexity of your characterisation of both Appalachia's land and people. Was that always explicit in your work?

ANN: I was aware that I was resisting stereotype by the time I was writing in college. There are plenty of amazing Appalachian writers who work with complex representations of our region and who influenced me. Still, much writing about Appalachia over the past 150 years, especially writing that has gotten wide distribution, has been by outsiders, and a lot of that perpetuates the usual stereotypes. I've come to believe that the general reading public expects those stereotypes, so publishers expect them, too. But what I also understand are the political ramifications of stereotypes—they demean the people, make it easier to justify their exploitation, easier to see them as worthless. So I've always been very sensitive about complicating or overturning the usual caricatures and stereotypes.

JAMES: Could you name some of those writers, and say how their work appeals to you and what makes it unique?

ANN: Some writers from West Virginia who work with complex representations of the region and who influenced me as a younger writer include Breece Pancake, Jayne Anne Phillips, Denise Giardina, Davis Grubb, and Chuck Kinder.11All of these writers grew up in West Virginia. Each has a different vision of the place, but each vision presents our culture with a nuanced depth perception that complicates the one-note picture of Appalachia so often perpetuated by outsider writers. They offer characters struggling with internal contradictions; they provide context and history that help shed light on the state's darker elements; they carry a sense of place deep in their bodies; and they do amazing things with our language.

There are also West Virginia writers younger than I am who deserve far more recognition than they've received so far, writers who are writing better, in my opinion, than most of their peers outside the region: Jessie Van Eerden; Matthew Neil Null; Glenn Taylor. Only Glenn has received much notice from the wider literary establishment.12

JAMES: The way you write about Appalachia is clearly very striking, but also something which can be co-opted into broader cultural/media narratives of Appalachian rural poverty that offer a simplistic and frequently unflattering image of Appalachian life—do you grapple with this as a writer, how aware of it are you, does it affect your craft or editing process?

ANN: I'm very aware of how easily one can lapse into stereotype when writing about Appalachia. Appalachian people in the world are confronted with stereotypes about themselves constantly, so we're sharply conscious of them. Still, in early drafts, I might fall into a stereotype because I haven't gotten to the stage of the work where I'm complicating things. So, to answer your question, when I'm writing about violence in Appalachia, I try to be careful to complicate the issue. I try to tell the truth, and I try to tell it with context and by offering different perspectives on the violence and by making the perpetrators and the victims full human beings as opposed to flat caricatures.

West Virginia is its own culture within Appalachian culture, and Appalachian culture, in turn, shares some qualities with US southern culture. If I'm around Southerners there is a feeling of familiarity and home, more so than if I'm around people from Pennsylvania, even though Pennsylvania is fifty miles from where I grew up. I've also been influenced as a writer primarily by writers from the South and from Appalachia.

JAMES: I wanted to talk a little about your use of violence in your writing. One of the recurrent themes in your work is ghosts, especially in relation to the Confederacy and the Civil War. How does that historical violence, or its afterlife, translate into and overlap with physical or literal violence?

ANN: That's a good observation and a good question. I'm not sure how exactly to answer it. Appalachia does have a violent past: the violence of the Civil War and the "Indian" wars before that; the violence inflicted on the environment starting from the time of industrialization; the violence surrounding the labor movement in the early part of the twentieth century; the forms of violence the larger nation imposes on Appalachia in its appetite for Appalachian resources. Appalachian people are not more violent than other Americans, however, despite popular narratives to the contrary. In fact, before the drug epidemic, West Virginia consistently had the lowest violent crime rate in the nation. Still, I believe that all that violence in our past continues to manifest in our present.

The violence to the environment continues, and there is not the political will to stop it, and there is much violence suffered by Appalachia's people. Although often that's self-inflicted: addiction, overdose, suicide. I believe that self-inflicted violence is related to environmental destruction and economic exploitation. I recognize that my work contains a fair amount of literal violence. Some of that is just factual, reflecting the region's history. Some of the violence in my work, though, probably comes out of my love and hate for the region, my fears of and for the region, and my deep desires for the region. The violence may arise from all that conflicted unconscious material.

JAMES: How much of that fear comes from a sense of displacement, or fracture? Earlier you talked about becoming aware of your identity as a West Virginian through interacting with people from surrounding states. You describe a sense of "we are this because we are not something else." How much of that can be traced back to the Civil War?

ANN: West Virginia's paradoxical place in the Civil War is one of the reasons I find West Virginia fascinating. The state separated from Virginia to be part of the Union in 1863, and popular belief is that we did this because we were against slavery. The truth about our secession is much more complicated and is tied also to the schemes of industrialists. There were certainly Union sympathizers in West Virginia and Union troops. My county, Hampshire, was very Confederate, though, with slave-owners, including my own family. Romney was right on the border, and Romney changed hands between the Union and the Confederacy fifty-four times during the war. I grew up playing in Civil War trenches a mile behind my house.13The remnants of the war were very present when I was growing up. And there are stories my family has passed down from the war—my family was Confederate identified, so their stories are about the Yankees coming in and raiding the farm.

JAMES: That feeds into another question I wanted to ask about the role of race in your work—I believe West Virginia is the third or fourth whitest state in the country.14

ANN: West Virginia is very white, but there are and were African-Americans there. It's true, they don't often appear in my work, and I don't think I have any who are main characters. I believe this is the case because I don't want to misappropriate or misrepresent them. My personal relationship with race growing up taught me a lot. My county was very racist and still is, but my parents were much more liberal than most people there. My parents tried to bring us up with a "colorblind" philosophy: everyone is the same regardless of skin color, which also of course isn't true, but it was pretty enlightened for those times and that place. In junior high and high school I had an African-American boyfriend. I haven't talked about that or written about it much, I probably should. That certainly opened my eyes to racism, by the time I was fourteen, because of the kinds of insults I would receive and also because I started to see through my boyfriend's perspective. It also called into question my belief in Christianity. I started to reject the church at that time in large part because I saw very clearly its hypocrisy concerning race, at least where I lived.

JAMES: In your work you're very aware of trying to offer a representative account of West Virginian life. Are you more reluctant to write about African American experience?

ANN: Yeah, I'm much more comfortable writing about class. It's good that you bring that up, people don't usually ask me about it. The truth is, I do have experience with race in Appalachia. I need to ask myself why I don't write more about it.

JAMES: I want to read a short moment from your short story "Ghostless" which encapsulates one of the reasons I enjoy your writing so much:

The cold came high in my chest, but the wind had finally laid and from some distance I could feel the heat off the horse. The hide-odor off the horse, that soily smell he carried even in winter. I pushed my face into it, into the hollow behind the shoulder, before the belly swell . . . . I still had horse on my hands, and I smeared them across my Sunday pants, listening, the wood fire brightening my back.

That's gorgeous. The physicality of your writing, its tactile nature, your relationship to senses and sensory language. Where does that come from and how has it developed over time?

ANN: I write by sinking myself as deeply as I can into a place or a person, then imagining how the character's senses would respond to a situation, or imagining how I personally would react sensorily to a place. Certainly touch and smell in particular are powerful for me in the way they evoke memories. The way they are more animal. I also revise a whole lot, so as I do more drafting, more of that sensory detail comes in.

JAMES: And growing up in West Virginia played an important role in developing that detail in your work?

ANN: Now that I've lived out of West Virginia I've come to understand that growing up in Appalachia usually means growing up closer to the ground than one might in other places. Growing up in Appalachia in the 70's was pretty raw. You were not sheltered in the ways the middle-class is sheltered in Seattle. We had a lot of tactile interaction with the natural world, plants and animals, we were raised working big gardens and running the woods, and we saw our food get killed and skinned out and butchered. We ate that. I think as little kids we were very directly in touch with our senses. We weren't inside, we weren't on computers. I could also identify how poor people were by how they smelled, because the really poor people didn't have plumbing, so couldn't wash like we could. I see this as a metaphor for how white poverty is sometimes invisible in this country.

JAMES: How do you keep that visceral relationship to West Virginia in your writing?

ANN: I try to get home at least twice a year, and the place is very deeply embedded in my memory and in my body, so it's present to some extent even when I'm not there. When I do return, I can settle back into the land pretty quickly. At the same time, the culture in West Virginia has changed since I was a kid. Also, at this point in my life and my career, I'd like to be writing more about places that aren't West Virginia. That'll happen some in my next book.

Presents, Pasts, and Futures

JAMES: Your latest collection Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley remains centered in West Virginia, but in a different way. There seems to be more scope for hope or forward momentum than in your earlier writing.

ANN: I'd agree with that, I think part of it is time of life. I'm at a point in my life where I just can't bear to be spending all that time in darkness like I could while writing Given Ground and some of my earlier work. I also think that, just in order to survive as an American in 2016, I've had to try to figure out ways to look towards light exactly because we are in such a dark time, from a certain perspective. I also think—I wrote about this in an essay for the Georgia Review—I'm finished with writing about how things are hurt in Appalachia.15 I'm tired of documenting destruction. I'm committed to writing that imagines unconventional ways to relate to the natural, including the natural world in Appalachia. Some of the stories in Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley such as "Sab" or "The Following" play with redefining relationship with the natural world.

JAMES: In the story that opens Me and My Daddy, "In Such Light," that progression definitely comes through. Trauma and hurt persist, but it holds more scope for maturation than many of your earlier stories.

ANN: I'd agree.

JAMES: Do you think that literary shift is connected to a broader recognition within the United States that the country needs to move away from a reliance on coal and seek less destructive and more sustainable forms of energy?

ANN: I think my literary shift is connected to a recognition that we won't survive as a species unless we think very, very differently about live beings that aren't human in this world. As for the shift away from coal, it is true that in Appalachia less coal is being mined now, but that's in part because of the boom in natural gas. Areas of West Virginia that were untouched by coal mining are now being devastated by hydrofracking. However, I do think we're at the beginning of the end of coal. And I think there is a wider movement, particular among younger generations in West Virginia, which understands that our state must move beyond dependence on natural resource extraction if we are to survive as a culture and as a people. This gives me optimism.

JAMES: It's been almost fifteen years since the publication of your first short story collection. What do you think are the most notable differences between Me and My Daddy and Given Ground?

ANN: Given Ground was written almost entirely intuitively and without much consideration of an audience. I wrote that book mostly for myself, not because I'm a narcissist, but because I couldn't imagine that many people would want to read those stories. For those reasons, it's more music-driven, less concerned with plot, and less accessible than Me and My Daddy. Me and My Daddy I obviously wrote after finishing my novel, and the novel required that I learn how to work with plot and that I make my writing more accessible. I wanted an audience for Strange as this Weather Has Been. I think those influences and considerations bled over into my writing of Me and My Daddy. Teaching creative writing and writing a novel has made me more conscious of craft, has made me use a little more intellect when I write fiction. I'm not convinced, however, that that is a good thing.

JAMES: Why did you choose that particular title?

ANN: [Laughs] My publisher decided that. I had named the book "Bone Dowser" which was also the original name of the story in the collection now called "The Following." My publisher thought we'd sell more books with the title Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley. I'm sure he's right.

JAMES: If that was a conversation which had happened fifteen years ago, do you think the outcome would have been the same?

ANN: [Laughs] would I have been as malleable do you mean? No I probably would have been more resistant. I've become less resistant, and I don't have as much investment in that kind of stuff anymore. That's a good question!

JAMES: Part of maturing is coming to terms with what exactly you are able to do through your work and through your activism, and being able to channel that in ways and into things which are productive.

ANN: Yeah, exactly.

JAMES: Do you ever feel like you're writing about a West Virginia that doesn't exist in the same way anymore?

ANN: In some ways West Virginia has changed significantly since I grew up there. One change that I mourn is the way the dialect and accent are being lost among younger people. Exposure to mass media is homogenizing our language. The place is also under greater environmental attack and is suffering a drug addiction epidemic. Those changes, though, I understand very well, because of my research and experiences and because of addiction problems in my family, so when I write about that West Virginia, I'm writing about one that still exists.

JAMES: You live in Seattle now, quite far removed from Appalachia. Is your relationship with the land different now, and if so in what ways?

ANN: I'm not immersed in the land here like I was growing up in West Virginia. Also, the land here doesn't speak to me like back home does. It doesn't give me sounds and stories. Still, I love the mountains in Washington. But it feels more like a friend, while back home land feels like family -- and that includes the way family can be fraught. My relationship to the land back home is very painful because there is so much ongoing destruction of it. In Washington, there is certainly destruction, but because of the kind of economic and political will here, there are vast tracts of land that aren't going to be destroyed, at least not anytime soon, and I can escape into those. That helps to ameliorate the pain I feel about back home. But I won't ever be rooted in the land in Washington like I am rooted in Appalachia.

JAMES: What's the next step? You mentioned that moving forward you are looking to write about Appalachia, but in different ways, and then looking to write about other things as well.

ANN: I can't be really specific about the project I'm working on now because it's in its very early stages, but it's a book that explores the ways we can have different relationships with the natural world and with things that aren't human. It's nonfiction. So there's that strand of it, which runs simultaneously with the ways I see Appalachia as a microcosm of what's happening globally in terms of the environment and as a harbinger of where we're headed without a revolution in our common sense. Finally, there' s a thread about my family, whom I see as a kind of microcosm of Appalachia, in the ways my family's addiction, fear, economic exigencies, and mental illness have caused the destruction of land I love where I grew up.

The book is part memoir, part imagining forward. It asks how we might live well in a time of mass extinction. A modest thesis, I know. I'm obsessed with the question because I've witnessed all my life a place I love be destroyed. Appalachia has always been called backwards, but in the last couple of decades, the rest of the country caught up with Appalachia and recognized the natural environment everywhere is being devastated.

Most recently, the land where I grew up, in Romney, has been destroyed by the parts of my family who are entangled in my brother's drug addiction. I see this family dynamic and tragedy as a microcosm of larger destructive forces in Appalachia. I see Appalachia, in turn, as a microcosm of larger destructive forces in the United States, especially capitalist corporate forces. So in this new book, I plumb that question—"how do we live well while natural places and beings are being annihilated at an unprecedented rate?"—by tracing my own personal history of loss as a West Virginian.

Part of my answer to the question involves radically reconceiving our relationships with natural beings. To do that, we need to become intellectually flexible enough to see rationalism and mechanistic science as just one way of knowing among several, with no one way superior to the other, and each with its own purpose. In other words, I'm suggesting we give more validity to intuition, the unconscious mind, the imagination, and ideas of the sacred.

About the Interviewer

E. James West is a teaching fellow in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham and a postdoctoral fellow at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. His research focuses on African American history and literature since 1865, with a particular interest in the history of the black press, print culture, African American media and business history, architecture, and advertising.

• 1. Elizabeth Judd, "Books in Brief,"New York Times, August 12, 2001.
• 2.Ann Pancake, Strange as this Weather Has Been (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press/ Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007).
• 3. Jeremy Jones, "Ann Pancake's STRANGE AS THIS WEATHER HAS BEEN," Iowa Review, January 8, 2011.
• 4."Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley,"Publisher's Weekly, December 8, 2014.
• 5. Quotes taken from Pancake's personal website, http://www.annpancake.blogspot.com.
• 6. Sam Pancake and Catherine Pancake. Ann and Catherine collaborated on the production of Black Diamonds, a 2006 documentary film about mountaintop removal and the fight for coalfield justice in West Virginia.
• 7.Fred Gipson, Old Yeller (New York: Harper & Bros., 1956). Wilson Rawls, Where the Red Fern Grows (New York: Laurel-Leaf Books, 1961). William Armstrong, Sounder (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1969).
• 8.Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain (New York: Scholastic, 1959). Bill Cleaver and Vera Cleaver, Where The Lilies Bloom (New York: Harper Collins, 1969).
• 9."I told myself once I go to WVU, I'd never look back. Truth was, though, after a month away, I was feeling a kind of lonesomeness I'd never known there was…they had hills in Morgantown, but not backhome hills, and not the same feel backhome hills wrap you in. I'd never understood that before, had never even known the feeling was there." Pancake, Strange as this Weather has Been, 4.
• 10.In an earlier interview with Robert Gipe for Appalachian Journal, Pancake cited the impact of the Japanese 'wabi sabi' aesthetic, noting its similarities with Appalachian culture—"an aesthetic that values the old and flawed and rusty." Robert Gipe and Ann Pancake, "Straddling Two Worlds,"Appalachian Journal, 2011.
• 11.Breece Pancake, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (Boston, MA: Little, Brown,1983). Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets (New York: Dell Pub., 1979). Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams (New York: E.P. Dutton/Seymour Lawrence, 1984). Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite: A Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). Denise Giardina, The Unquiet Earth: A Novel (New York: Norton, 1992). Denise Giardina, Storming Heaven: A Novel (New York: Ballantine Pub. Group, 1987). Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter (New York: Harper, 1953). Davis Grubb, The Voices Of Glory (New York: Scribner, 1962). Chuck Kinder, Snakehunter (New York: Knopf, 1973).
• 12.For recent work see Jessie Van Eerden, My Radio Radio (Morgantown, WV: Vandalia Press, 2016). Matthew Neill Null, Honey from the Lion (Wilmington, NC: Lookout Books, 2015). M. Glenn Taylor, A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (London Borough Press, 2015).
• 13. The trenches Pancake is describing are the Fort Mill Ridge Civil War Trenches, among the best preserved Civil War trenches in the nation. "Fort Mill Civil War Trenches", National Parks Service, http://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/places/13001121.htm.
• 14. According to the latest United States Census estimates, West Virginia is the fourth-whitest state in the Union.
• 15. Ann Pancake, "Towards Light,"Georgia Review, 2009.

Review

There's a gripping scene in Arthur Jafa's award-winning film, Dreams Are Colder Than Death, in which he pairs the image of a small group of African American boys acrobatically diving into a swimming pool with a haunting narration from literary scholar Hortense Spillers. Without equivocation, Spillers warns, "I know that we are going to lose this gift of black culture unless we're careful." Here, she defines "culture" not as a particular art form or creative expression, but as a "special insight that connects us to something human."1 Over the course of Jafa's documentary, Spillers, Fred Moten, Kara Walker, and Saidiya Hartman, among others, meditate on the African American condition, the future of blackness, and the fate of the US democratic experiment. Commissioned by the German television station ZDF as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, Dreams Are Colder Than Death engendered a great deal of conversation among scholars in Black Studies. The buzz centered not just on its stellar cast of intellectuals but also on its formal qualities. Shunning talking heads, Jafa recorded audio and visual components separately and then paired them together during post-production. Such an approach allows for "an extended freedom in both sound and image" where subjects do not produce "survival modalities," defined by Jafa as "the ways that black people have been conditioned to act or appear in film—to sit, stare, or talk in a certain way, or to be assessed by a white gaze."2

Although two years have passed since my first viewing of Jafa's Dreams, Spillers's provocative statements, along with the film's powerful bridging of the lyrical and the sonic, have refused to loosen their grip. The film's formal qualities open up important questions regarding the future of black culture and Black Studies (entering its fifth decade). What are the aesthetic, intellectual, and political challenges confronting scholars in the field? How have the formal qualities of our work advanced? What separates us from other interdisciplinary fields of inquiry and practice?

Jafa's daring formalism whetted my appetite for bold, ambitious scholarship in which "forms, techniques, and ideas coalesce into an indigenous or vernacular tradition while remaining opportunistically open to influence and radical vision."3

Such a work is Sarah Haley's provocative No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. Haley's meticulously researched, beautifully crafted, and cogently argued first book contributes immensely to US southern, economic, gender, and political history. Examining the experiences of black female convicts in Georgia between emancipation and the 1920s, No Mercy Here enriches our understanding of the importance of African American women—particularly those ensnared in the South's penal system—in the making of New South modernity. It demonstrates the centrality of the carceral regime in the production of gender categories. And it deepens our knowledge of the trajectory and genealogy of black intellectual work around the US prison regime through Haley's highly sophisticated reading of Mary Church Terrell, Selena Sloan Butler, Bessie Smith, and other African American women thinkers and artists. No Mercy Here also breaks new ground in the field of Black Studies through its innovative play with form and structure. Bessie Smith shares theoretical space with Fred Moton, the blues function as not just an explanatory tool but as literary inspiration, and short yet powerful sentences pierce with the intensity of Miles Davis's horn.

The brutality of Georgia's convict system and its central role in the construction of gender categories are the two themes considered early in No Mercy Here. With clarity and imagination, Haley reconstructs the lives of African American women such as Eliza Cobb, who at the age of twenty-two was arrested and convicted for infanticide, a charge she vehemently denied. Legal authorities ignored her declaration of innocence, as well as evidence that her pregnancy was the result of rape. Cobb was first sent to work in a sawmill before being transferred to Milledgeville State Prison. Laboring and living in horrific conditions, Cobb submitted three clemency requests between 1907 and 1910. Suffering from a variety of maladies, including a large growth on the back of her neck, her crippled body could no longer withstand the workload which included tilling the land, planting and harvesting cotton, corn and other crops, cooking and cleaning for other inmates and the employees.

Although African American women rarely received clemency, several white officials intervened on Cobb's behalf. Most notably, the coroner who had testified for the state in her infanticide trial reversed himself, declaring that Cobb had not committed infanticide and that her child had more than likely been stillborn. Guards and administrators submitted letters attesting to Cobb's exemplary behavior at Milledgeville. In 1910, prison administrators included a photograph of Cobb to provide evidence of her physical defects (particularly the large growth on her neck) and to prove "her mind was not as strong as the average negro's." Their framing of Cobb was intentional. "Her description," writes Haley,

as a 'horrible-looking person' may have been attributed to an accident, but it was part of a larger pattern of female representation. Black women's bodies were similarly portrayed in letters from convict guards and overseers as well as in journalistic descriptions and cartoons. Perceived ugliness was one attribute that defined black women's deviance from the category 'woman' and justified their imprisonment and assault during the nadir of American race relations, from the end of Reconstruction through the Progressive era.

Only as an "imbecilic, monstrous body" could Cobb be rendered "legible to white authorities."4 Their strategy of portraying Cobb as monstrous worked, as governor Joseph M. Brown commuted her sentence in September 1910.

Equally intriguing is Haley's examination of a clemency petition involving Martha Gault, a white woman charged and convicted in 1923 of assault with the intent to murder. Gault and a male accomplice had stolen a car and brutally beaten the driver, "a deliberate and wanton offense" so grave the judge believed it was "impossible for the human intelligence to entertain any idea of clemency or even leniency after reading the record in this case" (21). Two years into her sentence, Gault petitioned for clemency on the grounds of her transformed character. A victim of her environment, particularly the bad influence of an older man, Gault had been rehabilitated and in the words of prison officials could make "a splendid woman and good citizen" (22). Again, Haley relies on photography to help us understand the racial logics of normative womanhood in the white Georgia imagination. She demonstrates how the presence of white women in Milledgeville destabilized gender categories and created moments of crisis in the state's efforts of racial and gender control.

While the photograph accompanying Eliza Cobb's clemency papers presents her as lacking the "essential traits of personhood and normative femininity," the photograph attached to Martha Gault's papers presents an image of "unassailable femininity."

"Her likeness," Haley notes, "is clear, and her smile is apparent. The partial figure of a companion situated her sentimentality within the realm of feminine friendships and her proximity to a pet reinforced, through distinction, Gault's humanity. Although the photograph was taken at the state farm, the shot makes it difficult to ascertain whether she is inside or outside of the prison, an ambiguity that signaled her fitness for freedom" (22). Fusing the narratives of Gault and Cobb, Haley addresses the racial logic of gender construction, specifically how Cobb's deviant body was required to "make Martha Gault's idealized body real, to give it political, cultural, and social meaning" (23). Here lies one of No Mercy Here's most important interventions: the illumination of carceral institutions as central sites for the making of New South gender identities.

Turning to the brutality of Georgia's penal system, Haley depicts the physical and mental anguish inflicted upon black female convicts and their families. Drawing upon Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and Angela Davis, she depicts the southern convict camp as a theater of black female abjection, "part of an archipelago of pornotropical sites in which black female bodies were rendered flesh for the production of value: the ideological value of the continued relegation of black people to things and, inextricably, carceral value for southern racial capital through the use of such objects for labor" (87). Rituals of torture against African American women enacted a spectacle of daily violence that haunted black female convicts. Haley also tackles the silence of the archives as representing the "likely belief among black women that they had no claims to femininity that would legitimize assertions of rape" (104). Although prison records provide numerous instances of African American women giving birth to children conceived during their imprisonment, Haley finds no record of a prison guard being investigated for the sexual violation of convicts.

No Mercy Here builds upon and expands insights of convict lease scholars such as Mary Ellen Curtin, David Oshinsky, Talitha LeFlouria, and Alex Lichtenstein. Haley's work also complements that of Khalil Muhammad, Cheryl Hicks, and Kali Gross, who have documented how African American activists and reformers grappled with state-sanctioned punishment in the Progressive Era. Her analysis of the criticisms of convict leasing put forth by Selena Sloan Butler and Mary Church Terrell reminds us that powerful rebuttals of state violence emanated from African American women, who far too often are discussed only in terms of respectability politics and uplift strategies. Haley details how Butler (The Chain-Gang System) condemned the South as an antimodern state formation, rescued African American women from the margins of criminal discourse on punishment, and pushed the National Association of Colored Women to confront the brutalization of black convicts.

Equally impressive was the intellectual work of Mary Church Terrell, who in 1907 published "Peonage in the United States: The Convict Lease System and Chain Gangs," one of the most thorough critiques of the system. Anticipating scholars who would treat convict leasing as slavery by another name, Terrell's essay provides a powerful critique of African American female criminalization, positions the chain gang system as a form of debt peonage, and highlights the deep relationship between the carceral regime and economic oppression. Haley also delves into the work of white Progressive Rebecca Latimer Felton. In contrast with Terrell and Sloan, Felton viewed African American women as an inherently and irredeemably deviant group that, like African American men, posed an "all-consuming threat to the white supremacist moral fabric of southern life, including white femininity and womanhood" (151).

No Mercy Here provides a rare portrait of black women's experiences in the parole system, which the Georgia General Assembly established in 1908. Private companies and individuals could conscript recently paroled African Americans to work for at least one year, even if they had served their minimum sentence. Under parole, "black women were forced to labor as domestic workers for white families, giving new meaning to the concept of the prison of the home. They were subject to constant surveillance and the threat of return to the prison camp for any transgression; private individuals, many of whom were now white women, continued to serve as police and warders" (158). This new situation of black women's servitude "differentiated them from men but did not place them closer to normative femininity, since the relation of servant to employer also worked to expose black women's difference from the white women for whom they worked" (176). In this context, Haley discusses how the inclusion of black women on the chain gang, a Progressive penal "reform," also contributed to the codification of women as white. Though the General Assembly stipulated that the chain gangs were for men only, more than two thousand black women were sentenced to this form of hard labor.

Extending the work of Clyde Woods, Angela Davis, and Ted Gioia, the concluding chapter of No Mercy Here illuminates the blues as an archival source for African Americans' critique of the US carceral regime. "Blues creations," Haley argues, "render an imaginative world of carceral dismantling, not by merely recounting the terror of gendered regimes of imprisonment but by challenging the very foundations of ideologies justifying carceral control" (214). Through music from Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey, and Herbert Halpert's 1939's Women's A Capella Songs from the Parchman Penitentary5, she demonstrates how black women blues artists contested a principal claim of Western liberalism: "the ability to govern through universal tenets of reasonability and the legitimacy of legal actors' decisions and actions" (217). Black women destabilized hegemonic categories of crime and forged codes for living and navigating Jim Crow America. The blues became a vehicle through which "black women protected themselves from negative perceptions by constructing and disseminating a nuanced image of themselves as simultaneously sexual and spiritual, dangerous and vulnerable, heartbroken and strong" (243).

Critiquing the limits of reform discourse, Sarah Haley shows how historical writing can inform as well move us, taking literary risks and imaginative leaps to find meaning in the seeming silences of the archives.

About the Author

Claudrena N. Harold is an associate professor of African American and African Studies and History at the University of Virginia. In 2007, she published her first book, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942(New York: Routledge, 2007). In 2013, the University of Virginia Press published The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), a volume Harold coedited with Deborah E. McDowell and Juan Battle. Her latest book is New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South(Athens:University of Georgia Press, 2016).

• 1. Arthur Jafa, Dreams Are Colder Than Death, 2013.
• 2. See Nijla Mumin, "LAFF Review: Arthur Jafa Conducts Multilayered Exploration of Blackness in 'Dreams are Colder than Death,'"Indiewire.com, June 19, 2014, http://www.indiewire.com/2014/06/laff-review-arthur-jafa-conducts-multilayered-exploration-of-blackness-in-dreams-are-colder-than-death-159613/.
• 3. Marlon Ross, "Introduction" to Houston Baker's speech at the University of Virginia in the spring semester of 2012, https://blackfireuva.com/2012/03/.
• 4. Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 19-20.
• 5. Various artists, Mississippi Department of Archives and History presents Jailhouse Blues: Women's a cappella songs from the Parchman Penitentiary Library Of Congress field recordings, 1936 and 1939. Rosetta Records RR1316, 1987, vinyl.

Review

Whenever the concepts of diaspora and indigeneity come together, scholars tend to ascribe oppositional power to them. Diaspora implies transnational if not global movement, displacement, and attenuation while indigeneity connotes originality, belonging, and rootedness. In drawing together diaspora and indigeneity to compass the complexities and ambiguities of indigenous peoples' lives, scholars of indigenous diasporas have closed the gap between the two concepts. They suggest that in spite of diasporic indigenous persons' relationships to multiple places—a lost homeland, a current abode, a far-away site of work—and to multiple identities—clan, tribal, historical, racial, and political—diasporic indigenous peoples can and do remain rooted in common memories, traditions, and pasts.1

Gregory D. Smithers's The Cherokee Diaspora offers one of the first diasporic studies of Native North America. The idea of diaspora allows Smithers to remove Cherokee history from the usual linear settler/colonial paradigm that frames the subject and to instead address long and recurring cycles of Cherokee dislocation, movement, and coalescence. The problems that beset any diasporic people—a sense of belonging, of identity, and of home—have confronted Cherokees for centuries. How they responded to such challenges has varied over time as sense of self and place shifted from the sacred fires that centered each town in the eighteenth century to engagement with the federal government's so-called "civilization" policy in the early nineteenth century, to the valorization of blood quantum later in the nineteenth century, to federal law and competing indigenous notions of what it means to be Cherokee today. While such different formations enabled Cherokees to maintain a sense of peoplehood, there was often little agreement over who counted across time and space as a Cherokee. Contests over Cherokee identity became an insistent theme, but, Smithers concludes, one basic determinant above all others has defined being Cherokee since the 1830s: their shared history of expulsion from an ancestral homeland and their arduous and deadly forced march to the West along what is known as the Trail of Tears.

Scholars have wrestled with how to interpret and depict the cyclical unity of time, space, and place that gives indigenous peoples powerful identities and senses of place.2 Smithers makes a promising start when he grounds his study in two Cherokee sensibilities, tohi and osi, which embody notions of flow, equanimity, and power. An individual's actions always implicate him or her in the flow of the world, posing a constant challenge to remain balanced and to flow well (53–4). By setting in motion a space where people flow, where rivers and mountains are alive, where the East is associated with the beginning of life and the West with its inevitable end, Smithers embeds Cherokees within a cosmological space that holds great promise as an interpretive entry into their past.

Such an auspicious spatial framing wanes over the course of The Cherokee Diaspora. As Smithers' explication of diaspora and modern identity becomes unmoored from the senses of space and place that tied them with great depth and specificity to their ancestral homeland, what remains is a fairly conventional narrative of post-removal Cherokee history. Cherokees, however, had emerged from the earth, their mother. What we gloss as trees, rocks, mountains, springs, streams, animals, and plants knit the Cherokees' knowledge of the world and its origins into a tight narrative that informed everything: how a child should behave, how to make a medicine, how to achieve peace. They were not people who inhabited a natural world; instead, the Cherokees were so implicated within the workings of the world that their lives played out in a complex mixture of time, space, and place that can be neither imagined nor perceived when disaggregated. The text also neglects a register of the profound, unexplored impact of losing their homeland. Loss of place often triggers drastic transformations in a sense of past, self, and future. Reconstituting themselves in Indian Territory was not just a struggle to resettle, build new homes, plant new gardens, and learn about new weather patterns. It demanded a reimagination of who the Cherokee were, how they connected to the world, and how they connected to their former ancestral home—all processes that lie at the core of the diasporic experience and demand closer attention.3

In a longer history, Cherokees arrived in the southern Appalachians about four-thousand years ago, having left their Iroquoian homeland, which itself was once a place of arrival for ancestors thousands of years before. The Cherokee diaspora that concerns Smithers began at the end of the American Revolution when a handful of prescient leaders in mountain towns of what is today Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina ascertained that the long knife republic was not going to abide by borders negotiated by the crown they had just overthrown. In anticipation of this invasion, Cherokees began to head west in search of places to ensure that they could remain in flow and balance. Over the following decades many more followed while others headed for the Mexican province of Texas in search of respite from Anglo-American encroachments. By 1830, Texas Cherokees numbered several hundred while around five thousand western Cherokees settled in present-day western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. Many of the 16,500 who still inhabited their ancestral homeland in the states of Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina regarded their far-flung kin as either outsiders or as rivals who had abandoned them in their fight against the federal and state governments and who had turned their backs on the adoption of Anglo-American cultural norms. But when in 1838 and 1839 the US army expelled the remaining eastern Cherokees from Tennessee, with the exception of a few hundred who remained in western North Carolina, the relocation of the nation to what became known as Indian Territory was complete.

The land once home to a few thousand western Cherokees (what is today southeastern Oklahoma) transformed in the early 1840s into the site of a new nation that had to remake itself out of a population segmented by different histories of movement, identity, and resistance. In the wake of assassinations and bitter civil strife, the former leader of the eastern Cherokees, John Ross, forged a coalition in defense of their new homeland, a renewed sovereignty, and a proactive adaptation to life in Anglo-America. Over time the people who remained in North Carolina found themselves estranged from their western kin and increasingly excluded from the new nation's exclusive claims to Cherokee identity.

Two subsequent events, abolition and allotment, undermined the Cherokee identity fashioned in Indian Territory. Emancipation at the end of the Civil War created a new set of Cherokees out of the nation's enslaved population whose skin color made them anathema to most other Cherokees. The freed peoples' claims to certain legal rights and benefits hastened the nation's embrace of U.S. racial norms and laws in order to exclude freed people from the census rolls that determined membership in the nation. Then, in the early 1900s, the federal government allotted most of the Cherokees' western land for sale to speculators and homesteaders. Allotment transformed the nation from a place that could be mapped on the ground to a space of the mind and heart that could only be felt and enacted through cultural rites, church services, and social gatherings. How Cherokees remained conscious of themselves as a people and how they reformulated a sense of self after allotment demands a deeper investigation than Smithers offers. It is unclear whether and how a sense of spatiality informed debates over who belonged and who did not. In eliminating formerly enslaved men, women, and children from the nation's rolls, Cherokees undertook a purging of collective genealogy and a restructuring of the spaces they inhabited. A different kind of removal required the political and racial separation of neighbors and kin.

Two world wars and the Great Depression further disrupted Cherokee life. Poverty, urban opportunities, and service overseas pushed and pulled Cherokees across the country as they sought belonging and work in U.S. cities. By the 1970s, most still called Oklahoma home but thousands had sought better opportunities in California and other states. Some made it as far as Hawaii and a few even lodged applications with the Australian government. Meanwhile, the Cherokees in North Carolina had rebuilt their land base as the Qualla reserve and gained separate federal recognition to set themselves up as a second Cherokee nation.

In spite of confusing and complicated histories of dislocation, violence, and rivalry, Smithers argues that there is still a Cherokee people whose identity transcends a myriad of political, racial, and geographical divisions. Cherokees are, Smithers argues, defined by their shared diasporic experiences of the Trail of Tears. His inability to anchor consistently his interpretation in indigenous concepts of flow and propriety fails to clarify how understanding their expulsion can be usefully explored as a diaspora. At the heart of the story of the Cherokee diaspora sit the brute facts that they lost most of their ancestral homeland, were driven by force of arms from their homes, reconstituted themselves in a new homeland which they subsequently lost, and then underwent bitter struggles over who counted as a member of the nation and who did not. When held apart from specific ethnogeographic considerations, such a narrative comports well with other such studies. If, however, Smithers had probed more deeply the interdependence of peoplehood, place, and memory, and pushed his analysis back to the much earlier migration that brought the Cherokees to their southern homeland, he might have better represented the pain of expulsion from not just an ancestral homeland but from a living being that had borne and nurtured the Cherokees for millennia.

Consider the Cherokee dead, the ghosts that haunt TVA reservoirs, inhabitants of ancient cemeteries that lie beneath economic development projects, and occupants of forlorn mounds—the beings who tie the living to the past and to the land. They have stories to tell. According to notions of tohi and osi the dead are never really dead but cohabit with the living and the unborn. When real estate development and other forms of excavation disturb or destroy the Cherokee dead, Cherokee life is imperiled. The life that Cherokee ghosts enact draws time, space, and self into one conceptual and existential field, making stories about survival, endurance, hope, and belonging possible. They ensure that life continues to flow well and that Cherokees remain Cherokees and, above all else, grounded.4

It is not, in the end, altogether clear how the concept of diaspora reframes the standard story of Cherokee dispossession. Lacking a deeper exploration of place and space, Smithers' interpretive angle never closes on the emotional depth and psychic pain of removal and allotment, nor does it open a view into the transformative creativity needed to remake a homeland, both real and remembered, over and over. Nevertheless, Smithers has tried something new, seeking to set the history of Native North America on a different footing that engages with broader inquiry into transnational themes of identity, memory, and history. He demonstrates that the trauma of ethnic cleansing remains today in Cherokee minds and memories and at the core of their collective identity. That such trauma reaches out across almost two centuries indicates the need to find ways to open the past so that well-worn narratives can recover some of their original power to provoke and to disturb.

About the Author

James Taylor Carson is head of the school of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Brisbaine, Australia. His research and writing has focused largely on issues related to contact between European invaders and first peoples in North America. His books include Making an Atlantic World: Circles, Paths, and Stories from the Colonial South(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007).

• 1. William Safran, "Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,"Diaspora 1 (July 1991): 83–99; Michele Reis, "Theorizing Diaspora: Perspectives on 'Classical' and 'Contemporary' Diaspora,"International Migration 42 (June 2004): 41–60; Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); Rogers Brubaker, "The 'Diaspora' Diaspora,"Ethnic and Racial Studies 28 (January 2005): 1–19; Paul Burke, "Indigenous Diaspora and the Prospect for Cosmopolitan 'Orbiting': The Warlpiri Case,"Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 14 (August 2013): 304–7; James Clifford, "Indigenous Articulations,"Contemporary Pacific 13 (Fall 2001): 470–72, 478–79; Robin Delugan, "Indigeneity across Borders: Hemispheric Migrations and Cosmopolitan Encounters,"American Ethnologist 37 (February 2010): 41–2.
• 2. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); James Taylor Carson, "Ethnogeography and the Native American Past,"Ethnohistory 49 (Fall 2002): 765–784; Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
• 3. Andrea L. Smith and Anna Eisenstein, Rebuilding Shattered Worlds: Creating Community by Voicing the Past (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 3–4, 11–13.
• 4. James Taylor Carson, "Cherokee Ghostings and the Haunted South,"The Native South: New Histories and Enduring Legacies, eds. Tim Alan Garrison and Greg O'Brien (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 238–62.

Video and Essay

A barrier island on the Georgia coast, Sapelo has an unusually long and varied blend of natural and human history. The western half of the island is composed primarily of Pleistocene sediments deposited along a shoreline 40–50,000 years ago. Much of its eastern half is more recently formed and dynamically shifting. Modern ecosystems include extensive salt marshes with tidal creeks, beaches, maritime forests, back-dune meadows, grasslands, and a few human-made freshwater ponds. Erosion occasionally reveals sediments from older environments, such as hundreds-year-old relict marshes exposed along Cabretta Beach on Sapelo's northeastern edge.

The Sapelo climate is temperate to subtropical; temperatures range from an average high of 90°F (32° C) in summer to 50°F (10° C) in winter. Freezing is rare. Rainfall is about 50 inches (127 centimeters) a year, with the majority of precipitation during the May–September hurricane season. Despite the impact of Hurricane Matthew on October 8, 2016, hurricanes rarely affect the Georgia coast. The worst was in 1898, and directly impacted Sapelo and its companion, Blackbeard Island, to the northeast. Until the 1898 hurricane hit, Blackbeard hosted a US Marine Hospital yellow-fever quarantine station, which was damaged heavily by the storm; it reopened, only to close in 1909 with the development of yellow-fever vaccines.

A prominent and well-preserved Native American (Guale) shellring on the northwestern corner of the island gives evidence that humans have experienced Sapelo for at least 4,500 years. The arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century resulted in the naming of "Sapelo," an Anglicized corruption of "Zapala" from Spanish and likely a corruption of the original Guale name for the island. French and English colonization of Sapelo in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries heavily modified the local ecosystems.

Following the American Revolution, alteration of the local environment continued throughout the early to mid-nineteenth century. Plantation agriculture depended on slave labor of people with varied languages and origins in west Africa, resulting in an enforced cultural mélange. Descendants of those enslaved people, and theonly Gullah-Geecheepopulation on any Georgia barrier island, reside today in the Hog Hammock community. Although shrinking in size, Hog Hammock retains a distinctive culture and features a revival of traditional knowledge, including handicrafts such as sweetgrass basket weaving, cultivation of unique agricultural species (e.g., Sapelo red peas), and Gullah-Geechee storytelling.

Perhaps the most scientifically significant legacy of Sapelo is its birthing of modern ecology, much of which was done at the University of Georgia (Athens) Marine Institute, or the UGAMI, founded in 1953. The UGAMI owes its existence to ecologist Eugene Odum (1913–2002) and tobacco heir/businessman R.J. Reynolds, Jr. (1906–1964). Reynolds bought most of the island in 1934, but Odum persuaded him to donate land and buildings to start the UGAMI in 1953. The Institute, located next to its study sites, has conducted world-renowned research on salt-marsh ecology and other aspects of natural communities on and around the island.

Reynolds' widow, Annemarie Reynolds, sold much of the island to the state, which the Georgia Department of Natural Resources now manages. The western edge of Sapelo is part of NOAA's National Estuarine Research Reserve system, termed the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve. The UGAMI still serves as a thriving center for ecological research and hosts academic field trips in natural science education.

In September, November, and December 2015, we visited Sapelo Island to gather ground and aerial drone-video footage that would visually summarize its ecosystems. This footage also shows signs of human activity, such as the UGAMI complex, paved roads, a freshwater pond created by excavation, and the present-day lighthouse, still used for guiding maritime traffic in Doboy Sound.

Our first trip in September 2015 also coincided with "king tides," spring tides accentuated by a relatively stronger gravitational pull associated with a "super moon." This situation caused unusually high tides to flood marshes, roads, and other low-lying places on Sapelo, a phenomenon repeated there and along the rest of the Georgia coast in late October 2015. Tidal ranges on the Georgia coast are already greater than those of most barrier island systems, typically varying from 2.5–3 meters (8.2–9.8 feet). Any addition to this already-voluminous water exchange imparts dramatic effects. Some of the drone footage showing the extent of the flooding serves as a harbinger of predicted sea-level rise on the east coast associated with climate change. We also included two snippets of time-lapse sequences of intertidal areas—Cabretta Beach, on the northeastern corner of the island, and a salt marsh in the south end—to further convey the effects of tides on island margins and interiors.

This Sapelo video encapsulates a history that forecasts the future under climate change. Among its subjects are: abrupt transitions in coastal ecosystem, from beach to back-dune meadows to maritime forests; beaches where sand is being actively eroded or deposited by longshore drift; a tree "boneyard" with dead trees on a beach signaling the former presence of a maritime forest; an artificial freshwater pond adjacent to maritime forest but with salt marshes in the background; dendritic drainage patterns of marshes at low tide, and much more. Despite its short 3:45-minute length, this video's content, combined with its brief narrated descriptions, can inspire an hour or more of classroom discussion of natural and human systems on this remarkable Georgia barrier island.

About the Authors

Anthony (Tony) Martin is a professor of practice in the department of Environmental Sciences at Emory University. His publications include Life Traces of the Georgia Coast(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). Steve Bransford is an educational analyst for video with University Technology Services at Emory University. He launched his own production company, Terminus Films, in 2001. Anandi Salinas is a PhD candidate in the department of Religion at Emory University and a training specialist with the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. Michael Page is lecturer in geospatial sciences and technology in the department of Environmental Sciences at Emory University. Shannon O'Daniel is an educational analyst with Library and Information Technology Services at Emory University.

Submit all inquiries and materials to Southern Spaces managing editor Madison Elkins at seditor@emory.edu. Submissions are especially welcome before October 15th, 2017, but will be considered on a rolling basis.

Southern Spaces, an open access, multimedia, peer-reviewed journal, invites innovative scholarship on regions, places, and cultures of the US South as well as their global connections. We encourage interdisciplinary submissions that emphasize spatial interpretation and utilize digital media.

Southern Spaces welcomes submissions that:

• critically and creatively examine real and imagined spaces and places
• make connections and comparisons between southern regions and/or locales and sites in the wider world
• use textual, visual media, archival, and ethnographic materials—including artistic expressions—to address questions of spatial justice

Currently Southern Spaces seeks submissions that engage with the geographies of:

• historical memory and memorialization
• economic inequality and everyday precarity
• political boundaries (redistricting, voter suppression)
• forced migration, slavery, and human trafficking
• racial violence, hate crimes
• LGBTQ+ perspectives, rights, and spaces
• demographic shifts in urban, suburban, and rural populations
• immigration, refugees, and citizenship
• incarceration, internment, and the carceral state
• public health, healthcare policy and access
• climate change and environmental history

Examples

Southern Spaces accepts submissions within seven genres of open access, multimedia scholarship:

• Articles are long-form, interpretive, or critical pieces that incorporate multimedia (including digital scholarship) and scholarly analysis to pose an original argument or research-based claim. All Southern Spaces articles undergo peer review.
• Reviews offer critical evaluations of recently published books, films, digital projects, music, events, and other art or scholarship related to the study of space and place.
• Interviews are filmed or transcribed conversations with scholars, authors, artists, or others working in areas related to the study of space and place in the US or global south.
• Photo and media essays are curated collections of original photography or other multimedia that perform critical scholarly analysis. While primarily photographic or media-based, these essays also include a writing component.
• Short videos are five to twenty-five minutes and utilize visual—as opposed to textual or rhetorical—techniques to advance a critical argument or an aesthetic perspective. Southern Spaces frequently publishes ethnographic, documentary, and lyric videos.
• Presentations include media associated with public scholarly presentations as well as audio or visual recordings of presenters. Such presentations include lectures, conference highlights, panels, and performances.
• Blog posts are shorter, less formal essays or announcements of interest to the critical study of space, place, and southernness.

The following pieces provide examples of the critical, interdisciplinary, and multimedia scholarship we seek:

• Busch, Andrew M. "Crossing Over: Sustainability, New Urbanism, and Gentrification in Austin, Texas."Southern Spaces, August 19, 2015. https://southernspaces.org/2015/crossing-over-sustainability-new-urbanism-and-gentrification-austin-texas.
• Conis, Elena. "DDT Disbelievers: Health and the New Economic Poisons in Georgia after World War II."Southern Spaces, October 28, 2016. https://southernspaces.org/2016/ddt-disbelievers-health-and-new-economic-poisons-georgia-after-world-war-ii.
• Cooper, Brittney. "#SAYHERNAME: Towards a Gender Inclusive Movement for Black Lives." Southern Spaces, January 26, 2016. https://southernspaces.org/2016/sayhername-towards-gender-inclusive-movement-black-lives.
• Flippen, Chenoa. "Diversity and Its Discontents: A Review of Behind the White Picket Fence." Southern Spaces, October 20, 2015. https://southernspaces.org/2015/diversity-and-its-discontents-review-behind-white-picket-fence.
• Goldstein, Holly Markovitz. "St. Augustine's 'Slave Market': A Visual History." Southern Spaces, September 28, 2012. https://southernspaces.org/2012/st-augustines-slave-market-visual-history.
• McClintock, Diana. "Gordon Parks at Atlanta's High Museum of Art." Southern Spaces, May 28, 2015. https://southernspaces.org/2015/gordon-parks-atlantas-high-museum-art.
• Pooley, Karen. "Segregation's New Geography: The Atlanta Metro Region, Race, and the Declining Prospects for Upward Mobility." Southern Spaces, April 15, 2015. https://southernspaces.org/2015/segregations-new-geography-atlanta-metro-region-race-and-declining-prospects-upward-mobility.
• Solomon, Eric. "Queer Memory: Loss, Martyrs, and Memorialization in Southern Florida."Southern Spaces, August 11, 2016. https://southernspaces.org/2016/queer-memory-loss-martyrs-and-memorialization-southern-florida.
• Suitts, Steve. "States' Rights Resurgent: The Attack on the Voting Rights Act."Southern Spaces, August 29, 2013. https://southernspaces.org/2013/states-rights-resurgent-attack-voting-rights-act.
• West, E. James and Ann Pancake. "Closer to the Ground: A Conversation with Ann Pancake." Southern Spaces, May 30, 2017. https://southernspaces.org/2017/closer-ground-conversation-ann-pancake.
• Yaeger, Patricia. "Beasts of the Southern Wild and Dirty Ecology."Southern Spaces, February 13, 2013. https://southernspaces.org/2013/beasts-southern-wild-and-dirty-ecology.

Submit all inquiries and materials to Southern Spaces managing editor Madison Elkins at seditor@emory.edu. Submissions are especially welcome before October 15th, 2017, but will be considered on a rolling basis.There is no submission fee or article processing charge. Visit our submissions page for more information.Southern Spaces does not consider previously-published work or simultaneous submissions. At the time of publication, authors may choose to retain copyright of their work or select a Creative Commons license. All publications, along with their associated media, are securely archived by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. Southern Spaces also accepts print and media submissions by post at Robert W. Woodruff Library, 540 Asbury Circle, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 30322.

Review

The thirst for information and the power of lies is "a very old problem," writes Alejandra Dubcovsky, yet Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South is more than a lament (215). By examining networks that included colonists from Spain, France, and England as well as American Indians and enslaved Africans, she excavates an "early South" characterized by messiness, complexity, and indigenous power rather than the inexorable westward march of European domination. For Dubcovsky this early South—"the composite societies who came to inhabit the colonies of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and parts of Louisiana"—is a "socio-cultural model" that allows her to explore the historical complexities of an increasingly multiethnic space and not "some projection backward in time of what would later become the Confederacy" (4).

In addition to traditional colonial sources, Dubcovsky delves into material culture, oral traditions, linguistics, and iconography to reveal how, from the pre-Columbian era to the middle of the eighteenth century, a diversity of peoples in what the Spanish called la tierra adentro—literally "the land inside"—communicated and mis-communicated with each other. Informed Power's insufficient spatial theorization becomes most apparent where Dubcovsky vacillates between the historiographically loaded term—the “South”—and la tierra adentro. Dubcovsky devotes only a paragraph to explicating the decision to use "early South" to designate a "region" where this term had little contemporary meaning.

Organized chronologically and thematically, Informed Power begins in a North America without Europeans and ends just as the English solidify their hold in Carolina and Georgia. Dubcovsky, an assistant professor of history at the University of California–Riverside, divides the book into three parts. The first—"What"—concerns the sort of information European settlers most desired: gold. Upon hearing from an Indian that a captured Spaniard named Juan Ortiz was nearby, Juan de Añasco "stopped listening and began celebrating certain that he had found oro (gold)" (31). Even when Europeans received useful information, "they did not know how to evaluate it properly," and evidently misunderstood it as relevant to the discovery of mineral wealth (32).

In "Who," Dubcovsky outlines who "acquired and spread" information as a way to come to terms with this volatile and disorderly geography (7). As a means to maximize his personal power and the safety of his Florida town, Apalachicole, an Indian named Pentocolo, for example, operated simultaneously as a "Spanish ally and an English sympathizer" (143).

And in the final section—"How"—Dubcovsky examines the Yamasee War to articulate how communication networks operated (and didn't). As the war progressed, the Spanish began "investing in particular Indians" because they began to treat "information as a commodity that could be purchased" (201). What, though, about "why"? "This absence is deliberate," writes Dubcovsky, "because the answer is clear: power." The entire book offers an answer to why. Although the connection between information and power might seem relatively facile, Informed Power reveals it to be "anything but simple and obvious" (8).

Dubcovsky begins her analysis in a place characterized by the colonizing power of Cahokia, a pre-Columbian urban center and chiefdom at the confluences of the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers (3). As she demonstrates in discussing the Commerce Map—a rock drawing (located about 150 miles south of present-day St. Louis) that is the oldest known cartographic representation in eastern North America—communication networks connected a wide geography well before Europeans arrived. The territory, however, looked dramatically different from that encountered by Europeans. Rather than power being diffuse, communication networks were centered at Cahokia (represented by a large falcon glyph). By dissecting the relationship between communication and power in a North America without Europeans, Dubcovsky demonstrates that exchange and control of information was central to the way American Indians organized their worlds. While much would change with the arrival of Europeans, the foundations for early colonial relations were established earlier. Rather than looking forward to an antebellum, plantation South, Dubcovsky persistently qualifies and enhances her arguments about indigenous power by gesturing towards the pre-Columbian past.

Informed Power's early chapters reveal the power held by Indians in cross-cultural communication. Once Cahokia collapsed—before European arrival—a new social geography emerged, still defined by chiefdoms, but where power was more diffuse and communication primarily oral. In this space, as distinct from urban centers such as Cahokia, trails were of the utmost importance, and for much of the colonial period Indians controlled them. "These paths," writes Dubcovsky, "bound distant Indian nations together, even as they pitted them against each other" (21). When de Soto traveled in the mid-sixteenth century, he was at the mercy of Indians. And once the Spanish, French, and eventually English established permanent settlements, they relied on Indians to glean information about the strategies of their European rivals. No matter what sort of grand plan imperial officials hatched across the Atlantic, the constraints imposed by Indian power mattered more. The malleability of information is especially clear in Dubcovsky's treatment of the 1656 Timucua Rebellion. La Florida's governor, Franciscan missionaries, and Timicua Indians each worked to channel the flow of information and shape it to their particular narrative. The governor blamed the Franciscans for causing unrest. The Franciscans gestured towards the abusive policies of the colonial government. And the Timicuas highlighted their dissatisfaction with "having to serve as cargadores," carrying food and supplies across La Florida for the Spanish. Using two visual representations of information networks to augment her analysis (83, 94), Dubcovsky argues that "The different versions of the uprising expose the multiple ways that information was gathered, interpreted, and networked in the early South" (96).

In most instances of cross-cultural communication, the who mattered just as much (if not more) than the what. By examining a large cast of historical actors, Dubcovsky illuminates the motivations of those establishing and disrupting connections. In a geography shattered by disease, slavery, and violence, varying motivations colored information exchange. It obscures complexity to talk only about the Spanish or the English or Indians—or even Yamasees or Timucuas or Cherokees. Individual motivations are not easily mapped onto an entire people. Pamini, for example, was a female Yspo leader who lived near Santa Catalina in the early 1670s. We know very little about the Yspo—they were probably a group of Muskogean-speaking refugees who had coalesced as a way to deal with slave raids. After a meeting with the Spanish captain Argüelles near Port Royal, in which Pamini provided him with news that the English in Charles Town were relatively weak—contradicting the information of other Indian informants, Argüelles began to trust her.

Over the next three years Pamini told the Spanish much about the English. She also told the English much about the Spanish. Whether true or not, Pamini's information provided a means to an end: she able to secure trade with the Spanish and English while protecting her people from enslavement. "News was a powerful weapon," Dubcovsky concludes, "it was both the sword Pamini used to defend her authority and the shield she wielded to protect her town" (109). Sowing confusion was integral to Pamini's power. By identifying who transmitted information and mis-information, Dubcovsky provides a schematic of layered, messy, and constantly shifting networks.

Information connecting the peoples of this this colonial landscape also pushed them apart—most apparently when the tenuous networks broke down. As the Yamasee War exposed factions, the English could no longer rely on their old networks. Working to refashion their information-gathering, they began to "dictate, not negotiate, the terms of exchange" (191). The Spanish were also forced to adapt to a changing social geography. As the Yamasee War progressed they began to privilege information from select Indian leaders, not from just anyone who would talk to them. What emerged were "bitter, competing," and "coexisting articulations of power" (214).

While Dubcovsky does an excellent job of weaving disparate strands of evidence in Spanish, English, French, and indigenous language sources into a larger tapestry characterized by the irony of communication, she leaves a number of loose ends. Mentioning the power of rumors and the struggle colonial actors had identifying them, she doesn't examine this expressive form nor cite Gregory Evans Dowd's Groundless, a study of rumor in early America. Lies receive similar short shrift, without mention of Joshua Piker's The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler.

Informed Power's blurring of distinctions between "space" and "place" sometimes obscures the book's arguments. Writing that the "early South's" communication networks connected "discrete places" and that these networks were crucial to the "creation, development, and growth of colonial spaces,'" Dubcovsky doesn't examine how local places (and abstract spaces) would mean something different to indigeneous groups than to colonizing powers (4). Citing Keith Basso's Wisdom Sits in Places—a favorite among historians of American Indians—she agrees that "Indian place names offer perhaps the most enduring clue to how Indians conceived their world" (45). Yet, without citing an example, Dubcovsky concludes that the "Indian place names of La Florida show an ethnocentrism that was supported not by isolation but rather was fostered by a deep awareness of others" (45).

Informed Power is, however, a remarkable achievement. Not only does Dubcovsky illuminate the significance of communication networks to the emergence of an early South, she does so in a way that highlights indigenous power where it is often ignored—powerful Indians were not only denizens of the American West.

About the Author

Nathaniel Holly is a PhD student at the College of William and Mary. His research interests focus on the intersections of urban, colonial, and indigenous histories in the early American southeast. His recent work includes book reviews in Historical Geography, Chronicles of Oklahoma, the South Carolina Historical Magazine, and H-Net, as well as articles, such as "'Living Memorials to the Past': The Preservation of Nikwasi and the 'Disappearance' of North Carolina's Cherokees," in the North Carolina Historical Review (July 2015) and "Transatlantic Indians in the Early Modern Era," in History Compass (Oct. 2016).

Review

Whenever the concepts of diaspora and indigeneity come together, scholars tend to ascribe oppositional power to them. Diaspora implies transnational if not global movement, displacement, and attenuation while indigeneity connotes originality, belonging, and rootedness. In drawing together diaspora and indigeneity to compass the complexities and ambiguities of indigenous peoples' lives, scholars of indigenous diasporas have closed the gap between the two concepts. They suggest that in spite of diasporic indigenous persons' relationships to multiple places—a lost homeland, a current abode, a far-away site of work—and to multiple identities—clan, tribal, historical, racial, and political—diasporic indigenous peoples can and do remain rooted in common memories, traditions, and pasts.1

Gregory D. Smithers's The Cherokee Diaspora offers one of the first diasporic studies of Native North America. The idea of diaspora allows Smithers to remove Cherokee history from the usual linear settler/colonial paradigm that frames the subject and to instead address long and recurring cycles of Cherokee dislocation, movement, and coalescence. The problems that beset any diasporic people—a sense of belonging, of identity, and of home—have confronted Cherokees for centuries. How they responded to such challenges has varied over time as sense of self and place shifted from the sacred fires that centered each town in the eighteenth century to engagement with the federal government's so-called "civilization" policy in the early nineteenth century, to the valorization of blood quantum later in the nineteenth century, to federal law and competing indigenous notions of what it means to be Cherokee today. While such different formations enabled Cherokees to maintain a sense of peoplehood, there was often little agreement over who counted across time and space as a Cherokee. Contests over Cherokee identity became an insistent theme, but, Smithers concludes, one basic determinant above all others has defined being Cherokee since the 1830s: their shared history of expulsion from an ancestral homeland and their arduous and deadly forced march to the West along what is known as the Trail of Tears.

Scholars have wrestled with how to interpret and depict the cyclical unity of time, space, and place that gives indigenous peoples powerful identities and senses of place.2 Smithers makes a promising start when he grounds his study in two Cherokee sensibilities, tohi and osi, which embody notions of flow, equanimity, and power. An individual's actions always implicate him or her in the flow of the world, posing a constant challenge to remain balanced and to flow well (53–4). By setting in motion a space where people flow, where rivers and mountains are alive, where the East is associated with the beginning of life and the West with its inevitable end, Smithers embeds Cherokees within a cosmological space that holds great promise as an interpretive entry into their past.

Such an auspicious spatial framing wanes over the course of The Cherokee Diaspora. As Smithers' explication of diaspora and modern identity becomes unmoored from the senses of space and place that tied them with great depth and specificity to their ancestral homeland, what remains is a fairly conventional narrative of post-removal Cherokee history. Cherokees, however, had emerged from the earth, their mother. What we gloss as trees, rocks, mountains, springs, streams, animals, and plants knit the Cherokees' knowledge of the world and its origins into a tight narrative that informed everything: how a child should behave, how to make a medicine, how to achieve peace. They were not people who inhabited a natural world; instead, the Cherokees were so implicated within the workings of the world that their lives played out in a complex mixture of time, space, and place that can be neither imagined nor perceived when disaggregated. The text also neglects a register of the profound, unexplored impact of losing their homeland. Loss of place often triggers drastic transformations in a sense of past, self, and future. Reconstituting themselves in Indian Territory was not just a struggle to resettle, build new homes, plant new gardens, and learn about new weather patterns. It demanded a reimagination of who the Cherokee were, how they connected to the world, and how they connected to their former ancestral home—all processes that lie at the core of the diasporic experience and demand closer attention.3

In a longer history, Cherokees arrived in the southern Appalachians about four-thousand years ago, having left their Iroquoian homeland, which itself was once a place of arrival for ancestors thousands of years before. The Cherokee diaspora that concerns Smithers began at the end of the American Revolution when a handful of prescient leaders in mountain towns of what is today Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina ascertained that the long knife republic was not going to abide by borders negotiated by the crown they had just overthrown. In anticipation of this invasion, Cherokees began to head west in search of places to ensure that they could remain in flow and balance. Over the following decades many more followed while others headed for the Mexican province of Texas in search of respite from Anglo-American encroachments. By 1830, Texas Cherokees numbered several hundred while around five thousand western Cherokees settled in present-day western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. Many of the 16,500 who still inhabited their ancestral homeland in the states of Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina regarded their far-flung kin as either outsiders or as rivals who had abandoned them in their fight against the federal and state governments and who had turned their backs on the adoption of Anglo-American cultural norms. But when in 1838 and 1839 the US army expelled the remaining eastern Cherokees from Tennessee, with the exception of a few hundred who remained in western North Carolina, the relocation of the nation to what became known as Indian Territory was complete.

The land once home to a few thousand western Cherokees (what is today southeastern Oklahoma) transformed in the early 1840s into the site of a new nation that had to remake itself out of a population segmented by different histories of movement, identity, and resistance. In the wake of assassinations and bitter civil strife, the former leader of the eastern Cherokees, John Ross, forged a coalition in defense of their new homeland, a renewed sovereignty, and a proactive adaptation to life in Anglo-America. Over time the people who remained in North Carolina found themselves estranged from their western kin and increasingly excluded from the new nation's exclusive claims to Cherokee identity.

Two subsequent events, abolition and allotment, undermined the Cherokee identity fashioned in Indian Territory. Emancipation at the end of the Civil War created a new set of Cherokees out of the nation's enslaved population whose skin color made them anathema to most other Cherokees. The freed peoples' claims to certain legal rights and benefits hastened the nation's embrace of U.S. racial norms and laws in order to exclude freed people from the census rolls that determined membership in the nation. Then, in the early 1900s, the federal government allotted most of the Cherokees' western land for sale to speculators and homesteaders. Allotment transformed the nation from a place that could be mapped on the ground to a space of the mind and heart that could only be felt and enacted through cultural rites, church services, and social gatherings. How Cherokees remained conscious of themselves as a people and how they reformulated a sense of self after allotment demands a deeper investigation than Smithers offers. It is unclear whether and how a sense of spatiality informed debates over who belonged and who did not. In eliminating formerly enslaved men, women, and children from the nation's rolls, Cherokees undertook a purging of collective genealogy and a restructuring of the spaces they inhabited. A different kind of removal required the political and racial separation of neighbors and kin.

Two world wars and the Great Depression further disrupted Cherokee life. Poverty, urban opportunities, and service overseas pushed and pulled Cherokees across the country as they sought belonging and work in U.S. cities. By the 1970s, most still called Oklahoma home but thousands had sought better opportunities in California and other states. Some made it as far as Hawaii and a few even lodged applications with the Australian government. Meanwhile, the Cherokees in North Carolina had rebuilt their land base as the Qualla reserve and gained separate federal recognition to set themselves up as a second Cherokee nation.

In spite of confusing and complicated histories of dislocation, violence, and rivalry, Smithers argues that there is still a Cherokee people whose identity transcends a myriad of political, racial, and geographical divisions. Cherokees are, Smithers argues, defined by their shared diasporic experiences of the Trail of Tears. His inability to anchor consistently his interpretation in indigenous concepts of flow and propriety fails to clarify how understanding their expulsion can be usefully explored as a diaspora. At the heart of the story of the Cherokee diaspora sit the brute facts that they lost most of their ancestral homeland, were driven by force of arms from their homes, reconstituted themselves in a new homeland which they subsequently lost, and then underwent bitter struggles over who counted as a member of the nation and who did not. When held apart from specific ethnogeographic considerations, such a narrative comports well with other such studies. If, however, Smithers had probed more deeply the interdependence of peoplehood, place, and memory, and pushed his analysis back to the much earlier migration that brought the Cherokees to their southern homeland, he might have better represented the pain of expulsion from not just an ancestral homeland but from a living being that had borne and nurtured the Cherokees for millennia.

Consider the Cherokee dead, the ghosts that haunt TVA reservoirs, inhabitants of ancient cemeteries that lie beneath economic development projects, and occupants of forlorn mounds—the beings who tie the living to the past and to the land. They have stories to tell. According to notions of tohi and osi the dead are never really dead but cohabit with the living and the unborn. When real estate development and other forms of excavation disturb or destroy the Cherokee dead, Cherokee life is imperiled. The life that Cherokee ghosts enact draws time, space, and self into one conceptual and existential field, making stories about survival, endurance, hope, and belonging possible. They ensure that life continues to flow well and that Cherokees remain Cherokees and, above all else, grounded.4

It is not, in the end, altogether clear how the concept of diaspora reframes the standard story of Cherokee dispossession. Lacking a deeper exploration of place and space, Smithers' interpretive angle never closes on the emotional depth and psychic pain of removal and allotment, nor does it open a view into the transformative creativity needed to remake a homeland, both real and remembered, over and over. Nevertheless, Smithers has tried something new, seeking to set the history of Native North America on a different footing that engages with broader inquiry into transnational themes of identity, memory, and history. He demonstrates that the trauma of ethnic cleansing remains today in Cherokee minds and memories and at the core of their collective identity. That such trauma reaches out across almost two centuries indicates the need to find ways to open the past so that well-worn narratives can recover some of their original power to provoke and to disturb.

About the Author

James Taylor Carson is head of the school of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Brisbaine, Australia. His research and writing has focused largely on issues related to contact between European invaders and first peoples in North America. His books include Making an Atlantic World: Circles, Paths, and Stories from the Colonial South(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007).

• 1. William Safran, "Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,"Diaspora 1 (July 1991): 83–99; Michele Reis, "Theorizing Diaspora: Perspectives on 'Classical' and 'Contemporary' Diaspora,"International Migration 42 (June 2004): 41–60; Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); Rogers Brubaker, "The 'Diaspora' Diaspora,"Ethnic and Racial Studies 28 (January 2005): 1–19; Paul Burke, "Indigenous Diaspora and the Prospect for Cosmopolitan 'Orbiting': The Warlpiri Case,"Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 14 (August 2013): 304–7; James Clifford, "Indigenous Articulations,"Contemporary Pacific 13 (Fall 2001): 470–72, 478–79; Robin Delugan, "Indigeneity across Borders: Hemispheric Migrations and Cosmopolitan Encounters,"American Ethnologist 37 (February 2010): 41–2.
• 2. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); James Taylor Carson, "Ethnogeography and the Native American Past,"Ethnohistory 49 (Fall 2002): 765–784; Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
• 3. Andrea L. Smith and Anna Eisenstein, Rebuilding Shattered Worlds: Creating Community by Voicing the Past (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 3–4, 11–13.
• 4. James Taylor Carson, "Cherokee Ghostings and the Haunted South,"The Native South: New Histories and Enduring Legacies, eds. Tim Alan Garrison and Greg O'Brien (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 238–62.

Presentation

Closer Reading: Three Images from the Presentation

Standing at the summit of Signal Hill (used previously by the Spanish military for the transmission of communications), Armstrong figuratively dominates the landscape by sweeping his arms over the mountains. Later he inscribes relevant cartographical information on this photographic image. Armstrong's presence reinforced the intentions of US colonial dominion over Puerto Rico while his panoramic gaze helped create the knowledge that made it possible. He repeats this pose in other photographs, sometimes appearing repeatedly in the same panorama (a result of pasting adjacent views together) and multiplying his gaze indefinitely.

This interior photograph shows a sick "peon" in the presence of an unknown observer, who does not resemble Armstrong in appearance or dress. Anemia caused by hookworm decimated Puerto Rican rural workers. After the discoveries of Dr. Bailey Ashford, an effective clinical treatment became available in 1904.1 This photograph from 1910 suggests the continuing misery of rural workers under the colonial state. The observer appears detached from and indifferent to the suffering of the hunched, dying man. Armstrong, in an ominous field book note, suggested that in the on-going process of "Americanization" it might be better if the unfit inhabitants simply "died off."

Armstrong produced extensive cartographic materials on his journeys through Puerto Rico from 1908 to 1912. In the process of making a topographical map, Armstrong traced elaborate itineraries, which he organized in field books complete with descriptions and maps of more than thirty towns and illustrated with more than five-hundred annotated photographs and postcards. He also included visual details of the transportation networks of primary and secondary roads, local trails, and railroads, as well as the agricultural environs. The archival research (upon which this illustrated lecture relies) includes a biography of Armstrong, an analysis of the contents of the field books, and discussion of the effects of the map in the context of the colonial state. The final publication will be a facsimile edition of ten field books, a Spanish translation, and a digital version of the topographical map.

Acknowledgments

This project is funded by the Fundación Puertorriqueña de las Humanidades, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. All images and quotes are from the original field books, which are located in the following archives and collections: Colección Puertorriqueña, Biblioteca José M. Lázaro, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras; Archivo General de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Colección de Héctor Rodríguez Vázquez.

About the Author

Lanny Thompson is a professor of Sociology at Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. He is the author of Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2010).

• 1. For more on Ashford and hookworm eradication, see José Amador, "The Pursuit of Health: Colonialism and Hookworm Eradication in Puerto Rico,"Southern Spaces, March 30, 2017, https://southernspaces.org/2017/pursuit-health-colonialism-and-hookworm-eradication-puerto-rico.

Introduction: Unusual Sympathies

In 1811 a prominent Choctaw woman named Molly McDonald placed her eleven-year-old son in the home of Silas Dinsmoor, an unpopular U.S. government official who had just established a sprawling plantation in her homelands in what is now the state of Mississippi. Dinsmoor—who served as federal liaison between the Choctaw Nation and the U.S. government—was openly disdainful of Choctaw people, politics, and sovereignty, viewing his slaveholding household as superior to the household arrangements of the Choctaw communities that surrounded him. Nonetheless, he eagerly incorporated McDonald's son into his family. Why would McDonald and Dinsmoor, whose interests appeared to be at odds, share a stake in McDonald's son?

That question lies at the heart of this book. For as it turns out, the transfer of McDonald's son to Dinsmoor's care was not unique. In the decades following the U.S. Revolution, a number of American Indian women and men and elite U.S. whites supported the placement of Native children into "white" households throughout the existing United States. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, a small group of American Indians in the Southeast from the Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw Nations became particularly interested in sending their children—especially their sons—to live in slaveholding households in the U.S. South. U.S. slaveholders proved more than eager to oblige, enfolding Indian children into their domestic spaces and the white and black worlds that shaped them.

Most of the children who lived in U.S. homes spent only short periods of time there, receiving educations in English language and literacy skills as well as in numeracy, literature, and Western philosophical and religious traditions. Those incorporated into U.S. plantation households learned other lessons still as they watched white guardians try to assert mastery over the African and African American women, men, and children they enslaved. These U.S.-educated youth then returned to their tribal nations—and their families—where many took up prominent leadership positions.

Despite the brief nature of the majority of these domestic arrangements, those who housed and schooled Indian boys and girls understood their actions as a form of adoption. They saw themselves as absorbing Native children into their white families—however temporarily—and framed their actions as part of a broader initiative on the part of their new republic to assimilate Indian people into its expanding territorial borders. White adopters took their cue from some of the most influential governing officials of their day. As the United States aggressively pushed into Indian territories east of the Mississippi River between 1790 and 1830, a wide range of governing elites declared the importance of assimilating Indian people into the U.S. body politic, which they described as a free white national family. Rather than emphasizing the various forms of violence required to dispossess Native people of their ancestral territories, government officials turned U.S. imperialism into a family story, one supposedly capacious enough to include American Indian people—but not blacks—within "white" kinship systems, the foundational familial frameworks that shaped the rights of citizenship.1 A number of established and would-be government officials themselves incorporated Indian children into their family spaces. Andrew Jackson—perhaps the most infamous figure in nineteenth-century U.S. history for his assaults on Indian sovereignty and Indian lives—embraced the discourse of adoption as he and other U.S. slaveholders worked to acquire Southeast Indian territories for the U.S. plantation economy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. After invading Creek territories in what is now Alabama in 1813 and ordering the destruction of a Creek village—and the massacre of the women, children, and men who lived there—Jackson pronounced an "unusual sympathy" for a Creek infant orphaned by his troops. The Southern general sent the child home to be adopted into his plantation household in Nashville, Tennessee.2

In current times, the term "adoption" relates to a specific liberal familial and reproductive arrangement whereby an individual or a two-parent couple legally asserts exclusive parentage rights over a child or children who are not immediate offspring.3 Within this framework, adopted children are by law full members of their adoptive families, with no fewer rights than children born into these kinship units. The vast majority of the U.S. whites incorporating American Indian children into their homes during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries did not see their roles in these legalistic terms, nor is there any evidence that the Indian children living within these domestic spaces believed themselves to be similar in status to the household's white children. Further, not all white guardians used the term "adoption" per se when it came to defining their relationships with the Indian children in their care. At this time, adoption had not yet been formally codified in the United States. Up until the mid-nineteenth century, in fact, adoption was a rather unpopular practice among U.S. whites due to common beliefs that only "blood" relations should inherit family property as well as to the continued availability of other forms of voluntary and involuntary child transfer, such as wardship and indenture. These prevailing guardianship practices at times left both birth parents and surrogate caretakers with some form of legal authority over the children in question, which could lead to conflicts over parental rights and responsibilities. Those who did formally adopt children during this era typically legitimated their parental status and their adopted children's inheritance rights through specific legislative acts.4 Massachusetts would pass "the first modern adoption law in history" in 1851, setting a precedent for, in the words of legal historian Jamil S. Zainaldin, "the judicially monitored transfer of rights with due regard for the welfare of the child and the parental qualifications of the adopters."5

This book's use of the term "adoption" more flexibly denotes an array of practices focused on the assimilation of Indian youths that were held together by declared desires on the part of U.S. whites to situate Indian people as members of the U.S. body politic. Within this framework, Indian people were supposed to enjoy liberty in the United States, but were also to remain socially and politically subservient to U.S. whites. Unlike people of African descent, whose identities became synonymous with slavery—a status that denied black people the very rights or recognition of kinship—Indians were described as free people who could potentially be incorporated into the U.S. national family, a process that in turn mandated that Indians adopt the social, economic, and familial values associated with white U.S. society.6 Desires to adopt Indians into the United States reflected ambitions to position Indian people as at once on an equal footing to whites yet simultaneously pliable to white demands. Indians were to be assimilated as free children within the white national family, yet they were also supposed to remain permanent youth whose social, political, and intellectual maturity was constantly deferred.

Those who believed they could incorporate Indian people into the United States on their own terms quickly came to confront Native resistance strategies that they had not expected. A number of American Indian communities saw significant utility in placing their children among U.S. whites for schooling. In the North, those whose lands stood in close proximity to U.S. settlements were especially keen on acquiring for both young girls and boys English language and literacy skills as well as a facility in technical arts— particularly spinning, for women—in order to better position themselves economically and politically with respect to their acquisitive white neighbors. Native families' placement of young children within U.S. homes was not a sign of their subservience to the United States but quite the opposite. The forms of knowledge their children could obtain in the midst of empire would better allow these youths and their extended families to oppose it.

American Indian nations throughout North America had their own indigenous definitions of captivity, slavery, and adoption, ones that evolved over time and, particularly in the Southeast, took on increasingly racialized characteristics in concert with European and U.S. colonial invasions into their homelands.7 These shifting understandings of warfare, race, labor, and kinship directly shaped Native decisions to place their children in U.S. homes. Among the Southeast Indians who sent their children away, most appear to have at least entertained ambitions to hold people of African descent as slaves, if they were not already engaging in the practice of racial slavery. Rather than viewing white guardians as the permanent adoptive parents of their children, most of these families sent their children to live in U.S. households with the full expectation that their youth would return home and use the skills they had acquired in U.S. homes in the service of self-determination. And their children did return. Although Andrew Jackson's adopted son—who came to be called Lyncoya—was an exception, many of the Southeast Indian men schooled within the United States used their educations in dramatically different ways than their adopters intended. After learning the ideas and practices forwarded by their U.S. mentors—including those revolving around antiblack racism and plantation slavery—they drew upon their knowledge and experiences to oppose U.S. Southerners seeking to dispossess tribal nations of their homelands.

While the number of Indian children living in U.S. households was relatively small, the study of their lives and their migrations is illuminating.8 The political and familial commitments of white adopters, American Indian parents, and adopted Indian children offer a unique vantage point into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nation building on the part of the early U.S. republic and those American Indian nations forced to contend with it. The expansionist visions of U.S. settlers and the complex forms of resistance engaged in by American Indian women and men in the decades before the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Indian people living east of the Mississippi River to the trans-Mississippi West reveal how a subset of whites and Southeast Indians used adoption, kinship, and slavery to impose and resist U.S. imperial rule. For white adopters, incorporating Indian children into their homes supported U.S. settler expansion. For the select group of American Indian women and men who placed their girls and boys in U.S. homes, acquiring the forms of knowledge valued within the settler societies in their midst was a crucial step in assuring political, economic, and territorial sovereignty.

By the early 1800s a small but powerful class of Southeast Indian elites saw white slaveholders' interest in incorporating Native children into their plantation homes as particularly useful. With U.S. planters invading the Southeast at unprecedented rates, these Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw women and men sent sons to acquire the racialized educations that increasingly supported political and economic authority in the slaveholding South. U.S. expansionists would come head-to-head with these Native strategists in the 1820s. Through their selective engagement with some of the colonial logics and practices that drove U.S. settler expansion in general, and the plantation economy in particular, adopted Southeast Indian sons effectively thwarted state and federal claims to their lands, so much so that Southern slaveholders advocated for the forced removal of Southeast Indian nations west of the Mississippi River in 1830.9 Indians' access to U.S. domestic regimes proved more threatening than most U.S. imperialists had anticipated. Instead of being solely an imperial practice of assimilation, adoption proved a Native-driven strategy of infiltration, allowing elite Indian men privileged access to and knowledge about powerful and influential spaces within an expanding U.S. empire.

The transfer of American Indian children into foreign homes and institutions during the post-Revolutionary period reflects both a continuity in European and Euro-American relationships with Indian people and a distinct moment in North American history. On the one hand, the practice existed prior to the formation of the United States and would endure long after the forcible relocation of American Indian nations during the 1830s. Well before Molly McDonald sent her son to live in a Mississippi plantation household or Andrew Jackson raided the Creek Nation, American Indian people found themselves living in European and Euro-American homes. Christopher Columbus enslaved Native people from the Caribbean after his first voyages to the Americas, inaugurating a practice that persisted among the French, Spanish, and British empires and within some U.S. settlements well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.10 In 1561 Spanish adventurers took a young man—who some believe was probably a member of the Chiskiak tribe—from the Chesapeake region. Dubbed Don Luis de Velasco, he was trained in the Spanish language and Christian religion in Mexico and then sailed back to the Chesapeake on two Spanish colonization expeditions to serve as a guide and interpreter. (Much to Spanish dismay, Don Luis apparently sabotaged both expeditions, eventually returning to his people in 1570).11 In 1584 English explorers attempting to establish their empire's first colonies in North America carried two Algonquian-speaking Indians from the Chesapeake region back with them to England. One was Manteo, the son of the leader of the Croatoan polity, and the other was Wanchese, who hailed from the Secotans. These young men's voyage appears to have been more voluntary than those migrations previously orchestrated by the Spanish, as the English left two of their own men in exchange for their Native travelers. Manteo and Wanchese, however, would develop very different impressions of their European hosts during their stay in London, which would influence their relationships with British colonists upon their later return to their homelands in what would become known as Virginia. Manteo declared himself fairly treated and developed a lasting alliance with British colonists, one that he undoubtedly hoped would better conditions for his own people. Wanchese, on the other hand, did not trust the British empire and, once back in his own community, worked to unseat the unwelcome settlers who proved to be disloyal and treacherous in their treatments of Indian people.12

The Roanoke settlement that threatened Wanchese's community disappeared within a matter of years. However, the Jamestown settlement that would arise in its wake also circulated Indian people through the British metropole, most famously in the case of Amonute, who would become known to the British by her nickname, Pocahontas.13 Initially held hostage by Jamestown settlers, Amonute eventually married into the British community and traveled to London with her husband and their infant son. Like Manteo, she made the journey to improve conditions for her Native polity— in this case the powerful confederacy built up by her father, Powhatan—as the English took more and more territory by force. Her death in London from illness cut short her attempts at diplomacy and the promotion of coexistence between the two polities.14 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as British colonists claimed territories in what would become known as New England, as well as in the mid-Atlantic and in the South, other Indian people would choose to enter into English households—and, later, into English-run schools—in order to learn the English language and understand the spiritual beliefs that they believed might help them to better navigate British settlement and the devastation it wrought.15 Others still found themselves held in colonial households by force. Indeed, European settlers' desires for Indian slaves and indentured servants put countless Indian people—particularly women and children—in Euro-American homes, dramatically reshaping Native politics, communities, and even nations in the process.16

Jumping forward to the close of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century, the U.S. federal government endorsed the forced relocation of American Indian children into boarding schools, hoping to erase a new generation's indigenous cultural and kinship ties and, by extension, their claims to their homelands.17 Here, too, Indian children went into the households of U.S. whites as families "adopted out" from boarding schools, a practice that often translated into the indenture of Indian girls and boys as laborers on U.S. farms and in white homes.18 Throughout the twentieth and into the present century, American Indian families have faced ongoing struggles to protect their children from U.S. adoption and fostering practices. State and federal agencies and private adoption services continue to undermine both the familial and national rights of indigenous people by transferring children away from their Native kin and tribal communities to wealthier—and most often white—families, despite existing laws aimed to protect Indian families and nations from precisely these kinds of predatory processes. In the words of Muscogee legal scholar Sarah Deer, such ongoing forms of child removal have "sent a variety of messages to tribal communities, particularly to mothers. The dominant society disapproved of the way Native people parented."19

Like their predecessors and their later counterparts, white adopters in the Revolutionary and early national period believed themselves to be superior to American Indian people and drew upon this sense of entitlement as they encouraged the separation of Native children from their families and into white-controlled spaces. They believed the right to have children and to control the upbringing of young people was the privilege of white settlers and not of those whose lands they invaded. Settler colonialism revolves around the foreign settlement of indigenous land and the subsequent declaration on the part of colonists of their own nativity to indigenous space, a move that correspondingly defines indigenous people as foreigners in, or alien to, their own homelands.20 Within this formulation, indigenous people are not only positioned as unworthy of reproducing their own communities as they see fit but are actively prevented from doing so. The goal of settlers is to circumscribe or eliminate both the power and the populations of indigenous people so as to make lands and resources available to colonizers.21 Within the context of British and U.S. settlement of North America, when settlers encouraged—or even demanded—the migration of American Indian children into their homes, they were hoping to erase or severely limit autonomous Native futures outside of the purview of the British colonies or the United States.

During the early national period, U.S. officials were formulating expansionist policies oriented around the geopolitics of racial slavery and in direct response to specific American Indian resistance strategies developed to thwart U.S. imperial ambitions. In this particular historical moment, the politics of adoption took on singular importance, becoming a means to define citizenship within a slaveholding republic and to undermine indigenous resistance struggles based upon pan-Indian unity movements and transatlantic commercial, trade, and military alliances with European empires. Adoption signaled who could be incorporated into a free white national family—and who could not—and structured imperial policies aimed at assimilating American Indian people and the nations to which they belonged into a U.S. "domestic" economy. As Indians' powerful international connections began to crumble in the face of U.S. policies and shifting European geopolitical interests by the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, adoption also became a way for Native people to defend themselves against exploitative U.S. international agendas and economic systems, especially as the possibilities for military defense evaporated.

Racial slavery—and the ideas about "blackness,""whiteness," and "Indianness" it helped to engender—sat at the heart of U.S. contests over human beings and territory. It determined who would—or could—occupy specific household and territorial spaces, shaped economic relationships and political governance across U.S. settlements, and calibrated the kinship systems informing how individual women, children, and men were able to labor, live, and love. With plantation slavery directly driving U.S. colonization of the Southeast—the region that would become known as the "Deep South"—and a small but influential group of Southeast Indian women and men themselves beginning to hold black people as property, chattel slavery came to shape decisions by a number of mothers, fathers, uncles, and aunts to send children to live in the United States. The women and men who placed their children within U.S. slaveholding households acted in ways to better position themselves—and often their tribal nations more broadly—within rapidly changing imperial worlds. Yet they also subjugated people of African descent, a move that distinguished them from the vast majority of the individuals living within their Native nations, not to mention in American Indian nations across the continent.22 It lent them their own unusual sympathies with the very slaveholders who sought to dispossess them of their homelands.

By following a series of families and the ways in which the lives of the individuals who composed them intersected across nations and empires, the stories told in the following chapters seek to provide an intimate glimpse into the history of nation building—and of attempts to destroy indigenous nations—in post-Revolutionary North America.23 Adoption, expansion, and slavery would serve as important and intertwined practices in these familial, national, and imperial stories, shaping the daily lives of people of American Indian, African, and European descent and influencing U.S. and Southeast Indian political governance. Ideas about kinship and race became central in competing claims to land, labor, and citizenship in the post-Revolutionary era. They directly informed imperial policy decisions and articulations of self-determination, structuring a diverse range of struggles for individual and collective sovereignty and freedom in the process.

Acknowledgments

Southern Spaces thanks Harvard University Press for their permission to reprint this excerpt from the introduction of Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion.

About the Author

Dawn Peterson is an assistant professor of Early North American and US History in the Department of History at Emory University. In her research, she considers the roles of race, gender, and kinship in the history of US capitalism, settler colonialism, and slavery, particularly in the post-Revolutionary period. Her book Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 2017) looks at a group of white slaveholders who adopted Southeast Indian boys (Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw) into their plantation households in the decades following the US Revolution. While these adoptions might seem novel at first glance, they in fact reveal how the plantation household—and the racialized kinship structures that underpin it—increasingly came to shape human life for American Indians, African Americans, and Euro-Americans after the emergence of the United States. Peterson has received fellowships to support this work from the American Antiquarian Society, Harvard University, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Huntington Library, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Newberry Library.

• 1. I am indebted to the work of black feminist thinkers and scholars in Native American and Indigenous studies and Queer studies in my analysis of family, race, and citizenship. See, for example, Brackette F. Williams, "The Impact of the Precepts of Nationalism on the Concept of Culture: Making Grasshoppers of Naked Apes,"Cultural Critique 24 (1993): 143–91; Patricia Hill Collins, "It's All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation,"Hypatia 13, no. 3 (1998): 62–82; Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
• 2. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, November 4 and December 19 and 29, 1813, in The Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Harold D. Moser, Sharon Macpherson, and Charles F. Bryan Jr., vol. 2, 1804–1813 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 444, 494–95, 516; Robert Vincent Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 192–94; Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 189.
• 3. The field of adoption studies has grown quite large in recent years. For both histories of adoption as a legal practice in the United States and the social and cultural parameters determining who qualifies as an adoptive parent and an adoptable child, see, for example, Jamil S. Zainaldin, "The Emergence of a Modern American Family Law: Child Custody, Adoption, and the Courts, 1796–1851,"Northwestern University Law Review 73, no. 6 (1979): 1038–89; Rickie Solinger, Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002); Laura Briggs, Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Brigitte Fielder, "'Those People Must Have Loved Her Very Dearly': Interracial Adoption and Radical Love in Antislavery Children's Literature,"Early American Studies 14, no. 4 (Fall 2016): 749–80.
• 4. Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 268–69.
• 5. Zainaldin, "The Emergence of a Modern American Family Law," 1042–43, emphases in original. See also Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 269–80.
• 6. On enslaved families' lack of legal rights, see Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 31. On antebellum white society's reluctance to adopt African American children—or to even recognize their status as young people in need of actual protection and care—see Fielder, "'Those People Must Have Loved Her Very Dearly.'"
• 7. For examinations of these changing histories, see, for example, Miles, Ties That Bind; Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
• 8. It is impossible to fully assess the numbers of Native children "adopted" by U.S. whites during this period of study due to uneven record keeping on the part of U.S. educational institutions and missionary organizations, the transient nature of many of these "adoptions," and the fact that many records have simply not survived into the present. This book accounts for small numbers (fewer than thirty). However, all told, there were an additional forty-two Indian children living in Cornwall, Connecticut, over the course of the 1810s and 1820s, as well as fluctuating numbers of Native youth at a residential school called Choctaw Academy in Blue Springs, Kentucky, opened in 1825. In addition, in 1824 the U.S. House Committee on Indian Affairs estimated that over eight hundred Indian children had attended mission schools within Indian territories. See Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 152. For scholarly accounts regarding the numbers of children at Cornwall mission school and Choctaw Academy, see John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (New York: Knopf, 2014), 231; Carolyn Thomas Foreman, "The Choctaw Academy,"Chronicles of Oklahoma 6, no. 4 (1928): 453–80.
• 9. As scholar Alexandra Harmon argues, "the banishment of Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Creeks was a response to competition between peoples with comparable agendas and comparable enterprising classes." Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 93.
• 10. Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, A.D. 500–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 105; Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), esp. 13–45. A number of recent monographs and edited volumes have documented British, French, Spanish, and U.S. participation in the enslavement of American Indians. See, for example, ibid.; Alan Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
• 11. Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, American Portraits (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 7–9.
• 12. James Horn, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 55, 60–61, 81–82, 92, 155, 157–60.
• 13. Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, 13–14.
• 14. Ibid., esp. 85–158.
• 15. Jean M. O'Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 54; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 30–39. For a useful overview of Indian schooling by European-descended settlers, see Margaret Connell Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–1783 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).
• 16. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade; Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Gallay, Indian Slavery in Colonial America; Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau, "The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era," in After King Philip's War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 115, 121–24, 127.
• 17. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997). For how Native parents and children navigated the trauma of this history, see Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
• 18. See Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 71. For a compelling memoir of one man's experiences of being put in a residential school and then placed in an abusive white family in the 1940s, see Peter Razor, While the Locust Slept: A Memoir (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002). Leslie Marmon Silko provides a powerful novel that engages with the history of this practice. See Leslie Marmon Silko, Garden in the Dunes: A Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
• 19. Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape, 85. See also Briggs, Somebody's Children, 59–93; Laura Briggs, "Why Feminists Should Care about the Baby Veronica Case," Indian Country Today Media Network, August 16, 2013, http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/08/16/why-feminists-should-care-about-baby-veronica-case-150894; Laura Sullivan and Amy Walters, "Native Foster Care: Lost Children, Shattered Families,"NPR News, October 25, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/10/25/141672992/native-foster-care-lost-children-shattered-families.
• 20. See, for example, Jean M. O'Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Patrick Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,"Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409; J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Patrick Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism Then and Now: A Conversation," in special issue, ed. Michele Spanò, Politica & Società (June 2012): 235–58.
• 21. Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native."
• 22. For histories of slavery in Indian country, see, for example, James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 80; Miles, Ties That Bind, 75; Celia E. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 17; Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979); Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country.
• 23. Drawing on the work of sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, historian Tiya Miles argues that the "family can . . . be read as a barometer for . . . society, tracing and reflecting the atmospherics of social life and social change."Ties That Bind, 3. For compelling studies on the intersections of family relationships and Euro-American imperialism, see ibid.; Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (New York: Ecco, 2012); Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

Beginnings

How did you become involved with Southern Spaces?

Halbert: I was involved in the inception of Southern Spaces and can shed some light on the endeavors that led to the creation of this marvelous and innovative new vehicle for scholarly communication. A fascinating and unpredictable journey through accidents and sagacity took us to what we needed.

During the early 2000s, I was Director for Digital Programs and Systems at Emory University Libraries while also pursuing my interdisciplinary PhD in Emory's Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts (ILA). Following my experience and training as a librarian and a technologist (at IBM and Rice University), I wanted to explore what the internet could mean for humanistic inquiry. How could the library and the systems department work more closely with scholars? The story of Southern Spaces began with an initiative seemingly unrelated to creating a journal, but without the initial support for graduate students, faculty travel, and technical assistance, Southern Spaces would not have happened. In retrospect it's very surprising, if not a small miracle, that the support became available for this work at all.

In 2001 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded a series of projects on "metadata harvesting."1I was the principal investigator for two of these (the MetaArchive and AmericanSouth), which brought in some six hundred thousand dollars to the Emory Libraries. These grants inaugurated a new era of work for digital library activities at Emory which, I am gratified to say, have greatly expanded.

Without delving too deeply into these two projects, I'll share a few salient points. According to Mellon program officer Don Waters, the general idea of the initiative was to "explore the requirements for developing scholarly-oriented portal services based on the use of a variety of internet technologies, including the new Metadata Harvesting Protocol."2

While other institutions in this initiative devoted their project work to narrowly defined technical development of software systems designed to use the metadata harvesting telecommunications protocol, I thought that these grant-funded projects should not build technical systems in isolation, but should explore digital innovations through collaborative relationships between the library and scholars. I sought to make MetaArchive and AmericanSouth such a broadly conceived program. I talked with interdisciplinary faculty and, whenever possible, hired bright project personnel who were themselves scholars.

I was interested in how media innovations affect the way we think about scholarly communication—in my doctoral research I studied media history scholars such as Walter Ong, Eric Havelock, and Harold Innis. I labeled this combination of projects the MetaScholar Initiative, and tried to get everyone involved to think both broadly and reflectively about the opportunities that new digital technologies offered. I was very fortunate in meeting people like Allen Tullos (who became my close collaborator and dissertation advisor), Katherine Skinner (my ally in many subsequent endeavors) and a number of ILA graduate students.

Skinner: I was part of the picture when SouthernSpaces.org germinated, gelled, and launched. I worked as its founding managing editor from 2003–2007, and I supervised subsequent managing editors until 2009, when I transitioned into my current role on the journal's editorial board.

Allen Tullos, Charles Regan Wilson, Will Thomas, Lucinda MacKethan, and Carole Merritt made up the scholarly design team for the AmericanSouth project that was led by Martin and on which I served as project manager. We were studying how to unite materials from disparate archives around a specific topical area—the study of the US South—using the internet and the bridging device protocol OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).

As we worked together on this project, Allen (who was also my dissertation director) suggested that primary source materials could be complemented by the creation of an online vehicle for scholarship. From our first conversations about founding a site for scholarly publication, Allen, Martin, and I agreed that we needed to demonstrate how the online environment could not only disseminate text-based digital scholarship, but could create and express new forms. We wanted to advance scholarship that used digital media as essential components.

We also wanted to differentiate the purpose of this new publication from "Southern Studies" in general, which considered "the South" as a monolithic historical and cultural entity. We wanted to examine the plurality of "souths" that existed and overlapped. We prioritized peer-reviewed scholarship that relied on multimedia elements, not just as reference points of cited works supporting an argument, but as part of the scholarship itself.3

Tullos: In terms of editorial perspective, Southern Spaces emerged from spatial theory (Henri Lefebvre), critical regional studies (David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Dolores Hayden), social justice theory (Iris Marion Young), cultural studies (Raymond Williams), and documentary practice. As Katherine Skinner mentions, one of our intentions was to critique broad, mystifying conceptions of the South—"Southern" imaginaries. Who needs or shapes a South and why? Why do simplistic and oppressive meanings of the South manage to live on into the twenty-first century? In such a South, it's always the day after yesterday. What can we gain by understanding the South not as a region, but as a geography of many changing regions and places?

We developed and solicited content about these southern regions (old, recent, and emerging), and about real and imagined places. We sought analysis that made conections from these locales to the wider world. And we aimed for an audience of scholars and teachers, students in and out of classrooms, writers and media producers, and the general public.

We wanted to distinguish Southern Spaces from strictly disciplinary publications and from just-the-facts online projects such as Wikipedia—invaluable though these are. As I assumed the role of senior editor, the scholarly design team transformed into a very active editorial board with the addition of Barbara Ellen Smith, Tom Rankin, Natasha Trethewey, and Earl Lewis—each contributing distinctive perspectives and talents.4Early on, we featured essays offering interpretations of regions such as the Mississippi Delta, Black Belt, Carolina Piedmont, South Louisiana, metro Atlanta, and the Valley of Virginia. As a field project, we began the "Poets in Place" series (supported by an award from the Emory provost's office) collaborating with Natasha Trethewey to identify and video-record poets reading and commenting on their poems in the places they write about.

Southern Spaces built upon and extended a network of writers and scholars developed from my experiences as editor (1982–2003) of the print journal Southern Changes and from contacts suggested by our editorial board. We set up rights and permissions so that copyright of articles, images, videos, etc., remained with content creators. We depended on the networked infrastructure offered by the Emory Libraries (thanks to Martin and to library director Linda Matthews), and learned about organizing and describing materials from the library's subject area and metadata specialists. We decided, early on, that Southern Spaces would become a site for training graduate students in digital publishing. And that, where possible, we would collaborate with small non-profit organizations engaged in regional research and education that might not have access to their own publishing platforms.

Toton: I came to Emory in the fall of 2003 as a graduate student in American Studies from the University of Iowa. As a research assistant for Prof. Tullos I first transcribed OCR text into XML for the digital archiving of the journal Southern Changes. In January 2004 I began with Southern Spaces where I advanced from editorial associate to photo and media editor, then assistant managing editor, and finally managing editor before becoming a digital strategist at Emory Libraries in 2009. I left Emory to work as a technical product manager in digital media for Turner Broadcasting in 2010.

Abbott: I started working on Southern Spaces as a research assistant for Dr. Tullos during the 2006­–2007 school year. I was an editorial associate in the summer of 2007, assistant managing editor from fall 2007 until August 2009, and managing editor from September 2009 until August 2011.

Battle: I began working as a graduate assistant for Southern Spaces in fall 2007, became a part-time, student employee in the summer of 2008, and served as an editorial associate and series editor until December 2010, when I moved to Charleston, South Carolina, to finish researching and writing my dissertation.

Rawson: I came to Emory to continue studying culture in the US South, and I had a background in editing literary journals and producing video, so I knew I wanted to be part of Southern Spaces. I initially tried to volunteer my time; however, the journal has an admirable policy of not having students work for free. Luckily, it didn't take long for then-managing-editor Sarah Toton to find the needed funding to add another position. I joined Southern Spaces as an editorial associate in the summer of 2008. From 2011 to 2013, I was the managing editor.

Melton: When I applied to Emory after my master's program in American Studies at the University of Alabama, I knew that I wanted to work on Southern Spaces. As part of my first-year graduate training for the ILA in 2009, I began as an editorial associate. I continued working on the journal for the next few years, becoming a series editor and assistant managing editor. In 2014, I transitioned into a full-time position at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) where I continued to support the journal and other projects as a digital publishing strategist.

Karlsberg: I joined Southern Spaces in January 2011 as an editorial associate while serving as Allen Tullos's research assistant. I worked as assistant managing editor from 2012–2013 before becoming managing editor. Two years later I transitioned to a new role as consulting editor in which I help with strategy and technology concerns. I was especially involved in the migration of the journal from its Drupal 6 platform to Drupal 7 in 2015.

Doster: I came on staff in January 2013, transitioning to assistant managing editor in spring 2014. In August 2015, I stepped into the managing editor position, just in time to shepherd the final stages of the journal's migration to Drupal 7 to completion. My main emphasis as managing editor was the sustainability of journal staffing and training with lofty goals of coordinating and implementing a five-year strategic plan.

What was Southern Spaces like when you began working with it? How did it change with your participation?

Halbert: Of course, there was no journal when we started these projects and that wasn't what we thought we were creating. We began with concepts of "annotation," as in annotating archival records and web information discovered in a search and retrieval system. We set out to build "portals." Nowadays you would simply say we were creating websites. And, we built an array of them that did many things. But from discussions with scholars about what would be useful to them, one point kept emerging. While the basic assumption of the projects was that we needed to create systems for researchers to discover existing scholarly information, what scholars really wanted was a means of publishing new work. Everyone had been drowning in information for a long time. We didn't need to drink from a bigger fire hose. What people wanted was a way to make sense of information. Although I was obligated to finish the metadata portal work we had proposed, it was clearly Southern Spaces that became the single most compelling outcome of the projects.

It is always a surprise when you embark on a journey of discovery seeking one thing, and instead come upon something completely different. I thought this was a wonderful and wholly delightful outcome. While Southern Spaces now counts its start as 2004, we were debating the first questions associated with the idea of web-based scholarly publications as early as the 2002 meetings I convened at Emory. We discussed and planned the journal through 2003. Mellon continued to fund the metadata harvesting work with subsequent awards, but Southern Spaces grew in relative importance until it was the project.

Skinner: There was no "journal" in the beginning and we contested and debated the use of that term internally. We wanted relevance that stretched beyond the readers of traditional scholarly publications. Atlanta-based Mindpower Inc., where I'd worked prior to graduate school, produced the earliest design for Southern Spaces: sage green and orange, with a compass in the logo. We produced the site in Dreamweaver—which was a great way for non-coders to build. As the primary "keeper of the code," I produced the initial Southern Spaces publications by hand, using the coding view in Dreamweaver. I tried to code it all in xhtml. As we brought on additional students to help—Sarah Toton, Steve Bransford, Paul O'Grady, Jere Alexander, and Zeb Baker—we refined our methods. We hoped to provide a model that others could adapt.

Tullos: During our first year we were able to model most of content types that came to characterize the journal going forward: text essays that included hyperlinks, images, and maps; videos of poets in place; multi-media surveys of musical genres; media-illustrated lectures and edited conference presentations; interpretive overviews of regions and literary genres.

Not only did we create an excellent and active editorial board, we began to build a network of editorial reviewers to carry out scholarly evaluations of submissions. This network has grown over the years to include many peer reviewers in the US and beyond. Much of the labor that goes into Southern Spaces comes from these unpaid critical scholars, photographers, videographers, and writers—our editorial reviewers.

Toton: At the beginning, Southern Spaces operated with stand-alone, static pages using Dreamweaver. Media was stored in wmv and mov files and to implement Google Analytics, we added the Google snippet to the JavaScript on every page. I programmed all the first SWFs (small web format) for the journal's top scroll until 2006 when Franky Abbott took over this task. We formatted all articles using html and made the journal a composite of handcrafted digital objects. Media was always a bit of a challenge, as was walking content through internal review, peer review, and copyright review. We worked with Lisa Macklin, the first director of Emory's scholarly communications office, to create release-permission forms for writers and content creators and to address questions of copyright and intellectual property.

Battle: The look and feel of Southern Spaces changed significantly during my time working on it, particularly when we shifted from Dreamweaver to Drupal 6 in 2010. While planning for that migration, the staff conducted an audience survey that provided insights into changing the site's appearance to become more user-friendly. We created more accessible menu options for navigating the growing content. With the increasing number of multimedia articles and features, we standardized the organization of pieces to enhance accessibility. We shifted from pieces with numerous pages to scroll-down navigation. These changes began with Sarah Toton, before Franky Abbott oversaw the implementation of the redesign by the Southern Spaces staff. It was a giant endeavor that involved extensive discussions, and was carried out with assistance from a Georgia Tech web designer. As someone new to digital humanities, being involved in that process helped me learn a great deal about how to build web-based projects.

Abbott: When I started working on Southern Spaces in the fall of 2006, it was in transition. During my tenure, I like to think I helped clarify the journal's online identity to its readership and build systems that remain part of the way Southern Spaces operates: setting goals for monthly publication rate, inaugurating topical series, measuring traffic and considering users and use with Google Analytics, tracking workflow with the first project management system, as well as formalizing training for new students in copyediting, research, and review best practices.

Rawson: I began when the journal used an orange color scheme and was hand-coded with Dreamweaver. Our audio and video media was encoded in three different formats for three different media players. Articles had multiple pages.

Melton: Our shift to Drupal allowed streamlined editing and reviewing. In 2015, with the assistance of Sevaa (an Atlanta-based technical group) we migrated to Drupal 7, which updated the look and feel of the site, as well as added much backend functionality.

We also added and reorganized quite a bit of content. When I began, we had no separate category for reviews, which are now important to the journal. We also added an active blog, that allows us to highlight our new publications and makes the journal and its processes more transparent.

Karlsberg: When I joined Southern Spaces in early 2011, it had recently migrated to the Drupal 6 platform. The site's aesthetics felt contemporary and fresh, and new articles read well and were easy to navigate. One major change from the earlier design was a transition from publishing articles on multiple pages to just a single scrolling page. This transition made sense as page load times improved and users became increasingly accustomed to reading online. However, the new design was an awkward fit with a number of older articles and essays which used novel, beautifully conceived navigation schemes, but were often hard to adapt to the new site's design. As we continued to work with Drupal 6, we transitioned from then-archaic downloadable streaming media players in Real, Quicktime, and Windows Media formats to an embedded JW Player that could accommodate audio and video as well as playlists. These changes increased the range of publication types and media Southern Spaces could accommodate.

As monitors grew and pixels shrank and the web's dominant aesthetic shifted from a three-dimensional emulation of real life to a flatter and more minimal aesthetic, our site began to look dated. Conceived with desktop or laptop computers in mind, it was not as easily read on smartphones and tablets. Analytics showed that our readers increasingly accessed our content on handheld devices, part of a larger trend. These concerns informed a redesign we initiated in 2014 that culminated in the August 2015 soft-launch of the Drupal 7 site. The new site featured larger text and a cleaner aesthetic that minimized visual clutter and emphasized content and essential navigation. It was more responsive on mobile devices and tablets and better enabled larger media. As with our previous redesign, fitting old pieces to the new site was a challenge that sometimes required revisiting layout and navigation.

Doster: In my first few semesters at Southern Spaces, we published in Drupal 6 and were beginning conversations about the redesign. New to both Mac operating systems and coding of all kinds, my first months required a steep learning curve. I had finally mastered our older operating systems when we migrated to Drupal 7.

Software, Platforms, and Technology

What were some of the technical challenges of the journal? What software platform(s) did you use? What systems did you develop and implement? How did these technologies impact Southern Spaces's rendering of scholarship?

Halbert: At first, the notion of focusing software development on the journal part of the projects (namely Southern Spaces) did not occupy our thinking much. All the software development went towards the metadata harvesting brouhaha. What we talked about regarding Southern Spaces were (to me more interesting) questions of innovative scholarship: What should the forms, conventions, and citation standards of an "online" journal be? Remember, this was more than a decade ago. You had to do an inspired job of tap-dancing, wheedling, and convincing most humanities faculty that the two words "online" and "journal" could be used in the same sentence. Technical challenges? Software development? Hell, we just wrote up Southern Spaces's initial content in HTML (Ur-language of the internet). And after having done my share of chasing imagined perfect software solutions, I'm convinced that the technology used for publication is far less important than ensuring scholarly standards.

Having said that, Southern Spaces evolved in technical sophistication tremendously and quickly. We realized that the technical infrastructure of an online journal could not be left in basic HTML. There were a number of iterations of the underlying software as we explored the needs and functions involved in content management. I left Emory well before the move to the Drupal platform; I celebrate and salute the Southern Spaces team for their achievement in implementing this sophisticated and robust new software infrastructure. But I also can't help interjecting a longer-term observation that this moment is always a circle-of-life point. What happens when the day comes for extracting all the content out of Drupal? I can virtually guarantee that a new generation of Southern Spaces editors will be scratching (pounding?) their heads over that challenge.

Skinner: A better question would be what technical challenges did we NOT experience . . . wow. Hand-coding a site was one piece of the puzzle—always complicated and prone to problems. But we also had other challenges—video capture (Martin broke a long-standing rule in the Emory Libraries against purchasing Macs so that we could have our first video editing station), storage, back up, preservation, metadata. Paul O'Grady will remember the weeks we spent working with Emory metadata librarian Laura Akerman. Everything was a blank slate. Everything required decisions.

At launch, we used two platforms—one for the journal itself, and another for the editorial process. Open Journal Software (OJS) was being used by another start-up journal at our sister campus in Oxford at the time. We hoped that OJS would help to streamline and manage all of the editorial functions—submission, responding to authors, circulating a piece for blind peer review, synthesizing the reviews, communicating back to the author the status of a piece, etc. It didn't. It was easier for our editorial board to use email. That meant that tracking was also done by hand, both by Allen as senior editor, and by me as managing editor.

As technologies changed, we struggled to adapt. The challenge—always—was almost non-existent funding and staffing. We were a lean enterprise, and heavily relied on the skill sets of graduate students and the work of widely-scattered scholars. That said, I think one of the reasons we're celebrating our years of publishing incredible scholarship is that we operated on sustainable funding and energy.

Tullos: With Dreamweaver, each digital article became a handmade object. But because the journal was innovative and collaborative, our student editorial staff found the layout and design work interesting and artful even as it was tedious and painstaking. My training in ethnographic fieldwork and videography led Southern Spaces, early on, to publish stand-alone video pieces as well as to embed video and audio as necessary complements to written narrative and interpretation. We received a timely grant from the Lewis Beck Foundation to purchase a digital video camera, microphone kit, and editing suite. This helped us launch our Poets in Place series in mid-2004. As a public-facing publication, we sought to balance the quality of media streaming with the low-tech media players that many people used to access the journal. Here we received help from Jim Kruse who maintained Emory library's streaming service. Also, realizing that most of the scholars we were soliciting material from did not have digital production expertise, we felt it was part of our job to provide assistance in gathering, editing, and displaying media in their articles. And we were "long form" before that became a conventional term. One of our most important multimedia essays, Daniel A. Pollock's "The Battle of Atlanta: History and Remembrance" features the long form and an accompanying web app for cell phones that offers a guided tour of this critical Civil War battle. With the move to Drupal 7 came responsive design for mobile device accessibility and our increased use of social media to entice visitors to Southern Spaces.

Battle: Dreamweaver was time consuming and difficult to learn for a person only moderately tech savvy like myself. For example, after we pasted in text for an article from a Word Document, we then had to go through and add code for breaks, italics, bold lettering, em-dashes, links, anchors, and so on. We also had to find and change all apostrophes or quotation marks in the text, because they always pasted in as the wrong font. All of them. This could actually be a weirdly satisfying task after a long day of classes—like a mindless video game to chase the ugly punctuation marks—but it took time. There was also no spellcheck. Inserting images involved lots of fussing with their size and appearance in Photoshop, and figuring out the places to wrap text around the images. With a small staff, we relied on each other heavily for checking all these "fixes." Together, we tackled the endless technical difficulties that seemed to arise in layout and in converting and uploading videos.

After the move from Dreamweaver to Drupal in 2010, layout became much quicker and there were fewer possibilities for errors. This made a difference in the scholarship and impact of Southern Spaces. We could produce more pieces at shorter intervals. This enhanced the overall activity on the site, and our user audiences grew significantly, which led to more scholarly attention and submissions. On the back end, Drupal was easier to learn than Dreamweaver, so our staff could grow to include graduate students with minimal digital expertise who worked for both long and short periods (in the past, the longer learning curve often meant that a staff member had to work on the site for a while to acquire the technical skills).

Toton: Writing a parser to convert content to Drupal was challenging. The hand-coding was something we'd grown used to and losing that was really hard. My biggest fear wasn't the technical side, but that we'd lose funding or that students wouldn't want to work on the journal. I believed in it and wanted to ensure it moved forward. Southern Spaces could have been run on a Wordpress site in terms of technical publishing and delivery requirements, but the quality of the content would have suffered. The majority of time was spent on vetting content, conducting internal reviews, researching primary materials, emailing writers and archives, finding supportive media, researching historical information, gaining copyrights, and formatting the text for an online, born-digital piece.

Abbott: I became managing editor of Southern Spaces amid the 2010 redesign from static html to Drupal. This was challenging for a group of students with no experience of holistic web project design, and limited time and funding. We did the very best that we could though! The migration of individual pieces, which had often been constructed in unique ways, provided a huge quality control challenge and required resilience and creativity. Mary Battle, Katie Rawson, Sarah Melton, Caddie Putnam Rankin, and I put a lot of heart and soul into moving Southern Spaces to a new site. I also helped squeeze the first draft of a peer review dashboard out of our part-time developer on his way out the door so that we could have a more consistent process and better archiving for pieces under review. I also led the transition from the three-format encoding model for media files to a single format with the embedded JW Player.

Rawson: When I began, video encoding was often a struggle. We wanted media to work at low bandwidth for accessibility to the widest group of users, but we also wanted clarity and smooth motion. We had to find media player settings that would work for the greatest number of users. Then there was the variation in original materials. Producers submitted many forms, sizes, playback rates, etc. I cut my technical teeth on making video function well. Around 2011, I worked with Jesse Karlsberg and Alan Pike to improve the system by having one embedded streaming player.

The 2010 redesign had a steep learning curve—it was terrible and ultimately amazing. With Dreamweaver, I had filled legal pads with specifications. The redesign built many of those specifications into Drupal, along with easier systems for laying out images and text and adding footnotes.

Melton: Migrating to Drupal 6, a content management system with databases and added functionality, was a challenge. We spent some time thinking about sustainability processes, consistent file naming conventions, and how to wrangle all our pieces into an organizational schema. Much of the work of running a journal is invisible, particularly on the technical end. We periodically update file types to keep up with web standards for usability and accessibility.

Karlsberg: One continuing technological challenge has been a multimedia player that looks good and is easy for readers and staff to use. In 2012 we adopted JW Player, a customizable streaming audio and video player, but running it meant serving video from an in-house server and purchasing regular updates. We decided to migrate to Vimeo, a cloud hosted service with a fair use policy that aligns with our own, an easy-to-use back end, and a widely trafficked site. While Vimeo can accommodate streaming audio if paired with still images, it's a challenge. Multimedia is a core commitment for the journal, but one for which there's no ideal single tool.

Another challenge is maintaining and updating our Drupal platform. With development of Drupal 8 underway but far from complete, and a strong interest in redesigning Southern Spaces, we decided to remake our site in the Drupal 7 environment. Lacking an easy path, upgrading required a substantial investment of time and resources. As an open source platform with a large and active user base, Drupal offers flexibility, and support. These advantages motivated us, but the challenge of upgrading is nontrivial.

Doster: While we initially migrated all audio content to SoundCloud during the migration to Drupal 7, we quickly encountered incompatibilities between our interpretation of "fair use" and SoundCloud's restrictive copyright policies. As an open-access journal we are committed to pushing the boundaries of scholarly communications. To accommodate our authors' interest in embedding a variety of copyright-protected material according to accepted fair-use standards, we decided to migrate our audio files to an internally-hosted streaming server maintained in Emory's Woodruff Library, once again assisted by Jim Kruse. The in-house WOWZA server grants us control over streaming content and allows us to respond quickly and efficiently to any fair-use contestations.

The Publishing Process

What were some of the editorial challenges you and your colleagues faced during your time at Southern Spaces? How did the role(s) of editorial staff shift during your time at the journal?

Halbert: I quickly realized as we dreamed up Southern Spaces that a key role would be to identify a scholar recognized in Southern Studies to step up and serve as editor in chief. I cannot say how pleased I was that Allen Tullos took this on. I believe that Allen's leadership and persistence is one of the primary factors in the success of the journal, the others being the extraordinary project management, diligence, and creativity of Katherine Skinner and the graduate students recruited into the project. That Southern Spaces maintains a living, breathing network of scholars is the reason that it has survived so far. The lack of scholarly engagement is why all the metadata harvesting portals we built in many of the Mellon-funded projects went by the wayside. While I do think I played a significant role in founding Southern Spaces, it was the involvement and commitment of the scholars serving in editorial capacities that made it blossom.

Skinner: Just getting the basic procedures in place and making decisions about . . . everything! Including: what our publishing schedule would be (rolling, not issue-based since "issues" are a print convention and one of the strengths of the digital medium is its lack of dependence on a one-time issuing of batches of content); how we would update content over time; versioning conventions, naming conventions (URLs that were human readable were important in the early years when we were managing lots of files); what to save and store (master images, video, GIS files, etc.) so that we could create new derivatives in future years as technical standards of quality changed.

Tullos: Southern Spaces would not have come into being or have continued for very long without the work of so many collegial, smart, and engaged graduate students. Each of the managing editors has had skills and talents appropriate and equal to the challenges facing the journal at the time they stepped into the position. Although we never had a significant or secure budget until we became part of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship in 2013 during Rich Mendola's reorganization of Library and Information Technology Services (LITS), we relied upon Woodruff Library's technical infrastructure and support staff from the beginning.

Toton: When it started, it was pretty much Allen Tullos, Katherine Skinner, Emily Satterwhite, and me helping when I could. Steve Bransford began video editing in January 2004. He filmed, edited, and encoded. Paul O'Grady joined as a fellow for historical pieces in fall 2004. Zeb Baker followed as an editorial associate for twentieth-century history and pop culture and did a retrospective on the Atlanta Olympic Games. Jere Alexander worked as an editorial associate in 2005 focusing on pop culture and literature. Robin Connor and Matt Miller also worked on writing, researching, producing video, and copyediting.

When Franky Abbott came onboard in 2006 I felt like Southern Spaces as a student-operated journal was going to succeed and live on. She operationalized the review and publishing process, identified peoples' strengths, and made the journal hum along.

Battle: One of the most useful skills I learned at Southern Spaces was how to work with and rely on a team for our editorial and layout process. So much academic work involves producing your research in isolation. It can be hard to learn how to reach out for help. We relied on staff to provide editorial criticism, assist with technology questions, and provide insight about overall goals. I learned how to give and receive criticism, and how to benefit from multiple perspectives. Now that I am managing graduate students in my current position at the College of Charleston, I constantly have to remind them to ask each other for help.

Group coordination at Southern Spaces relied on leadership from the managing editor. During most of my time there, Franky Abbott filled this role, and I cannot say enough about her attention to structure, communication, and keeping deadlines. Once we started using the project management software Basecamp, Franky was able to delegate tasks more easily and we could see what other staffers were working on.

When I joined in 2007, many scholars were new to producing digital or even multimedia projects, and seemed unclear about their academic significance compared to traditional print publications. By the time I left, more authors were becoming familiar with digital contexts and taking their possibility and impact seriously. As our audience grew, we received and reviewed more competitive and polished submissions across a range of subjects, gaining invaluable experience about the editorial process.

Abbott: I am proudest of the impact that I had on the culture of the student editorial staff. When I arrived as a research assistant, graduate students came and went from the staff every semester; the editorial process was more of an assembly line where individual students applied a particular skill (html/css, video editing) to relevant pieces as they went to publication. At that time, Dr. Tullos was responsible for all aspects of the in-house editorial process that weren't copyediting. I helped build a student review into the process to give us a chance to develop editing skills while decreasing Dr. Tullos's workload (and getting pieces through the system more quickly). We convinced him to extend more editorial trust by working hard on our reviews and discussing challenges honestly in staff meetings. With the development of topic-focused series, social media accounts, and other responsibilities, I also thought about how to incentivize a multi-year commitment to the Southern Spaces team through increased engagement and skill building. I wanted everyone to get the chance to learn skills that interested them and to then show leadership in that area as they spent more time on staff. This model led to a tight-knit team that worked hard to make the journal better. It was all about creating a culture of investment in the project and encouraging new student staff members to buy in. This didn't happen 100% of the time, but it happened often enough to give Southern Spaces some institutional memory and its students some great experience for a variety of future jobs.

Rawson: One of the challenges was learning to reject submissions that were not going to make it to publication. I can name several pieces that we put a great deal of time into when we probably should have cut our losses. At the same time, I can name pieces that we put a lot of work into that were worth every minute because their content is significant and original. We also had a few challenges that involved student-produced work and figuring out how and if we could accommodate it in a peer review journal. I don't know that these questions were resolved in an ideal way—but I felt like these were important conversations around scholarly production.

During the time I was at Southern Spaces, we supported practicing artists, in particular photographers, in developing photo essays that make significant scholarly contributions—and are compelling. The redesign gave us more time to edit. Also, we began pursuing and including book reviews (thanks Alan Pike!).

Melton: Before we became part of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, funding for Southern Spaces was a continuing challenge. We had some support from Woodruff Library and from the Laney Graduate School through fellowships.

In general, I've watched the editorial staff become much more comfortable and proactive about the technological directions of the journal. We want staff to leave the journal with a solid set of tech skills that they can use elsewhere. This shift towards overt training sets us apart in many ways—we're teaching staff members how to edit, critique, and build digital scholarship.

Karlsberg: During my time on the journal's staff we added two new regular publication types with different editorial processes than our peer reviewed articles, photo essays, and short videos. Determining how to critically evaluate book reviews and blog posts took experimentation, and, where our decisions broke with common practice, required clear communication with authors. For example, our book reviews undergo rigorous internal review in a genre where author expectations vary widely. Blog posts, which can undergo internal review without the oversight of the senior editor, required a working out of how best to balance prompt publishing with critical evaluation. Our staff also formalized rigorous processes for peer review that were already in practice, helping make clear when editorial staff members take part and how their work contributes to that of the senior editor, editorial board, and external peer reviewers. A parallel challenge was how to train new staff on these processes and expectations, and how to share knowledge about potential publications as they navigated the review process. Better documenting our training process helped us bring new staff members up to speed on our editorial guidelines. Shifting weekly staff meetings from reporting on progress to an opportunity to talk through reviews in progress helped with training and keeping everyone informed about the submissions we were considering.

Doster: Southern Spaces is the product of teamwork and I have benefitted immensely from the hard work and innovation of my predecessors and my colleagues. When I began as managing editor, many of our standard editorial procedures were fully vetted and operational. In 2015, Alan Pike encouraged the journal to adopt Trello, an open-access management tool that we now use to track all phases of solicitation, review, and publication. This tool makes our editorial process easier to follow and manage. In addition to continuing to hone and streamline our internal review—a task that each managing editor and Southern Spaces team takes on—we continue to assess how to best convey digital scholarship conventions to authors more familiar with traditional print publications. On the content front, editorial associate Clint Fluker worked closely with me to revive the Southern Spaces blog. Clint's interdisciplinary work helped keep the blog current and relevant. Editorial associate Kelly Gannon has also championed our more active presence on social media, extending the journal's reach and readership.

Staff Favorites

Describe an article or project that best represents your experience at Southern Spaces.

Halbert: Two early articles are Carole Merritt's essay on the Herndon Home in Atlanta and Will Thomas'essay on television coverage of the civil rights movement. These pieces forced the questions I mentioned earlier: What form should an online journal take? What static elements carry over from print journals and what dynamic elements emerge? The internet enabled the display of high-resolution color photographs and audiovisual clips as evidence in making scholarly claims. It's a medium with many more functional capabilities and flexibility than print.

Skinner: One of the most representative articles I hand coded in the earliest years was Will Thomas's piece on television news and civil rights. This was one of the first articles that demonstrated how a multimedia environment could transform scholarship. It was also the last article that I coded mostly solo—and I used it to help train Sarah Toton in my esoteric xhtml dreamweaver practices.

Toton: I remember Rob Amberg's "Corridor of Change" photo essay being particularly challenging. It encompassed around sixty printed pages and we needed to figure out how to tell his story in an online-friendly format. We worked on that essay off and on for months, stitching it together into a piece that was interesting and nonlinear, yet made logical sense. I also worked on laying out Will Thomas's Eastern Shore piece for months. We researched primary materials, found photos and maps, created galleries, slideshows, graphs, etc. to make it a rich born-digital piece of historical storytelling. After we published, Will sent me a pewter otter statue from an artist on the Eastern Shore.

Battle: Starting in 2009, I served as the editor for the series, "Migration, Mobility, Exchange." This included organizing a call for papers and recruiting and reviewing article proposals. We published seven pieces in this series. This was one of my first leadership experiences at Southern Spaces, and it gave me insights into the editorial process from beginning to end. I was proud of the work we produced.

Abbott: Some of the earliest pieces I worked on in 2007 had a big impact on my own scholarship, my growth as an editor and designer, and my sense of what was possible for Southern Spaces: Kevin Pask's "Deep Ellum Blues" and Terry Easton's "Geographies of Hope and Despair." Also the pieces in the Space, Place, and Appalachiaseries: Scott Mathews'"John Cohen in Eastern Kentucky" and Earl Dotter's "Coalfield Generations." Matt Miller's "Dirty South." Later, Dot Moye's Hurricane Katrina five-year anniversary photo exhibition. The list goes on and on.

Rawson: Clive Webb's "Counterblast" article exemplifies a Southern Spaces experience to me, because of the multimedia components and its scholarly intervention. It included a mix of public domain images that I found—particularly the released FBI files—and things we had to seek permission for, such as letters from Emory's Rothschild Papers and video from the WSB television collection. It's the kind of article that examines a moment in a particular place and adds to our understanding of the civil rights movement.

Melton: I was a relatively new staff member during the Drupal 6 migration in 2010. The transition was a great opportunity to learn what is required to create and sustain a long-term project. We had six years of article drafts, edited and unedited video, and audio clips and photographs to organize. During this process, I became interested in how we might best support the lifecycle of digital publications. This experience set me on the path to my current career.

Doster: Many of the pieces mentioned above have taken considerable work to translate into the Drupal 7 redesign. As all Southern Spaces content is conceived and laid out in a specific platform, migrations often require piece-by-piece updates to retain or improve upon previous design and layout. The 2014 Battle of Atlanta publication, for example, required several modifications in its original layout to build a multi-media essay with accompanying app. While the piece is still engaging, the layout isn't as tight in Drupal 7. Updating older pieces while maintaining an active publishing schedule remains a perennial challenge.

Graduate Student Training

How do you understand Southern Spaces's scholarly and pedagogical missions?

Halbert: Southern Spaces provides tremendous research content for interdisciplinary scholarship. It also represents learning and training opportunities for the graduate students who work on it. Many of these students built on their experiences when they progressed to their own careers.

Skinner: Southern Spaces had huge ambitions from 2003, when it was just an idea, and I think those have fed into its mission and its accomplishments. It is no accident that I was a grad student and was given a tremendous amount of access to and collaboration with seasoned and highly respected scholars in the field. From its inception, senior editor Allen Tullos and key library supporter Martin Halbert, engaged students in the work of the publication. Part of the journal's purpose has always been to support the next generation of scholars, giving them exposure to and a voice in scholarly communications. Many of us who have worked on Southern Spaces credit it with leading us into our careers and giving us the skill sets, connections, and street cred we needed to succeed.

A key facet of the Southern Spaces mission is its engagement. That training is similar to what some university presses once did. It benefits the students and enriches the publication. Southern Spaces explores and enables multimedia scholarship in ways that few other publications have done—using the power of the medium, including its huge audience base (much larger than the academy's) in the process. It's a demonstration of public scholarship that crosses boundaries and engages people in different spheres.

Toton: At a selfish level, Southern Spaces is something I can share with my mother. She's often overwhelmed by academic or scholarly writing. I love Southern Spaces because it's open-access so I can send her links for great articles. She reads them, understands and appreciates their points, and we can talk about them. They're accessible. She's excited when new pieces appear.

Battle: When I first started at Southern Spaces in 2007, digital humanities felt like an emerging field. DH has a much longer history, but most academics I knew at that time were not particularly involved. The staff sometimes experienced skepticism from other students and from faculty about dedicating so much time and energy to the journal in the midst of a PhD program. Awareness of the value of this student experience started to grow, but I did not realize the impact digital humanities would have on how I conceptualized scholarship and my future career until I finished working on the journal. The pedagogical importance of digital humanities has since become more recognized at Emory, which I see as a great thing. I learned not just how to build a project using different technology platforms, but also how to conceptualize project structure, workflow, partner collaboration, and layout possibilities. These conceptualization skills have proven crucial in my current work with the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative at the College of Charleston.

Abbott: Southern Spaces offers its graduate student staff the opportunity to have real responsibility in a deeply collaborative environment. This is so rare. Most graduate student jobs are isolated or short-term. They don't offer the kinds of editorial, digital, and team-oriented skill building that a variety of employers look for. Southern Spaces gives students the ability to show off individual work through edited pieces or curated series as well as their contributions to the growth of a whole project and team. It's also rare for a faculty member (in this instance Prof. Tullos) to devote so much time to a student-staffed project, to be that big an advocate for the students, and to use so much of his own time, energy, and intellectual bandwidth to see it grow in positive directions.

For readers, I think Southern Spaces is a smart, well-articulated experiment that they can watch grow and change. The journal publishes academic content alongside artistic and journalistic forms. And Southern Spaces does this in the context of an organized, digital space that capitalizes on the best aspects of that medium: redesigns, updates to functionality, attention to usability, interaction with users, timeliness, rolling submissions. Plus, it's one of the oldest living open access journal surrounded by a graveyard of other open access journals, which says something in and of itself.

Rawson: Two parts of Southern Spaces scholarly mission are central to how I understand it and why I love it: Southern Spaces publishes critical scholarship that is accessible—in medium and style—and Southern Spaces demonstrates that scholarship is more than interpretative text on a page, not simply enriched but made more significant by including primary sources, maps, photography, audio, and film. The journal offers a wide spectrum of what research is, as well as insight into the construction of culture and geographies, the intersection of lived experiences of people and politics, and the ways that places and spaces shape individuals and societies.

Southern Spaces provides three important forms of training. First, intensive scholarly training: editorial staff learn to assess arguments and evidence within the context of multiple fields of inquiry including American Studies, geography, and history, ultimately constructing and revising scholarly publications. Second, training with technology: the details change over time, but Southern Spaces is always on the edge of new media and methods in research and publishing, whether video, digital tools, copyright, GIS, or design. The training is the best, because it is driven by needs and goals. We learn and we teach because that is what keeps the journal going.

Third, and perhaps most significantly, Southern Spaces provides professional training that opens doors and builds careers. I learned how to run a meeting. I learned how to train and manage others as well as how to work collaboratively with peers, with people who are experts and leaders in their fields, and with people who are just venturing into academia—and in situations where everyone did not see eye-to-eye and where solutions were hard won. I learned how to write emails that were direct, tactful, and productive; to write a form email, organize a major transition, develop a workflow, cold call archives and artists, and how to find resources in a complex institution.

Melton: We take time trying to define who our publics are, and I'm not sure we'll ever get a final answer. I've watched our readership grow in ways that I could not have expected, from K-12 students to university librarians to history buffs, and everyone in between. This diversity is part of what I love about the journal (I once found my own article cited on a blog about football). It's clear from readership analytics that our policy of making work open access and minimizing the use of academic jargon has garnered a wide audience.

Karlsberg: Southern Spaces embraces scholarly rigor and an interdisciplinary orientation incorporating history, English, music, anthropology, sociology, and geography as well as interdisciplines such as critical regional studies, critical race theory, sexuality studies, women's and gender studies, and of course space and place theory. The journal also adopts a critical posture that it took me a while to absorb that likewise challenges conventional scholarly and public understandings of the South. Southern Spaces critiques the idea of a monolithic South, eschewing romanticization and stereotypes. The journal advances a vocabulary that complements this critique, urging authors to scrutinize "region"; to reserve "region" rather than "subregion" for geographies such as the Delta or the Black Belt; and to refrain from capitalizing the terms "southern" or "southerner" except in their historically nationalist frame of reference.

Southern Spaces equips the graduate student editorial staff with technical, editorial, and conceptual skills that will aid in the job market and expand career possibilities. Staff members also acquire technical skills—ranging from video, audio, and image editing to familiarity with markup language and web design, to working with interactive mapping tools such as CartoDB—which prepare them for positions involving the digital humanities at university departments, libraries and beyond academia. Staff participation in a digital scholarship graduate training program initiated in the fall of 2015 by ECDS staff member and former Southern Spaces review editor Alan G. Pike, extends and formalizes this process.

Space/Place and the US South: A Critical Approach

What did you learn about critical regional studies, new approaches to the US South, and spatial imaginaries?

Halbert: These are of course some of the most intriguing intellectual foundations of Southern Spaces, and the perspectives that excited us most in its creation. The journal has very effectively challenged and ramified conceptions of the South.

Skinner: I will never, ever approach "the South" or, indeed, any other broad space, as though it can be defined in one dimension. I learned to appreciate pluralities. I also learned that those pluralities can be found in a variety of subject matter—from quilts to poems, and from tree farms to TV broadcasts.

Toton: I moved to a PhD program at Emory from Iowa. I had no understanding of where I would be living beyond that it was in "The South." The idea was nebulous, foreign, antiquated and downright scary. Southern Spaces helped me understand that the South was a collection of regions, and of neighborhoods. This insight influenced not only how I started to understand Atlanta, but the surrounding areas. It taught me the importance of the intersection between geography and cultural studies by repeatedly offering examples of how places impact people and vice versa.

Battle: Being involved in the review and editorial process at Southern Spaces significantly expanded my ability to critically engage scholarship about the US South. In my dissertation research and as a public historian, dismantling traditionally exclusive representations of Charleston's historic tourism landscape to include African American history, as well as the history of slavery and its legacies, is central to my work. My experiences with Southern Spaces helped provide me with the skills to take on this challenge.

Abbott: Discussions of space and place, especially in southern studies, can be abstract, easy, assumptive, and essentialist, or they can be particular and meaningful ways to think about identity, context, and social constructions. Working on Southern Spaces teaches you to know the difference between these when you see it. And how to make use of a map.

Rawson: Southern Spaces conventions are so engrained in me now that I have a hard time seeing them. Southern Spaces asks for certain approaches to language, which is one of the first things I learned as an editorial associate. At the time, I remember feeling exasperated with some of these distinctions; however, I have come to understand how powerful it is to attend to the specific geography of places, the pieces of history and environment that shape a piece of soil, that make imagined Yoknapatawpha, lived Lafayette County, the state of Mississippi, and an imagined literary South each have their own meaning and influence. When we move between these places and scales of place discursively, we must be intentional and attentive.

I also am a real believer in Southern Spaces's mission to expand what people publish—whose stories get told, what the subject matter is, what counts and how places are connected. I am glad that we have chosen to publish difficult stories, work that accounts for what is violent and unjust, as well as work that examines how people respond creatively and productively to facilitate change.

Melton: Coming from an American Studies background, I had already thought a lot about the ways we define the South and the necessity of avoiding monolithic descriptions. Working at the journal has helped broaden my understanding of how to understand the US South and the global South in relation to each other. Mary Frederickson's article on the connection between labor practices in the Carolinas and Uzbekistan remains one of my favorite pieces for precisely this reason.

My own dissertation research examines connections between the struggles for civil and human rights in the US South and South Africa. Southern Spaces has helped me to analyze how people understand the interplay between global and local histories.

Karlsberg: My work at Southern Spaces influenced and was concurrent with my growing interest in applying a critical regional frame to my scholarly work on Sacred Harp singing. I was initially drawn to southern studies because the culture accompanying this musical genre is most widespread in several southern states, but until I began reviewing, discussing, and editing Southern Spaces's submissions, I had little sense of the recent critical turn away from southern exceptionalism and toward analysis of the constructedness of the concept of the "South"—and the acknowledgment of the many intersecting people and southern regions.

Doster: Coming from Appalachian Studies, I was eager to find a cohort of critical regionalists at Emory. At Southern Spaces, I worked among dialogue partners and colleagues invested in critical approaches to the study of the South's many sections. At times, I have questioned the journal's framing—I'm still working out my own relationship to the term "community"—but I have a deep appreciation for Allen Tullos's vision and commitment to fresh narratives and new approaches to southern spaces.

Professional Development

How did your work with the journal influence your professional career goals and employment trajectory?

Halbert: The various projects that collectively comprised what I called the MetaScholar Initiative, and in particular the role I played in the creation of Southern Spaces, are some of the career achievements of which I am most proud. The perspective and experience that I gained during the thirteen years I was at Emory have informed my work subsequently as a library dean in thinking about the broader needs of the university.

Skinner: There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not referencing the experiences and using the skills that I first honed working on Southern Spaces.

Toton: My background in digital publishing and migrating journals to content management systems was the reason I got a position at Turner as a technical product manager. After Southern Spaces, I helped design the content managment system used to publish some of Turner's news and sports websites.

Battle: Southern Spaces ended up playing a very influential role in my career. After I moved to Charleston, I found part-time work at the Lowcountry Digital Library (LCDL) housed at the College of Charleston. When my boss at the time, Dr. John White, asked me to update some online exhibitions connected to LCDL, I was able to conceptualize new ways to develop the exhibitions altogether, and to organize a cohesive digital public history platform rather than a series of stand-alone projects. We successfully received major grant support in 2011 and 2013 to launch the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI) in 2014. In 2013, I finished my Emory PhD and became the public historian at the College of Charleston's Avery Research Center. The workflow for LDHI online exhibitions relies heavily on the collaborative student work model and editorial process I learned through Southern Spaces.

Abbott: Southern Spaces was the turning point in my own career. I joined because I was interested in southern studies. I left a digital project manager. For many of the core team, the idea was that if we made Southern Spaces as good as possible, we would be rewarded through our affiliation with it on the job market. It was a great and rare kind of experience to have as graduate students and I think it's clear this gamble paid off for us. I wouldn't have had any of the jobs I've had since I graduated without Southern Spaces. It was Southern Spaces that showed me that I didn't want to be a traditional academic and that I would be skilled at a different path. Since graduating from Emory, I've run a digital humanities center at the University of Alabama and I'm currently working as a curation and education strategist for the Digital Public Library of America.

Rawson: My career is what it is because of Southern Spaces. After I completed my American Studies PhD at Emory, I became the coordinator for digital research at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Southern Spaces was one of the key factors in my investment in digital scholarship. It prepared me for much of the work that I do and gave me connections that are important for my career. My relationship to Kat Skinner is one example of this. Of course, the group I went through with—Franky Abbott, Mary Battle, Sarah Melton (along with Miriam Posner who sat at the cube over from us)—is the core of my professional network. It is a network that is noticeable at conferences like ASA and DLF. Working at Southern Spaces also helped me understand the importance of supporting people on the alt-ac track. I realized that I like other kinds of work in addition to teaching and research: I like working in teams, at set hours, on projects with clear timelines. Further, I can excel at these things and create and facilitate work that is meaningful. After two-and-a-half years at Penn, I returned to Emory in 2016 in a position as a humanities librarian that emphasizes my digital skills.

Melton: My time at the journal shaped my professional employment trajectory in ways I could not have anticipated. I became interested in open access publishing more generally and began working towards better situating Southern Spaces in the publishing landscape. After the formation of Emory's digital center, I was hired as digital projects coordinator and worked with several of our open access publications. I've become more involved with open educational resources and open data efforts. Southern Spaces has connected me to an international network of people interested in improving scholarly communications. Along the way, I've also learned invaluable skills about managing people and projects that prepared me for my current job as head digital scholarship librarian at Boston College.

Karlsberg: My work at Southern Spaces has taught me how much I enjoy collaboration, editing, and facilitating the publication of excellent and important writing. Thinking critically about the publishing platform of Southern Spaces introduced me to exciting conversations about digital humanities and the future of scholarly publishing. This contributed to my interest in my next positions: a postdoctoral fellowship centered around the editing of a series of digital critical editions of turn-of-the-twentieth-century US tune- and hymnbooks and a fulltime job as senior digital scholarship strategist in ECDS. In this new role, I manage an open access, multimodal journal and blog featuring interdisciplinary scholarship on Atlanta called Atlanta Studies, continue to work on the proof-of-concept series of publications for a platform for digital critical editions called Readux, and contribute to numerous collaborative research and publishing projects in helping to streamline our center's project process. I remain interested in positions that combine teaching and research but now also hope to make editing and involvement in the future of scholarly publishing a part of the mix.

Southern Spaces: What's Next?

How do you see Southern Spaces evolving in the next ten years? What goals do you have for the journal as it moves forward?

Halbert: There are an enormous number of future avenues for Southern Spaces. Clearly, the basic pattern and best practices of digital scholarship of the journal have now been thoroughly laid down and explored, and should be continued as they constitute some of the best and most accessible digital scholarship available anywhere today. The question comes down to what new directions (if any) Southern Spaces should consider. There are at least two speculative issues. First, is the potential relationship of Southern Spaces with the other big website that I helped create and had to leave behind when I left Emory, namely the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (slavevoyages.org). The second is the potential connection between Emory and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), where former Southern Spaces managing editor Franky Abbott now works.

The significance of Southern Spaces should be evident to everyone that encounters it, as one of the most successful experiments in digital scholarship to have been created to date and as a model for collaboration between researchers and librarians.

Skinner: I hope to see Southern Spaces continue to widen the net and attract many different people to scholarly writing by addressing questions that matter throughout society. I hope it continues to bend what "scholarly writing" is—emphasizing quality, not pedigree, and engaging forms beyond the article, like the reviews, poetry, video, etc. that it already publishes. I hope the journal continues to be propelled by the fabulous ideas and energy of the students who are trained by and contributing to its form over time.

Toton: I think the content has become more diverse and prolific as the journal has enlarged its staff. I love the reviews and hope to see more student-written pieces. I think that the "Southern Spaces Blog" ought to be folded into the general content.

Battle: I am very excited to see where and how Southern Spaces grows. I'm sure we will continue to have plenty to learn from what the journal produces. From my own experience directing the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, we hope to expand our work on multi-institutional projects as well as projects with individual authors. For example, our current works-in-progress include projects with smaller cultural heritage institutions, translating physical exhibitions to an online context (particularly museums that do not have the resources to host their own online exhibitions). We are also working with library and museum institutions to produce exhibitions that highlight archival collections. With the resources at Emory, it could be interesting to see what similar institutional collaborations could produce through Southern Spaces, particularly for public-facing projects as well as scholarly works.

Abbott: Southern Spaces will have to keep pace with ever-evolving web design. Each generation of Southern Spaces staff thinks the site is a dinosaur and can't wait to make changes. That energy will keep it healthy. Now that the journal has a more stable home in ECDS, I think new collaborations are possible. I want Southern Spaces to never let itself fall into traditional academic modes of discourse—but to continue to push for experiments with video, photography, perhaps the exhibition as a medium. I'd love to see Southern Spaces work more closely with materials from the many great archives at colleges and universities, museums, historical societies, research centers, in pieces that place digital content curation at the narrative center. I also hope Southern Spaces continues to make plans to sustain itself for the future—by consistently engaging and growing the editorial board, seeking grant funding for special projects, providing staff support for graduate students, staying on the bleeding edge of conversation in both digital humanities and critical regional studies.

Rawson: I hope the journal continues to gain readers in the academy and beyond. I expect it to continue to publish important work and new forms of scholarship and to engage with literary production and public scholarship. I hope it continues to expand its role as a space for critical conversation around politics and social justice. On the technology side, I think Southern Spaces has the potential to be a great commuter/wait-time read and hope that the mobile presentation of the journal keeps up with devices and users' reading practices.

Melton: I'm proud that Southern Spaces is an incubator for new directions in scholarly publishing. With the launch of our redesigned site we're also experimenting with new ways to measure the journal's reach. I want to see more of this spirit of experimentation. I also hope Southern Spaces will continue to serve as a model for other publications, both technically and in the context of student training as it seeks to manage sustainability and currency.

Karlsberg: Technologies and design conventions of web-based publishing shift rapidly. Committing to web-only publishing creates opportunities for our authors, yet obligates us to periodically remake our site to preserve and enhance access to what we've published. This also provides us with an opportunity to embrace new tools and to share what we develop. Over the four year period I served as a member of the staff we redesigned the site twice, switched audio and video formats as many times, and introduced new tools for slideshows and interactive mapping. I expect Southern Spaces will continue to revisit these choices as new technologies emerge. As Southern Spaces moves forward I anticipate it will continue to pioneer innovations in the form of scholarly journal publishing that others can learn from and adopt, and that this will enable us to continue to keep our own presentations of scholarship current.

Doster: I'd like to see the journal move into a stronger advocacy role among its peer publications and in national networks, and to continue to model the training of doctoral students in academic digital publishing. I also advocate for long-term planning that regularly assesses the journal's management structure, the sustainability of its staffing model, and its replicability.

Tullos: In 2003, as we began planning what became Southern Spaces, we imagined that other scholarly journals would soon participate in this new model for digital publishing (beyond the pdf) by creating multi-media content formats, expanding open access, and providing grad student training. For many reasons that include slow-to-change academic publishing models, scholarly-society inertias, antiquated tenure and promotion practices, and limited institutional resources—especially following the Great Recession—there are still few digital publications such as ours. In the intervening years we've learned a good deal about the field of scholarly digital publishing, acquiring insights about what works and what to avoid. In this spirit, we welcome inquiries from interested institutions and editors. As our primary emphasis remains with critical content, we hope to continue our commitment to regional studies through original scholarship about southern regions, and exemplary examples from regions far and wide.

• 1.Martin Halbert, ed., Workshop on Applications of Metadata Harvesting in Scholarly Portals, MetaScholar Initiative, October 24, 2003, Emory University General Libraries. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277283794_Workshop_on_Applications_of_Metadata_Harvesting_in_Scholarly_Portals_Findings_from_the_MetaScholar.
• 2.Donald J. Waters, "The Metadata Harvesting Initiative of the Mellon Foundation,"ARL: A Bimonthly Report, no. 217 (August 2001): 10–11. arl.org/storage/documents/publications/arl-br-217.pdf.
• 3.Charles Reagan Wilson, "A Scholar's Perspective on AmericanSouth.Org," in Halbert, ed., Workshop on Applications of Metadata Harvesting in Scholarly Portals.
• 4.See "About," at http://southernchanges.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/.

Introduction

In the winter of 1936, Minnie Lee Ishcomer left home in Idabel, Oklahoma, and journeyed to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Thirty years old, white, poor, and the victim of a long-standing venereal infection, Ishcomer came to Hot Springs hoping to obtain treatment at the VD clinic operated there by the United States Public Health Service (PHS). Her experience was less than satisfactory. Because the clinic officially admitted only acute, infectious VD cases, Ishcomer was initially denied entrance—on the grounds that she was "not a danger to the public health." She passed her first few days in Hot Springs in search of food and shelter. Without money, she made her way to a bus station where a police officer found her "in a very serious condition." Taken back to the clinic, she received a few days' treatment. Soon after her release, a PHS official angrily wired the health officer in Ishcomer's home county that "such cases will not be treated in the future."1

The treatment Minnie Lee Ishcomer received likely did little to improve her health.2 Nevertheless, her story sheds light on a relatively unexplored site of public health work in the early twentieth-century US South.3 The opening of the Hot Springs VD clinic in 1921 followed upon extensive anti-venereal initiatives carried out by the U.S. military during World War I. Closing in the 1940s, the clinic marked a transition in the federal government's campaign against syphilis and gonorrhea—including the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932–72) and the Chicago Syphilis Control Project (1937–40). Throughout the interwar period, Hot Springs sat on the front lines of the PHS's war against VD, and although its efforts were largely unsuccessful, the clinic's history points toward a more complex understanding of this moment of "venereal peril."4

The history of the Hot Springs clinic offers insights into racial, gendered, and class-based aspects of the federal government's campaign against syphilis and gonorrhea. The clinic treated all manner of patients—black as well as white, male as well as female. Some patients were chronically poor, and others—particularly with the onset of the Great Depression—had only recently fallen on hard times. How similar were the experiences of these different groups, and to what extent did their treatment reflect prejudices against the various "others" (such as prostitutes and African Americans) popularly associated with VD? While many historical VD studies examine population subsets, this article about Hot Springs offers a more comprehensive analysis, comparing the experiences of stigmatized groups along with those of Hot Springs's prototypical health-seekers: syphilitic white males. Although they accounted for the vast majority of the clinic's caseload, white men have not received significant attention in VD historiography. Including their experiences adds new depth to our understanding of the "venereal peril" while illustrating how forcefully eugenics pervaded the PHS's campaigns against syphilis and gonorrhea.

Eugenics, of course, figures prominently in scholarship on the infamous Tuskegee Study. This experiment, in which the PHS deliberately withheld treatment from four hundred syphilitic Alabama black men in order to study the disease's "natural" progression, was designed to provide evidence for the theory that (as the Johns Hopkins syphilologist Joseph Moore put it) "syphilis in the negro is in many respects almost a different disease from syphilis in the white."5 From 1932 to 1972 white PHS doctors attempted to prove that black syphilitics almost never progressed to the late, advanced stage of the disease characterized by disorders of the nervous system–including tabes (syphilis of the spinal cord) and paresis (syphilis of the brain). Blacks were seen as belonging to an uncivilized race with smaller, less developed brains that equipped them with a "racial resistance" to neurosyphilis; as a result, they were more likely to suffer from the disease's cardiovascular symptoms—including syphilis of the heart.6 Doctors believed that this partial immunity to neurosyphilis was a hereditary trait. As the authors of a recent article on Tuskegee observe, the experiment's goal was to "prove the biological basis of racial difference by documenting race-linked pathology, consistent with prevailing eugenic theory."7

In providing an assessment of intellectual undercurrents circulating through the PHS in the 1920s and 1930s, this new literature successfully rebuts the claim that Tuskegee had little to do with scientific racism or eugenics.8 Unanswered, however, is how eugenic theories informed aspects of the agency's anti-venereal work involving non-blacks. At Hot Springs, these theories found expression in a campaign designed to prevent the clinic's mostly white male patients from succumbing to the "racial poison" that was VD. Comprising traditional medical services and a variety of extra-medical measures (including financial assistance for food, shelter, and basic care), this campaign cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, with its budget increasing dramatically during the early years of the Great Depression—just as the PHS dismantled a number of pilot projects designed to provide mass treatment to syphilitic blacks. Although many of the initiatives undertaken in Hot Springs benefited patients regardless of race or sex, the clinic's white male health-seekers experienced a level of preferential treatment denied to both women and African Americans. Further, for the latter group, discrimination and hostility were part and parcel of the Hot Springs experience—both inside and outside the clinic. All of this represented the eugenic impulses coursing through the PHS facility, whose director—Oliver C. Wenger—declared syphilis and gonorrhea important "from the standpoint of race conservation."9

Hot Springs reveals a significant instance of the federal government's racist approach to public health policy. When dealing with white patients, Washington extended a taxpayer-supported hand. Because such a sizable gap existed between the experiences of Hot Springs's black and white health-seekers, the story of the city's VD clinic provides a further context for understanding the Tuskegee Study. But first, a more elementary question: why did the PHS decide to create a VD clinic at Hot Springs, Arkansas?

"Mecca for Syphilitics"

Hot Springs's selection as the site of the federal government's "model" VD clinic would not have surprised early twentieth-century Americans.10 In 1832, Congress declared that the boiling waters of the Ouachita Mountains were to be forever set aside for the "benefit and enjoyment" of the general public.11 In 1877, Congress created the Hot Springs Reservation (HSR). Initially consisting of 2,529 acres, the HSR was public land managed by a federally-appointed commission, whose task was to maintain and control access to the 826,000 gallons of water that daily coursed through the site.12 Word of the area's therapeutic prowess spread across the country, and as the city began welcoming hundreds of health-seekers every year, its waters acquired a reputation for curing syphilis.13 During the late nineteenth-century, a growing belief in the springs' ability to "drive out syphilis completely" spurred a "Hot Springs craze" among venereal sufferers. Contemporaries began referring to the city as the "Mecca for syphilitics in America."14

While some of Hot Springs's health-seekers received treatment at the Free Government Bathhouse created by the HSR in 1878, increasing numbers did so at private enterprises.15 Hot Springs was "fast becoming a fashionable resort."16 Leasing land and water from the HSR, local developers began replacing the city's "miserable board shanties" with "palatial hotels."17 The resort's clientele shifted: earlier the preserve of "poor, miserable paupers," it was increasingly visited by "very wealthy people from the Northern states."18 To ensure that its visitors remained a "people of leisure, with an abundance of money to spend," local officials forcibly uprooted the city's poorer health-seekers—those living in "shanties or tents" or found "encamped under the trees with no other shelter."19 Medical authorities in other locales came to believe that "only the rich" could afford the "costly excursion" to Hot Springs.20 As a Chicago physician said of his city's syphilitic patients: "our rich people go to the great Mecca of medical wisdom, to Hot Springs," while "our poor people may go to—where they please."21

The invention of Salvarsan (1910), a more effective drug, also prompted a decline in the city's voluminous traffic in syphilitic health-seekers.22 Nevertheless, neither new drugs nor the discrimination against impoverished health-seekers succeeded in severing the city's association with VD.23 In 1920, the HSR created a new, expanded Free Government Bathhouse; its lower floor would soon become home to the PHS's VD clinic.24 As its director put it upon entering the city that same year: "to the average layman, Hot Springs, Arkansas, means VD, and VD means Hot Springs."25

Hot Springs's status as federal land and as a "mecca" for syphilitics made the city an ideal site for the PHS's "model" VD clinic. But why would the government create such a clinic? The early twentieth-century was a time of profound anxiety over syphilis and gonorrhea, diseases said to be "undoubtedly on the increase."26 Medical authorities proclaimed that 80 percent of adult males living in large cities contracted syphilis or gonorrhea before the age of thirty, and that 80 percent of all operations performed on women for diseases of the womb and ovaries were the result of one of these conditions. Such figures, though highly suspect, engendered fears of a looming VD epidemic across the country.27

The sense that venereal diseases constituted "a menace to the national welfare" stemmed less from epidemiology than from social and cultural concerns—of "race suicide" attendant upon the declining fertility of native, white-born women and the influx of "new immigrants," of urbanization and its impact on sexual mores, of a "family crisis" prompted by the emergence of the "new woman," and of eugenic concerns tied to the rhetoric of social Darwinism and racial degeneration.28 Reformers clamored for an attack on prostitution, artists luridly illustrated the consequences of untreated syphilitic and gonorrheal infections, and anxious legislators passed laws that ranged from the reporting of all professionally-handled VD cases to the bacteriological examination of immigrants and prospective spouses.29

The climax of these fears came during World War I. With scientific diagnoses, doctors found that a surprisingly high number of prospective US military recruits suffered from VD. Hoping to head off a manpower shortage, in 1917 Congress created the Committee on Training Camp Activities—an organization that sought to curb the venereal scourge through the forced incarceration of prostitutes, the provision of medical services for infected soldiers, and the establishment of "wholesome" alternatives to the vice-ridden recreational opportunities commonly found in cantonment zones.30 The following year Congress passed the Chamberlain-Kahn Act, which created the PHS's Division of Venereal Diseases and allocated two million dollars for the establishment of free VD clinics across the country.31 As the war came to a close, Washington followed up on these efforts by conducting a nationwide VD survey.

Each of these actions drew attention to Hot Springs. Throughout the war, military authorities fretted over Little Rock's Camp Pike, a training facility whose VD rates were reportedly "the [highest] by far of any camp or cantonment in the United States."32 According to local commanders, Camp Pike's reputation as a hotbed of sexual sickness owed to its proximity to Hot Springs, where prostitution had been legal since the late nineteenth-century and where brothels enjoyed a reputation as home to the profession's "aristocrats."33 In August 1918, Camp Pike's commanders ordered the closure of Hot Springs's numerous "houses of immorality."34 Municipal authorities reluctantly complied, but the federal government's interest in Hot Springs did not end. While conducting their post-war VD survey, government officials grew increasingly anxious about the city's "serious medical and social problems," observing that Hot Springs was home to an increasing population of venereally afflicted "indigents" and an entirely "inadequate" public health infrastructure.35

From the federal perspective, syphilitic health-seekers represented an "interstate menace."36 The PHS determined to "protect the rest of the country" from those who traversed it with a venereal infection.37 Opening a clinic in Hot Springs devoted to rendering the afflicted non-infectious seemed the best means of accomplishing this goal. Because patients traveled here from all parts of the country, constituted a diverse racial and socioeconomic makeup, and encompassed the full range of syphilitic infections, the PHS also found in Hot Springs an unprecedented opportunity for research. Establishing a long-term presence here would also allow the government to continue its wartime campaign against "houses of immorality," while transforming a parochial medical culture.38

In late 1920 the PHS drew up plans for the facility, obtained $300,000 in construction funds and selected Oliver C. Wenger, one of the country's leading venereologists, as director.39 Born in St. Louis in 1884, Wenger obtained his MD from St. Louis University in 1908. During the First World War, he served in the Medical Corps of the Missouri National Guard, later traveling to England and France as part of a sanitary squad involved in VD control.40 His time in Europe convinced Wenger to devote all his efforts to venereology. According to a contemporary, Wenger's idea of heaven was a place containing "unlimited syphilis," and of course, "unlimited facilities to treat it."41 In 1919, Wenger joined the PHS Division of Venereal Disease. Before becoming director at Hot Springs, his first assignment was the national VD survey.

Inside the Clinic

With an inaugural budget of $40,000, the clinic opened in August 1921.42 In its first year, five hundred patients received treatment; a total of 61,930 patients—male and female, black and white—had wound their way through by 1936, receiving 1.2 million injections of mercury and Salvarsan. Who were these individuals? How did their circumstances, needs, and experiences differ? How did prevailing ideas about VD actions influence Hot Springs's response to syphilis? And how did the clinic's campaign develop over the course of the 1920s and 1930s?

On one level, the PHS's day-to-day work reflected the widespread belief that VD constituted the "wages of sin"—a sign of sexual immorality. In lectures given by clinic personnel, patients learned that their illnesses were the result of "ignorance and your own misconduct." This message of personal irresponsibility also extended to the clinic's official instructions, which warned patients not to "loaf downtown" between treatments. Above all other commandments stood one: "DON'T GET INTO TROUBLE." And because the minimum course of therapy lasted between twenty and thirty weeks, patients were "expected to make arrangements to pay [their] own room and board."43

The PHS advised that "no patient should go to Hot Springs without at least a return ticket and $100 in cash." Such expectations clashed with reality. Wenger observed that "less than five percent of these indigent persons had funds with which to maintain themselves while receiving free treatment."44 Many arrived "without one cent of money."45 In 1931, the average applicant carried not "$100 in cash" but $15.43. The following year, $8.76.46 Resembling a "dumping ground of many indigents" during the 1920s and 30s, Hot Springs became the preserve of all sorts of "unfortunate people" who "slept out on the hillside or in alleys, begging food from door to door...or looking for food in garbage cans."47 As the clinic's director admitted, "the great majority left…before they could receive enough treatment to give them any real benefit."48

One of this "great majority" was Virgil Oren Adams. A native of Clovis, New Mexico, during the early 1930s Adams made several visits to the Hot Springs VD clinic. Each time, he "ran out of funds" after only a few weeks, and being "sick and weak from lack of food and sleep," was forced to leave. In 1934 he wrote to President Roosevelt seeking assistance for yet another clinic trip. "I have been fighting syphilis since 1927," Adams wrote, adding that he was "very much interested in…getting rid of this terrible disease.""[A]bsolutely broke," Adams entreated Roosevelt for a letter to take "as a recommendation for treatments at Hot Springs.""Anything you can do in my behalf," he pleaded, would be "highly appreciated."49

Cases like Adams's were of "daily occurrence."50 While poverty hampered patients' chances of recovery, so did the advanced state of their ailments. Most venereal sufferers came to Hot Springs long after contracting syphilis or gonorrhea. Most had not received more than a few shots of mercury or Salvarsan, and many relied only on cheap, ineffective patent medicines.51 Their illnesses were chronic, and generally immune to existing remedies. With disease burrowed deep in their bodies, few had any hope of ever being free from VD.

Realities such as these inspired a modicum of sympathy among clinic doctors. Particularly worrying to Wenger was the fate of ex-servicemen. Disappointed by the fact that during World War I, "our young American manhood" was often "unable to serve because of venereal diseases," Wenger observed hundreds of infected former soldiers seeking admittance to the Hot Springs clinic during the early 1920s. Like most patients, they were "nomads, seeking treatment here and there." Particularly troubling was the fact that these veterans were beginning to form families, and had entered "the best years [of their lives] from an economic standpoint." All of them needed medical attention; none were in a position to pay. Such matters made the treatment and control of syphilis and gonorrhea a national priority, he urged, especially "from the standpoint of race conservation."52

Language such as this dovetailed with contemporary eugenic discourse. Like other eugenicists, Wenger's interest in "race conservation" stemmed from anxieties over white racial purity and integrity. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, birth rates among native-born white women declined by approximately 45 percent, and this, coupled with the simultaneous arrival of millions of "new immigrants" from southern and eastern Europe, prompted fears of "race suicide" among the nation's political and cultural elite.53 Speaking to these fears, New York City gynecologist Abraham Wolbarst opined that "the flower of our land, the mothers of our future citizenship, are being mutilated and unsexed by surgical life-saving diseases, particularly gonorrhea."54 Sentiments such as Wolbarst's were widely held by PHS officials, including Oliver Wenger—whose eugenic beliefs scholars have also observed in his later work in Tuskegee and Chicago.55

The PHS sought means of accelerating the therapeutic process. Among the myriad venereological experiments conducted at Hot Springs, none loomed larger than those undertaken within the Salvarsan room. During the early 1920s clinic personnel began "the intensive and continuous plan of treatment."56 In the typical VD clinic, patients received one dose of Salvarsan per week; in Hot Springs, they would receive twice that amount.57

Derived largely from arsenic, a highly toxic substance, Salvarsan was a frightening remedy. While more effective than mercury, its use was accompanied by a panoply of side effects—from the mild (dermatitis, gastro-intestinal distress) to the severe (ocular damage, cardiac distress, edema). In rare cases, death resulted. In a review of 6,308 syphilis patients admitted between 1922 and 1932, Wenger counted a total of 225 adverse reactions to Salvarsan—including three fatalities from arsenical poisoning.58 It appears that severe reactions to Salvarsan were more common here than elsewhere.59 Cognizant of the fact that "the duration of anti-syphilitic treatment at the Hot Springs clinic is for a relatively short time," Wenger's staff rushed to experiment with untested modes of therapy. The adoption of an "intensive and continuous plan of treatment" contributed to the clinic's high rate of serious complications.60

Such was certainly the case for Forrest LaPrade. A twenty-four-year-old Texan who arrived in Hot Springs in March 1930, LaPrade's original intention was to "boil out nicotine and malaria" through the city's "healing waters." Directed to Wenger's clinic for a physical, LaPrade was found to be syphilitic. Over the next few weeks he received seven shots of Salvarsan and eleven of mercury. His condition then worsened.61

On May 2, 1930, LaPrade complained of a "slight oedma" of the face, which his physician noted was "characteristic of arsenical poisoning." By the next day, he displayed a "face intensely swollen," along with a fever and an accelerated heart rate. After being diagnosed with erysipelas, LaPrade was transferred by a friend to a nearby hospital, where for twenty-eight days he experienced "untold agonies." Hoping to heal his swollen face, from which dripped "large drops of yellow corruption," LaPrade's doctors covered him with a white, glue-like paste, a remedy that produced a constant itching sensation that left the Texan "at the point of death.""I was actually skinned alive," LaPrade later said, describing how the itching left him "scaled like a fish." Unable to sleep, LaPrade's condition was so bad that his body "trembled like a leaf and even shook or quivered the bed.""I suffered, cried, and prayed as one who was in the doorway of Hell," he recalled with horror. "But for the Lord, I would have been six feet of earth."62

Although few patients faced an ordeal like Forrest LaPrade's, the clinic's experiments failed to produce "new and better methods to fight venereal diseases."63 A report from the PHS's Division of Venereal Diseases spoke in disappointed terms: "It was hoped that this clinic would prove useful from a research standpoint, but because of the transient character of the patients, results thus far have not been up to expectations."64 And as late as 1936, clinic personnel were still reporting on the "comparatively small number of treatments given" to patients—a reference to how few individuals completed a full course of anti-venereal treatment.

Healing the "Other": Women and African Americans at the Hot Springs VD Clinic

Because their attempts to accelerate the curative process largely failed, Wenger's staff also investigated ways of keeping patients within Hot Springs for longer periods of time. This search for extra-medical means of disease control had a racial foundation, one that becomes clear through an examination of doctors' experiences with female patients. Initially, Wenger and his staff harbored quite negative attitudes toward women, who were seen as "uncontrolled spreaders of infection" and a "menace to the community at large."65 With the passage of time, however, clinic personnel became increasingly sympathetic to the plight of female health-seekers—even those who supported themselves through prostitution while receiving treatment. From these sentiments (which extended only to whites) emerged a non-traditional disease control program, one rooted not only in testing and treatment, but also in socioeconomic measures—including financial aid for food and housing.

Wenger's first few years in Hot Springs were characterized by an intensive crackdown on the city's red-light districts, which had re-opened in the aftermath of World War I. Hoping to prevent local brothels from recovering their former strength, in January 1921 the PHS presented an ultimatum to municipal authorities, explaining that unless the city abolished its regulated district the agency would quarantine all individuals who came to Hot Springs seeking treatment for disease—venereal or otherwise. Recognizing that it would "prove a great financial blow to the city if this patronage were lost," the PHS argued that it was "absolutely inconsistent to permit men to go there for the cure and, at the same time be exposed to reinfection through the agency of an open red-light district." Women too would be subject to these measures, as some of the female patients in Hot Springs were prostitutes who "carry on their profession while under treatment."66

This seemed clear from a report Wenger received from the Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Department (ISHD) in 1922. A governmental entity tasked with investigating the relationship between prostitution and VD, the ISHD in 1921 sent an agent named Blanche Young to Hot Springs. Upon questioning a few girls "of the prostitute type" found within the city's public dance halls, she concluded that no progress against VD would be forthcoming unless the federal government abolished its system of regulated prostitution. One of the prostitutes Young met with informed her that "she had gone to the city for medical treatment and was under the care of a private physician." On another occasion, Young encountered a "very fast looking girl enter[ing] an automobile occupied by three young men who were obviously under the influence of liquor.""A little later," Young continued,

I saw this automobile stop and the men 'pick up' two girls. This was about 11:43 PM. The men talked to the girls on the street, inducing them to enter the car, immediately driving off. The next day I recognized in both the G.U. [genito-urinary] and syphilis clinics one of the girls who was present in the dance hall.67

Reports such as these inclined Wenger toward an all-out assault on the city's red-light district. As during wartime, Hot Springs's response to this federal ultimatum was regretful compliance. The death of the city's physician-mayor J.W. McClendon—"the leader of the wide-open town policy"—eased Washington's task. With the removal of this "obstacle," the PHS convinced local law enforcement officials to fall in line.68 By the summer of 1922, five brothels had been shut down; by 1923, their number had been reduced by half.69 These results bore out the federal government's conclusion that local personnel had been "very successful" in "eliminating houses of prostitution" in Hot Springs.70

This assessment proved premature. The interwar years brought new life to prostitution. While initially complying with the PHS, steep declines in revenue from saloons and bawdy houses prompted municipal officials to change their minds.71 In the late 1920s, the city's mayor "[threw] the town wide open" to prostitution, and in the next decade, cases of "female patients street-walking or soliciting" were "almost of daily occurrence."72 The clinic did little to oppose this challenge to federal authority. A 1934 visitor to the city remarked that Hot Springs was "the only national park where gambling, imbibing, and prostitution go unmolested."73

What explains this reversal? For one, it appears that clinic personnel had little appetite for prolonged conflict with the array of local forces (officials, doctors, and brothel owners) opposed to the abolition of prostitution. More important, however, were the interactions clinic personnel had with female patients—many of whom sold their bodies for sex while seeking VD treatment.

Consider the experience of a "young white woman" from Tennessee named "O.J." Orphaned since childhood, O.J. had grown up at the House of the Good Shepherd in Memphis. With "limited" opportunities, she then supported herself largely through prostitution—by which she contracted both syphilis and gonorrhea. Upon arriving in Hot Springs, O.J. found work as a boarding house maid. Subsequently accused by her landlady of "running around with men," O.J. found herself back on the streets. For the remainder of her stay, she supported herself through prostitution, a decision defended with three words: "I must eat." While concerned over the number of "boy friends" this "more than ordinarily attractive" woman had infected, Wenger sympathized with O.J.'s plight, explaining to his superiors that "she was a good patient and reported regularly for treatment." Summarizing her case, the PHS agent conceded that "it is hard to be chaste and hungry."74

Interactions with patients like O.J. had a dramatic impact on clinicians, who came to accept prostitution not as an indication of immorality, but as a consequence of the adverse circumstances many female patients faced.75 In one of his earliest reports, Wenger spoke of the "large number of female patients" who arrived in Hot Springs with "no funds" and "no friends." With work "scarce" in the city, many of these women—in a "much discouraged" state—were "forced by dire necessity to support [themselves] by prostitution."76 The experiences of patients like O.J. were "not unique nor unusual, but exactly what goes on as these transients move across the country in their efforts to receive free medical service."77 Criticizing those who argued that prostitution could not be tolerated, Wenger explained that "as social workers and health officers, we must change our own attitude and remember that we ourselves would become transients seeking medical services if they were not available at home. This is only natural."78

Consistent with his new understanding of prostitution, Wenger's interactions with female patients displayed a lack of moralizing. In lectures on how to "prevent a second infection," he endorsed the use of condoms and taught women "the value of prophylaxis and also contraceptives, or birth control methods." A typical lesson began with a discussion of female anatomy and concluded with demonstrations of birth control techniques.79 While initially concerned about how female patients would react to these frank methods, Wenger reported that "there has been no embarrassment on the part of the volunteer subjects or the patients looking on. The remarks and questions asked during the demonstrations are amazing."80

The clinic's female patients also encouraged Wenger to search for economic solutions to the country's VD epidemic. Consider the 1933 case of "Mrs. W." A white, college-educated woman who "came here all the way from old Mexico" after having been deserted by her husband (who infected her with syphilis) and having "suffered losses in the general depression." Upon arriving in Hot Springs, Mrs. W. initially stayed with a "colored friend." When this woman's relatives moved in, Mrs. W. informed clinic personnel that she was "planning to 'hitchhike' her way back to Nogales, Arizona," where friends would take her home. Believing such a trip would be "practically impossible," Wenger turned to local welfare agencies, "who agreed to pay half of her fare." The remainder was "made up by clinic personnel." Discussing her case in a report to his superiors, Wenger noted that "this is just another instance, in which, if maintenance could have been arranged for a longer period of time, the patient could have probably improved sufficiently to take her place again among her friends and be self-supporting."81

Like O.J. and Mrs. W., most of the women who made their way to the Hot Springs clinic in the 1930s were white.82 They received a much more sympathetic response than did the city's black health-seekers. Consider the case of Charley Wade Bradshaw. Shortly after entering the clinic on September 3, 1927, Bradshaw—a twenty-five year old black man employed as a porter by the Oklahoma City Railway Power House—was diagnosed with neurosyphilis and placed on a regimen of mercury. For six weeks, Bradshaw's savings enabled him to rent a room at a colored hotel, but on October 19, he was reported "AWOL." One year later, an Oklahoma City law firm supplied the reason for this abrupt departure. Coming to Hot Springs after company doctors "advised him that he had bad blood," Bradshaw left after running out of money for room and board. As an attorney informed Wenger, Bradshaw was "in a bad condition physically," and because he had "no means whatever," anyone who tried to help him "will have to do so at their expense."83

Wenger apparently made no effort to pay for Bradshaw's expenses, despite his recognition of the socioeconomic inequalities that imperiled black health.84 While concurring that venereal diseases were "playing havoc within the Negro population of the country," he criticized those who interpreted these findings as evidence of African Americans'"absolute lack of morality." The observed differential between whites and blacks, commented Wenger, "does not mean that there is a considerable difference in the morals of these different groups." The critical variable was African Americans'"social economic status"—in particular, their "more limited" educational and employment opportunities. "When the social and economic backgrounds of the two races are considered," he concluded, "there seems to be little difference in the incidence of infection."85

Improving black health-seekers' access to treatment required more than a rejection of the "syphilis-soaked negro" stereotype. When it came to removing institutional and economic barriers confronting African American VD patients, Wenger did little. He refused to challenge Hot Springs's adherence to Jim Crow, which confined African Americans to an "exterior observation" of all but two of the city's bathhouses. In addition to the "great disadvantage" they faced due to the "lack of proper accommodations in hotels and bathhouses," black patrons had fewer opportunities for securing therapeutic services than did whites. The Depression felled the one institution—the Woodmen of the Union Hospital—specifically catering to blacks.86

Black patients also faced the racial hostility of local physicians—some of whom worked in the PHS clinic. Believing that their higher rates of syphilis and gonorrhea stemmed from "the negro's almost absolute lack of morality and cleanliness," the resort's white doctors contended that southern blacks were "little better than animals with strong sexual passions."87 Some believed that emancipation constituted the primary cause of syphilis's spread "among the negro population of the South," as rampant promiscuity created a situation in which "the very existence of the race is threatened."88

Racist attitudes were on display within the Hot Springs VD clinic. Admitted in July 1925, George Smith was a black man who came to the attention of local authorities after his arrest for "night prowling." While a judge ordered his release on the condition that he leave town, a Wassermann test revealed that Smith was infected with syphilis. Shortly after Wenger prevailed upon the city to permit his entrance into the PHS facility, trouble began. One day while receiving an injection of mercury, Smith reportedly became "impudent," and the doctor treating him "lost his temper and threatened to ruin" the man. Upon hearing of the incident, Wenger informed Smith to "remain away" from the clinic until the physician in question—a Dr. Abington—left. Though not expelling him, Wenger warned the doctor not to "cuss" the patients, and in his review of the case, the PHS official observed that Abington "was born and raised in the South, and [was] prejudiced toward all aggressive negroes."89

With the advent of the Great Depression, fewer and fewer men such as Charley Bradshaw and George Smith entered the Hot Springs clinic. As the economic misery of the 1930s increased, the proportion of black men and women admitted to the clinic declined precipitously; whereas in the 1920s, roughly one-third of the city's health-seekers were African American, by the middle part of the 1930s, this figure had fallen to about one-fifth. Those able to pay for a stay came later in the course of their infections than did whites, and in addition to presenting less curable forms of illness, they left Wenger's clinic much earlier than did white men and women.90 A 1940 study revealed that the average white syphilitic received twelve shots of Salvarsan, and blacks only nine.91

Instances of racial discrimination continued. In 1941, a PHS officer reportedly entered a number of "reputable Negro business places" in nearby Texarkana, arresting several "young ladies," and then transporting them to Hot Springs for treatment—all without testing them for venereal disease.92 Such tactics soured many black syphilitics on Hot Springs.93 For their part, black newspapers discouraged readers from journeying into central Arkansas, noting that northern health resorts and spas were "more attractive than Hot Springs" on account of the latter's "awful...Jim Crow cars and other uncivilized offerings to the colored visitor."94

Clinic to Camp

From the beginning, clinic personnel were wary of attracting local citizens' ire. Hot Springs's patients frequently "[ran] into trouble with the police for housebreaking and robbing. " Local residents resoundingly objected to "the presence of such large numbers of indigent VD cases on the city streets."95 As early as the mid-1920s, Wenger called on the federal government to provide "some means of housing these indigent patients, or at least of providing them with sufficient food while they are under our care."96 Such aid never came.

During the Depression—as the city was "swamped with applicants seeking medical aid"—"begging, borrowing, and stealing" intensified.97 Many of these applicants, wrote Wagner, belonged to a "much higher type group," individuals who in normal times would not have had to avail themselves of free, government-provided services.98 Aware of the ways his clinic was "causing objection and criticism from certain groups of citizens," in 1933 Wenger again asked for federal housing of indigent patients. His next budget included monies courtesy of the Arkansas Transient Bureau (ATB), a branch of the Federal Transient Bureau, to provide "free room and board" at "$1.00 per day per patient," as well as funds for hospitalization, telegrams, minor emergencies, and transportation home.99

During its first month in operation, the ATB provided shelter, clothing, food, and medical attention to over 2,300 VD patients—black as well as white, female as well as male. The program reaped immediate dividends: according to state officials, only one year after implementing Wenger's "maintenance" plans, the number of venereal health-seekers leaving Hot Springs non-infectious increased by 38 percent.100 Echoing these sentiments, in January 1934, Wenger wired Washington praising the ATB for "giving out free room and board," noting that as a result of this "most of the old patients are remaining because they are getting free room and board and are taking more treatment."101

As diseased men and women descended onto Hot Springs, by early 1935 the ATB was providing for 4,000 diseased indigents.102 City officials claimed that many patients were "irresponsible as to their personal conduct"; every day, one local paper reported, twenty-five health-seekers faced arrest on charges of drunkenness and disturbing the peace.103"If the federal government continues to invite the scum of the earth here," complained a judge to the PHS, "I guess we'll just have to move out and give the town to you."104

Hot Springs officials began resisting calls for assistance, even refusing to admit dozens of children whose parents were receiving treatment into the public school system. Despite Wenger's "most vehement protests," and despite repeated assurances that it was "perfectly safe" for these children to mingle with local children, municipal leaders were adamant.105 They began to push for the removal of the clinic's "undesirable" indigent transients.106

Conceding that patients "cannot be left to roam at will and get into difficulties on the streets of Hot Springs," federal officials and the ATB considered construction of a camp on the city outskirts to house clinic patients and "give them wholesome occupation and recreation."107 Initially, Wenger opposed these plans, but in order to "meet the needs of patients and the community," in 1934 the ATB began building a camp "for lone men who are under care in the United States Public Health Service clinic.108

A year later, Camp Garraday opened on a thirty-three acre tract with a sixty-bed infirmary, nine barracks, kitchen, dining hall, and recreation building. During its first year, the ATB facility quartered five hundred white male transients.109 While these men—whom Wenger labeled the clinic's "hardest problem"—benefited from the "good food," shelter, immediate medical attention, and recreational opportunities provided directly by the federal government, white women and African Americans of both sexes continued to subsist under the old plan, by which they were "maintained in rooming and boarding houses throughout the city."110

Camp Garraday embodied the PHS's eugenic understanding of VD. While Wenger labeled white male patients a "problem," they were central to his ideology of "race conservation" and thereby worthy of privileges. Other patients might receive very modest financial aid, but they had to find sources of food and shelter, and felt the full force of the city's loathing. By contrast, white male patients received care on site, in a domiciliary setting. And Wenger sought to expand the camp's capabilities. In his 1936 budget, he recommended $55,320 for additional forms of support—including a butcher, a recreational supervisor, a housing director, a nursery, and a children's school (with principle and one teacher)—for Camp Garraday's residents.111

Wenger's plans never came to fruition. Local white citizens quickly and vehemently complained that Camp Garraday, "a Frankenstein monster," restored the "old stigma that Hot Springs is a place only for the treatment of venereal diseases." As the director of the Hot Springs Reservation explained, the PHS's efforts threatened to "ruin the results of the past hundred years of our history, to say nothing of the millions of dollars invested in the resort by private capital." The existence of Camp Garraday functioned to "make the place undesirable for pay patients."112

Unable to overcome residents' objections to Wenger's maintenance program and the ATB's camp plan, the federal government terminated the Transient Bureau in 1936 and Camp Garraday ceased to house patients. Venereal health-seekers wishing treatment in Hot Springs were required to bring "sufficient funds available to pay their room and board over a period of at least ninety days."113 For Oliver Wenger, who left Hot Springs in 1937 to take part in Chicago's Syphilis Control Program, it was a bitter ending. It appeared to him that Hot Springs was in no better shape than when he first arrived fifteen years earlier.

The same year Wenger left Hot Springs, Congress passed the National Venereal Disease Control Act. Allotting funds to the states, this legislation enabled a dramatic expansion in the nation's anti-venereal infrastructure. Arkansas soon felt the act's effects: prior to 1937 there were no state-run VD clinics here; by 1943, there were eighty-three. These new medical facilities treated fifteen thousand patients per year, far exceeding the heyday of the Hot Springs VD clinic.114 In tandem with the mass production of penicillin in the 1940s, these developments led to a precipitous decline in the nationwide incidence of syphilis and gonorrhea. By the early 1950s, the country's VD "epidemic" had ended, and although rates for both syphilis and gonorrhea rose in subsequent decades, the government's model VD clinic would play no part in post-war developments.

Conclusion: Race, Hot Springs, and Tuskegee

The history of the Hot Springs VD clinic reveals how eugenics shaped the federal government's response to syphilis and gonorrhea. The facility's day-to-day operations show how the goal of "race conservation" structured patient experiences and outcomes. On account of the high volume of white syphilitics seeking admittance, clinic personnel became increasingly sympathetic to patients' circumstances and needs, and eventually, this sympathy manifested itself in a medical program that included free treatments as well as stipends for housing and food. While patients, regardless of race or sex, benefited from these extra-medical measures, it is unlikely the PHS would have launched such an approach to VD had not the primary beneficiaries been white males. The Camp Garraday transient center doled out special services to clinic patients because they were white men.

How did eugenics and scientific racism unfold at Hot Springs as compared with Tuskegee? As the failure of its venereological research program suggests, Hot Springs is a story about subjects becoming patients. In Tuskegee, the opposite occurred. What began as a series of mass treatment campaigns ended up as a horrific forty-year research program revolving around the denial of medical services. Tuskegee's creators tried to explain their complicity by invoking the Great Depression, claiming that their actions resulted from agency budget cuts that rendered additional funding for VD treatment impractical. However, just as the Depression deepened its hold, the PHS began pouring money into the Hot Springs clinic, whose patients were provided with drugs as well as with funds for food and shelter. The clientele at Wenger's clinic were primarily white; those enrolled in the Tuskegee study were black.

Race played a determining role in the PHS's attack on syphilis and gonorrhea. In broadening the scope of historical study beyond Tuskegee, and in particular by looking at the agency's policies toward white patients, the extent of the government's racialized response to VD becomes clearer.

About the Author

Elliott Bowen is a professor of history at Nazarbayev University and a historian of medicine and public health in the modern United States. His research explores the history of sexually transmitted diseases. He is currently working on a book-length project about the history of Hot Springs, Arkansas.

• 1. H.S. Cumming, Surgeon General, to Charles M. Pearce, State Health Commissioner, Oklahoma, January 29, 1936, General Records of the Venereal Disease Division, 1918–1936, 203.4, in RG 90, Records of the Public Health Service, 1912–1968, National Archives, College Park, Maryland. Hereafter VD Division Records.
• 2. Available federal census information indicates that in 1930, Ishcomer was married and had a least one son. Her husband appears to have been a mill hand but no occupation is listed for her. Exactly which of her conditions triggered resentment by clinic doctors is not clear.
• 3. For a brief overview of the Hot Springs VD clinic, see Edwina Walls, "Hot Springs Waters and the Treatment of Venereal Diseases: The U.S. Public Health Service Clinic and Camp Garraday,"Journal of the Arkansas Medical Society 91, no. 9 (1995): 430–7.
• 4. The term "venereal peril" was a staple of turn-of-the-century discourse around syphilis and gonorrhea. For a particularly good example of this, see William Leland Holt,The Venereal Peril: A Popular Treatise on the Venereal Diseases, ed. William Josephus Robinson (New York: The Altrurians, 1909). For historical studies on this, see Theodor Rosebury, Microbes and Morals: The Strange Story of Venereal Disease (New York: Viking Press, 1971); Allan Brandt, No Magic Bullet: Venereal Disease and American Society since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Suzanne Poirier, Chicago's War on Syphilis, 1937–40: The Times, the Trib, and the Clap Doctor (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Nancy K. Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Marilyn Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War Two (New York: New York University Press, 2008); John Parascandola, Sex, Sin, and Science: A History of Syphilis in America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008).
• 5. Susan Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 136.
• 6. Christopher Crenner, "The Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the Scientific Concept of Racial Nervous Resistance,"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 67, no. 2 (2012): 244–80.
• 7. Paul A. Lombardo and Gregory M. Dorr, "Eugenics, Medical Education, and the Public Health Service: Another Perspective on the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,"Bulletin of the History of Medicine 80, no. 2 (2006): 313.
• 8. For a recent article in the revisionist vein, see Thomas G. Benedek and Jonathon Erlen, "The Scientific Environment of the Tuskegee Study of Syphilis, 1920–1960,"Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43, no. 1 (1999): 1–30.
• 9. O.C. Wenger, "The Need for Social Hygiene,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 10. C.N. Myers, "Hot Springs and the Model Federal Venereal Disease Clinic,"Medical Review of Reviews 28 (1922): 86.
• 11. For more on the city's early history and the role of the Hot Springs Reservation, see Janis Kent Percefull, Ouachita Springs Region: A Curiosity of Nature (Hot Springs, AR: Ouachita Springs Region Historical Research Center, 2007).
• 12. J.K. Haywood, Analyses of the Waters of the Hot Springs of Arkansas (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1912), 5.
• 13. For evidence of this, see A.J. Wright, "Some Account of the Hot Springs of Arkansas,"The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal (1860): 798–9, 801; R.M. Lackey, "The Hot Springs of Arkansas,"Chicago Medical Journal 23 (1866): 9; J.L. White, "The Hot Springs of Arkansas,"Chicago Medical Recorder 36 (1878): 311.
• 14. S.B. Houts, "Cases in Practice,"The Medical World 5 (1887): 248–52; Edward L. Keyes, The Venereal Diseases, Including Stricture of the Male Urethra (New York: William Wood & Company, 1880), 107–8; E.R. Lewis, "The Hot Springs of Arkansas,"The Kansas City Medical Index-Lancet 10, no. 7 (1889): 249. For references to Hot Springs as a "Mecca" for syphilitics during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, see "Editorial: Syphilis of the Nervous System,"The Hot Springs Medical Journal 3, no. 2 (1894): 51; A. Ravogli, "The Thermomineral Cure in the Treatment of Syphilis,"The Medical Era 6, no. 8 (1897): 276; Bukk G. Carleton, A Treatise on Urological and Venereal Diseases (New York: Bukk G. Carleton, 1905), 741; Loyd Thompson, Syphilis (Philadelphia, PA: Lea and Febiger, 1920), 212.
• 15. Haywood, Analyses of the Waters, 5.
• 16. J.L. Gebhart, "On the Therapy of the Waters of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and Their Relation to the Medical Profession at Large,"St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal 38 (1880): 634.
• 17. Robert Heriot, "Letter to the Editor,"Locomotive Engineers Journal 25 (1891): 919.
• 18. E.B. Stevens, "Hot Springs, Arkansas,"Transactions of the Ohio Medical Society 31 (1875): 197; Heriot, "Letter to the Editor," 919. See also H.M. Rector, "Then and Now,"Hot Springs Medical Journal 4 (1895): 225; Henry Durand, "Uncle Sam, M.D., and His Great Sanitarium,"The American Monthly Review of Reviews 16 (1897): 75–9.
• 19."Hot Springs, Arkansas,"The Medical Visitor 20 (1904): 140; "Hot Springs, Arkansas, as a Health Resort,"Hot Springs Medical Journal 3, no. 6 (1894): 173; William H. Deaderick, "The Development of the Hot Springs of Arkansas as a Health Resort,"The Medical Pickwick 2 (1916): 265–6. One turn-of-the-century visitor reported on how "it was the policy of the municipality of Hot Springs to discourage the coming of the poor people to that place," which it did "by withholding all of the usual eleemosynary institutions from their use." Hal C. Wyman, "A Surgical Pilgrimage to Arkansas,"Physician and Surgeon 28 (1906): 207.
• 20."Syphilitic Paresis,"The Eclectic Medical Journal 50 (1890): 562.
• 21. Joseph Zeisler, "The Social Evil,"Year Book (Chicago: The Sunset Club, 1894), 218.
• 22."Since the arsphenamines have justly become popular," the director of the Hot Springs VD clinic observed in 1921, "the number of syphilitics coming to Hot Springs has been decreased year by year." O.C. Wenger, "The Early Days of Hot Springs, Arkansas (1850–1900),"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 23."We see every day, here in Hot Springs," one local physician noted in a 1913 treatise, "from ten to a hundred persons" suffering from the "terrible disease" that was syphilis. Albert J. Whitworth and John M. Byrd, The Hot Springs Specialist (Memphis, TN: B.C. Toof & Company, 1913), 164. For more about Salvarsan, see Patricia Spain Ward, "The American Reception of Salvarsan,"Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences 36, no. 1 (1981): 44–62.
• 24. Oliver C. Wenger, "The Early Days in Hot Springs, Arkansas (1850–1900)."Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 25. Oliver C. Wenger, "Results of a Study and Investigation of Venereal Disease at the United States Public Health Service Clinic at Hot Springs, Arkansas,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 26. George P. Dale, "Moral Prophylaxis,"The American Journal of Nursing 11, no. 9 (1911): 689. It is unknown whether the general prevalence of VD increased during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What changed was likely not the percentage of the population infected by syphilis or gonorrhea, but instead, the medical profession's awareness of how many illnesses originated in one of these two diseases.
• 27. For these estimates, see G. Shearman Peterkin, "A System of Venereal Prophylaxis That is Producing Results,"American Medicine 10 (1906): 328. A colleague named John Cunningham declared that "it is a fact worthy of consideration that every year in this country 770,000 males reach the age of maturity. It may be affirmed that under existing conditions at least 60 percent, or over 450,000 of these young men will sometime during life become infected with venereal disease, if the experience of the past is to be accepted as a criterion of the future." John C. Cunningham, "The Importance of Venereal Disease,"The New England Journal of Medicine 168, no. 3 (1913): 77–8.
• 28. Abraham L. Wolbarst, "The Venereal Diseases: A Menace to the National Welfare,"Medical Review 62 (1913): 327–80.
• 29. For more on this, see Brandt, No Magic Bullet.
• 30. See Bristow, Making Men Moral. See also Alexandra M. Lord, "Models of Masculinity: Sex Education, the United States Public Health Service, and the YMCA, 1919–24,"Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 58, no. 2 (2003): 123–52.
• 31. For the Chamberlain-Kahn Act, see Alexandra M. Lord, "'Naturally Clean and Wholesome': Women, Sex Education, and the United States Public Health Service, 1918–1928,"Social History of Medicine 17, no. 3 (2004): 423–41.
• 32. Victor C. Vaughan, "Protection of American Army Against Social Diseases by More Rigid Health Laws,"The Pennsylvania Medical Journal 22 (1918): 26. According to Vaughan, the venereal disease rate at Camp Pike was 568.7 per 1,000 soldiers. See also, "Disease Conditions among Troops in the United States: Extracts from Telegraphic Reports Received in the Office of the Surgeon-General for the Week Ending October 19, 1917,"Journal of the American Medical Association 69 (1917): 1535–6; "Venereal Disease and Birth Control,"Journal of the Switchmen's Union 20 (1918): 756.
• 33. For evidence of this, see the letters of Archie C. Cowles, a syphilitic health-seeker who traveled to Hot Springs in 1905. In a letter dated December 10, 1905, Cowles wrote that "many of the women here seem to be on the courtesan order. Of course, it would not do to call them prostitutes," Cowles remarked, "for they are aristocrats in their profession." For Cowles' correspondence, see the Archie C. Cowles Papers, Garland County Historical Society Archives, Hot Springs, Arkansas.
• 34."Commissioners Issue Order to the City Manager to Close the Houses of Immorality, Which Goes into Effect at Once,"Hot Springs Sentinel-Record, August 2, 1918. Local businessmen and religious leaders rejected the association the military made between Camp Pike's high venereal disease rate and the "terrible conditions" in Hot Springs. See "Ministerial Men to Discuss Morals: Report from Washington of Bad Conditions Here Stirs some Enthusiasts,"Hot Springs Sentinel-Record, August 9, 1918; "The Moral Condition,"Hot Springs Sentinel-Record, August 10, 1918.
• 35. Audrey Wenger McCully, "The United States Public Health Service Venereal Disease Clinic and Government Free Bathhouse, 1919–1936,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 36."Proceedings of the Minnesota Academy of Medicine,"Minnesota Medicine 5 (1922): 61.
• 37.First Deficiency Appropriation Bill, 1921; Hearings before Subcommittee of House Committee on Appropriations, 66th Congress, 3rd Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921), 588.
• 38. This last point holds for all of the public health campaigns undertaken in the early twentieth-century US South. In the case of Hot Springs, the city was seen as a center of quackery, and in particular, of the country's VD patent medicine industry. See Excluding Advertisements of Cures for Venereal Diseases from the Mails; Hearings before the Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads of the House of Representatives, 66th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921).
• 39. During the war, Wenger—a native of St. Louis—served in the Medical Corps of the Missouri National Guard, and later focused his efforts on "venereal disease prophylaxis" as a member of Sanitary Squad #18, stationed in Camp Mills, a military camp in Long Island, New York. Afterwards, Wenger sought and obtained appointment as a "regional consultant" in the PHS, whereupon he assisted in the nationwide venereal disease survey (1919–20). See McCully, "The United States Public Health Service."
• 40. For more on Wenger's biography, see McCully, "The United States Public Health Service."
• 41. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee, 141.
• 42. Oliver C. Wenger to C.C. Pierce, March 16, 1921, Hot Springs National Park Administrative Archives, Subseries 25.1.4, File A7615[04]. Hereafter NPS Archives.
• 43. Oliver Wenger, "Instructions" (1921), Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 44. McCully, "The United States Public Health Service."
• 45. O.C. Wenger, "The United States Public Health Service Clinic at Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 46. Oliver C. Wenger, "A Comparative Study of the Amount of Money Each Applicant Declared Under Oath at the U.S. Government Bath House for the Years 1931–32,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 47. O.C. Wenger, "United States Conducts Clinics for Venereal Diseases,"Nation's Health 8 (1926): 103; McCully, "The United States Public Health Service."
• 48. McCully, "The United States Public Health Service."
• 49. Virgil Oren Adams to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, September 27, 1934. Part of Adams's story also derives from a letter he sent to Captain Geoffrey, an officer at the Hot Springs clinic. For full texts, see VD Division Records.
• 50. Oliver C. Wenger to the Surgeon General, October 18, 1934, VD Division Records.
• 51. For evidence of this, consider the case of James Gordon. A Michigan man, in 1926 Gordon wrote the PHS asking for help in getting to Hot Springs. "I have tried [sic] all kinds of medicines, which you know that it [sic] takes money." From a book he had read, Gordon surmised that "there is not mutch [sic] chance for a poor man there," but still he pleaded: Hot Springs was "the last chance I have got—I have every thing [sic] else until my money is gone." For this letter, see James R. Gordon to United States Public Health Service, August 17, 1926, VD Division Records.
• 52. Wenger, "The Need for Social Hygiene."
• 53. For more on America's fertility transition, see J. David Hacker, "Rethinking the 'Early' Decline of Marital Fertility in the United States,"Demography 40, no. 4 (2003): 605–20.
• 54. Wolbarst, "The Venereal Diseases," 373.
• 55. For more on this, see Reverby, Examining Tuskegee, 139–44.
• 56. McCully, "The United States Public Health Service."
• 57. J.R. Waugh and Elizabeth Milovich, "Severe Reactions to Arsphenamine among 3,050 Previously Untreated Patients,"Journal of Venereal Disease Information 21, no. 12 (1940): 391. The Hot Springs clinic, it bears noting, was far from the only site where this experimental use of Salvarsan took place. In the medical literature of the time, many physicians reported success with an accelerated treatment regimen, and some recommended giving as many as three doses in a twenty-four hour period. One advocate advised colleagues to "give the largest possible amount of salvarsan in the shortest possible time." Faxton E. Gardner, "The Treatment of Syphilis,"Medical Times 45 (1917): 63. For more discussions of the intensive and continuous treatment of syphilis with Salvarsan, see Frederick W. Smith, "The Modern Diagnosis and Treatment of Syphilis,"Medical Record 91 (1919): 186–91; B.C. Corbus, "Prophylaxis in Cerebrospinal Syphilis,"Journal of the American Medical Association 69, no. 25 (1917): 2087–9; Carlyle N. Haines, "Salvarsan in Syphilis,"Pennsylvania Medical Journal 24 (1921): 839–41.
• 58. O.C. Wenger and Lida J. Usilton, "Notes on the Syphilis Clinic, United States Public Health Service, Hot Springs, Arkansas,"Journal of Venereal Disease Information 15, no. 6 (1934): 210. It is impossible to verify these morbidity and mortality figures, as the clinic operated free from federal oversight. Because of this, and also because of the clinic's generally poor record-keeping practices, the number of "adverse reactions" may be higher than what Wenger reported. For more on the latter problem, see C.H. Waring to the Surgeon General, January 23, 1923, VD Division Records.
• 59. In a 1940 study, clinic personnel revealed that nearly 2.5 patients per thousand experienced "severe reactions" to Salvarsan—a rate higher than the 1.99 per thousand reported by the Cooperative Clinical Group's studies of syphilis. Waugh and Milosivic, "Severe Reactions."
• 60. Wenger and Usilton, "Notes on the Syphilis Clinic," 209. For further evidence of serious medical complications following upon the clinic's intensive plan of syphilis treatment, see George E. Tarkington, "Value of Liver Function Test in Arsenical Therapy,"Journal of Venereal Disease Information 7, no. 1 (1926): 24–5. For details of a specific injury, see Paul S. Carley, "Infarction of Buttock from Intra-Muscular Injections of Mercury Benzoate,"Journal of Venereal Disease Information 17, no. 10 (1936): 281–3. It bears noting here that during the 1920s and 1930s, the idea of "informed consent" had not become a universally recognized principle within medical ethics. Because of this, scientific investigators were not required to obtain patient permission before proceeding with experiments. Those housed within custodial institutions (public hospitals and clinics, asylums, prisons, orphanages, etc.) were especially targeted for human subjects research, with the justification often being that they owed society a debt in exchange for the free treatment they received. For more on this, see Susan Lederer, Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
• 61. For the details of LaPrade's case, see G.L. Collins to the Surgeon General, October 11, 1932, VD Division Records.
• 62. Forrest D. LaPrade to Mr. Wright Patman, June 10, 1930, VD Division Records.
• 63. M.J. White, "Next Steps in the Field of VD Control from the Standpoint of the United States Public Health Service,"Journal of Venereal Disease Information 7, no. 1 (1926): 173.
• 64."Meeting of the Advisory Committee to the Division of Venereal Diseases, United States Public Health Service, May 16, 1927,"Journal of Venereal Disease Information 8, no. 8 (1927): 303.
• 65. Wenger, "The Need for Social Hygiene"; Oliver C. Wenger, Annual Report for 1923, Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 66."Hot Springs Threatened With Loss of Patronage: Health Resort Must Eliminate Red-light District,"The Social Hygiene Bulletin 8, no. 1 (1921): 8.
• 67. L. Blance Young to O.C. Wenger, February 8, 1932, Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 68. O.C. Wenger to David Robinson, April 18, 1921, Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 69. Information on brothel closures comes from my own analysis of police dockets from the City of Hot Springs, 1920–1923. These documents can be found in the Garland County Historical Society Archives, Police Department Records, Vertical Files, Garland County Historical Society, Hot Springs, Arkansas. In 1918, before the initial crackdown on prostitution, sex-workers accounted for almost one-fifth of all criminal arrests in the city.
• 70.First Deficiency Appropriation Bill, 1921: Hearing before Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921), 568.
• 71."Hard Sledding for Bankrupt City,"Yearbook of the City Managers' Association 6 (1920): 85–6.
• 72. Oliver C. Wenger, "The Transient-Indigent-Medical Problem at Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 73. Ray Hanley, A Place Apart: A Pictorial History of Hot Springs, Arkansas (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2011), 81; "Hot Springs Would Secede,"Today 3 (1934): 23.
• 74. Wenger, "The Transient-Indigent-Medical Problem."
• 75. Wenger, Annual Report for 1923.
• 76. Oliver C. Wenger, "History of United States Public Health Clinic, Hot Springs, Arkansas," Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 77."Any person who engages in travel," Wenger maintained, "may be the carrier of a communicable disease.""Every health officer knows," he reminded his superiors, "of instances, when, from one single source, hundreds and thousands of new cases have developed." Oliver C. Wenger, "The Indigent, Transient Problem and Its Relation to Public Health," Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 78. Ibid. In connection with Wenger's apparent acceptance of prostitution in Hot Springs, it is interesting to note that while overseeing a VD control program in Puerto Rico during the Second World War, the PHS official was privately reprimanded for proposing "methods of registration and identification of prostitutes which seem quite out of line" with the federal government's official policy of repression. For more on this, see Surgeon General Parran to Senior Surgeon O.C. Wenger, March 23, 1942, Thomas Parran Papers, Series 1, Box 5, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hereafter, Parran Papers.
• 79. In educating his patients on the use of contraceptives, Wenger was taking a risk. As he noted in a 1926 letter sent to Thomas Parran (the recently-appointed director of the PHS's Division of Venereal Diseases), "the whole subject of prophylaxis is T.N.T. at this stage of the game," and as such, advocating too forcefully on behalf of birth control measures "might innocently start some unwelcome comment"—particularly in the South. On account of this, Wenger generally advised that the PHS "let the State V.D. men do as they please"—another sign of the impact local forces had on the federal government's efforts. For more, see Oliver C. Wenger to Thomas Parran, October 23, 1926, Parran Papers.
• 80. O.C. Wenger to Dr. White, January 13, 1925, VD Division Records.
• 81. Wenger, "The Transient-Indigent-Medical Problem."
• 82. During the clinic's formative years, white women never accounted for more than one-fifth of the clinic's annual caseload. Between 1928 and 1936, however, their numbers steadily grew, reaching a peak of 2,353 in 1935—a year in which they represented nearly one-third of all patients treated. During the same period, African Americans' share of the clinic's annual caseload declined from 36.9 percent to 20.3 percent—a trend especially evident among females. O.C. Wenger, "Summary Statistical Data,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 83. Walter Martin to O.C. Wenger, March 2, 1928, VD Division Records.
• 84. Between 1922 and 1932, the number of African American visitors listed in the "unskilled labor" category was "nearly twice as high" as the comparable figure for whites. O.C. Wenger, "An Analysis of 10,000 Cases of Syphilis,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 85. Oliver C. Wenger, "Analysis of 10,000 Cases of Syphilis,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 86. A.W. Hunton, "The American Carlsbad,"The Voice of the Negro 3, no. 5 (1906–7): 331; C. Melnotte Wade, "Hot Springs—Its People,"Colored American Magazine 10, no. 1 (1906): xviii; O.C. Wenger, "The United States Public Health Service Clinic at Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives; O.C. Wenger to Surgeon General, July 27, 1934, VD Division Records.
• 87. Thompson, Syphilis, 52.
• 88. L.R. Ellis, "Address of the Chairman of the Section on Dermatology and Syphilology,"Journal of the Arkansas Medical Society 6 (1909): 44; Loyd Thompson and Lyle B. Kingerly, "Syphilis in the Negro,"American Journal of Syphilis 3 (1919): 396.
• 89. O.C. Wenger to the Surgeon General, July 20, 1925, VD Division Records .
• 90. On average, between 1922 and 1936, African American rates for tertiary syphilis were ten percentage points higher than those of their white counterparts, who also presented 8 percent more primary and secondary cases than did black syphilitics. O.C. Wenger, "Classification of Syphilis Cases, U.S. Public Health Service Clinic,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 91. Waugh and Milovich, "Severe Reactions," 390. For further evidence of the unfavorable therapeutic outcomes for black patients, see J.R. Waugh and W. Burns Jones, "Genito-Urinary Survey of 1,625 Male Patients, United States Public Health Service Venereal Disease Clinic, Hot Springs, Ark.,"Journal of Venereal Disease Information 13, no. 1 (1932): 9.
• 92."Officer Uses 'Gestapo' Methods: Texarkanians Terrorized, Business Houses Molested,"Arkansas State Press, July 25, 1941, 1.
• 93. For likely racial discrimination, see Paul Carley, "Infection with Syphilis Masked by Gonorrhea,"Journal of Venereal Disease Information 18, no. 2 (1937): 21–4.
• 94."Negroes Can Bathe at French Lick Springs,"The Michigan State News, Tuskegee Institute News Clippings File.
• 95."Hot Springs Judge Wroth over 'Dumping' of Indigent Diseased Transients in City,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives; Wenger, "The Transient-Indigent-Medical Problem"; O.C. Wenger to Surgeon General, July 27, 1934, VD Division Records.
• 96. O.C. Wenger, "United States Conducts Clinic for Venereal Diseases," 103.
• 97. Oliver C. Wenger to Taliaferro Clark, August 29, 1931, NPS Archives.
• 98. O.C. Wenger, "The Transient-Indigent-Medical Program,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 99. Ibid.
• 100. R.O. Brunk, "Some Interesting Facts,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 101. Oliver C. Wenger to Dr. Vonderlehr, January 10, 1934, NPS Archives.
• 102. McCully, "The United States Public Health Service."
• 103. Brunk, "Some Interesting Facts,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives; "Hot Springs Judge Wroth over 'Dumping' of Indigent Diseased Transients in City,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 104."Hot Springs Judge,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 105. Oliver C. Wenger, "A Plan for the Consolidation of all Medical Measures for Transient Relief in Hot Springs, Arkansas,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 106."Council Approves New Transient Plan,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 107. Antoinette Cannon, "Hot Springs Transient Program,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 108. Ibid.
• 109. O.C. Wenger, "A Plan for the Consolidation of all Medical Measures for Transient Relief in Hot Springs, Arkansas," September 5, 1935, NPS Archives.
• 110. O.C. Wenger, "The United States Public Health Service Clinic at Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas,"Oliver C. Wenger Papers, Box 1, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Archives.
• 111. Oliver C. Wenger, "A Plan for the Consolidation of All Medical Measures for Transient Relief in Hot Springs, Arkansas" (September 5, 1935), NPS Archives.
• 112. As one local authority put it, developments of the early 1930s had given the health resort's more wealthy visitors the impression that "the transients being treated here were so numerous that [they] would overrun everything," and on account of this, the city had become "undesirable for pay patients." Thomas J. Allen to Arno B. Cammerer, July 23, 1934, NPS Archives.
• 113. John J. McShane to All Local Health Authorities, March 10, 1936, VD Division Records.
• 114."Venereal Disease Control,"Arkansas Health Bulletin 1, no. 3 (1944): 6–9.

Presentation

Response

About the Speakers

Kirk Savage is a professor of art history and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He has written extensively on public monuments within the theoretical context of collective memory and identity. He is the author of Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) and Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Andra Gillespie is an associate professor of political science at Emory University. Gillespie, who studies racial and ethnic politics in the United States, is the author of The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

Introduction

Of countless images over the last century, attempts to frame Appalachia's landscape and people have drawn on a limited number of tropes. Whether Bayard Wootten's photographic illustrations for Cabins in the Laurel,1 or the Farm Security Administration (FSA) images of Walker Evans, Elmer Johnson, and Marion Post Wolcott, or photojournalists' frontline depictions of the War on Poverty, the visual encoding of Appalachia has reinforced and recirculated images of a rugged, yet pristine landscape, and a people who are portrayed in equal mixtures of pride and deprivation, perseverance and lack. Without question Appalachia "as a whole" presents a rather problematic construct, embracing a diverse cultural and physical geography with multiple, conflicting borders and covering—by the Appalachian Regional Commission's (ARC) definition—420 counties in thirteen states. The volume of images depicting Appalachia belies diversity, reinforcing instead a homogenized depiction of the "region." That such a broad space and numerous people—congressionally constructed—becomes reduced to one region is itself an oversimplification. A Google image search of "Appalachian photography" reveals visual stereotypes in present-day action, and their limited scope.

While these stereotypical depictions of the region exist across a broad range of media, photography has a way of literalizing this act of framing certain images at the expense of others. But alongside the many attempts to traffic in Appalachian images for commercial or political gain, projects exist that question how photography frames Appalachia: what is contained and what excluded. This effort dates back to some of those images of the FSA Photographic Unit. As Marion Post Wolcott noted, "Constantly we were asked [by Unit Director Roy Stryker] and [we were] asking of ourselves, 'In what direction are we going; are we doing the whole job? How can we fill in the gaps, round out the file…?'"2 In a similar spirit, Roger May's crowdsourced photography project, Looking at Appalachia (begun in 2014, and ongoing) seeks a broader picture. This collection of images engages in a multivalent and ambivalent approach to framing Appalachia, presenting over four hundred photographs taken by more than one hundred photographers across multiple counties in thirteen states. To visit this collection is to experience "unseeing" the region through multiple frames and lenses. This strategy of "visual counter point," as May describes it, attempts to create a complex and contradictory "crowdsourced image archive [that] will serve as a reference that is defined by its people as opposed to political legislation."3

Most striking in this "visual counter point" is the degree to which the project is fundamentally frustrating. Each time an image seems to frame Appalachia in a particular way, other images unsettle the frame. As Susan Sontag suggests in Regarding the Pain of Others(2003), "the photographic image… cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude."4 Unlike Wolcott and Stryker's challenge of "doing the whole job,"Looking at Appalachia's use of multiple, competing frames undermines any attempt to portray a region in its entirety, or to pin this floating signifier within a fixed, defined border. But, at the same time, each of these images invites us to look at Appalachia—to see Appalachia and what it signifies in this particular image. These multiple, at times contradictory perspectives yield an increasingly complex sense of speakers and voices; as Looking at Appalachia contributor Lou Murrey explains in her commentary on May's project and several other online, collaborative photography projects: "All around Appalachia there are photographers engaged in a dialogue to change and expand perception of the region, allowing folks to declare 'hey, I'm Appalachian too.'"5 What is particularly compelling about Looking at Appalachia is that the dialogic qualities of this crowdsourced work find expression in both form and content. Individual pictures declare "I'm Appalachian too," by calling attention to the frames that select these images. As William Schumann has noted in "Place and Place-Making in Appalachia," region is a social and historical construct, emerging through "a process of selectively cultivating some narratives of belonging while erasing other meanings from public discourse."6 The project is fundamentally unsettling to the extent that powerful and idiosyncratic framings do not coalesce into any easy sense of what "Appalachia" signifies, but call attention to acts of inclusion and exclusion. By design, viewers are left in productive confusion, wondering what "region" means in this mixing of frames and images. The project intentionally draws upon the highly problematic ARC-defined boundary for Appalachia for its submission criterion at the same time that it challenges how these borders have framed a regional imaginary. "Appalachia's boundaries,"David Whisnant writes, "have been drawn so many times by so many different hands that it is futile to look for a 'correct' definition of the region."7Looking at Appalachia does not offer a "correct" narrative of belonging. It strives to provide a crowdsourced corrective to the dominant visual tropes for Appalachia through its use of multiple, competing frames.

The diversity of images in Looking at Appalachia also reveals the degree to which photographic meaning-making depends upon the power of visual citation. The crowdsourced call to photographers produces clusters of family resemblances in a manner not unlike the same-yet-different clustering that emerges through the social media practice of tagging photographs (for example, the #appalachia hashtag on Instagram.) As Sontag notes, "photographs echo other photographs"8; we recognize something in Tamara Reynolds's portrait of a Tennessee man's face (Figure 1), a semiotic resemblance that, when framed as "a face of Appalachia" contributes to the "substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings." In these moments of recognition, ideologies take visual form that "commemorate—in no less blunt fashion than postage stamps"—embedded values.9But as the number of photographers creating these images increases, commemoration becomes an increasingly granular—and increasingly ordinary—act. As Fred Ritchin writes in his discussion of the impact of social media on contemporary photojournalism, the proliferation of images documenting any single event tends to create not only greater variation in the images recorded, but also a greater number of photographs that are "more detail-oriented and everyday, with fewer elaborately constructed attempts at the larger, synthesizing statement."10 While an editorial board curates content included in Looking at Appalachia, the project taps into the diffusive power of crowdsourcing with the same intent: to use multiple, idiosyncratic perspectives from professional and amateur photographers alike to refract Appalachia, resisting reduction of these multifaceted photographs into a blunt commemoration.

Visual Dialogues: A Mosaic of Appalachia

In After Photography(2009), Ritchin suggests that the digital photograph acts less as "window" than "mosaic," not only because any digital image consists of pixels, but because once digital, any image exists as a link within a larger network.11 Photography in a networked environment "is far from a mechanical recording; it becomes a collaborative, multivocal interrogation of both external and internal realities in which the initial exposure is only a minimalist starting point."12 In Looking at Appalachia each photograph speaks to "Appalachia" in its own way, while commenting upon the reality that other images purport. Looking at Appalachia offers a mosaic of disparate images in dialogue with one another. Any image added to the mosaic does not move us closer to completion but only complicates attempts to define a "region." Because the network is always an open-ended structure, an open call for additional contexts, commentaries, and contributions, the project can never be "finished"—even after the editorial board stops adding images. It is in those gaps and contradictions among a large array that the project succeeds in evoking a sense of Appalachia while offering less and less certainty as to what exactly Appalachia contains.

Looking at Appalachia also challenges the power to exclude through the framing of visual design, juxtaposing photographs in a grid layout reminiscent of other photosharing social media services, such as Instagram, Trover, or Flickr. To return to Tamara Reynolds's portrait: this image does not present itself in isolation when we first encounter it. It is already in dialogue with other images—some sharing the same echoes of recognition (perhaps Jaclyn Brown's portrait of Bill Mullaly from Knoxville), while others (an image from the Corazon Latino Festival in Jonesborough) calling attention to all that falls outside the frame of this photograph (Figure 2). Appearing directly above in the image grid is a photograph of a young, blonde-haired woman in sunglasses, head hanging out of a demolition derby car at the Crossville Raceway in Cumberland County. While this image may echo well with other visual tropes for (Southern) Appalachia by way of NASCAR and its mythologized connection to moonshine running, it is not an image that speaks in the same semiotic registers as Reynolds's portrait. Yet both photographs—taken at the same location by the same photographer—contribute to the Appalachian imaginary. Juxtaposed and conflicting images of the same scene call attention to what Judith Butler has termed "frames of recognition"—normative structures that allow recognition of a subject as such, but only through an attempt to exclude or cast off aspects of the subject that "exceed the normative conditions of its recognizability."13 As with the playful series of photographs that went viral in 2015, in which images of a beautifully crafted meal, a woman seated on an empty beach, and a solitary bicycle on an empty road appear in their Instagram frame and in a broader frame that captured everything just outside of that "perfect shot," viewing iconic face and demolition derby car side by side in a grid of competing images reveals how framing is anything but a neutral act, and how any frame depends as much on visual citations of norms that give rise to recognition as it does excluding everything "already outside, which made the very sense of the inside possible, recognizable."14

If the imperative of the frame insists, "Look at this (and not that)," then the design strategy of juxtaposing images by diverse photographers with divergent visions compels recognition of what is just beyond the frame—to "look at this and that." The website's overall hypertextual design reinforces this visual tension between framing and what falls outside. Looking at Appalachiagreets visitors with a cover image, a logo, links to information about the project, and a menu that invites users to choose a state within the thirteen-state ARC-designated region. The site directs users to select—to frame by state—one set of images of Appalachia over other sets. How viewers engage with the site determines their initial frame of context—whether proceeding alphabetically (Alabama), or via a state considered more central to their understanding (West Virginia) or perhaps beginning with a state that they might only marginally connect with Appalachia (Mississippi). While the site has many points of entry, it offers no final resting point, only a growing number of juxtaposing images, and an increasingly complex mosaic of Appalachia.

Certain images in Looking at Appalachia affirm and commemorate popular cultural assumptions. Consider the contribution of Shelby Lee Adams, a photographer of Central Appalachia who, since the mid-1970s, has garnered considerable attention—and criticism—for creating portraits that would seem to perpetuate stereotypical images of rural deprivation and depravity—what Jason Huettner has called "poverty porn."15 Adams has only one work included in the project, which, for those only familiar with his more controversial images, may seem a departure of sorts, though one still resonant with Appalachian stereotypes: A portrait of one-hundred-year-old Barbara, from Perry County, Kentucky. The image affirms deeply inscribed indices of the Appalachian "granny" stereotype: her aged face, whiteness, and rugged cheer. But in the mosaic presentation of images on the Kentucky page, her portrait abuts Trey Jolly's landscape of the Daniel Boone Plaza, also in Perry County—a mountaintop removal reclamation site (Figures 3, 4, 5). The nostalgia framing recognition for one photograph only maintains itself as a stereotypical image of Appalachia through exclusion of other images that lie outside the frame—images of extraction and reclamation that are just as much a normative frame as Barbara's weathered and aged face. At the same time, Adams's portrait of this mountain woman asserts itself with equal weight as a counterpoint to the stereotypical framing of Appalachia as a sacrifice zone. Photographs echo one another in ways that both cancel and amplify resonant spatial representations. No single frame can contain Appalachia and its competing significations.

There is reason to closely consider this stereotypical photograph by Adams. In a June 2016 email exchange, May describes Adams as "the first living photographer I entered into conversation with" regarding what it meant to "look at" Appalachia through the lens of a camera and frame it in a particular way. In an essay published on May's blog, Walk Your Camera, Adams situates his work as a visual response to the War on Poverty imagery of the 1960s, which he describes as an ongoing "embarrassment to all."16 Like Adams, May casts Looking at Appalachia—launched to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the War on Poverty—as an attempt to unravel the "visual definition of Appalachia" that codified over the ensuing half century through the heavy circulation and citation of those images in the mass media.17 While Adams's photographs, like the portrait of Barbara included in Looking at Appalachia, may seem to operate within the same echo chamber of iconic images and visual tropes captured in these Great Society-era photographs, Adams explains that the visual stereotypes that structure Appalachia in the popular imagination are likewise part of his own emplacement in this space. They operate as normative frames that give rise to recognizability. Acknowledging this provides an opportunity to engage in what Adams describes as "the work of looking" in photography:

Our ancestral mountain people are mythologized into our greater existence from our beginnings, a part of our childhood and permanent memories. If we are truly honest with ourselves, we know this cannot be erased. If you are from these mountains, your and my dreams and reality itself are engraved within this collective group consciousness forever. One can choose to repress, but sooner or later, the lives and images of our mountain people will return to us and keep returning until we come to terms with their importance, not just the ones we chose, but all. 18

He goes on to describe photographs as "catalysts" that can complicate these stereotypes through this work of looking.19 May admits that his initial response to Adams's photographs was to "dismiss the work as typical stereotyping of Appalachia," yet in confronting those photographs, he likewise had to come to terms with his own embedded stereotypes.20 By including Adams's portrait of Barbara alongside other photographs that echo competing, iconic images of Appalachia, the project offers its audience an opportunity to catch themselves in the act of recognition, and to question what it is they are recognizing. This play of frames serves as a central feature of how Looking at Appalachia operates, in concept and design—"fram[ing] the frame" that attempts to delimit Appalachia in each of these juxtaposed images. 21

It should come as no surprise that Looking at Appalachia traffics in some of the frames of recognition that the project might be expected to attempt to undo. But this crowdsourced collection of images functions collaboratively within a mosaic that shows the recognizable as well as the frame that allows its recognition. Consider the cluster of images depicting bearded men, and the frame of reference within which these images operate. The mountaineer beard is an iconic image of Appalachian masculinity, repeated in university mascot as well as hillbilly stereotype. As beards echo other beards, a visual exchange develops, offering a complex portrait of Appalachian masculinity. A series of three images by photographer Elle Olivia Andersen of Robert Pickens, from Pickens County, South Carolina, offers a frame for the mountaineer that seems to confirm the stereotype—gray-bearded, capped, and wearing overalls (Figures 6, 7, 8). The photographs assert a documentary authority, capturing an "authentic portrait" of Appalachian life. But these images—and this beard—stand in dialogue with other images of bearded men that work against the authority of any one frame. As counterpoint, consider the portrait from Madison, Kentucky, of a younger mountaineer, bearded, but in a hat one would never confuse with an iconic "toboggan" (Figure 9). Other beards appear in other semiotic constellations that suggest an Appalachia outside the frame of any singular attempt to define the "mountain man" (Figures 10, 11, 12). The same visual conversation occurs when the gendered "granny" stereotype in Adams's portrait of Barbara is repeated and contradicted in other photographers' images of Appalachian women, old and young. With each echo of recognition, viewers see "mountain women" and "beards of Appalachia," but as these framed portraits engage one another, they ask, rather than answer: What makes these images recognizable? When you look at Appalachia, what is it that you see?

Frames of Recognition

Butler suggests how frames operate as normative structures giving rise to recognizability and representability: "When a picture is framed, any number of ways of commenting on or extending the picture may be at stake. But the frame tends to function, even in a minimalist form, as an editorial embellishment of the image, if not a self-commentary on the history of the frame itself."22 Framing is an interpretive act, embedded in the photograph, a material instantiation of various norms of recognizability. "Even the most transparent of documentary images is framed, and framed for a purpose," she writes, "carrying that purpose within its frame and implementing it through the frame."23 Recognizability is "both jettisoning and presenting" the norms of representation and interpretation, "doing both at once."24 The "iterable structure" of the frame—the fact that "the frame breaks with itself to reproduce itself"—gives rise to an inherent instability in this interpretive moment.25 In one sense, Butler notes, "to be framed" implies that one has been set up—the subject of a "false accusation"; but because the frame is always vulnerable to exposing itself, to showing how this interpretive "break" in context operates (jettisoning and presenting), it also marks a potential for "breaking out" of normative structures of recognizability.26 She writes of these moments of destabilization: "What happens when a frame breaks with itself is that a taken-for-granted reality is called into question, exposing the orchestrating designs of the authority who sought to control the frame. This suggests that it is not only a question of finding new content, but also of working with received renditions of reality to show how they can and do break with themselves."27

In a similar move, Looking at Appalachia breaks with itself by offering and destabilizing recognizable norms of Appalachian photography. Returning to the portraits of Robert Pickens (Figures 6, 7, 8), the frame seems to affirm the "quaint but stalwart mountaineer."28 The project as a whole, however, provides multiple iterations of this normative structure that break with themselves through multiple, contradictory framings. Even before Horace Kephart's popular depiction of "mountain whites" in Our Southern Highlanders (1922), the recognizable mountaineer identity has featured a normative whiteness exclusive of the racial and ethnic diversity significant in Appalachian demography.29

Figures 13–16

Numerous portraits within this collection of photographs speak directly to this erasure, and do so by asking viewers to question the recognizability of an Appalachia that reveals its racial and ethnic diversity. To see echoes of the same norms of representation that give us the "stalwart mountaineer," presented in portraits of African American Appalachian men, offers the normative frame of recognition and a break with its own terms for recognizability (Figures 13, 14). Similarly, while immigrant labor populations have moved into and out of the mountains throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and found their way, for example, into FSA documentation of Appalachian coal towns, ethnic diversity frequently falls outside of the frame of recognizability for "mountain folk."30Looking at Appalachia returns these often-erased and overlooked images to a visual dialogue, and does so within recognizable frames that reveal "received renditions of reality" at the same time that they destabilize the authoritative claim of these normative structures. Contemporary photographs of Hispanic mountaineers affirm and destabilize norms of representation (Figures 15, 16). "To learn to see the frame that blinds us to what we see is no easy matter," writes Butler.31

Looking at Appalachia's contemporary, crowdsourced images destabilize normative frames of Appalachian nostalgia through photographs of a more mainstream place that works its way in and through recognizable visible tropes of quaint and simple country life. As Williams and others have noted, from the local color writers movement of the late 1800s onward, Appalachia appears as a "reservoir of American folk culture."32 Images outside of this framing reveal acts of selective focus. As Watkins notes of Wootten's 1930s photographs of Spruce Pine and Bakersville, North Carolina, her choice of camera angles and framing emphasized quaintness over development: "Had the camera been placed further back up the street," he notes, in his reading of one image, "the picture would have shown, among other things, a newer department store and a movie theater, more recognizable signs of modernity."33 Williams makes a similar observation: images that "placed [Appalachia] squarely in the American mainstream" historically have been marginalized to make room for more recognizable, nostalgic framings.34 As with depictions of grannies, beards, and mountaineers, Looking at Appalachia does present images that seem throwbacks. Consider Meg Wilson's portrait from Garrard County, Kentucky, of two generations (is it grandfather and grandson?) in a tobacco barn (Figure 17). There are echoes of nostalgia. But the Angry Birds image on the boy's T-shirt connects this scene to traditional Kentucky tobacco farming practices as well as global networks of mobile devices, digital games, and franchise marketing. Similarly, Lou Murrey's candid shot at Skate World in Vilas, North Carolina, frames Appalachia in ways that foreground nostalgia for an imagined simpler and remote American past (Figure 18). A closer look reveals the smartphone in the woman's hand behind the counter, locating this image squarely within the broader context of highly networked American mainstream culture. These moments of contradiction—within and between photographs—create a tension within the project that undermines the authority of these normative frames.

Figures 19–23

Similarly, nature photography in Looking at Appalachia complicates and questions received and expected visual tropes. Chris Jackson's portrait of a young couple walking at the edge of Virginia's Falling Springs waterfall, or Nathan Armes's image of a dirt road on Wayah Bald in North Carolina, echoes photographs framing Appalachian geography as wild refuge (Figures 19, 20). Images of Appalachia as a sacrifice zone reinforce these norms by presenting the opposite—such as Dobree Adams's active mining sites in Perry County, Kentucky, or Pat Jarret's photograph of the Freedom Industries' chemical spill site in Charleston, West Virginia (Figures 21, 22). Other "natural settings" alter these frames: does Amanda Greene's North Georgia Christmas tree farm landscape, with portable toilet in the foreground, offer an image of untouched nature, extractive economy, or something in between (Figure 23)? Or consider Wes Frazer's photograph of a youth in mid-swing over a river in Jefferson County, Alabama (Figure 24). Not only does this image echo other representations of the region as a locus of simple country pleasures (destabilized, of course, by other images in Looking at Appalachia—for example, another Frazer photograph of a tattooed youth huffing inhalants while standing in the same river) but it also depicts Appalachia as a wild and rural refuge from urban and suburban development. But this first Frazer photograph disrupts its own image of Appalachia as simple, rural refuge by including the large pile of trash on the shore. Cropping out the trash would present a very different image. It is not ironic contrast (no more so than an Angry Birds T-shirt within a tobacco barn); rather, it is an acknowledgement of both the complexity of the region and the norms that come into play when we frame Appalachia through these powerful structures of recognizability.

The logic and design of Looking at Appalachia includes as many images as possible in a collaborative mosaic. In a June 2016 email correspondence, May dates the origin of Looking at Appalachia to his reflection on the work of William Gedney, a War on Poverty-era photographer who managed to see more than most photojournalists. May wondered how Gedney "somehow…made photographs of grace, beauty, and simple existence all the while capturing the hardscrabble environs of his subjects."35 May finds in Gedney's work "moments so obviously absent from most of the work…from Appalachia, that one has to wonder why so few photographs like this exist."36

That Appalachia has operated far more as a narrative construct than a geographic location—as Williams phrases it, "a place that always will be—and never was"—makes Looking at Appalachia a powerful interrogation of how frames of recognition operate, and how photography can simultaneously affirm and destabilize these powerful visual tropes.37Looking at Appalachia succeeds in part because crowdsourcing has become a common practice. And perhaps, as Ritchin (2013) suggests, the superabundance of images and image recording devices has moved us into a "postphotographic" era in which "the image output from a camera is no longer thought of as being, or needing to be, above all a recording:

The photographer need not explain clearly, but can share his or her impressions with other viewers who might be able to help to figure it out. Images containing ideas not yet sufficiently explicated, based on the photographer's knowing or sensing that something of importance is happening, can be construed as invitations to a reader to join in the search for meanings. Thus the image becomes, in a sense, open source.38

Looking at Appalachia encourages an open relationship to documenting and delimiting the boundaries of representation, suggesting that while we recognize Appalachia in these images, we recognize the possibility of other ways of seeing it.39 Each photograph speaks to Appalachia in some way, but what it speaks to is often just outside the frame.

About the Author

Mark Nunes is the chair of the Department of Cultural, Gender, and Global Studies at Appalachian State University. He is author of Cyberspaces of Everyday Life(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), which explores how the Internet restructures our everyday experience of the public and the private, and the local and the global. He is also editor of and contributing author for a collection of essays entitled Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures(New York: Continuum, 2011), which examines how the concepts of "noise" and "error" structure modes of cultural resistance in a network society.

• 1. Muriel Earley Sheppard, Cabins in the Laurel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935, 1991 reprint).
• 2. Betty Rivard, ed. New Deal Photographs of West Virginia, 1934–1943 (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2012), 143.
• 3. Roger May, "Overview,"Looking at Appalachia, 2014, http://lookingatappalachia.org/overview.
• 4. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 46.
• 5. Lou Murrey, "Out of Frame: Regional Stereotypes in Photography."Appalachian Voices, December 19, 2015. http://appvoices.org/2015/12/19/regional-stereotypes-in-photography/.
• 6. William Schumann, "Introduction: Place and Place-Making in Appalachia." In Appalachia Revisited: New Perspectives on Place, Tradition, and Progress, ed. William Schumann and Rebecca Adkins Fletcher (Bowling Green: University of Kentucky Press, 2016), 9.
• 7. David E. Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer: People, Power and Planning in Appalachia (Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1980), 134.
• 8. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 84.
• 9. Ibid., 84–86.
• 10. Fred Ritchin, Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (New York: Aperture, 2013), 11.
• 11. Fred Ritchin, After Photography (New York: Norton, 2009), 70.
• 12. Ibid., 75.
• 13. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), 4.
• 14. Ibid., 9.
• 15. Jason Huettner, "Capitalist Realism or Poverty Porn?"Hyperallergic, July 7, 2011, https://hyperallergic.com/28555/capitalist-realism-or-poverty-porn. See also Larry Vonalt, "The Dignity of Shelby Lee Adams's 'Disturbing' Family Photography."Studies in Popular Culture 29.2 (October 2006): 110–121.
• 16. Shelby Lee Adams, "The Work of Looking."Walk Your Camera, September 7, 2012, http://walkyourcamera.com/looking-at-appalachia-shelby-lee-adams-part-one/.
• 17. May, "Overview."
• 18. Adams, "The Work of Looking."
• 19. Ibid.
• 20. Roger May, "Looking at Appalachia: Shelby Lee Adams—Part Two,"Walk Your Camera, September 15, 2012. http://walkyourcamera.com/looking-at-appalachia-shelby-lee-adams-part-two/.
• 21. Butler, Frames, 9.
• 22. Ibid., 8.
• 23. Ibid., 70.
• 24. Ibid., 73.
• 25. Ibid., 24.
• 26. Ibid., 11
• 27. Ibid., 12.
• 28. John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 199.
• 29. Williams, Appalachia, 210–211; Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life Among the Mountaineers (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1922, 1984 reprint). See also: Patricia D. Beaver and Helen M. Lewis, "Uncovering the Trail of Ethnic Denial: Ethnicity in Appalachia." In Cultural Diversity in the U.S. South: Anthropological Contributions to a Region in Transition, ed. Carol E. Hill and Patricia D. Beaver (Athens: University of Georgia Press), 51–68; Schumann, "Introduction."
• 30. Rivard, New Deal, 2012.
• 31. Butler, Frames, 100.
• 32. Williams, Appalachia, 204.
• 33. Charles Alan Watkins, "Merchandising the Mountaineer: Photography, the Great Depression, and 'Cabins in the Laurel.'"Appalachian Journal 12.3 (Spring 1985): 227.
• 34. Williams, Appalachia, 300.
• 35. Roger May, "Looking at Appalachia: William Gedney—Part One."Walk Your Camera, July 1, 2012. http://walkyourcamera.com/looking-at-appalachia-william-gedney-part-one/.
• 36. Roger May, "Looking at Appalachia: William Gedney—Part Two,"Walk Your Camera, August 4, 2012. http://walkyourcamera.com/looking-at-appalachia-william-gedney-part-two/.
• 37. Williams, Appalachia.
• 38. Ritchin, Bending the Frame, 49.
• 39. Ibid., 50.

Somebody Else, Somewhere Else: The Raymond Andrews Story

I came to the work of Raymond Andrews in 2002, my final year as an undergraduate at Georgia State University. In a business writing class, we were generating mock resumes, cover letters, inter-office memos—that sort of thing. Our instructor, graduate student Brennan Collins, used some of his own material for demonstration purposes, including a curriculum vitae indicating he was researching and writing about the Georgia-born author, Raymond Andrews. Immediately, I wanted to know—who was Raymond Andrews?

I wanted to know because I was a lover of literature from and about Georgia, but also because I am from Madison, Georgia, and I knew of a celebrated visual artist from my hometown named Benny Andrews. Were they related? After class, Brennan told me that Benny and Raymond were brothers, and if I was from Madison and was about to receive a degree in English, I ought to read the younger brother's work.

So I did. I read the novels Appalachee Red, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee and Baby Sweets; I read the novellas Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Claire; and I read the memoirs The Last Radio Baby and Once Upon a Time in Atlanta. I read them quickly and enthusiastically, and at the end of the semester Brennan and I talked about the books and about his research.

Brennan was interested in Raymond's biography as well as his books. Raymond's arc from a hardscrabble childhood in rural Georgia—where he and his family suffered under the Jim Crow system as cotton sharecroppers—to a celebrated author at a major press in New York City is certainly intriguing, and I was compelled to find out more. Brennan's research had led him to the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University (MARBL) where Raymond's archive is housed. "You'll be amazed at what you have access to," he told me.

Handwritten manuscripts from Raymond Andrews archive, still from Somebody Else, Somewhere Else, 2010.

Soon I was elbows-deep in the Andrews archive. I went through dozens of boxes of folders. There were handwritten drafts of Raymond's novels, the later ones from his typewriter, peppered with edits in blue and red ink. There was his legal correspondence, volumes and volumes of personal letters, military discharge papers, a high school diploma, wedding photos, family photos, travel photos, scores of newspaper clippings, publicity material, ID cards, VHS cassettes of television appearances. His life was in those boxes, tucked away but ready for the curious to explore. I felt as if I had set foot on an undiscovered country. Reading the pages that Raymond had written—holding them, perhaps the way he had held them—engendered such a sense of intimacy that I developed a feeling of responsibility to tread through the archive with awe and purpose, deeper and deeper.

I did not go to the archive only because I loved Raymond's books. I had been looking for a documentary subject. Though I was graduating with an English degree, it had occurred to me about halfway through college that I would rather work in the field of film and television production. While at Georgia State, I had wrangled cables for the audio crew of a Hollywood production that was shooting around Atlanta. The film was very bad, but I loved the work. Before graduation I held an unpaid internship at Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) that turned into paying work on a nightly show covering state government. From my GPB experiences, I felt pulled toward documentary production, but there were very few of those jobs, and they were held by people with much more experience. How might I get such a job? I was told: go out and make your own film!

Talking about Raymond Andrews's Life and Death

Raymond Andrews during the Korean War, still from Somebody Else, Somewhere Else, 2010.

Raymond Andrews was a personable, talented man who embodied so much of the cultural history of the twentieth century. He was a child during World War II and wrote vividly about his memories in the Plainview neighborhood near Madison. Although his stories featured African Americans and told of hardships they faced under segregation, Raymond spent as much time telling about the joys and aspirations of his characters as he did the awfulness of the system that repressed them.

Raymond served in the Korean War, the United States' first fully integrated war, and he was part of the Second Great Migration. He lived much of his adult life in New York City, where he published with Dial Press. James Baldwin presented him an award for his first novel, Appalachee Red (1978).

Raymond worked alongside his brother Benny, a visual artist involved in the protests for inclusion at the Whitney and the Met. Benny became the first African American director of the National Endowment for the Arts' Visual Arts Program. After years of going against the grain of post-war abstract expressionism, Benny's paintings and drawings depicting the lives of rural laborers with sparse but adroit flourishes of form won over critics and collectors alike. Each of Raymond's published books features his brother's drawings.

I never met Raymond. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in November of 1991. Eleven years later Brennan Collins introduced me to his work. Benny lived until 2009. In 2003, when I felt I had done enough research to tape interviews for the project, I corresponded with Benny. I found out that he would be traveling to Madison that summer to take part in the Georgia Literary Festival where Raymond's work would be featured.

I convinced a friend to help me video most of the festival events. To interview Benny, we secured a room at a local bed-and-breakfast. I was not completely convinced that I understood the documentary process well enough. Although I had conducted many interviews at GPB, I was nervous that I wasn't properly prepared.

But what I was most nervous about was how much I did know. The archive at MARBL grants access to the many letters Benny and Raymond wrote to one another. (Benny's archive is also at MARBL.) At the end of Raymond's life, he and Benny had acrimonious phone conversations and exchanged angry letters. The letters referenced the phone conversations and expanded on them.

By 1990, Raymond's book sales had dried up. He had no other career and no "day job." Since 1984, he had lived in Benny's summer studio in Athens, and although Raymond was beloved around town, the idea that he could not make a living as a writer depressed him. By 1990 he was in his late 50s, and his health was deteriorating. He had a benign growth on his neck removed, but could not pay for the relatively inexpensive procedure. Instead, Raymond wrote morbid notes about his health and life situation on the medical bills. These are in the MARBL collection. Raymond's depression strained his relationship with his brother.

I grew very nervous about how I would talk about the end of Raymond's life with Benny. During this lengthy and very delicate interview, it seemed that Benny was not aware of how much I knew. I was not sure why, because Benny knew what was available in the archive. He had placed the letters there after Raymond's death. Perhaps Benny did not understand how many days and weeks I had spent pouring through both his and Raymond's papers, and how much detail was revealed. There was plenty to talk about besides the end of Raymond's life. We discussed their congruent struggles to "make it" in their respective fields. We talked at length about their parents and grandparents. Benny filled two hours of tape with anecdotes of their childhood in Plainview. And finally I asked Benny about Raymond's depression, and the problems it caused in their relationship at the end.

Interview with Benny Andrews, still from Somebody Else, Somewhere Else, 2010.

Benny didn't open up. He simply said that if he allowed himself to dwell on what happened it would "consume" him, and he talked briefly and broadly about the utter painfulness of it all. He didn't talk about details, and I didn't push it. At that point I think it occurred to me that the documentary would be composed with a voice-over narration recounting the details of Raymond's life, punctuated with less specific but more "felt" comments from the interviewees.

I taped interviews with twenty-one people, most of whom knew Raymond personally. I interviewed his former agent, Susan Ann Protter, as well as his editors, Juris Jurjevics and Dr. Emily Wright. In addition to Benny, I talked with his siblings, Shirley Andrews Lowrie and Valeria Anderson. I spoke with the writers Philip Lee Williams, Richard Bausch, Anthony Grooms, Gary Gildner, and Terry Kay. I spoke with his nephews and co-executors of his estate, Randy Latimer and Christopher Andrews. I traveled to Switzerland, where I interviewed his ex-wife, Heidi Wenger-Khosla. I interviewed George Williams, a nonagenarian who was a deacon at Plainview Baptist Church when Benny and Raymond were boys. I also spoke with his friends Dr. Freda Beaty, Judy Long, and James Taylor (of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library). And, in an interview that brought my research full-circle, I interviewed Brennan Collins, who had earned a PhD by writing about the work of Raymond Andrews.

Raymond Andrews in the Archive

The MARBL collection proved to be an inexhaustible source of information about Raymond's life. Though there were a few magazine articles and a few television and radio stories on him, there was not, at that time, any published biography. Virtually all of my research centered upon primary source material.

Since I made the documentary with no budget and no deadline, I had to conduct interviews as resources became available between 2003 and 2008. Before writing questions I would often revisit the MARBL archive to re-read the letters between Raymond and each interviewee. I often had the experience of knowing more than the interviewees could (or would) recall. The archive also provided photographs, manuscript pages, and personal effects (prizes and keepsakes). Since I was able to find very little extant video of Raymond Andrews, images of these materials visually carry the documentary.

Archival video of Raymond Andrews, still from Somebody Else, Somewhere Else, 2010.

What little video I found of Raymond mostly came from MARBL. There were a few copies of television appearances, as well as a copy of a short documentary an Atlanta-based producer named Debbie Bowling made when he was still alive. Raymond would ask for a VHS copy after making an appearance. Of course the VHS format is not a broadcast-quality format, but in some cases it was helpful to simply see the VHS version to know whether it would be worthwhile to purse a higher-quality version from its source. The credits of the broadcast would often indicate the source, and in some cases, the name of the producer.

In most instances it proved impossible to track down a broadcast-quality master. Since stations I contacted simply did not save masters of stories airing fifteen years before, I often used clips salvaged from Raymond’s VHS copies. The grainy quality of the video is apparent, but so is Raymond's personality.

I came back to the MARBL archive during scriptwriting. There were times when I had difficulty writing a concise, nuanced bit of script that was indicative of Raymond's personality. Concision is key for video because writing for television is like writing with a ten-thousand pound pen. Production considerations attach to every word. Script must match the visual elements and the soundtrack and impart as much as possible in a limited amount time. Every second that doesn't come from an interviewee (a "talking head") is a second that video or a digital image must cover. Consider the section of the documentary depicting the years Raymond enjoyed in Athens in the late 1980s, a time when it seemed he was living contentedly. I needed to show that Raymond enjoyed beers with friends, writing long letters, and working on his books very deliberately. I wrote something short and direct to that effect, but that needed to be more alive, more "Raymond." I revisited some of his letters, and something kept coming up. Raymond, who was a very poor grammarian but a wonderful joker, would often write in his letters that his typewriter couldn't spell. This isn't profound, but it's delightful, and indicative of how Raymond often spoke. So I changed the script to read, "It seemed that he lived the idyllic life that he'd always dreamed of. He typed long letters to his many friends around the country and joked that his typewriter couldn't spell. He tweaked his writing. He raised a little garden and took strolls by the lake with his cats."

Photograph of Raymond Andrews in the woods, still from Somebody Else, Somewhere Else, 2010.

I found a photograph of Raymond walking through the woods at the Athens property, a few seconds of him at the typewriter (from a VHS copy of a WXIA-TV story), and a few seconds of video of Raymond's cats (from the Bowling documentary). We edited these images over the new script, and audiences at screenings always laughed at this bit of the film.

It's fitting that the Raymond Andrews archive has found a home in Atlanta. When Raymond left Morgan County at age fifteen, he went to Atlanta. He was allowed to attend a decent high school in Atlanta, which he could not have done in Madison. Atlanta was the place where he and Benny shared adventures and dreams before they enlisted in the Air Force and went to Korea. Atlanta was his portal to the world. And now, if the world wants to get to Raymond Andrews, it will have to go through Atlanta.

Telling Stories of Madison, Georgia, and the Memory of Injustice

The biggest change in Madison, Georgia, took place in the late 1960s, and the new racial dynamics created a feeling of distance for me when I first read Raymond's books. The Madison of my childhood in the 1980s was certainly no bastion of progressive inclusiveness, but the sharecropping system and the segregated schools appearing in Raymond's books seemed archaic by the time I came to his work. It was difficult for me to imagine there were still people around town, people I knew well, who had participated in, and suffered from, segregation.

Interview with Shirley Andrews Lowrie, still from Somebody Else, Somewhere Else, 2010.

I remember interviewing Shirley Andrews Lowrie, Raymond’s sister, about their shared childhood. She told me, almost casually, how the Andrews siblings would walk to an ineffective school for African-American children in Plainview, and a school bus for whites would sometimes buzz by them. The white children would sometimes lean out of the windows and hurl insults. The camera was rolling and the lights were up, but there wasn't a tinge of dramatic tone coming from her lips. She was just telling me how it was, and I sensed that, if anything, she was downplaying what she and her siblings went through. She carried herself with such grace—and I mean both senses of the word "grace"—a regal demeanor, as well as imparting a forgiveness that was never earned by the offending parties. Her pale skin, like Raymond's, was evidence that black and white people in Morgan County could desire and love one another, but the untenable burden she and her siblings bore everyday was proof that respect and love across the races, at that time, was the scant exception, not the rule, and it could never be as simple as the word "love" may at times connote.

Raymond Andrews, in his books, articulated this memory of injustice. He did so in his singular, jocular, and powerful manner. He wrote stories of a place both familiar and unrecognizable to me, and I believe, to my generation. The reverberations of the Jim Crow era continue to shape our political and cultural discourses, so the story of the way it was is not obsolete. It needs to be heard. Who better to tell it than Raymond Andrews?

Review

"By branding the South as the racist section of the country," writes Brent Campney, "those narrating the identity of other sections have found a foil against which they can compare their own racial goodness. They can then deny, sanitize, or simply not see the profound anti-black racism in their own sections. Furthermore, when confronted by it, they can depict it as episodic or aberrant, something that occurred in but was not really of that place" (9). Long attentive to the history of white racial violence and lynching in the states of the former Confederacy,1 recent scholars have both widened their geographical frame and explored violence directed against racial and ethnic groups other than African Americans.2 Campney's book breaks new ground in revealing the hollowness of congratulatory comparisons between Kansas and the South while analyzing how Kansans created a "Free State Legend" and made themselves the not-South.

Campney insists that too many scholars reduce racist violence to lynching3 perhaps because lynching "seemed to define in the starkest terms the virulence of white racism, the vulnerability of blacks, and the brutality of the racial order" (1). He deploys a more capacious approach, encompassing sensational violence (lynchings, race riots, mobbing, killing-by-police, and homicides), threatened violence (threatened lynchings by mobs and intimations of violence by posses and crowds), and routine violence (many everyday types). He also highlights both black and white resistance.

Although "racial conservatives made up the majority of whites in the state" (14), Campney asserts, they did not have the education, resources, or influence of their moderate and radical white counterparts. Historians tend to minimize their voices, but Campney "examines the racist violence by means of which they fervently demonstrated their contempt for blacks" (14). Radical and moderate Kansans did not, by and large, approve of racist violence. However, by the 1880s, conservatives, usually through violence, compelled dissenters to abandon earlier promises of justice and equality.

Campney writes that beginning in 1861, white Kansans tolerated black fugitives from Missouri out of self-interest rather than beneficence and employed lynchings and other racist violence to stymie black suffrage, segregate public schools, and assert dominance.4 Lynch mobs received widespread support from white communities. During Reconstruction, white Kansans employed racist violence to segregate public schools. Although traditionally defined as the five decades between the end of Reconstruction (1877) and the beginning of the Great Depression (1929), Campney widens the temporal bounds of the "lynching era" to include Reconstruction. In addition, when the black Exodusters arrived in Kansas in 1879, many whites employed violence to reinforce their supremacy.5 Lynching "continued to provide a barometer for race relations," but other types of violence including enforced segregation and exclusion from towns and counties "played a highly publicized role in the savagery that defined the [eighteen] nineties" (91).

The spatial dimension of This Is Not Dixie is fascinating. Throughout the Midwest, and Kansas in particular, government agencies, residents, and writers framed racist violence as an exclusively southern phenomenon. The South became the demonized geography against which Kansans gauged their virtue and measured their superiority. When racist violence appeared, white Kansans usually considered it to be an imported contagion, claiming, for instance, "that white Texas drovers imported racist violence into the state's cattle towns" (34). White Kansans often asserted that "racist violence would always be foreign—no matter how common it was" (42).

Following the Civil War, white Kansans created the Free State Legend, reshaping the memory of the struggle in the 1850s into "a fight not only for white political and economic freedom but for the liberation of the slaves as well" (12). While utilizing violence to define racial boundaries, they spoke of Kansas as a "land of freedom and justice" (41). They argued that Kansas was a "worthy foil to the 'Negro-Hating South'" (72), even as they attacked the Exodusters. Pangs of conscience about the difference between the Free State Legend and everyday reality occasionally caused authorities to attempt to prevent violence. More commonly, however, after an episode of racist violence, white Kansans thumped their chests and decried the disease imported by Southerners. Kansans used the "mythology as a palliative to obscure their assault on blacks" and "routinely invoked the territorial origin myth as prima facie evidence of their commitment to racial equality" (99).

Deploying the Free State Legend, white Kansans "did internalize it to some degree, absorbing it into their geographical imaginations and thereby placing potent, if largely unconscious, constraints upon their own behavior" (166). African Americans appealed to it to "encourage whites' adherence to their own professed beliefs in racial justice" (177). Black men and women skillfully exploited white self-righteousness and shrewdly played on fears that racist violence would undermine the state's reputation.

African Americans cultivated their own version of the Free State Legend, sometimes juxtaposing memories of the South against Kansas and, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, creating an "idyllic representation of the state" (177). Black newspapers frequently referred to Kansas as the land of freedom, especially in comparison with the Jim Crow South. Black Kansans determined to make Kansas live up to its promises.

Critically, this is not a story of helpless black people prostrate before savage whites. One of the most captivating and important components of This Is Not Dixie is Campney's discussion of black resistance by men and women, especially in self-defense organizations that sometimes succeeded in mounting jailhouse defenses to prevent lynchings. When black people defended a jailhouse, white men often preferred not to risk a confrontation.

Campney's discussion of black resistance challenges notions offered by some scholars that it was the defiant writings of New Negro intellectuals that first sparked a shift in black attitudes and that it took black World War I veterans to inspire a militant turn.6 African Americans in Kansas articulated a defiant message and confronted white mobs decades earlier. The veterans of the 1920s "were not charting any radical new path; they were instead following in the well-traveled footsteps of their parents and grandparents" (199).

As African Americans resisted, so too did some whites. This Is Not Dixie offers several courageous examples. Mob violence offended the sense of civic order of many middle-class whites. White police officers, sometimes working with African Americans, began to thwart lynchings. This seeming progress, however, proved hollow. Killings-by-police escalated while lynchings declined, allowing the state to wrest control from mobs, effectively diminishing unpredictability while achieving the same repressive purpose.

Although Campney might have delved deeper into manuscript collections and sought out more contemporary correspondence, This Is Not Dixie is supported by thorough research in the state's many newspapers. The book is full of challenging and provocative ideas. It critiques, for instance, the too-simple "what's the matter with Kansas" analysis. This analysis, articulated in Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas, unquestioningly accepts the Free State Legend and asserts that Kansas "doesn't do racism."7 Campney deftly illustrates how a compelling narrative benefitted white people, but also how African Americans used the Free State Legend to sway white behavior. His examination of black resistance complicates older notions about accommodation and militancy. In expanding the geography of racist violence, This Is Not Dixie will appeal to anyone interested in US race relations from the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction through the 1920s.

About the Author

Evan C. Rothera is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the History Department at The Pennsylvania State University and a member of the Richards Civil War Era Center. Rothera's dissertation analyzes civil wars and reconstructions in the United States, Mexico, and Argentina in the period 1860–1880.

• 1. See George Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Lou Faulkner Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials 1871–1872 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006); J. Michael Martinez, Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007); Stephen Budiansky, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War (New York: Penguin Group, 2008); LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of White Power, Black Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, The Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008); and Kimberly Harper, White Man's Heaven: The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in the Southern Ozarks, 1893–1909 (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2010).
• 2. See William D. Carrigan and Christopher Waldrep, eds., Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical Perspective (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013); William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Michael J. Pfeifer, ed., Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013)
• 3. Campney uses "racist violence" instead of "racial violence" to "underscore the implicit power dynamic: whites used racist violence to 'maintain social control over the black population through terrorism,'" (1). Here he follows Barbara J. Fields, "Whiteness, Racism, and Identity,"International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001): 48–56.
• 4. In making this argument Campney critiques Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 229 and Robert G. Athearn, In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879–80 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978), 75.
• 5."Exodus" refers to the migration of tens of thousands of African Americans from the South to Kansas. See Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976); Athearn, In Search of Canaan; and Charlotte Hinger, Nicodemus: Post-Reconstruction Politics and Racial Justice in Western Kansas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).
• 6. In making this argument, Campney builds on the work of Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, "'A Warlike Demonstration': Legalism, Armed Resistance, and Black Political Mobilization in Decatur, Illinois, 1894–1898,"The Journal of Negro History 83 (Winter 1998): 52–72.
• 7. Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan, 2004), 179.

Introduction

Introduced in a 1995 song by the Atlanta-based group Goodie Mob, the idea of the "Dirty South" spread quickly throughout the rap music subculture and industry, and by the early years of the twenty-first century moved into more general usage in a variety of contexts not directly related to rap.

The concept of the Dirty South as elaborated by the Goodie Mob and other rappers and producers in several of the major cities of the South was complex, contradictory, and multidimensional.1 This multidimensionality encompassed ideas of a racist, oppressive, white South historically continuous with slavery; a 'down-home' black South marked by distinctive speech and cultural practices; a sexually libidinous South; a rural, bucolic South; a lawless, criminal South; and a sophisticated urban South. The Dirty South was forged in conversation with older or alternate modes of imagining the South, spanning a continuum from Gone with the Wind-flavored Confederate apologetics at one end to the idea of the South as a unique African-American homeland on the other.

The Dirty South spread from a relatively insular rap music subculture to a wider, popular usage during the late 1990s along with the acceleration of investment on the part of major music corporations in the rap scenes of several large southern cities, including Atlanta, New Orleans, and Houston, as well as Memphis, Miami, and Virginia Beach. The passage of "Dirty South" from the specific context in which it emerged to a wider, popular culture resulted in a significant diminution of nuance in the discourse surrounding it. The understanding of the "Dirty South" and southern rap music generally finds articulation in the already familiar stereotypes of the South as variously backwards, abject, slow, corrupt, communal, down-to-earth, rural, or oversexed.

The emergence of the Dirty South represented a seismic shift in the established geographical imaginary of rap music, centrally related to claims of authenticity and marketability. Before the Dirty South, artists from places like Atlanta, Houston, or Miami were not completely excluded from rap, but seemed compelled to adhere to certain stylistic and conceptual limitations in order to sustain a wider rap music authenticity that would ultimately contribute to their long-term economic prospects within the national market. In a similar manner to 'West Coast' (L.A.-based) 'gangsta' rap, which rose to prominence in the late 1980s, the emergence of the Dirty South involved a combination of participation by previously marginalized participants as well as a shift in stylistic and conceptual conventions.

Rap and Place

Perhaps the most remarkable dimension of the Dirty South phenomenon is the way it brings to the fore paradoxical and contradictory ideas about the relationship between music and place. For some scholars, this relationship is more or less "organic"— the stylistic differences between music produced in different places are unavoidable outgrowths of different cultural, economic, political, and geographic contexts. For instance, Jason Berry asserts, "popular music . . . springs from an organic culture: the lyrics, rhythms, and dance patterns reflect a specific consciousness, the values of a given place and time."2 More concretely, Sara Cohen writes, "music reflects social, economic, political, and material aspects of the particular place in which it is created. Changes in place thus influence changes in musical sounds and styles."3

Other scholars caution against a naturalized or taken-for-granted understanding of "'organic' relationships between music and the cultural history of [a] locale" and argue that participants appropriate "music via global flows and networks to construct particular narratives of the local." This process results in music "styles which are the result of an 'interlocking of local tendencies and cyclical transformations within the international music industries'."4 Others have underscored that music and the people involved in its production and consumption at various levels of scale do not take a passive or secondary role in this process. "Music," writes Martin Stokes, "does not then simply provide a marker in a prestructured social space, but the means by which this space can be transformed."5

Taken in aggregate, these scholarly claims suggest a dynamic and mutually influential relationship between music and place. Connections between a style of music and its place of origin often appear to be organic because of the layered ways in which style and place make meaning through repetition and reinscription, establishing implicit or explicit ties (rhetorical, structural, stylistic, or otherwise) to the history of a social, musical, and cultural context.

From the time of its emergence in the Bronx in the mid-1970s, rap has been centrally concerned with place-based identities. Geography plays an essential part in the conception of authenticity that characterizes the genre, and the history of rap music entails a continual growth of place-based imaginaries. Rap has put places on the map — like the South Bronx or Compton— that the mass media either ignored or portrayed as dangerous and hopelessly blighted. However, the representation of previously marginalized places does not occur in any sort of a uniform pattern — only particular places, at particularly historical moments, are eligible for admission to the canon of authentic rap music places. Understanding the ways that place-based identities change within rap is of central importance.

It is relatively difficult for a particular place to become familiar to wider rap audiences, but once achieved, artists, producers, and record labels from that city enjoy a significant advantage over those from seemingly more marginal places. A place becomes significant to rap geography through a combination of factors. First and foremost, the city must produce rap music which is of interest to outside audiences. For this to happen, creative and infrastructural development must occur on the "supply" side. On the "demand" side of this equation, the music produced in a given locale must accommodate national audiences' sonic, lyrical and thematic expectations in a way that does not push existing boundaries beyond their breaking point.

Music companies and other mediating forces try to identify the ideal blend of novelty and sameness, aware that an overemphasis on either of these two poles entails different risks. While it is not impossible for an artist or record label from a marginal place to become successful in rap, the process of mutual reinforcement favors already-established places. Running counter to this privileging of incumbents within rap music geography are worries about saturation or exhaustion (that a particular place can only produce a limited number of marketable artists) and, to a lesser degree, speculative exploration (that going to obscure places might yield a novel interpretation of the form).

Place-based affiliations can elevate an artist's status. Being able to claim a certain place—one known widely to the African American youth subculture that exists around rap music in the United States—affords an artist leverage to move his or her career forward. Represented at various levels of abstraction, places exist in a nested hierarchy which spans between generalized metaregional affiliations (East or West Coast and now Dirty South) and extremely specific connections to particular black neighborhoods. While establishing a place-based identity can prove profitable for artists and labels, there are less desirable consequences, often in the form of expectations of an intrinsic and monolithic relationship between performer and place that excludes as many artists as it empowers. Ultimately, the attachment of a distinct musical identity to a particular place introduces a paradoxically enabling/constraining dynamic which exercises a substantial effect over all rap music production from that place. The sound of any given place within the national-level rap imaginary is a fluid, contested and necessarily over-simplified idea that becomes more problematic as it achieves larger levels of scale.

The Rap Map Unfolds

From its beginnings in New York's neighborhoods, rap spread first to other large cities in the northeast, then jumped across the continent to southern California, for reasons that had much more to do with the preexisting structure of the music industry than with any sort of monopoly on talent held by the California-based rappers and producers who entered the national rap market in the late 1980s. However, California-based artists and independent record label owners took advantage of the opportunity and in turn helped to develop what would become known as the "gangsta rap" subgenre. This style was characterized by lyrics which emphasized criminality, violence, and rebellious anger, tempered by a celebration of the extravagant lifestyles of pimps and drug dealers.

Within the lyrics of this hyper-masculinized genre, women were infrequently represented. When they were, it was within a schema where the only positive model was that of the older, self-sacrificing single mother. Younger women were scorned as either stuck-up "bitches" or promiscuous "hoes." As in other emergent rap scenes, artists, producers, and label owners in these places were overwhelmingly male, and the emergence of well-known female rappers was a slow process. However, in New York, California, and other places where rap scenes coalesced, women and girls played a central role as part of rap's audience. As Kyra Gaunt argues, "black girls' sphere of musical activity (e.g. "handclapping games, cheers, and double-dutch") represents one of the earliest formations of a black popular music culture."6

Until the late 1980s, when Los Angeles emerged as an up-and-coming center for rap music production, New York had enjoyed an exclusive claim on the genre. Two regionally based stylistic spheres began to take hold. New Yorkers still dominated rap in the northeast throughout the 1980s, but as the decade progressed, many rap acts began to emerge from areas outside of the core neighborhoods associated with the genre's early years. New York retained a symbolically and structurally central position, but suburbs like Long Island and nearby places like New Jersey and Philadephia began to be grouped with New York-based artists to form a cultural-industrial bloc called "the East Coast." Meanwhile, the Los Angeles-based scene engendered another regional imaginary, "the West Coast." This metaregional division was used to categorize artists, companies, and audiences and was soon imbued by audiences, critics, and music industry personnel with an understanding of basic differences in style and viewpoint which characterized each contingent.

Hip-hop scholar Murray Forman has noted the correspondence between "the rise and impact of rappers on the West Coast" and a "discursive shift from the spatial abstractions framed within 'the ghetto' to the more localized and specific discursive construct of 'the hood' occurring in 1987-88."8 Did West Coast artists and audiences initiate this change? Or did they simply hitch their wagons to an emerging trend in rap? What is clear is that the considerable influence of West Coast-based gangsta rap along the lines of musical style, lyrical content/, and imagery was paired with a general movement in rap towards an emphasis on "regional affiliations as well as . . . a keen sense of . . . the extreme local."9 As Forman notes, the emergence of a place-based concept of authenticity relates to changes in the conception of rap's narrative voice: "The tendency toward narrative self-awareness and a more early definable subjectivity effectively closed the distance between the story and the storyteller, and the concept of place-based reality became more of an issue in evaluating an artist's legitimacy within the hip-hop scene."10

As Adam Krims argues, this "poetics of locality and authenticity can work through sound, visual images, words, and media images together."11 Reference to the local in the lyrics and titles of songs such as NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" or 2 Live Crew's "Miami" offers one way of figuring place. On the more abstract level of musical style, the metaregions of rap are tied to regional flavors. Highly mutable and unstable, differences in musical style relate to the different cultural mix at work in various places, as well as to the efforts of empowered individuals or companies. In L.A., African Americans, some with roots in southern states like Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas engaged with Southern California Latino youth culture, with its mellow soul music and lowrider cars.12 In Miami, another distinct blend formed, as African Americans with roots in the US South formed but one element of a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and heavily Caribbean cultural mix.

Rap artists and companies selling their music profited from the place-based authenticity that association with established centers of production provided. However, the strongly felt and expressed sense of place, combined with economic or artistic competitiveness, led these blocs to become increasingly hostile towards one another — as Kelefa Sanneh writes, "the '90s saw the rise and fall of a bitter bicoastal war, which gave way to an explosion of regional styles."13 Many of the most prominent of these local styles were located in various urban areas of the US South.

Rap Scenes and Styles of the South

For all of its novelty in the areas of vocal performance, narrative voice, and musical backing, rap was strongly tied to previous genres of African American music, a fact which helped make the music accessible to Black southern audiences. In addition to sustaining an interest in and a market for "mainstream" rap produced for national audiences, inhabitants of southern cities soon began the process of creating rich musical subcultures based around locally specific interpretations of the form. Usually oriented towards dancing, these forms were often characterized by a decreased emphasis on lyrical complexity, a prioritization of audience participation and engagement, and certain constellations of musical or lyrical devices. Southern scenes incorporated and absorbed the changes and products of the national rap music industry, accepting or rejecting them according to their own preferences.

For the most part, the development of the rap scene and production infrastructure in the South was not due to major label investment, but was rather the product of the collective (although not necessarily coordinated) efforts of local audiences, artists, independent record label owners, club owners, record or tape sellers, and a host of other microeconomic players whose activities are ultimately essential for the emergence of a larger collective musical culture. The pursuit of local musical preferences in Miami, Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis, and Virginia Beach outpaced the majors' ability to track, exploit, and profit from these emerging markets — a lag due as much to "broader culture formations and practices that are within neither the control nor the understanding" of the major music corporations as to the limitations of technology or corporate strategy.14 Because of their cultural and geographic distance from emergent rap scenes in cities such as Atlanta and New Orleans, major music corporations left these local or regional markets to independent entrepreneurs until their profitability was beyond dispute. In this sense, the majors chose an overly cautious course that resulted in a diminished share of the potential profits. Their investment followed rap audiences inside and outside of the South, whose tastes were being shaped and supplied by the efforts of independent local entrepreneurs. When the majors did arrive on a scene, they sought to ally themselves with these local independents and harness the advantages — in the form of both infrastructural development and the cultivation of "authenticity"— that their established commercial and artistic networks provided.

Rap scenes, styles, and local industries coalesced in Atlanta, Houston, Memphis, New Orleans, Miami, and Virginia Beach. While these urban centers were often discursively subsumed under the rubric of "the South," in reality, the development of rap as a genre in various southern states was a highly uneven process in which certain places became hubs of the emergent industry and style, while others languished in the hinterlands of these cities. Sheer size or the presence of a large African American population alone did not guarantee that a city would become established as a center of rap production, but these factors clearly influenced the range of possibilities in the South generally. Nevertheless, it is incorrect to conceive of rap music in the South as a phenomenon that stops at the city limits of the urban centers that have become known for their artists and scenes — it was and remains a much more diffused process within a hinterland/urban center arrangement. Artists, producers, and record label owners in those urban centers depended upon relationships with other like-minded folks in the cities' hinterlands in order to stage concerts and sell recordings.

Miami

With a climate, history, and cultural mix that diverges in important ways from Atlanta, Memphis, Houston, or New Orleans, Miami exists as much within the hemispheric South as it does within the historical US South. Geography and demography informed cultural production from the city — as rap mogul Luther Campbell asserted, "the Cubans and the Caribbean blacks gave this city its personality . . . . The Latin style blended with the black, Caribbean rhythm and colors."15 The city occupies a midpoint between the Caribbean and the urban Northeast, a liminal space of contact between the people and cultures associated with these places and those with ties to proximate states like Alabama and Georgia. These factors encouraged an early adaptation — or even a parallel evolution — of the rap form. A distinctive local interpretation emerged out of the everyday musical culture of the city's poor neighborhoods (including Liberty City, "Miami's most notorious sprawling ghetto, . . . Overtown, [and] some parts of Opa Locka and North Miami") which came to be known as "Miami Bass" in the early 1990s.16

Referring to the 1970s, a period "before rap . . . when rap was being created," Luther Campbell observed, "We DJ'ed differently down here." Groups like "the International DJs[,] The South Miami DJs, SS Express, and the Jammers" used turntables to mix records through loud, bass-heavy sound systems in parks, at parties, and nightclubs.17 The Miami style that grew out of this scene involved distinctive techniques (such as "regulating") and distinctive aesthetic concerns — which, as in reggae, centered around the generation and reproduction of extremely low, long and loud bass tones, as well an emphasis on layered, polyrhythmic percussion which can also be productively linked to Caribbean forms, shaped by a variety of fills and breakdowns.

The Miami style came to be defined by relatively fast (around 125 b.p.m.) tempos, with vocal performances that were heavily rooted in call-and-response and relied upon short, repeated phrases rather than extended narrative raps.18 As in other diasporic forms like dancehall reggae, "vocal and musical quality [were] as important to listeners as [was] the strictly lexical register" when it came to Miami Bass, and the rapidly-diffusing genre introduced a number of innovative and exciting developments.19 The sonic qualities of many of these recordings were reminiscent of the 'electro' style that had briefly flourished in New York around 1982, when artists like Mantronix and Afrika Bambaattaa used futuristic themes and imagery to complement sounds generated with drum machines, sequencers, and synthesizers, drawing heavily upon the work of the German group Kraftwerk.

The first commercial attempts to produce recordings of this local style came in the mid-1980s. Many participants credit 2 Live Crew's "Throw the D" (1986) as the first bass record, but it was joined by efforts from early Miami artists like Gigolo Tony, MC A.D.E., Clay D., The Gucci Crew, and veteran DJ and producer Pretty Tony. Female artists like Missy Mist, Debbie Deb, and Candy Fresh were among the artists who recorded in the formative years of Bass. In addition to Luther Campbell's various record labels, other independent record companies such as Pandisc, Joey Boy, and 4-Sight flourished as the popularity of Miami Bass grew in block parties and teen clubs, as well as "car races, car audio stores, clubs, skating rinks, and even strip clubs."20 The latter formed one of the dominant spaces that informed Miami Bass lyrics and imagery with regard to women. The world of adult entertainment in the city and the emergent rap scene were highly intertwined, as shown in the film Dirty South (1996). While female rappers did not represent any less of a minority in Miami than in other places, many critics viewed the representation of women in general within Bass lyrics and album artwork as hypersexualized objectification. One commentator who supported her argument with many songs and videos by Miami- and Atlanta-based groups observed, "there remains a thin line between sex and sexism, and what's troubling, judging from the videos, is that the women in these clips don't have any clearer a sense of the difference than the men holding the mikes."21 The bass music produced in the city divided into two distinct camps: a raucous, chant-heavy variety oriented towards rowdy nightclub crowds who demanded salacious lyrics, and a more understated style that often eschewed lyrics entirely so that club or car-based listeners could enjoy the booming bass tones without distraction.

Miami Bass flourished in the early 1990s, and much of the groundwork for this growth was laid by Luther "Luke Skyywalker" Campbell, who made impressive strides in establishing the business infrastructure to support the genre and providing a platform for its creative development. At its peak, Campbell's rap empire encompassed multiple record labels and various nightclubs (including a 'teen club' called the Pac Jam). He came to national prominence around 1990, when efforts by Moral Majority-affiliated critics to ban the sale of his bawdy records pushed him into the unlikely role of First Amendment champion. By the time Campbell's legal troubles had wound down, Miami bass was hitting its stride. As a 1994 issue of The Source dedicated to Miami — touted as "hip-hop's hidden hotbed" on the cover — indicated, Bass was enjoying a level of exposure and interest in the rap world that was unprecedented for a place outside of the East Coast / West Coast framework. The production of Miami-style bass music quickly spread to other southeastern cities like Orlando, Jacksonville, and Atlanta.

In the early 1990s, Miami enjoyed a brief moment in the semi-tropical sun as its early start in the rap genre placed it at the head of a group of southern scenes moving towards an intersection with mainstream markets and audiences. A few songs by Miami-based artists, like 95 South's "Whoot, there It Is" (1993), enjoyed mainstream success, but for the most part, the city's exposure declined in the mid-1990s as Atlanta's rose. Bass and similar club-oriented dance music continued to be produced and consumed throughout the South, but the production of these records was no longer limited to Miami. Indeed, Miami artists had to compete with increasingly prominent artists and labels from, most notably, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Houston. By the late 2000s, several Miami rappers, including Trick Daddy, Trina, and Rick Ross, had broken through to national markets, and the Slip N Slide label (distributed by Atlantic Records) established itself as one of several important independent labels in the Southeast. The particular cultural mix in Miami and its geographic proximity to the Caribbean has enabled the rise of a strong presence of 'reggaeton' music, a Spanish language form that draws upon dancehall reggae and rap.

Miami Audio Samples
(Warning: Some of these audio samples contain explicit content.)

Houston

Houston also had an embryonic rap scene by the mid to late 1980s. As Atlanta-based journalist Roni Sarig notes, while the Fifth Ward was one of the city's oldest black neighborhoods, it was in South Park, a newer black neighborhood that "encompasses both hard-core slums and middle-class streets" that some of the city's earliest rap music emerged.22 The group Real Chill released a single in 1986, and along with groups like Triple Threat or Royal Flush was part of the first generation of artists and producers to rise in Houston. But what made Houston into the South's early capital of rap was the 1986 founding of Rap-A-Lot Records by James Smith (later known as James Prince), "a young black salesman of used luxury cars," in partnership with Cliff Blodget, a white software engineer from Seattle.23

Smith worked on building a roster of local artists, eventually putting together a group called the Geto Boys. The group's exposure to the national market depended upon the intervention of New York-based producer Rick Rubin, who signed the Geto Boys to his Def American label and produced a hard-hitting album of sample-driven material (understandably consistent with the dominant New York aesthetic) to support the group's gangsta rap lyrics. Stylistically, the album was consistent with the dominant trends in the New York- and Los Angeles-based rap mainstream. The only thing "southern" about the Geto Boys was their origin, which, in keeping with the moment, was perceived as an anomaly rather than a central feature of their ability to produce credible rap music for national audiences.

Regardless, The Geto Boys was nothing if not controversial — as one critic observed, it "was so verbally abusive that Geffen severed all ties with Def American, which never worked with Rap-A-Lot again."24 The notoriety gained by these events no doubt helped propel their next album — 1991's We Can't Be Stopped, distributed by California-based independent Priority Records— to national prominence, cementing Rap-A-Lot's (and by extension, Houston's) reputation as "a central entity in the southern rap scene, . . . [and] a beacon for many southern rap artists who were geographically or culturally distant from . . . New York or Los Angeles."25

The group that rose to prominence in the early 1990s was the most recent of several attempts by Smith to put together a "Ghetto" or "Geto" Boys. The biographies of the group's principal members speak to the lack of a unified tie to place — while both Willie D. and Scarface were from Houston, they grew up in different neighborhoods, separated by geographical distance as well as social class. The diminutive Bushwick Bill had family roots in Jamaica and had moved to Texas as a teen. This incarnation of the group was described in 1992 as "the hottest music figures to come out of the Houston area since Clint Black."26 Rap-A-Lot continued to release music by Geto Boys veteran Scarface ("the label's biggest star"), as well as the significantly less angry Odd Squad, and found regional support for subsequent efforts by Odd Squad member Devin the Dude and a variety of Houston-based artists, including Ganksta N-I-P and The Fifth Ward Boyz.27 In 1995, Smith broke with Priority and negotiated a deal with Noo Trybe/Virgin to distribute Rap-A-Lot. While its centrality in the Houston scene declined as other independents rose to prominence, "the label's rags-to-riches story continues to exert a strong influence on Houston rappers."28

Other labels and artists added to the momentum Rap-A-Lot had initiated. Rapper Bun B and rapper and producer Pimp C had grown up in Port Arthur on the Texas-Louisiana border, but as UGK they gravitated to Houston's rap scene. Their 1992 debut on local label Big Tyme Recordz caught the attention of Jive Records, who released several albums by the group, including the highly acclaimed Ridin' Dirty in 1996. UGK's sound featured slower-than-average tempos and live instrumental backing music or sampled equivalents playing bluesy grooves, a style that came to be known as "Texas funk." Despite their status as "one of the key acts defining southern hip-hop" in the mid-1990s, UGK was not able to fully capitalize on their popularity.29 Five years passed before they released another album, and in 2002, Pimp C was sent to prison for aggravated assault. Though "few listeners outside the South" heard UGK's music during their heyday, their growing reputation further elevated Houston's profile.30 Suave House Records also played an important role in the continuing expansion of Houston's rap scene in the 1990s. The label was founded by Memphis native Tony Draper, who brought his hometown's hottest rap duo 8-Ball & MJG with him when he relocated to Texas.

Innovative artists and stylistic approaches continued to emerge from Houston — in 2005, critic Kelefa Sanneh claimed that the city "has been producing some of the country's best and weirdest rap since the late 1980s"— and the local subgenre called "screw" played an important role in this process. The genre was pioneered and named after DJ Screw, whose homemade "screw tapes" presented a technological reworking of rap songs which involved playing the song at half-speed (producing extra-deep bass and percussion and groaning vocals) and repeating small portions of the song in a technique called "chopping." Screw's music turned out to be the perfect soundtrack for another emerging local scene, based around the consumption of narcotic cough syrup (called 'syrup' or 'lean'). Screw has been cast as a reflective outgrowth of this drug scene, but Sanneh finds that connections between the musical style and "the city's slow, rambling speech patterns" or "the region's thick, muggy climate" are no more compelling than the argument that screw tapes were simply the perfect entertainment for a highway-happy city where you might spend more time driving to the club than being there. Whatever the connection between screw and the environment from which it emerged, screw has defined Houston's identity within the national rap music culture, and has formed a central part of locally-felt local rap music identity: "Just about every new album or mixtape from Houston is still available in two versions: regular or slow."31

While DJ Screw overdosed on cough syrup in 2000, the genre has been carried forward by other local labels and producers (such as Swishahouse's Michael "5000" Watts). Elements taken from or inspired by screw tapes have also formed part of the local identity of Houston artists who are working in more commercial formats. The 2004 song ''Still Tippin','' by Mike Jones with Slim Thug and Paul Wall, featured elements drawn from or insired by the screw style and represented a breakthrough for national awareness of the Houston subgenre. Along with Lil Flip, who "got his start rhyming on DJ Screw's tapes," these artists represent the vanguard in a scene that has managed to retain its prominence in southern rap even as Memphis, New Orleans, and Miami have slowed considerably since the Dirty South heyday of the late 1990s.32

Houston Audio Samples
(Warning: Some of these audio samples contain explicit content.)

New Orleans

Rap music culture and practice grew in New Orleans throughout the decade of the 1980s thanks to the efforts of DJ groups like Denny Dee's New York Incorporated and the Brown Clowns. The first rap record released by a New Orleans-based group was "We Destroy" (1986) by the Ninja Crew, tellingly, on a Miami-based label, 4-Sight. The New Orleans rap infrastructure was still largely nonexistent. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, artists like Bust Down and the rapper/DJ team Gregory D. and Mannie Fresh recorded and released records on local labels, but forged connections with independents in other cities (Dallas and Miami, respectively) in order to expand their careers. A local infrastructure began to take shape, with producers, engineers, and label owners from previous generations being joined by younger aspirants. Releases by MC Thick and Bust Down (originally on local labels Alliv and Disotell) were picked up by majors for national distribution in the early 1990s.

The New Orleans rap scene incubated in concerts, nightclubs, teen clubs, house parties, and block parties throughout the city, as well as through radio play and recording sales. It drew upon qualities already in existence, including a fractionalized urban geography of neighborhoods, housing projects, and wards that often structured business arrangements and formed an axis around which artistic and commercial competition could revolve. The city's highly-developed traditions of expressive culture — represented by Mardi Gras Indians, brass bands, and "second line" parades — provide analogues to the emerging rap scene in terms of the intensity of creative engagement and the strong sense of competition driving the efforts of rival groups or factions. These two central features — the city's relative isolation vis-à-vis the centers of rap music industry and its deeply rooted traditions of expressive culture, including those related to carnival — profoundly influenced the development of the New Orleans rap scene and style.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the rap scene slowly expanded and took root in New Orleans. A variety of artists — including 39 Posse, Tim Smooth, and Warren Mayes — rose to local fame. In late 1991, the New Orleans scene and style changed dramatically due to the impact of a song called "Where Dey At" by MC T Tucker and DJ Irv. The duo hastily recorded a version of a song they had been performing at a nightclub called Ghost Town, with lyrics consisting of various phrases repeated and chanted in a rhythmic manner, backed by music taken from a recording of "Drag Rap," a 1986 song by New York group The Show Boys. "Where Dey At" took New Orleans by storm, selling hundreds of copies and receiving play on local rap radio.

A similar release by DJ Jimi in 1992 helped establish a distinctive sound, and a vital scene coalesced around the new style of music soon christened "bounce." Local independents like Cash Money, Parkway Pumpin', and Pack supplied the growing demand with releases by Juvenile, Lil Slim, Magnolia Slim, Pimp Daddy, Everlasting Hitman, Silky Slim, Cheeky Blakk, and dozens of others. Grounded in a participatory approach to performance and composition, the style that these artists helped to create relied upon a dance orientation, vocals structured by call-and-response, and lyrics featuring local references. Chanted phrases which often unfolded in basic melodic patterns formed part of the polyrhythmic layering of the music along with elements such as handclaps and highly-inflected bass drum patterns similar to those in second line parades.

Bounce dominated the New Orleans market, but the city also saw the rise of a number of artists who did not fit neatly into that category. West Coast gangsta rap acts like N.W.A. and Tupac Shakur had always enjoyed popularity in the city, and Cash Money and Big Boy Records released many records that were either within this genre or that mixed it with ideas drawn from bounce. Mystikal, on the Big Boy label, became one of the earliest artists from the Crescent City to break nationally, possibly due to the fact that he eschewed the bounce sound almost entirely. His rapid-fire, animated lyrical style helped convince the established independent label Jive to sign him in 1995.

Soon after Mystikal's signing, New Orleans' profile in the rap world received another boost when Master P's No Limit Records signed a lucrative deal with California-based independent Priority records. Building upon his "underground" success with minimal marketing and radio support, Master P leveraged a $30-million deal with Priority in 1996 in which he retained the rights to keep his master recordings. Throughout the late 1990s, he released a string of platinum-selling albums, earning a reputation as one of the top new rap moguls in the country. While Master P used several producers with long histories in the New Orleans scene, his engagement with local artists diminished as his success grew. His 1995 compilation Down South Hustlers: Bouncing and Swingin'(the first double rap CD) featured a host of prominent local New Orleans artists, but by the late 1990s his roster had narrowed to a few members of his immediate family and the fading star Snoop Dogg.

In 1998, New Orleans' second remarkable partnership formed between major labels and a local independent. Cash Money Records, a label headed by the Williams Brothers, with Mannie Fresh as in-house producer, established itself in the early 1990s as the top-selling local label with releases by Pimp Daddy, Kilo G, Ms. Tee, and UNLV. While the Williams brothers had largely parted ways with most of these artists by the time they sealed a multimillion dollar deal with Universal in 1998, Cash Money retained several promising artists, including B.G. and Juvenile, whose 1998 song "Ha" brought the New Orleans sound to national audiences. Members of the label's roster continued to defect, however, until Lil' Wayne represented the only Cash Money artist receiving national attention.

No Limit and Cash Money began to decline in terms of relevance and market share as 2000 approached. However, the local "bounce" scene, which had experienced a lull in the late 1990s, was reenergized around 2000 by the emergence of several gay male "sissy" rappers, including Katey Red and Big Freedia, and others. Along with other artists like Hot Boy Ronald, Josephine Johnny, and Gotti Boi Chris, they produced music for small independent labels that was well-received in the local market and bore a strong New Orleans stylistic imprint. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina dealt this grassroots rap scene a hard blow. While some artists and producers have returned, New Orleans rap may never re-establish the pre-Katrina level of neighborhood participation and enthusiastic popularity. The areas most affected by flooding were also those which provided the most consistent support for the local rap scene.

New Orleans Audio Samples
(Warning: Some of these audio samples contain explicit content.)

Memphis

The rap scene in Memphis developed gradually over the late 1980s and early 1990s. Cool K's 1986 "I Need Money" is reputed to be the city's first recording, and formed part of the early scene along with club DJs like Soni D and Spanish Fly. The first local rap record to receive radio play was the 1989 song "Ain't Nothing like the Bass" by W-Def. Many of the rappers to emerge from Memphis have been tied to South Memphis and the Orange Mound neighborhood, the city's oldest African American community. The lyrical and philosophical perspective of Memphis-based rappers is often described as "dark and menacing," qualities that could just as easily be linked to the haunting Delta Blues that once flourished in the area, as to the bleak economic circumstances faced by many Memphians in this majority African American city.33 Memphis' history as a center for black popular music in the Southeast helped it achieve some degree of rap prominence, but the city was not positioned to compete with larger regional centers like Houston, Miami, New Orleans, or Atlanta.

The Memphis rap scene began to take off in the early 1990s, when a local dance craze began based around samples from the 1986 song "Drag Rap" by the New York group The Show Boys (also highly influential in New Orleans). As one commentator notes, "the song was probably the driving force behind a dance which . . . spread throughout Memphis and the surrounding area, [and] became known as the 'gangsta walk.'"34 Releases by artists such as SMK, Romeo, and Gangsta Pat (who soon became the first Memphis-based artist to secure a deal with a major label) were spawned from this trend, which kicked off a decade of significant Memphis scene development. Memphis-based Select-O-Hits, a distributor with roots stretching back to the 1970s, handled many of these releases regionally, and the company continued to be an important resource in later years.

In 1992, Memphis rap was still largely self-contained and unknown in wider circles, a fact which led the city's top rap act, 8Ball & MJG, to depart for greener pastures in Houston with Suave House label owner Tony Draper. Other early- to mid-1990s artists such as Al Kapone and Kingpin Skinny Pimp formed points around which the local scene grew. Several of these artists recorded for local independent On The Strength. Their popularity was further fueled by frequent appearances on mixtapes released by local DJs like DJ Squeeky, "an Orange Mound DJ who got his start spinning at the neighborhood's Club Memphis."35 Another pair of mixtape DJs, DJ Paul and Juicy J, began producing original material using local rappers, eventually forming a crew called Triple Six Mafia (later Three 6 Mafia). This group, led by DJ Paul and Juicy J and featuring male rappers Lord Infamous, Project Pat, and the female rapper Gangsta Boo, became known for compositions featuring "spare, low-BPM rhythms, simplistic chants . . . and narcotically repetitive, slasher-flick textures," features which were instrumental for the emergence of the crunk style.36 Their first releases came out on their own Prophet Records, but with independent success, Three 6 Mafia signed with Sony's Relativity, and in late 1997 released their first record under the new arrangements. In 2000 they changed their label's name to Hypnotize Minds. With releases by the group and protégés like Project Pat, Three 6 Mafia came to be the most successful Memphis rap enterprise during this decade.

Memphis Audio Samples
(Warning: Some of these audio samples contain explicit content.)

Atlanta

Atlanta's status as the Dirty South's capital rests upon two interrelated features: its status as a growing population center and symbolic "mecca" for African Americans, and its role as the economic and transportation hub of the Southeast. Largely a satellite of the Miami Bass scene in the mid- to late-1980s, by the 1990s, Atlanta was one among several expanding southern urban rap centers. By 2000, the city's rap prominence far outstripped that of Memphis, Houston, New Orleans, or Miami. It seems unlikely that any other southern metropolis will be able to catch up with the investment and expansion that have solidified Atlanta's position as the rap capital of the Southeast.

Like other cities covered in this essay, the rap scene in Atlanta did not begin to build any sort of significant momentum until the late 1980s. Early rappers like Mojo and the club DJ known as King Edward J attracted local audiences, but remained obscure outside the city. The earliest rapper to develop any degree of more-than-local prominence was Peter "MC Shy D" Jones, a transplanted New Yorker who built a career rapping in Atlanta and Miami. At first, the dominance of Miami pulled Jones to work with Luther Campbell, recording and performing with 2 Live Crew. "In the late '80s," writes Roni Sarig, "Atlanta became a sort of colonial outpost of Miami hip-hop."37

As Atlanta's rap scene began to gain momentum, a generation who took rap as their primary frame of musical reference came of age. Club DJs/producers like Kizzy Rock and DJ Smurf began to cement the city's reputation as a source for uptempo dance music that could hold its own against Miami Bass. Atlanta artists like Kilo, Success N Effect, and others released recordings on independent labels like WRAP/Ichiban or Black Label, but few recordings made it outside the city. In a prelude to the expansive years, the early 1990s saw a number of national chart-climbing, "one-hit-wonder" releases from Atlanta-based or -connected artists, including D-Roc's "Bankhead Bounce" and Duice's "Dazzey Duks." The Atlanta scene's roots lay in the city's black neighborhoods, including the sprawling Southwest, East Point, and Forest Park near the airport, the areas surrounding the Atlanta University Center's cluster of historically black educational institutions, and "east side" neighborhoods like Decatur.

In early 1992, Arrested Development was the first group associated with Atlanta to attract the attention of national audiences and critics. Composed of college students who for the most part had grown up outside of the South, but who were able to exploit the stereotyped expectations of national audiences about what a southern rap act should properly look and sound like, Arrested Development's imagery evoked a black South in which poverty and rurality figured centrally. A sample-heavy, "East Coast" production style and a lack of references to club life, partying, and dancing signified the group's disconnection with local aesthetic and thematic priorities, and while their first album achieved critical acclaim and high sales numbers, their long-term effect upon the local Atlanta scene was minimal.

Considerable investment by major labels began in 1989 when Antonio "L.A." Reid and Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds moved to Atlanta and founded the Arista-backed LaFace Records. Along with their best-known act, OutKast, the label released rap music by female rap group TLC, Goodie Mob, Cool Breeze, and Witchdoctor, as well as a wide range of artists working in the R&B genre. LaFace's most prominent success story and the rap group which has become most closely associated with Atlanta — OutKast — was, in many ways, atypical of the Atlanta club music scene that prevailed in the mid-1990s. OutKast became the standard bearers of southern rap, but they were initially chosen to record by their producer Rico Wade because of their ability to render complex and non-repetitive raps ("no hooks"). In both musical and personal style, "they weren't no ghetto Atlanta niggas — no gold teeth. They were hip-hop."38 The statement shows how musical and visual style, social class, and regional affiliation could all be tied up in the same equation of rap music authenticity.

Jermaine Dupri, a producer who founded the So So Def record label in 1992, represents another important node in the Atlanta rap network. Dupri grew up in the College Park area of Atlanta. He became involved in the music industry at a young age, thanks in large part to his father, an executive who helped organize the first touring rap concert in the early 1980s. Dupri achieved enormous commercial success as a songwriter and producer before the age of twenty with teen rap group Kris Kross. He went on to produce commercially successful artists like Da Brat, and in 2000 he became a vice-president at Arista.

Not only did an increasing number of Atlanta-based artists — including Ludacris, T.I., Bonecrusher, Gucci Man, and Young Jeezy — find national audiences, but the exposure of stylistic subgenres associated with Atlanta far outstripped that enjoyed by other cities in the South. As detailed in a later section, "Get Crunk," Atlanta's position at the center of the southern rap spotlight made it easier for artists like Lil Jon or D4L to pitch their approaches to making music as a subgenre of rap (crunk and snap, respectively). The power that these artists and their business associates possess to name, categorize, and periodize ideas within the rap form speak to Atlanta's privileged position. In the increasingly globalized and media-connected world of rap, place still matters, both as a certification of authenticity, and as a way to maximize structural advantages and connections.

Atlanta Audio Samples
(Warning: Some of these audio samples contain explicit content.)

Virginia Beach

The rap scenes and styles in the other cities covered in this essay developed from years of collective grassroots activities, supported by local networks of clubs, radio, retailers, and small independent record labels. Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Memphis supported artists and labels making distinctive music for local crowds. Virginia Beach deserves note for its failure to conform. The decentralized beach town — "a faceless stretch of suburbia"— forms part of the sprawling "seven cities" on the swampy Virginia coast, and the presence of several military bases in the area provides a constantly shifting demographic diversity.39 By taking advantage of the area's positioning with regard to the New York-centered rap industry, a small number of talented producers and artists found shortcuts to pop stardom, producing rap music with a "less aggressive take on place" than other southern urban scenes, and a musical sensibility unfettered by allegiance to local preferences.40

The music industry in Virginia Beach was largely nonexistent before the arrival of Teddy Riley, a New York-based R&B performer and producer famous for pioneering the "New Jack Swing" style with the group Guy. Riley was inspired to relocate to the beach town after attending the Labor Day bash known as "Greekfest," which by the late 1980s had become "an anarchic event attracting tens of thousands of students and fun-seekers." However, the year after Riley's visit, the event spiraled out of control, as the fragile relationship between local authorities and an estimated 100,000 partiers descended into rioting and looting, followed by numerous arrests, events which effectively signaled the end of the annual gathering. However, Greekfest's demise did not deter Riley from his planned move, and he arrived in 1990, set up a studio and "actively embraced the local community" with charity events and talent shows.41 His presence helped focus the efforts of aspiring artists and producers, especially the team of Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, who worked on production and songwriting at Riley's Famous Recording studio under the maritime-inspired moniker The Neptunes while still in high school.

Slightly older than The Neptunes, producer Tim "Timbaland" Mosely and rapper/producer Missy Elliot have done much to elevate Virginia Beach's profile, but the two artists left the area in the mid-1990s, as a collaboration with R&B singer Aaliyah propelled them into the pop spotlight. Over the course of the next few years of multiple solo and collaborative albums and constant production work, the inventive and eclectic Timbaland became one of the top producers in rap, R&B and pop. Backed by Interscope, he founded a label, Beat Club, and signed white Georgia rapper Bubba Sparxxx as its first artist in 2001. With platinum sales from 1997 onwards, Missy Elliot became "the biggest female artist in hip-hop history."42 As her recording career leveled off, she ventured into reality television in 2005 with her rap-themed reality show, The Road to Stardom.

The Neptunes moved to New York in the late 1990s, and drew widespread attention in 1998 with their production work for the rapper Noreaga. The pair crafted hit songs for rap acts such as Mystikal, Jay-Z, and Scarface, to pop icons including Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, No Doubt, and Beyoncé. The pair founded the Star Trak label, distributed by Arista, and signed Virginia rappers Clipse as their debut artists. In 2002, they bought the Mastersound studio in Virginia Beach where they had previously worked alongside Timbaland and Missy, changing the name to Hovercraft Studios.

In terms of chart position, crossover, and influence, Virginia Beach produced some of the most successful producers and rappers during the Dirty Decade. The profiles of Timbaland, the Neptunes, and Missy Elliot have diminished, resulting in the disappearance of Virginia Beach from current rap geography. The Tidewater region has not sustained a grassroots scene capable of providing an ongoing supply of aspiring artists and producers, and its relationship to rap's Dirty South is tenuous and fragile. For Pusha T of the duo Clipse, "'I was raised here, but Virginia isn't what I know as Southern,' . . . 'There's no way I could call this the Dirty South. This is the middle ground before you start going Deep South. This is the mixing pot of everything; it's dead smack in the middle.'"43

Virginia Beach Audio Samples
(Warning: Some of these audio samples contain explicit content.)

Marketing the South

If we include Miami in "the South" (a move which brings traditional geographical and historical definitions of the South into question) people had been rapping, DJing, and releasing records in this part of the country for almost two decades before the idea of "southern rap" as a category emerged in the mid-1990s. Prior to that time, any artist or group with serious national aspirations would have considered "southern" origins fraught with negative stereotypes, rather than a neutral factor or strategic advantage. A southern imaginary within rap culture — one that had its own distinct musical flavors and forms — did not exist. Understandably, rap artists who emerged from the section of the United States defined by the former Confederacy did not embrace a southern identity, and rappers from early southern rap strongholds like Miami or Houston expressed their geographic ties at the level of neighborhood, city, or state rather than affiliate themselves with a wider South.

Overlapping this period in which the South was essentially invisible in the world of rap music came a second stage in which southern identity and imagery were used to challenge the status quo in rap. This approach is well represented by the Goodie Mob's "Dirty South" (1996), in which the group used the mapping of very specific and detailed Atlanta urban geographies to support a scrappy and, to some extent, defensive posture vis-à-vis the prevailing norms of geographic affiliation in rap. In the lyrics and imagery of the song, group members reject negative stereotypes (such as southern ignorance or inability to make credible rap music) and assert positive ones (such as community, family, and everyday culture). "Dirty South" was one of many songs released in the mid-1990s that pitted the South's diverse African American urban youth populations against the rest of the country and the world, within the artistic arena of rap music.

The Dirty South existed at the intersection of two different types of affiliation. On one hand, southern and northern blacks found common ground in an intense dislike for any sort of nostalgic or sanitized representations of the eras of slavery and segregation. The experiences of blacks in the South and their relationships with whites could easily be metonymically construed to represent black experience and black/white relations in the United States generally. The rhetorical rejection of the images and ideas related to a white supremacist South that often characterized southern rap of this period formed a point of identification between young black southerners and their counterparts in other areas of the United States, which black southern artists were capable of strategically exploiting.44

However, while the explicit discussion of 'southernness' sometimes engendered solidarity between southern and northern black youth, it also expressed divisions between these two groups. Within the context of rap, black southern participants often expressed an attitude of defensiveness or outright hostility towards blacks from other places in anticipation of dismissals of their efforts by listeners whose expectations were oriented to the more established sites of production. These feelings of division between northern and southern blacks were informed by "raced, sexed, and gendered scripts of pathological black masculinity" that predated the rap era, and by the South's status as a "pariah region" in the national context generally.45 The defensive framing of southern qualities suggests that artists in this period were unable to express 'southernness' without referencing, and ultimately reinscribing, to some extent, persistent negative stereotypes.

To the extent that they were familiar with the local preferences and practices that emerged in cities and towns across the South in the 1980s, mainstream audiences and participants in the national-level music industry often viewed the music and its audience as anomalous or even atavistic. As the popularity of Arrested Development demonstrated, national critics and audiences were more comfortable with representations of southernness in textual or visual imagery than they were with engagements of the musical style increasingly associated with southern rap scenes. Even iconic southern groups like OutKast straddled an undervalued local urban club scene and a more nationally oriented rap scene, two venues which possessed substantially different values of spatial authenticity.

During the late 1990s, preferences of national rap audiences became more closely aligned with those of audiences in the major urban centers, black suburbs, and even small towns across the South. While earlier artists from Atlanta, Miami, or New Orleans chose between participating in relatively self-contained local markets and trying to beat New York or Los Angeles-based rappers at their own game, by the late 1990s, they had succeeded in redrawing the stylistic map of the game itself. While Arrested Development or the Goodie Mob deployed speech patterns, familiar imagery, and lyrical references to locales such as Adamsville or East Point, later rappers expressed "southernnness" through the use of musical and stylistic signifiers widely understood by their audiences. Artists including Lil Jon, The Ying Yang Twins, Juvenile, Trina, Trick Daddy, and David Banner benefited from the creative work of earlier rappers who made more literal and direct reference to southern signifiers.

The late 1990s saw yet another transition: an assertion of a wider, generic "southern" identity was increasingly abandoned in favor of more specific articulations of local identities keyed to city or neighborhood. However, unlike the "invisible South" years, this lack of attention to the spatial imaginary of a wider South results from a taken-for-granted acceptance of the South and the authenticity of its rap music among national audiences and markets. For the time being, the South occupies a central position in the rap universe. Changing tastes of national audiences, dynamically related to changing ideas about the relationship of rap to place and to an evolving Southern imaginary, led to increased interest from independent label owners in exploiting local musical subcultures rather than identifying atypical artists or performers whom they could mold to national tastes.

Strategically deployed, "southernness" was no longer a handicap within rap. As the acceptance of southern rappers, producers, and audiences grew, the need for the expression of ideas related explicitly to a Southern imaginary subsided. With anti-southern bias receding as a barrier to success, the Dirty South as a point of affiliation also diminished, while increased exposure of rap scenes in major southern cities created competition at a more focused level. The disparity of access to national audiences and the music industry that once existed between southern cities and their counterparts in the Northeast or Southern California now maps onto a divide between well-connected southern cities like Houston or Atlanta and second- or third-tier cities like New Orleans, Memphis, and Miami.

Dirtiness Defined

For music critics and journalists, the "Dirty South" became shorthand for the growing numbers of rap artists from the former Confederate states. Sometimes appearing as a geographical referent, at other times the Dirty South described a genre of music. On the website allmusic.com in 2008, the Dirty-South-as-genre appeared as "a stoned, violent, sex-obsessed and (naturally) profane brand of modern hip-hop," the anonymous writer asserting that OutKast and Goodie Mob "were the best the genre had to offer, since both their music and their lyrics were much sharper than such contemporaries as the No Limit posse." Allmusic.com also features an entry for "Southern Rap," offering an overview of the most successful artists from the South with no attempt at thematic or stylistic unification.

The 2008 entry for "Dirty South" on Wikipedia, while lacking the dismissive tone of allmusic.com, is hardly more helpful. As part of a larger entry on "southern hip-hop" that features a series of subgenres or local styles, Dirty South is listed as "the biggest and most popular genre of southern rap," which itself is "just a general term for Rap made in the South.""Dirty South rap," write Wikipedians, "is largely characterized by its bouncy, upbeat, exuberant, club-friendly tunes and simplistic, heavily rhythmic lyrical delivery.""Dirty South" is also used as a geographical referent, "a term for the South minus any states whose Southern character is debatable." The shifting boundaries of "the South" in these definitions, and the fact that this uncited characterization of Dirty South as a discrete genre is not generally shared by music journalists, scholars, or artists who have commented on the subject, underscore the difficulties of dealing with a concept as mutable and adaptable as "Dirty South."

The Source: "Dirtiest Dirty Issue Ever"

In the mid-1990s, the growing interest in rap scenes of the South found expression within rap music magazines through special issues about Atlanta and Miami. Soon, the coverage moved from considering these cities as anomalous to situating them within a larger, southern rap culture. By September 2003, when The Source was published with two different covers featuring OutKast or Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, the southern takeover of the rap industry and fan base seemed complete. Trumpeted as "the dirtiest dirty issue ever," it included an article on the emerging "crunk" subgenre, entitled "The New South." Artists like Mississippi's David Banner and Atlanta's Lil Jon and Bonecrusher represent the rising generation of southern rappers.

A close reading of The Source's "Dirty South" reveals a puzzlingly conflicted mixture of connotations and perspectives. On one hand, the South represents a sort of hip-hop time machine through which a lost paradise can be regained. Citing the "fun factor" and the way that the "communal spirit of the artists and their music resonates with the masses," editor Kim Osorio enthused, "whether it's a packed club or a backyard BBQ, there's a whole other world of hip-hop down in the Dirty Dirty." Touching on traditional notions of (white) southern gentility and New South boosterism (Atlanta once proclaimed itself "the city too busy to hate"), she continues,

cats from the third coast got some manners. The idea that you can do your thing, get your money and still not hate on the next man (or woman). At least in the South, they understand that hip-hop has grown enough for all of us to eat. Look at how many people Cash Money, No Limit and the Dungeon Family have put on over the years. It's common practice down South to spread the wealth.46

One need not look far for contradictions to this vision of a feel-good communal South with rural undertones. Osorio's "Southern hospitality"— marked by "manners" and a willingness of southern artists and labels to "stick together"—lies over an imagined potential for lethal violence."There's no need for studio gangstas and desk thugs. 'Cause if you bark up the wrong tree, you just might getcha jaw broke, wig split, neck snapped . . . or forehead poked out . . . thinking this is just rap."47 In her commentary, violence, community, and rap authenticity combine to form a highly problematic vision of the South and its rap music. Describing the action in Three 6 Mafia's "very successful, graphic, straight-to-video movie" entitled Choices (2001), producer and rapper Juicy J offers a similar perspective: "[the film] is basically how it goes down in Memphis . . . It's not a pretty scene. A lot of these small towns got crazy niggas killing and cutting each other's throats."48

While Juicy J's comments call into question some of the glib assertions about the South made earlier in the issue, The Source's article on Three 6 Mafia reveals the persistance of another kind of place-based essentialism related to an organic paradigm of reflection with regard to the relationship of music and place. The group's "dark sound" based in satanic or macabre lyrical imagery (often voiced in "monotone chants") and "scary, eerie beats" represent, a writer in The Source remarked, "a reflection of their surroundings. With Tennessee bordering nine different states, it is an ideal distribution center for all things corporate and criminal . . . [Memphis] is rife with extreme poverty and gang activity."49 While it seems just as logical to connect a "dark sound" (or contemporary Memphis conditions) to the historical legacy of racism and poverty in the Delta region, either explanation conflicts with Kim O.'s assertion that "it's the fun factor that seems to be the selling point for the New South."50 What is noteworthy here is not that The Source's editors and writers ignored the contradictions among the multiple meanings subsumed into the Dirty South imaginary. Artists and producers, as well as national audiences, often did the same. Rather, it is the fact that historically rooted imagery and media-fueled fantasy remain so close to the surface of southern rap, its performance, interpretation, and evaluation. Rappers like Three Six Mafia or Lil Jon, as well as music critics, revisit a variety of southern imaginaries that predate the rap era.

Dirtiness in Southern Rap and Beyond

Within rap culture, the utility and adaptability of the Dirty South popularized by Goodie Mob became evident in the various ways that ideas or images of dirt and dirtiness continued to proliferate in artist names as well as album and song titles. The debut album from a Mississippi-based artist named Dirty South was advertised in XXL magazine in early 2002. Southern corruption and decadence localized to the county level in the name of the Albany, Georgia-based Dirty County Boyz. In Montgomery, Alabama, the two-person Dirty parlayed the local and regional success of their independently released album into a deal with Universal. Asked about the origin of their name, the group replied, "Dirty, is just a description of the South . . . Envision red hot clay dirt, chicken coops, slow living, good people and family — in other words, cold-hearted slum life—and that's Dirty. Our music brings that kind of energy."51 This provocative and ironic juxtaposition of two disparate ways of rural, southern life — which turn on the urban connotations of the word "slum"— illustrates the complexity and instability of the Dirty concept.

The trope of dirt and dirtiness thrived in the decade since "Dirty South's" release. Mississippian David Banner combined religious imagery with a dirt-based southern identity in his album MTA2: Baptized in Dirty Water (2003) the cover of which portrays a giant Banner rising monstrously from the Mississippi River. The white Georgia-based rapper Bubba Sparxxx, who tried to push the idea of a "New South" over a "Dirty South" (possibly because of the strong association between Dirty South and black ethnic identity), included a song called "Back in the Mudd" on his 2003 album Deliverance, the title itself a reference to the most influential cinematic portrayal of a violent, decadent, incestuous, perverted (read: dirty) South in recent filmic memory.52

Within rap, the idea of "dirtiness" imbues a form of southern authenticity. This dirtiness can exist across the South with local variants. In the case of the Alabama-based duo Dirty, a reviewer on the website www.down-south.com used a local Montgomery, Alabama slang term to describe the group: "Dirty is Gump. [There is] no other way to explain them, you can find some influence of some Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana and Georgia shit on the album, but the album is a hybrid of all that and their own shit, [it's] Alabama shit, [it's] all theirs." A 2000 prediction by Montgomery-based record label owner Mike Jackson demonstrates the stakes involved in a location in the rap imaginary, as well as the ubiquitous resort to the "map" metaphor: "Just like Nelly did it for St. Louis," claimed Jackson, "DIRTY will put Alabama on the map."53 In Alabama and Mississippi, the ability to "represent" on a national level is still largely confined to a limited number of people, almost always based in cities like Montgomery or Jackson (home of David Banner).

Dirty South Outside the Rap World

While dirtiness continues to be an important, if receding, trope within rap culture, the effects of the Dirty South imaginary rippled across other cultural spheres and adapted to new contexts in idiosyncratic ways. A Nebraska college football player originally from Horn Lake, Mississippi, described his technique as '"Dirty South' running, a combination of power, speed and agility."54 In late 2003, activists in Louisiana formed Dirty South Earth First to oppose logging operations by Maxxam, "a Houston-based holding company and forest products concern."55 Two years later in Louisiana, police closed Dirty South Kennels for its association with illegal dog fighting.56

Sports remain a common arena for appropriations of the "Dirty South"— there are Dirty South Runners, Dirty South [Trail] Riders, and a Dirty South [Basketball] Classic held at Norcross High School in 2005.57 In her study of black-sourced expressions in the news, Margaret Lee observed, "Journalists attempt to create an image of 'coolness' and 'hipness' through the use of well-established or popular black slang expressions."58 The Dirty South has proved itself adaptable to sports and entertainment writing. Statements describing "The Braves ditching the Dirty South for the West," or New Orleans' Hornets "making everything Dirty South comfortable for the visiting [Sacramento] Kings" confirm Lee's conclusion.59

A similar impulse underlies the appropriation of "Dirty South" by a variety of creative artists outside of the rap world. In March 2004, Ace Atkins, "a onetime Auburn football star . . . [and] crime reporter for the Tampa Tribune," published his fourth novel, Dirty South, the title, one reviewer explained, being "a reference to the new black sound coming out of places like Atlanta and New Orleans."60 While the exotic portrayal of "that glitzy and druggy world" of hustlers and rap music moguls in the housing projects of New Orleans entranced many reviewers, the appropriation of the Dirty South opened Atkins up to a particular line of criticism: "It's hard to hear the music in its pages."61 The imagery used on the cover of Atkins' book reveals the mutability of the Dirty South imaginary: one edition shows a desolate bayou, while another features neon signs and markers of urban decadence localized to New Orleans and Bourbon Street.

Geography poses no obstacle to the appropriation of the Dirty South. A nineteen-year-old shooting suspect in Canada is described as "white, 6-foot-2, 205 pounds" with "a 'Dirty South' tattoo on his neck," while a Melbourne, Australia-based producer and DJ calling himself Dirty South was hailed as "Australian dance music's newest star" by June 2006.62 The appeal of "Dirty South" in St. Louis, where rappers like Nelly and Chingy rose to prominence with style and material similar to that being produced in southern urban hotspots, was not limited to the rap sphere, as demonstrated by a 2006 advertisement for a rock band called "Dirty South."63 The website for a cover band from Northeast England called The Dirty South advertises "moonshine-laced southern rock" and features imagery and language that engage facile southern stereotypes (rebel flags, cowboy hats, "geetar,""hollerin'") in a manner somewhat comparable to blackface minstrelsy or the movie The Blues Brothers.

Another notable appropriation of rap's Dirty South surfaced in February of 2004, with the release of an album by the Athens, Georgia, rock group Drive-By Truckers. Dirty South is one of a series of ironic appropriations of ideas drawn from rap by the band, whose name involves the juxtaposition of imagery associated with the world of gangsta rap and southern-coded truck driver culture. While group members acknowledge their appreciation for both the spirit and musical content/ of the new rap sound coming out of certain southern cities, their appropriation of the term "Dirty South" is imbued with an explicit sense of "class consciousness" and is specifically linked by band leader Patterson Hood to "everything that went on in our [Alabama] hometowns politically and economically in the late '70s and early '80s."64 In a similar manner to the "cold-hearted slum life" referenced by the group Dirty, the Drive-By Truckers' Dirty South traps its inhabitants in a "vicious cycle" that keeps poor and working class people "working for a living till [they] die" in the cities and towns of the South.65 Like Atkins' novel, though, some reviewers resist the decontextualization of terms and ideas appropriated from rap music culture: as one complained, the album "has a clever title but remarkably little crunk."66

Get Crunk, Tear the Club Up

The crunk concept was born in the late 1980s and early 1990s in nightclubs in southern cities like Memphis and Atlanta, as DJs, producers and artists strove to produce the kind of music appropriate to a rowdy, collective, and embodied experience. Before it became a rap subgenre, crunk's meaning evoked a high level of crowd energy and enthusiasm. In 1995, a post on the newsgroup rec.music.hip-hop defined crunk as "hype, phat," while another poster pointed out in 1998, "krunk is pretty much the past tense of crank."67 In Rolling Stone, a 1999 "glossary of Dirty South slang" defined Get Crunk as "get excited."68 However, the word has an additional level of connotation for young African Americans in the South, encompassing both a desirable state of out-of-control abandon on one hand and an intolerable situation on the other. Explaining the source of their macabre and violent lyrical themes, a member of Three 6 Mafia explains, "Since Memphis is so crunk, all we gotta do when we rap is talk about real shit."69

The crunk concept existed in southern rap circuits for several years before it emerged to fuel a putative subgenre, thanks to the efforts of rapper and producer Jon "Lil Jon" Smith (b. 1972), who started in Atlanta's bass music scene in the 1990s: "Crunk is a term," said Lil Jon, "that's been used in the South for as long as I can remember."70 Referring to his 1996 release "Get Crunk (Who U Wit)," Jon recalled, "We were the first ones to use it in a hook and tell people to 'get crunk.' We started calling ourselves a crunk group, so we kind of paved the way."71 Jon produced two gold records independently in the late 1990s, then signed with New York-based TVT Records in 2001, helping it become "Billboard's top indie label of 2004." He continued to promote crunk as a rap subgenre, which found enthusiastic reception by listeners and critics.72

Lil Jon's role in the establishment of crunk speaks to the ways in which strategically positioned individuals or groups can exploit their access within the music industry to exercise significant influence over wider sense-making practices on the part of audiences, critics, and music companies. While the distinctiveness of Lil Jon's performance and presentation should not be minimized, his music — like that of others tagged as "crunk" artists — could just as easily be understood as occupying a point on a continuum of constantly evolving club-based rap.

The transformation of "crunk" from vague idea to musical subgenre produced mixed results for artists from southern cities. For those in the right place (chiefly Atlanta), with music that fit the crunk conventions, this was a positive development. In addition to Atlanta-based artists like Lil Jon, The Ying Yang Twins, Bone Crusher, and Pastor Troy, Mississippi's David Banner and Memphis' Three 6 Mafia (arguably the uncredited inventors of the genre) also rode the crunk wave in the late 1990s. However, the essentialist conflation of geography and musical style that lies under much of the critical and promotional discourse around crunk limited the possibilities for those who were not in a position to capitalize on them. As Mississippi-based rapper Kamikaze complained, "The industry has us in a climate where every cat that come out the South gotta be crunk. They got us pigeonholed."73

Crunk as Music

An emphasis upon call-and-response lyrical constructions in the form of "hooks" or "chants" intended to be repeated by the audience is a central feature of crunk, one that it shares with Miami Bass, New Orleans bounce, and other, older, southern club-based rap styles. Crunk songs often use tempos around 75 b.p.m., which, being relatively slow within the rap spectrum, allows for sparse beats to be accented with double-time hi-hat parts and bass drum fills. Beats and basslines are augmented by minimalist synthesizer riffs. The crunk vocal style is often characterized by collectively shouted or screamed performances, often in a call-and-response structure. Producers working in the crunk style often use drum machines, sequencers, and other "instruments," rather than samples from older recordings. They design the spare music with club sound systems in mind, which are capable of producing an intensely physical experience.

While some critics lauded the "complex, smart Southern production work" behind crunk, others found the music "vulgar, gnarly, bass-heavy,""joyless and bleak" with "rough, distorted basslines" similar to "gothic dirges."74 The association of the "riotous, anthemic music" and its "rebellious chants" with "rambunctious behavior" figured centrally in artists' and critics' attempt to compare it to previous genres of youth music.75 As Lil Jon describes it, "crunk music is something parallel to rock 'n' roll or punk rock because of the energy it gives you."76 For artists and audiences, crunk is about the generation and release of collective energy. As Miami rapper Pitbull explains, "Crunk is just getting wild, off the chain," while Lil Jon aims to "get you [the listener] hyper and to get the party off the hook."77 This release and freedom from hooks and chains articulates the physical abandon that makes "rumps shake and jugular veins throb," offering momentary release from social pressures while serving a generalizable need for cohorts of young people to define and create their own leisure spaces.78

There are divergent opinions as to whether crunk continues or departs from ideas and practices associated with the afro-diasporic music sensibilities that inform earlier genres of African American music. For those who understand crunk as "a superficial music obsessed with perversity," the style's novelty is emphasized in descriptions of "rowdy choruses less like classic call-and-response hollers and more like howls of pain."79 For many crunk artists, however, the style does not represent a repudiation or abandonment of the values and practices of prior African American popular music styles, but rather a continuation. "All of it," says Pitbull, "is African-based. It's all about the percussion and the changes behind them."80

A more poetic perspective comes from David Banner, the so-called "Mississippi Madman," who connects the energy of crunk with African American spirituality and youthful abandon: "Crunk is the closest thing there is to church music . . . you have to look at it from a spiritual perspective . . . it's the closest thing to pure adrenaline, the closest thing to pure freedom, that these kids have."81 In another interview, Banner further elaborates the spiritual dimension of crunk: "I think of crunk as being part of what religious people call the Holy Ghost. . . . It's just a spirit you have. People go to church to find the Holy Ghost. We go to the clubs to find the crunk. It's like a ball of fire in your spirit."82

The Crunk Zone

Often dismissed as meaningless or, at best, functional "inane party chants," crunk lyrics vary widely in complexity and meaning.83 In addition to the theme of communal enjoyment in the space of a party or club, crunk lyrics usually include a strong emphasis on sex, violence, and intoxication (understood as key components of the club experience). The setting of the strip club depends upon the objectification of women, and crunk has drawn criticism as a music defined by "rampant misogyny."84 While a critical engagement with and recognition of crunk's misogyny is important, there are other elements to the crunk lyrical world.

Songs such as Three 6 Mafia's 1997 crunk anthem "Tear Da Club Up" invoke a level of crowd enjoyment which borders on violence and destruction, similar to the explosive combustion suggested by black artists in the mid-seventies who urged audiences to "tear the roof off the sucker" in a "Disco Inferno."85 However, crunk's exploration of rage and violence as enjoyment and release in the club context is particular, both in its language and its tone, which are much angrier than anything produced in the eras of soul, funk, or disco. In a departure from 1970s club culture, crunk lyrics often turn other imagined club goers into targets for rhetorical rage and imagined assaults.

Lyrically, crunk often derives its creative energy from imagining and describing violent conflicts or confrontations between groups in an "us against them" context. In songs such as "What U Gon Do" or "White Meat" (both included on the 2004 album Crunk Juice), Lil Jon creates scenarios which imagine one group confronting another in the nightclub space, threatening to "bust your head 'til the white meat shows." Other songs, such as "Stilletoes (Pumps)," by the Atlanta-based group Crime Mob, or Ms. B's "Bottle Action" declare that women who attend clubs in expensive or fashionable clothes are nonetheless prepared for interpersonal violence, usually against challengers of their own gender.

While some crunk lyrics fantasize violence for mass consumption, I argue that, in addition, they relate to recent African American youth subcultural practices in the form of the nightclub experience as a central site for collective expression. While almost never expressed explicitly in crunk lyrics, the anger, rage, and violence expressed in the music evokes contemporary social conditions of African American young men, as well as the media imagery that helps justify the persistence of these conditions. Like previous forms of black popular music, the stylistic and thematic changes that marked the emergence of crunk appear "closely related to changes in the state of mass black consciousness."86 Though its style and content/ are far from being simply determined by the social context, crunk can be understood as engaging and responding to the extreme marginalization of black youth, particularly black men, in the post-Fordist, neoconservative climate.

As Tia DeNora has demonstrated, the possibility for music to be used to organize subjective experience on a non-cognitive, embodied level is a dimension of music's relationship with agency that is often slighted in favor of an emphasis on semantic or symbolic meanings.87 I suggest that rather than focusing on what the lyrics of crunk say, it is more productive to turn our attention to what crunk does for listeners (or what they do to themselves with it) in order to understand the power of the music. While the "rebellious chants" of crunk express a literal message of release and anger, they are one component of an experience produced through the combination of musical and performative features, most often enjoyed in an embodied manner.

The club experience intensifies the expressive power of crunk. Sometimes compared to "slam-dancing" or "moshing" associated with punk, the dancing at clubs or concerts associated with crunk often is a rough and chaotic affair, with participants feeding on each other's energy as "the club gets truly unruly, when elbows are wildly thrown and moshlike mayhem erupts on the dance floor."88 In addition to conjuring collectively embodied aggression and release, punk and crunk share a connection (real or imagined) with urban working-class culture.89

Lil Jon consciously frames his success in terms that emphasize down-to-earth attitudes. In a description contrasting the action in one of his music videos with a "normal video," Lil Jon states: "No mansions. . . we ain't about that [bourgeois] shit. We about being regular." Jon then describes the plotline for the video produced to promote the 2002 song "I Don't Give a F---," in which the artist and his rather nondescript and burly sidemen "aren't on the guest list" and eventually "rush the VIP [the most exclusive section of the club]", demonstrating, to some degree, a resistance to the glorification of wealth and status that has often characterized rap culture.90

The association of crunk with the lower social orders mirrors its association with the lower regions of the body or with previous stages in human evolution. The descriptions of crunk as "simple, catchy,""crude," or even "outrageously puerile" often imply a distinction between two broad classes of music, which correspond to the intellectual and the corporeal (metaphorized as high and low, respectively): "like Lil Jon, and more than a few of his other Southern brethren, [Georgia rapper Pastor] Troy's aiming for that grossly reactive section of the brain that governs activities below chest level. Which is where most pop music aims anyway, though Southern artists tend to be more upfront about it."91

Crunk Critiques

Like "Dirty South," the passage of "crunk" from subcultural to mainstream usage has meant a significant diminution of nuance in meaning, producing oversimplifications informed by stereotypes. The multivalent and ambiguous sensibility that characterizes the concept in its use by creative artists and grassroots audiences — in which tropes of energy and release are central — became simplified and caricatured as the term went mainstream. The most prominent example of this was the frequent assertion by mainstream journalists that the word derived from "a blend of 'crazy' and 'drunk.'"92 While it could very well accommodate this dimension of meaning (as well as the related etymology of combining marijuana ("chronic") with alcohol (drunk), it should be clear by now that this represents only one dimension of a open-ended concept.93

In a similar vein, the understanding of crunk's relationship to southern rap and its place in the genre system of rap in general has produced further confusion: "The use of the word has far surpassed the actual amount of music released within its ambit."94 An example of this is the description of Atlanta rapper T.I. as a "crunkster," when his style of composition and performance falls well outside the parameters of the genre as it has taken form.95Another reviewer writes that crunk was "made and minted in the US Dirty South, in new hip-hop strongholds from Atlanta to Houston," ignoring the fact that, with a couple of notable exceptions, "most of these cats grew up in the same Atlanta neighborhood."96 Crunk bears a strong association with Atlanta's rap industry and culture, but is also understood as a set of stylistic conventions that an artist can adopt or adapt.

The inroads that crunk artists made into mainstream musical consciousness met with less than universal enthusiasm. Despite Lil Jon's breakthrough to pop success with the production of R&B singer Usher's song "Yeah!" in 2004, an Atlanta-based reviewer criticized him as a "numbingly simple chanter [rather] than noteworthy rapper," and noted that Jon, once marginalized as "Southern" or "underground" or "independent,""now has the cachet to get A-list acts to join in on the inanity."97 Clearly, some reviewers wished the obnoxious music would just go away; "crunk is likely to be remembered with just a hangover a decade from now."98 For others, the work of crunk artists like Lil Jon pales in comparison to that of preceding figures such as OutKast and Goodie Mob: "These tracks [on Lil Jon's 2003 Kings of Crunk] have catchy choruses, chanted under some delusional notion that screaming vulgarities over a beat is what the Southern hip-hop movement is about." In this critique, Lil Jon's ability to relate to audiences with catchy choruses and beats (many of which he produces) represents a betrayal of a static and monolithic "movement" represented by elite artists "who have shown you can stay true to the 'dirty,' spit creative lyrical content/ and still move a crowd."99

Crunk's detractors often expressed a mixture of musical and moral objections to the genre and its representative artists. After a positive review of Lil Jon's music by Kelefa Sanneh, one Canadian reader complained that the New York Times critic was only interested in "champion[ing] the worst in pop music," and decried the "appallingly cynical attitude" evidenced by Lil Jon's "tireless use of racially offensive language and his blatant objectification of women (in his lyrics and in his videos)."100 Another writer connected crunk to an earlier generation's version of the archetypal southern, African American musical bogeymen, 2 Live Crew:

. . . their legacy thrives in the 'crunk' style, which depicts the sexuality of young black men and women in ways that, to put it mildly, conform to the fevered imaginings of the worst white racists. The standard defense is to say that this stuff is a parody. But of what? For millions of young people around the world, including many African Americans, these words (and video images) define blackness."101

These points deserve serious consideration, although I would argue that "grotesque" is a more appropriate frame for the representations in crunk than "parody." Lil Jon and other crunk artists like the Ying Yang Twins have forged close ties with strip-club-culture and have not hesitated to make the eroticized, objectified female body (or parts thereof) central subjects of their expressions. Still, it is difficult to separate the critique of sexism in crunk from the association of the music with "lower social orders." The perception of crunk artists and their antecedents like 2 Live Crew as representing a nadir of vulgarity and depravity speaks to the ways in which class affiliations (and related racial formations) affect our understanding of what is "crude" or "vulgar"— not to mention the taken-for-granted assumption of vulgarity for any expression related to sex, desire, or eroticism generally.

Crunk Epilogue: Snap

The prominence achieved by "crunk" speaks to the increasing centrality of Atlanta rap culture and willingness on the part of national audiences and major music corporations to accept and support southern urban club music scenes and styles that would have previously been considered underground or, at best, the source of the occasional one-hit wonder like D-Roc or Duice. Crunk's acceptance is often characterized by an absence of contextual or historical understanding that masks its strong similarities with prior expressions of club or dance music produced in cities such as Atlanta or Miami. Ultimately, the distinctiveness of crunk has as much to do with the ways in which it has been marketed and discussed as with its musical qualities.102

The forces that propelled crunk from the underground to the mainstream were multiple and intertwined. The shaping of the crunk style largely occurred in strip clubs or nightclubs, and was part of a wider process of the grassroots evolution of southern dance music styles as artists refined their expressions to achieve maximum effect with audiences.103 However, the way that crunk was marketed as a "movement" and as a new genre of rap depended centrally upon Lil Jon and a few other empowered artists, followed quickly by journalists seeking novelty and controversy.104 Both grassroots popularity and corporate hype figured centrally in Lil Jon's success: without these two factors, his rise to the status of the public face of crunk would not have been possible.

Crunk quickly became esconced within corporate networks, but, like punk rock, it resisted complete co-optation. Lil Jon's efforts with regard to crunk were characterized by shameless self-promotion and conscious attempts to manipulate rap's genre system and critical discourse to his own advantage. Like other rap impresarios, he tried to expand upon his success in the music industry through branding and marketing products like the "energy drink" Crunk Juice (which was also the title of his 2004 album), as well as "a clothing line, a porn DVD, . . . a record label and now a series on MTV."105 At the same time, however, more than economic concerns motivate Lil Jon, who had put in years of work as an Atlanta DJ and producer, and also worked as an A&R representative and promoter for Jermaine Dupri's So So Def Records before launching his own recording career. Even after his rise to prominence, he has frequently collaborated with obscure or up-and-coming artists by producing their music or making a guest appearance on their records: "we look at ourselves that we're on the same level with everybody . . . I [collaborate] with anybody if I like their [music]."106

The trajectory of crunk seems to await a newer Atlanta strip club music called "Snap," a less aggressive style characterized by slightly slower tempos than crunk and extremely sparse backing tracks which often feature the sound of snapping fingers as a meter (hence the name). One critic described snap as "a dance-centric form of hip-hop, defined by light but propulsive beats and lyrics that often revolve around playful chants."107 Along with crunk and other southern styles such as Miami bass or New Orleans bounce, snap relies heavily upon call-and-response lyrical constructions and often features narratives of sexual objectification, desire, titillation, and conquest set in a strip club or nightclub.

Following on the heels of several successful "snap" releases in 2004 by groups such as Crime Mob ("Nuck If You Buck") and Dem Franchize Boyz ("White Tee"), D4L broke open the Snap floodgates in 2006. Their infectious song, "Laffy Taffy," started snap down "an unlikely journey from Atlanta phenomenon to hip-hop laughingstock to mainstream juggernaut."108 Like many erotically themed songs within the African American popular music tradition, "Laffy Taffy" is constructed with layers of meaning which allow for children to enjoy the participatory, sing-along nature of the song, while allowing adults access to a raunchier realm of meaning contained within the lyrics. Reaction to this song among many in rap's fan base reached record levels of vituperation based upon "Laffy Taffy"'s perceived lack of sophistication and overly popular appeal. While similar minimalist approaches to rap continue to enjoy popularity among artists, producers, and audiences, the particularities that defined snap have largely vanished by the time of this writing (2008). Rather than representing a discrete genre, the wider exposure of snap represented a snapshot of a continually evolving club scene in Atlanta and other southern cities.

Visual Culture of the Dirty South

"In the field of representational politics," writes Katherine Henninger, "that is, the ongoing contest to assert what can and cannot be represented in a given culture — visual representations have played, and continue to play, an extraordinarily complicated, nuanced role in the South."109 Her insight applies equally to the visual culture of southern rap. The intersections of race, rap, and geography find a variety of visual articulations, including CD or album covers and promotional photographs, as well as performative expressions that use images of whole or partial bodies to conjure particular feelings or ideas. Below are two short essays on different themes in the visual culture of the Dirty South: the "rebel flag" and the "crunk body."

Confederate Grey Area: the Rebel Flag in Rap

African Americans won landmark victories in civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, but questions of power, including the power of historical symbols, remain far from settled. The use, for instance, of the Confederate Battle Flag, or the "stars and bars" (which I abbreviate to "rebel flag") as a nostalgia-laden symbol for white dominance has persisted decades after the end of de jure segregation. In the years when rap's Dirty South emerged, blacks and their allies challenged various southern state and municipal governments to eliminate Confederate symbolism in official flags and other material forms, including monuments and the names of public streets and buildings.

Defenders of the rebel flag often frame it as a historical relic devoid of racial animus, claims contradicted by a study revealing that for whites in Georgia in the mid-1990s, racial attitudes and southern identity were strongly related and "the widespread defense of the Confederate-emblazoned flag among whites has much more to do with racial concerns than with other aspects of southern heritage. . . ."110 The racial undertones of the flag are not lost on blacks, for whom it represents a basic symbol of white racist intransigence that conjures some of the most repulsive incidents of "Southern" history.

The Atlanta-based Goodie Mob introduced the "Dirty South" into the rap mainstream through their 1995 song of the same name, and elaborated its meaning through lyrics, video imagery, and interviews. Explicit thematic strains found in "Dirty South" included the shadowy world of the illegal drug trade in which neighborhood-based groups battle for their share of the spoils and try to avoid corrupt police; the mistrust that is a legacy of the white racist past; and an ideal of slower, friendlier, everyday life in southern black communities. Implicitly, via geographically coded lyrics, the song questions the valuing of some places over others within the material and symbolic dimensions of rap. An analysis of the "Dirty South"music video in light of statements by group members reveals how the production engaged, and was informed by, the outcry over official displays of the rebel flag and debates about the flag's meaning. Members of Goodie Mob make more explicit the understanding of "dirtiness" as it relate to the racist history of the South symbolized by the rebel flag. The video shows the group's members rapping the song's lyrics in a variety of places, including the porch and front yard of a small house, an open field, and a dystopian, post-apocalyptic industrial landscape. In many of these scenes,the members of Goodie Mob are joined by others, forming a multigenerational portrait of friends, colleagues, and family. These images of all-black social spaces are intercut with images of a white girl who sits alone in a fenced-in basketball court, absorbed in making a chalk drawing on the asphalt.

The isolation of this figure contrasts with the communal life of the Goodie Mob and, by extension, southern African Americans. As the video comes to a close, it dramatically problematizes the clichéd innocence of the white girl. The camera pulls back to reveal that her chalk drawing is of a large rebel flag. Imprisoned in an empty cage — a structure that isolates as much as it protects — the white child represents the reproduction in multiple generations of fenced-off, aloof whiteness.The specific use of a white girl to portray the passive, taken-for-granted (naturalized) perpetuation of racism and oppression builds upon a visual legacy in which, writes Henninger, "images, photographs in magazines and family albums . . . simultaneously assert the continuous, 'natural' existence of the white southern lady and bury the real and symbolic violences of gender, race, and class that this image was designed to mask."111

The symbolic destruction of rebel flags by artists such as Atlanta's Lil Jon or Mississippi's David Banner continues a conversation within rap music circles about the legitimacy of the "South" as a site of authentic rap music. The emergence of the South as a credible geographical imaginary in rap music requires a strong repudiation of the white racist baggage of the "Old South" represented by rebel flags and white-columned plantations popularized by the movie Gone with the Wind— all subjects of symbolic destruction, as in the cover of the DVD for the 2004 documentary Dirty States of America. The CD cover of his album Put Yo Hood Up (2001) shows Lil Jon clad in a pair of black rubber coveralls, his open-mouthed expression of rage and intensity augmented by the added effect of gold teeth, sunglasses, and long dreadlocks, creating a general impression of a demented slaughterhouse worker or other grotesque. The draping of the rebel flag around his shoulders in the picture, far from constituting an endorsement, communicates the hostile occupation of a symbol. The cover image seems the worst nightmare of a white supremacist, a demonic, superpowered black man appropriating, occupying, and defiling the treasured symbol of Dixie.

However, not all of those who appropriated the rebel flag for use in hip-hop culture are so unequivocal in condemnation. Rapper Andre 3000 of the Atlanta supergroup OutKast, when questioned about a rebel-flag belt buckle in a 2001 issue of Vibe, replied, "I wear the belt for southern pride and to rebel. . . . I don't take the Confederate flag that serious as far as the racial part is concerned."112 To some extent, then, artists from the South have used the rebel flag in ways that express deeply held feelings of anger and resentment over the southern past (and the present it informs) and that also serve to distance themselves from the white southern imaginary, a move that helped establish their authenticity within the rap music field. These uses existed simultaneously with the appropriation of the flag as a generic symbol of a marginalized, underdeveloped territory of rap music geography.

The divergent deployments of the rebel flag speak to a generational split among African Americans and a shifting terrain for symbolizing and portraying racial (and spatial) conflict and identity. For some, the rebel flag is so toxic that no amount of symbolic destruction can justify its use. Nashville journalist Ron Wynn raises the alarm about Lil Jon, Pastor Troy, and other "member[s] of the down-home hip-hop crew utilizing Confederate garb" in an article highly critical of rappers who "are boasting the rebel flag everywhere," displaying a level of historical amnesia that Fisk University professor Raymond Winbush likens to a "a Jewish child [saying] 'Let's wrap ourselves in a swastika.'"113 What seemed to Wynn a rising tide of historical amnesia in 2001 was really a passing sub-theme of southern rap.

Still, the rebel flag is hard to use without stirring controversy, which may explain some of its continuing appeal. How, for instance, to interpret Ludacris' 2005 appearance on the Vibe Hip-Hop awards in a leather suit with rebel flag motif, a suit he discarded at the end of his performance for one in African nationalist colors red, black, and green?114 Acknowledging the imbrication of much southern rap music within the corporate structures and values of the music industry, how much change or consciousness raising is possible from the most self-consciously political displays of destruction and violation of the rebel flag? Consider that 2003 issue of The Source, "The Dirtiest Dirty Issue Ever," which featured an article entitled "Native Sons," about three rising talents of the South — Atlanta's Lil Jon and Bone Crusher, and David Banner. The article directly linked these rappers to the historical struggle against white supremacy, evoked by allusion to Richard Wright's novel in the title, "Native Sons":

One day before America's 227th birthday three of southern hip-hop's most revered leaders, David Banner, Bone Crusher and Lil Jon, are on location up North, specifically Brooklyn, tearing up the most infamous symbol of the Old South, the Rebel Flag. Banner's sharp new fronts [i.e. his gold teeth] grit and Bone Crusher's girth quakes the ground as the threads of intolerance are lacerated. The message is loud and clear: The dawn of the New South has arrived.115

Even the most devoted advocate of oppositional readings of popular culture would have to admit that the transformative effect of these rappers posing in Brooklyn for a magazine cover is overstated. Bombast aside, the article and cover image that went with it represents the way that, like southern rappers of the mid-1990s, many more recent artists still perceive themselves as carrying the mantle of "revered leaders," with collective memory and pride related to the freedom struggle, combined with their repudiation, appropriation, or destruction of symbols of previous ideas of the South to form the latest "New South" identity. While the uses of the rebel flag in rap provide a unique perspective into issues of collective memory, regional identity, and symbolic play, it ultimately ties in to the specific policitics of rap in ways that are particular: "While southern rappers invoke the concept of 'representin'' that is so fundamental to rap," writes Richardson, "they have primarily used the concept to reflect their ongoing effort to make legible a South that has long been invisible in the rap industry," although it is more appropriate to say that representational politics form a central and dynamic part of the effort in question. The various uses of the rebel flag in rap culture illustrate ways in which multiple imagined "Souths" exist simultaneously, informing, antagonizing, and playing off on each other, all the while complicating the symbolic discourse.

Psychic Violence and the Crunk Body

Crunk artists combine musical and lyrical expressions of extreme psychic states — anger, pain, aggressive rage, emotional release — with a visual and physical aesthetic that merges the traditional "fly" stylishness of rap culture with freakish, uncanny, fractured bodies by drawing upon the expressive power of the grotesque. Southern rappers did not invent the "embodied rap grotesque"—faces twisted into grimaces, bodies contorted or distorted, teeth fashioned into over-the-top "grills." In the early 1990s, New York-based Gravediggas (a Wu-Tang Clan offshoot) brought images of rap monstrosity to national audiences with vampire-fanged gold teeth and macabre lyrics evoking the paranormal or demonic. Artists from the South such as Three Six Mafia, Lil Jon, David Banner, the Ying Yang Twins, Pastor Troy, and others all carried this strain of the monstrous within rap forward. Rather than — or in addition to — the stereotypical expressions of masculine power and toughness that often characterize rap imagery, these artists have often represented themselves in ways which emphasize grotesquely contorted or distorted bodies, faces twisted into painful grimaces.

Some of these bodies already loomed uncannily. Bone Crusher, the comic book-inspired rapper from Atlanta, weighed in at 421 pounds as he prepared to slim down on VH1's program Celebrity Fit Club.116 DJ Paul, one of the founding members of Memphis group Three Six Mafia, "was born with a stunted arm," while D-Roc of the Ying Yang Twins was born with several fingers missing from one hand. His Ying Yang Twin partner, Kaine, suffers from cerebral palsy.117 These physical factors may have contributed to artists' decision to pursue music rather than, say, team sports; as Roni Sarig speculates, "it's possible that the birth defect made [DJ Paul] more introverted."118 More intriguing, however, is the possibility that these embodied experiences of otherness contributed to the stylistic and thematic particularities of their music, performance, and artistic personae.

The "grotesque physical body," write Stallybrass and White, is "not simply a powerful image but fundamentally constitutive of the categorical sets through which we live and make sense of the world."119 While crunk's representation of the body is particular and strongly tied to previous expressions within rap, its "fundamentally constitutive" role lends itself to Patricia Yaeger's observations about southern women's fiction in Dirt and Desire.120

Like the writers Yaeger considers, crunk artists often portray "irregular models of the body, . . . damaged, incomplete, or extravagant characters." These bodily displays express the repressed and silenced: "flesh that has been ruptured or riven by violence . . . [and] fractured, excessive bodies telling us something that diverse southern cultures don't want us to say." Like the writers Yaeger considers, crunk artists cultivate modes of "dissonance. Instead of reducing disorder to rule, dissonance gets magnified or multiplied; anomaly gets figured as monstrosity, and monstrosity itself becomes a way of casting out or expelling the new. . . . When crisis erupts, when change grapples towards history, it is configured via appalling body images as something excessive, as monstrosity."121 A representation of crisis underlies crunk monstrosity, a struggle to express the paradox of change and stasis, of persistent structural racism and inequality, that situates black life in the United States.

Conclusion

This exploration of the Dirty Decade responds to Tara McPherson's assertion that "specific understandings of how the South is represented, commodified, and packaged become key."122 The mutability of the Dirty South (and the related phenomenon of crunk) and its widespread appropriation makes it easy to dismiss as a contrived and superficial marketing gimmick, but the Dirty South contested the received southern imaginary and stirred up the business of rap music in ways that had real consequences and which related to larger structuring forces of region, race, and class. That the battles over classification formed around music recalls previous historical moments: "Music, like many other aspects of culture," Michael Haralambos has written, "is associated with particular groups of people," and "distinctions in music in part refer to and are related to distinctions between social groups." In his own work on Chicago and Delta blues, Haralambos looked "further than the music to explain the more derogatory terms — 'nasty', 'dirty' and 'alley music'," a perspective that is also key to the Dirty South's wider import.123"Contamination by other people," Terence McLaughlin has observed, "is what we really fear about dirt."124

As Yaeger demonstrates with regard to southern women's fiction, dirt is a central trope in the process of creating boundaries and categories: "dirt becomes a rhetorical place marker for cosmos- or system-creating, a signpost that allows southern citizens to recognize a middle-class macrocosm and its underclass boundaries." In a point that sheds light on the Goodie Mob's "Dirty South" and the wider uprising to which this song contributed, Yaeger adds that dirt "also serves as a disrupter of systems. That is, it becomes the stuff of rebellion, the foundation for play, the ground of racial protest and gender unrest, as well as the earthy basis for children's delight in sullying grown-up categories." The Dirty South's potential to exploit "pollution's charismatic properties, its capacity to carry the [listener] toward the limits of the local, to experiment with emancipation" relates centrally to the concept's enthusiastic reception in rap and beyond.126

The instability of the Dirty South imaginary rests uneasily upon its own success. The emergence of the term coincided with the maturation of a rap industry in large southern cities, especially Atlanta. Not only did the Dirty South provide an entrée into rap geography for new artists, but over the next ten years, the music made by these artists rose to dominate radio playlists around the country. Out of a sense of southern lack, neglect, and disrespect, the Dirty South renamed and reclaimed an empty quarter on the national rap map.

The "southern turn" in rap music involved, in addition to a complex and highly strategic play of identities, stereotypes, and imagery, a rearrangement of values within the music. The relocation of rap's creative center to the urban South resulted in changes in the conception of rap's narrative voice, becoming much less focused on the rendering of complex narratives of individual experience and moving towards an exhortative, collective expression. The musical aesthetics that underlie rap music production shifted towards a focus on loud and low bass tones and tempos matching the expectations of audiences dancing in clubs. While rap has always been, with a few notable exceptions, dance music, the southern turn involved an increased emphasis on corporeal enjoyment at the expense of narrated experience.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my anonymous reviewers, the Southern Spaces editorial staff (Franky Abbott, Katherine Skinner, Sarah Toton, and Allen Tullos), Robin Conner, Daniel Green, Andy Hopkins, Andrew Nosnitsky and Ben Lawless for their generous assistance in preparing this article.

• 1. Matt Miller, "Rap's Dirty South: From Subculture to Pop Culture,"Journal of Popular Music Studies 16:2 (2004): 175-212.
• 2. Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose, and Tad Jones, Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986), xiii.
• 3. Sara Cohen, "Sounding out the City: Music and the Sensuous Production of Place" in The Place of Music, eds. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Revill (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998), 287.
• 4. Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson, eds., Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 2004), 7-8.
• 5. Martin Stokes ed., Ethnicity, Identity, and Music: the Musical Construction of Place (Providence, RI: Berg, 1994), 4.
• 6. Kyra D. Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 183. See also Roberta Rainwater, "Rhythm, Song Trademarks of '90s Patty-Cake,"Times-Picayune, April 26, 1990; "Pizza Pizza Daddy-O" at http://www.folkstreams.net/film,73.
• 7. Cheryl Keyes, Rap Music and Street Consciousness (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 5; Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 74-75, 77-78.
• 8. Murray Forman, The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 179.
• 9. Ibid., xvii.
• 10. Ibid., 170.
• 11. Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 124.
• 12. Lawrence B. De Graaf, "The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-1930,"Pacific Historical Review 39:3 (August 1970): 323-352, 331.
• 13. Kelefa Sanneh, "Memphis Bleak,"Village Voice (June 20, 2000), 144.
• 14. Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (New York: Routledge, 1999), 19.
• 15. Luther Campbell and John R. Miller, As Nasty As They Wanna Be: The Uncensored Story of Luther Campbell of the 2 Live Crew (Fort Lee, N.J.: Barricade Books, 1992), 223.
• 16. James Bernard, "Bass 9-1-9,"The Source 54 (March, 1994): 40.
• 17. Campbell and Miller, As Nasty As They Wanna Be, 22.
• 18. J-Mill [Jeremy Miller], "Prince Raheem,"The Source 54, (March, 1994): 22 ; Idem, "Bass Game: Clay D Returns to His Roots on His Latest Bass Odyssey,"The Source 54, (March 1994): 32-33.
• 19. Norman C. Stolzoff, Wake the Town & Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 19.
• 20. Brett Atwood, "Bass Music Rises From South As Acts Seek Majors' Interest,"Billboard 106:38 (September 17, 1994): 46.
• 21. Janine McAdams, "Let's Talk About Sexism On Recent Raps; Wreckx-N-Effect, Disco Rick, Duice, Dre Revealed,"Billboard 105:4 (January 23, 1993): 21.
• 22. Roni Sarig, Third Coast: OutKast, Timbaland, and How Hip-Hop Became a Southern Thing (New York: Da Capo Press, 2007).
• 23. Joe Nick Patoski, "Money in the Making,"Texas Monthly (August 1998): 136.
• 24. Ibid.
• 25. Forman, The 'Hood Comes First, 330.
• 26. Catherine Chriss, "For Houston's Geto Boys, Anything Goes in the World of Gangsta Rap,"Houston Chronicle, Texas Magazine section, April 17, 2005.
• 27. Patoski, "Money in the Making," 1998.
• 28. Ibid.
• 29. Sarig, Third Coast, 56.
• 30. Kelefa Sanneh, "The Strangest Sound in Hip-Hop Goes National,"New York Times, sec. 2, April 17, 2005. (Accessed electronically through LexisNexis Academic on April 13, 2007.)
• 31. Ibid.
• 32. Kelefa Sanneh, "The Woozy, Syrupy Sound of Codeine Rap,"New York Times, sec. 2, April 18, 2005. (Accessed electronically through LexisNexis Academic on 13 April 13, 2007.)
• 33. Sarig, Third Coast, 281.
• 34. J-Dogg [John Shaw], "Parallels in the Development of Memphis and New Orleans Rap, " Rec.Music.Hip-Hop Usenet Newsgroup, Dec. 9, 1997. (Accessed electronically through Google Advanced Group Search on February 2, 2006.)
• 35. Sarig, Third Coast, 272.
• 36. Tony Green, "Twerk to Do,"Village Voice (Oct. 23, 2001): 149.
• 37. Sarig, Third Coast, 103.
• 38. Roni Sarig, "Dungeon Family Tree,"Creative Loafing (Atlanta), Sept. 18-24, 2003. See also "Additional reporting by Tony Ware,"Creative Loafing (Atlanta), September 18-24, 2003.
• 39. Sarig, Third Coast, 146.
• 40. Sasha Frere-Jones, "The Sound,"New York Times, sec. 6, February 8, 2004.
• 41. Sarig, Third Coast, 158.
• 42. Ibid., 164.
• 43. Ibid.
• 44. Leigh Anne Duck, The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 4.
• 45. Riché Richardson, Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 5, 9.
• 46. Kim O. [Kim Osorio], "The Front Lines: Southern Hospitality,"The Source 168 (September 2003): 40.
• 47. Ibid.
• 48. Carlton Wade, "Three 6 Mafia: Mark of the Beats,"The Source 168 (September 2003): 166.
• 49. Ibid.
• 50. Kim O., "The Front Lines," 40.
• 51. Mary Colurso, "On Sellouts, Superstars, and Other Stuff,"Birmingham News, December 22, 2000.
• 52. Allison Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 182.
• 53."Universal Inks Record Deal With Emerging Alabama Rap Group Dirty,"PR Newswire, December 13, 2000.
• 54. Elizabeth Merrill, NU Rookie I-Back Lights Up Backfield."Omaha World Herald, sec. C, August 11, 2004.
• 55. Alex Markels, "Protesters Carry the Fight to Executives' Homes."New York Times, sec. 3, December 7, 2003.
• 56. Michael Perlstein, "Fighting Back." New Orleans Times-Picayune, sec. A, May 29, 2005.
• 57."Track & Field,"Times-Picayune, Aug.6, 2005; Larry Hartstein, "Daily Briefing,"AtlantaJournal-Constitution, June 18, 2005.
• 58. Margaret G. Lee, "Out of the Hood and into the News: Borrowed Black Verbal Expressions in a Mainstream Newspaper,"American Speech 74:4 (1999): 379.
• 59. Shane Harrison, "Sound Check: Sound Bites,"AtlantaJournal-Constitution, sec. P, Sept.15, 2005; Martin McNeal,. "Kings Control Hornets and Win,"SacramentoBee, sec. C, December 19, 2003.
• 60. Patrick Anderson, "Southern Living and Dying,"Washington Post, sec. C, April 5, 2004; Peter Mergendahl, "Books at a Glance." Rocky Mountain News, sec. D, March 26, 2004.
• 61. P. G. Koch, "New Rap for Nick Travers; Glitzy, Druggy Milieu Works,"Houston Chronicle, May 2, 2004; Collette Bancroft, "Twenty-One Hours to Live."St. Petersburg Times, sec. P, March 21, 2004.
• 62."Hunt on for Shoot Suspect,"Toronto Sun, Oct. 9, 2005; "Master Remixer on Deck," Hobart (Australia)Mercury, June 1, 2006.
• 63."Book Blog,"St. Louis Post-Dispatch, sec. F, June 11, 2006.
• 64. Chris Riemenschneider, "Drive South." Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, sec. F, February 1, 2004.
• 65. Robert Christgau, "Consumer Guide: Inter-Century Freundschaft,"Village Voice 49:36 (September 8-14, 2004): C90.
• 66. Jeff Vrabel, "Spin Control," Chicago Sun-Times, sec. "Sunday Showcase," August 22, 2004.
• 67. Niels Jansen, "Totally Unofficial Rap-Dictionary (Bi-weekly Posting, part 1/2)," Rec.Music.Hip-Hop Usenet Newsgroup, December 1, 1995; Prolifik, "This Is Driving Me Krunk." Rec.Music.Hip-Hop Usenet Newsgroup, October 7, 1998.
• 68. Side-bar story, Rolling Stone (August 19,1999): 91.
• 69. Wade, "Three 6 Mafia," 166.
• 70. Hattie Collins, "Crunk: Lots More Goodies in Store."Music Week (February 5, 2005): 11.
• 71. Steve Jones, "Get Crunk Huh!"USA Today, sec. E, July 25, 2003.
• 72."Power Players: Indie Labels,"Billboard 117:19 (2005): 30.
• 73. Joycelyn A. Wilson, "Show & Prove 2: Kamikaze, the Movement,"XXL (October 2003): 72.
• 74. John Lewis, "Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz Islington Academy Mon.,"Time Out (January 26, 2005): 108; Ricardo Baca, "Bring In Da Crunk: More Take Notice of Hyper Sound with Southern Accent,"Denver Post, sec. F, September 16, 2003.
• 75. Hattie Collins, "Crunk," 11; J. Freedom Du Lac, "From Memphis, Cranking Up the Crunk; Rap's Red Carpet Rolls Out for Al Kapone,"Washington Post, sec. C, July 25, 2005; Andy Battaglia, "Hip-Hop's Dirty Martini."Washington Post, sec. C, Nov. 17, 2004; "Box Office: The Lowdown,"Independent on Sunday, sec. "Features," February 6, 2005.
• 76. Jones, "Get Crunk Huh!"
• 77. Josefina Loza, "Pitbull,"Omaha World-Herald, Mar. 30, 2006; Jones, "Get Crunk Huh!"
• 78. John Soeder, "Nonstop Selling Eclipses Singing at Hip-Hop Show," Cleveland Plain Dealer, sec. E, August 17, 2005.
• 79. Baca, "Bring In Da Crunk"; Lewis, "Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz Islington Academy Mon."
• 80. Loza, "Pitbull."
• 81. Ricardo Baca, "The Rap on the Third Coast,"Denver Post, sec. F, March 15, 2004.
• 82. Jones, "Get Crunk Huh!"
• 83. Baca, "Bring In Da Crunk."
• 84. Lewis, "Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz Islington Academy Mon."
• 85. Parliament, "Give Up the Funk," 1976; Trammps, "Disco Inferno," 1976; see Sarig, Third Coast, 277 for a connection between crunk's destructive imagery and that of Texas bluesman Blind Willie Johnson.
• 86. Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 339.
• 87. Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47.
• 88. Jon Caramanica, "Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz,"Rolling Stone 931 (September 18, 2003): 34.
• 89. Jones, "Get Crunk Huh!"
• 90. Celeste Fraser Delgado, "Crunk Candy: On Location with Lil Jon, Trick, Hootchies, and Director Mamas," Miami New Times, June 23, 2003.
• 91. Sonia Murray, "Lil Jon, Crew Crank Up Chant with A-List Assist,"Atlanta Journal-Constitution, sec. E, November 16, 2004; Martin Edlund, "Strip Crunk,"New York Sun, June 28, 2004; Lewis, "Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz Islington Academy Mon."; Tony Green, "Twerk to Do": 149.
• 92. William Safire, "On Language: Kiduage,"New York Times, sec. 6, November 28, 2004; Andrew Pettie, "Reviews: Music,"Daily Telegraph (London), January 22, 2005; Collins, "Crunk," 11; "Box Office: The Lowdown,"Independent on Sunday, 27; Loza, "Pitbull."
• 93. Steve Dollar, "Cool 2 Know,"Newsday, sec. B, April 19, 2006; "CD Reviews: Hip-Hop,"The Irish Times(March 31, 2006): 15.
• 94. Collins, "Crunk."
• 95. Silvio Pietroluongo, Minal Patel and Wade Jessen, "Singles Minded; Country and Crunk among Year's Top Hitmakers,"Billboard 116:52/117:1 (December 25, 2004/January 1, 2005): 70.
• 96."CD Reviews: Hip-Hop,"The Irish Times, 15; Baca, "Bring In Da Crunk."
• 97. Murray, "Lil Jon, Crew Crank Up Chant with A-List Assist."
• 98."CD Reviews: Hip-Hop,"The Irish Times, 15.
• 99. Trish Davis, "New on Disc,"Hartford Courant, sec. CAL, January 9, 2003.
• 100. Mike Schultz, [letter to the editor] "Crunk as in Stunk,"New York Times, sec. 2, December 5, 2004.
• 101. Martha Bayles, "Troubled Soul: The Man Who Started It All Heads for the Finish Line,"The Weekly Standard 10:43 (August 1, 2005.)
• 102. Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures, 28.
• 103. Collins, "Crunk"; Ricardo Baca, "Lil Jon Crunks it up for All-Stars,"Denver Post, sec. F, February 17, 2005; Jones, "Get Crunk Huh!"; "Twins Crank Up Crunk."USA Today, sec. 7, June 28, 2005.
• 104. Delgado, "Crunk Candy: On Location with Lil Jon, Trick, Hootchies, and Director Mamas."
• 105. Hattie Collins, "Crunk in Charge," London Guardian, sec. "The Guide," August 5, 2006.
• 106. Soren Baker, "Interview with Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz Feature,"Murder Dog Magazine, http://www.murderdog.com/archives/2002/lil_jon.html (Accessed on May 20, 2008)
• 107. Kelefa Sanneh, "Critic's Notebook: 'Laffy Taffy:' So Light, So Sugary, So Downloadable,"New York Times, sec. E, January 12, 2006.
• 108. Ibid.
• 109. Katherine Henninger, Ordering the Facade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women's Writing(Chapel Hill, Univ. of N.C. Press, 2007): 28.
• 110. Beth Reingold and Richard S. Wike, "Confederate Symbols, Southern Identity, and Racial Attitudes: The Case of the Georgia State Flag,"Social Science Quarterly 79:3 (Fall 1998): 568.
• 111. Henninger, Ordering the Facade, 88.
• 112. Gregory Johnson, "Southern Pride,"Vibe (September 2001): 96.
• 113. Ron Wynn, "Reclaiming Confederate Flag Angers Older Black Generation,"Nashville City Paper, August 1, 2001.
• 114. Mosi Reeves, "Luda Disturbing tha State,"Creative Loafing Atlanta, December 7, 2005.
• 115. Branden J. Peters, "Native Sons,"The Source 168 (September 2003): 150.
• 116. Rodney Ho, "Rapper Has Big Plans to Lighten Up His Look,"Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 31, 2006.
• 117. Benjamin Meadows-Ingram, "Okay Okay,"XXL (September 2003): 150, 152.
• 118. Sarig, Third Coast, 273.
• 119. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 23.
• 120. Richardson, Black Masculinity and the U.S. South, 215.
• 121. Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xiii, 7.
• 122. Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 18.
• 123. Michael Haralambos, Right On: From Blues to Soul in Black America (New York: Da Capo, 1974), 35, 33.
• 124. Terence McLaughlin, Dirt: A Social History as Seen Through the Uses and Abuses of Dirt (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), 6.
• 125. Yaeger, Dirt and Desire, xii, 125, 110-111.
• 126. Ibid., 265, 271.

Review

Sensory history is an exciting new approach to writing history. It offers a fresh take on past perceptions. Sensing between the lines of written sources, the sensory historian recasts history as sense-making activity, not merely a litany of dates and deeds. Ideally, readers can feel the pulse of a given period, sniff the atmosphere, and see events in a different light.

Mark M. Smith is the doyen of sensory history in the US. In Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2007) he laid out a manifesto for bringing history to our senses. In How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) he explored the sensory dynamics of racialization in the American South. In The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege, he turns his attention to the Civil War.

Smith begins by evoking the antebellum sensorium offered in an 1852 essay, "The Cultivation of the Senses," published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine that portrayed the senses as shapers of character and agents of civilization, provided they were exercised properly: "[the] eye should not be injured by resting on a vulgar confusion of colors, or clumsy, ill-proportioned forms; the ear should not be falsified by discordant sounds, and harsh, unloving voices; the nose should not be a receptacle for impure odors; each sense should be preserved in its purity" (1). This preoccupation with sensory order and decorum was particularly intense in a city such as Charleston, South Carolina, built on slavery, where every social relation exhibited gradations of command and obedience. The slave did not speak unless spoken to; there was a strict curfew prohibiting movement at night; the singing of slaves at work in the fields was music to the ears of the white slaveholder.

However, the ostensibly serene city of Charleston also shivered with fear at the prospect of a slave revolt. Silence was ominous as well as golden: "If they [the slaves] want to kill us," one female diarist wrote, "they can do it when they please, they are as noiseless as panthers" (18). The senses of the white population were already on edge leading up to 1861­–1864 when, as Smith puts it: "The nation that had prided itself on its civilized control of the senses lost that control" (6).

Smith's book is structured around five events, each analyzed through a different sensory modality, while at the same time noting shifts in the salience of certain sensations as the event unfolded. The effect is captivating, and generative of many insights into, for example, military tactics, survival strategies, and commemorative practices.

In "The Sounds of Secession," Smith invites readers to listen in to transformations in the Charleston soundscape from the first murmurs of dissension sparked by Abraham Lincoln's election through the "storm of cheers" that greeted the signing of the Ordinance of Secession in November 1860 to the deafening bombardment of the Union stronghold at Fort Sumter in April 1861. Thousands of Charlestonians exited their homes to witness the conflagration in the harbor: "Unused as their ears were to the appalling sounds, or the vivid flashes from the batteries, they stood for hours fascinated with horror" (33).

In "Eyeing First Bull Run," Smith discusses how commanders on both sides were preoccupied with drawing up maps, building observation towers, constructing battle lines, ordering columns, and framing engagements—that is, with visualizing the impending battle. However, the first casualty of the Manassas battlefield was the certainty of sight and seeing. Due to dense woods, billowing clouds of dust and smoke, and dilapidated uniforms, it quickly proved impossible for the soldiers to keep in line, or to distinguish friend from foe. Many resorted to shooting blind. Somehow the Confederate forces prevailed, perhaps on account of their oft-remarked spine-tingling rebel yell.

Smith surveys the carnage at the Battle of Gettysburg, documented by the new technology of photography. The sensation that made the most lasting impression, however, was not that of sight but of stench. As one female diarist wrote:

Not the presence of the dead bodies themselves, swollen and disfigured as they were and lying in heaps on every side was as awful to the spectator as that deadly, nauseating atmosphere which robbed the battlefield of its glory, the survivors of their victory and the wounded of what little chance of life was left to them . . . A sickening, overpowering, awful stench announced the presence of the unburied dead upon which the July sun was mercilessly shining and at every step the air grew heavier and fouler until it seemed to possess a palpable horrible density that could be seen and felt and cut with a knife. (79)

Gettysburg was a "degenerative moment," Smith writes (7). It would take many grandiloquent speeches and solemn reconciliatory gestures to dispel the miasma and make it stand for something meaningful, a turning point.

Examining the Union siege of Vicksburg, Smith tells a harrowing tale of a city "taken by hunger." The Union forces under Grant dug in around the base of the terraced city, and kept up a constant bombardment of "shistling" bullets and pounding shells. Residents found shelter in newly dug caves, which provided a limited defense, and took a toll on the residents' comfort and dignity. "We went in this evening and sat down," one diarist wrote, and "the earthy, suffocating feeling, as of a living tomb, was dreadful to me. I fear I shall risk death outside rather than melt in that dark furnace" (98). Besides being reduced to a "troglodyte existence," the residents'diet was reduced and reduced again to "spoiled greasy bacon and bread made of musty pea-flour" (110). Ignominy as much as starvation precipitated surrender.

In the final chapter, Smith delves into the H.L. Hunley, a proud piece of Confederate technology, designed to break the US Navy's blockade of Charleston Harbor. The Hunley was an "underwater machine" consisting of a forty-foot-long refitted boiler (forty-eight inches in diameter) in which eight men turned cranks attached to the propeller shaft. A long arm protruded from the front of the vessel with a torpedo attached to its tip. Smith makes much of the cramped quarters, which imposed an unnatural proximity, and of the cranks' constant turning, which was reminiscent of slaves ginning cotton: "The Hunley men weren't slaves [they were volunteers], but they . . . willingly placed themselves in the condition of slaves—in the fight to preserve slavery" (128). Thanks to its underwater stealth, the Hunley succeeded at torpedoing and sinking the USS Housatonic, sowing great consternation, even though the entire crew drowned at their stations. This experiment in underwater warfare was not repeated.

Smith's epilogue revisits General Sherman's March, a swath of destruction up to sixty miles wide through the Confederate heartland, assaulting senses and resources, doling deprivation and misery while laying waste to buildings and crops in an effort to break Confederate will. Particularly loathsome to the defeated Southerners was the sight of the Union flag and the riling notes of "Yankee Doodle," not to mention the taunts. "Did you ever think of this when you hurrahed for Secession?" one Union soldier asked a white man in Columbia, as he gestured to the flames engulfing the city. "Your mouth is silenced now and it is worth every damn year of this bloody war. How do you like it, hey?" (144–45).

Smith's sensory history of the Civil War brings a dramatic new perspective to bear on this transformative event that gave rebirth to a nation. He tells a compelling story, based on diaries, letters, and other archival material. A number of questions remain unanswered, however. What of the sounds and expressions of the enslaved when out of earshot of the slaveowners? What did singing mean to them, and what messages did the songs convey? Smith has touched on these questions elsewhere, in Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), for example, but he does not address them in this book. For that, one might start with Lawrence W. Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Levine succeeds at rendering the inaudible sensible in ways that Smith does not, for Smith's book is more a "history from above" (attuned to the anxious perceptions of the dominant society) than "from below" (attentive to the sonic and other practices of persistence and resistance of the subaltern).

The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege is a foundational work, both in sensory history and in the emergent field of conflict and the senses.1 It yields many important insights into the lived experience of the Civil War, and is certain to inspire further research into what ranks as the most traumatic event in US history.

About the Author

David Howes is a professor of Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is also the Director of the Concordia Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC). He teaches courses on law, commerce, aesthetics, and the senses in cross-cultural perspectives.

• 1. Nicholas J. Saunders and Paul Cornish, eds., Modern Conflict and the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2017).

Blog Post

The Sacred Harp, a shape-note tunebook first published in 1844, has long been the center of a network of "singing conventions," weekend meetings featuring a cappella harmony singing at which participants take turns leading an informally assembled group in singing selections from the book. Beginning with singings in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas during the second half of the nineteenth century, participation in Sacred Harp has been tied to local, church, and kinship networks.1 In the twentieth century, however, The Sacred Harp's geography shifted to reach beyond these contexts. Scholars frequently recount the contours of these shifts in broad strokes bound up in narratives tied to folksong rhetoric and southern romanticism.2 As the style came to be characterized as a folk music and included in American music curricula on college campuses in the second half of the twentieth century, singings spread to the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. Later, through these same channels, The Sacred Harp expanded to Canada, Europe, Australia, and East Asia.3 Meanwhile, journalists and individuals across Sacred Harp's geography associated the style with "old-fogy" rural southern white culture in decline and regularly foretold the style's extinction in the southern states where it first thrived.4

In this post we complicate these narratives, drawing on a newly augmented database of the proceedings at thousands of Sacred Harp singings in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, adding nuance and specificity to the story of Sacred Harp's recent geographic transformations. Minutes, summaries of the proceedings at annual Sacred Harp singings, constitute an integral part of this music culture. Elected or appointed secretaries originally published minutes in pamphlets or spread them through local newspapers. After World War II, rural depopulation caused local singing networks to contract, while improved infrastructure facilitated travel. During this time, a publication known colloquially as the "Big Minutes" grew out of the minutes pamphlets of a network of singings centered in Winston County, Alabama.5 Today the "Big Minutes" are comprehensive: nearly all annual singings using the most common edition of The Sacred Harp disseminate their minutes through the volume. The "Big Minutes" contain appendices including contact information and birthdays for thousands of active singers, lists of singers who have died in the past year, and a directory of upcoming singings for the year. Still, the bulk of its contents are dedicated to documenting each singing held the previous calendar year.

These minutes for individual Sacred Harp singings are remarkable documents, providing a granular record of the musical taste and activities of each participant in this decentralized music culture. Minutes detail the name of each song leader, the page number(s) of song(s) each person led, the names of officers and committee members, these committees' reports, and even the timing of lunch and recesses. They also include information about the location of each singing, most often listing the city or town, state, and name of the church or other building where the singing was held.

In 1995, a non-profit organization, the Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association (SHMHA), assumed responsibility for the minutes and adopted a digital process enabling more streamlined production of annual print volumes and the publication of a searchable database.6 Projects such as the FaSoLa Minutes iOS and Android app and the "Song Use in The Sacred Harp" statistics page on Fasola.org draw on the availability of the minutes in digital form to enable analysis of song use and leader behavior.7 Thanks to its inclusion of location information, the minutes database also suggests the possibility of visualizing the geographical development of Sacred Harp over the past twenty years.

Our new mapping of Sacred Harp singings—drawing on minutes data—required enhancing the database used to publish the annual volumes. We began with data from 4,173 singings using The Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition held between January 1995 and December 2014.8 An array of variations from year to year and from singing to singing presented problems in creating a unified dataset. For example, different secretaries responsible for taking minutes at these singings adopted disparate approaches to the level of detail in naming singing locations.9 Additionally, a singing may undergo changes from year to year, as the building in which it was located may change names or the singing may move to a different location entirely, all while keeping the same singing name. Mapping the minutes required consistently adopting naming conventions found within the minutes so that each singing was given a building name, city/town, county, and state.

However, the majority of the work involved locating data not found in the minutes book. Through using a combination of web-based mapping services (such as Google Maps, Google Street View, MapQuest, and HERE), contacting dozens of singers who helped organize singings with hard-to-pin-down locations, and taking one field trip to a log cabin in Winston County, Alabama, we identified exact locations of all but thirty-one singings, complete with street names and numbers and, most importantly, GPS coordinates. This unified dataset with precise location data makes visualizing Sacred Harp's geographical shifts over the past twenty years possible to an unprecedented extent. The global timeline map (below) displays the locations of singings held each year between 1995 and 2014 in sequence.

Global Sacred Harp Singings, 1995–2014

The growth of Sacred Harp singings in Europe from a single annual event in England to a dense cluster with additional singings scattered across the continent, and the establishment of a singing in Australia, are perhaps the most noticeable of all changes on this world map. Even at this scale, changes within the United States, such as the increase in the density of singings in the Northeast and on the West Coast, are also visible.

Many more changes to the United States' singing geography are observable on a more regional scale. The zone stretching from West Georgia to West Alabama reveals a hotbed of Sacred Harp singing dating from the nineteenth century. Noticeable shifts are apparent between 1995 and 2014. These changes affirm that singings have ceased to be held in some counties, yet demonstrate that strong networks persist in other areas, undercutting the overdetermined narrative of the decline of southern singings. Our visualizations demonstrate that what began in 1995 as a solid strip of singings stretching across this area of the Alabama and Georgia upcountry had by 2014 coalesced into discrete spatial clusters. Interconnected networks of singings persisted in Walker, Winston, and Cullman Counties north of Birmingham; in northeast Alabama; and on the Alabama-Georgia border in Cleburne County, Alabama, and Haralson, Carroll, and Heard Counties, Georgia.

Alabama and Georgia Upcountry Sacred Harp Singings, 1995–2014

In the Birmingham and Atlanta metropolitan regions, the number of singings has held steady even as their geography has shifted, revealing nuance obscured by the overarching narrative of southern decline. In Birmingham, the number of annual singings remains constant while their locations move out of the city center (see map here). In Atlanta, singings held in north Fulton County are steadily supplanted by those held towards the center of DeKalb County (see map here).

The visible growth of Sacred Harp singings in southern states outside of historical singing areas, perhaps most noticeable in South Carolina (see map here) and Arkansas (see map here), undercuts the binaristic opposition of growth in the North and decline in the South. Before 2005, there were no Sacred Harp Singings held in South Carolina. By 2011, there were six annual singings held across the state. Arkansas, at its peak, featured three singings, none of which were held in 1995. (The state presently features two.)

Mapping minutes data also adds specificity to the story of Sacred Harp's expansion to other parts of the United States. Popular narratives date the style's expansion as occurring in the 1970s and 1980s, in the immediate aftermath of Sacred Harp's incorporation into the folk revival. Yet the mapping of minutes data reveals a later acceleration of the style's spread beyond the South in the 1990s and 2000s. No annual singings were held in Pennsylvania in 1995, yet singings proliferated in the eastern part of the state over the subsequent two decades, and spread to the central and western part of the state from 2008 to 2010 (see map here). Eight singings were held in Pennsylvania in 2014. Sacred Harp singing also grew steadily in the Pacific Northwest, from one singing in the mid- to late 1990s, to seven annual singings in 2014 (see map here). Even in New England, where the oldest continuously held annual singing outside the South celebrated its fortieth anniversary in the fall of 2016, mapping the minutes reveals a dramatic expansion from a single annual singing in 1995 to eleven events in 2014 (see map here).

New England Sacred Harp Singings, 1995–2014

Visualizing the changing geography of singings from The Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition also demonstrates shifts in the balance of singing from different Sacred Harp editions and the growing comprehensiveness of the "Big Minutes" compilation. In Texas, where singings generally feature the descendant of a competing early-twentieth-century revision of The Sacred Harp known as the "Cooper Book," mapping reveals the inroads made by the 1991 Edition in the state, growing from two singings in 1995 to six singings in 2014 (see map here).10 The increase in singings in the area of middle and south Georgia around Macon and Thomaston (see map here) and in east central Alabama near Alexander City is due to the decision of longstanding networks of singings from the 1991 Edition that continued to publish their own separate minutes pamphlets to affiliate with the "Big Minutes" in the late 1990s and early 2000s.11

Our augmentation of born-digital Sacred Harp minutes data dating back to 1995 affords an unprecedented look at the extent to which the use of The Sacred Harp: 1991Edition has shifted in the past two decades, complicating popular narratives of the style's northern spread and southern decline. A team of volunteers is currently processing digitized minutes from fifty annual volumes going back to 1945, produced prior to the digitization of the minutes' production process, part of a plan to expand the database that we augmented to create these maps.12 We hope this marks the beginning of the process of drawing insights from the extraordinarily comprehensive and granular record of participation in a music culture that the Sacred Harp minutes provide.

Additional Maps

• Metro Birmingham (Alabama)
• Metro Atlanta (Georgia)
• South Carolina
• Arkansas
• Pennsylvania
• Pacific Northwest
• Texas
• South Georgia

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Chris Thorman, Mark T. Godfrey, and Judy Caudle for their assistance obtaining and editing minutes data and Megan Slemons, Stephanie Bryan, and the rest of the Southern Spaces staff, for their assistance producing this post.

About the Authors

Jesse P. Karlsberg is the Senior Digital Scholarship Strategist at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and the consulting editor of Southern Spaces. A scholar of digital publishing and American music, Jesse is the editor of Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition (Pitts Theology Library and Sacred Harp Publishing Company, 2015). His 2015 dissertation, "Folklore's Filter: Race, Place, and Sacred Harp Singing," earned honorable mention for the Society of American Music's Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award.

Robert A. W. Dunn is a music and historical research consultant for the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship’s Sounding Spirit project. He is a Sacred Harp singer and musician and graduated in 2016 from Emory University with a BA in History and Music.

• 1. George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands: The Story of the Fasola Folk, Their Songs, Singings, and "Buckwheat Notes" (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933); Buell E. Cobb, The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989); David Warren Steel, The Makers of the Sacred Harp (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010).
• 2. John Bealle, Public Worship, Private Faith: Sacred Harp and American Folksong (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Kiri Miller, Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
• 3. Jesse P. Karlsberg, "Folklore's Filter: Race, Place, and Sacred Harp Singing" (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 2015), http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/pgtds; Ellen Lueck, "Sacred Harp Singing in Europe: Its Pathways, Spaces, and Meanings" (Ph.D. dissertation, Wesleyan University, 2016).
• 4. For examples and analysis of Sacred Harp singers' negotiation of the "old-fogy" label, see George Pullen Jackson, The Story of The Sacred Harp, 1844–1944: A Book of Religious Folk Song as an American Institution (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1944); Hugh W. McGraw, "'There Are More Singings Now Than Ever Before': Hugh McGraw Addresses the Harpeth Valley Singers,"Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter 2, no. 3 (December 31, 2013), http://originalsacredharp.com/2013/12/31/there-are-more-singings-now-than-ever-before-hugh-mcgraw-addresses-the-harpeth-valley-singers; Karlsberg, "Folklore's Filter," 105–12.
• 5. Editors of today's "Big Minutes" repeat the received history that the book originated as the minutes pamphlet of the Alabama State Sacred Harp Musical Convention, based in Birmingham, Alabama. However, minutes pamphlets in the collections of Winston County, Alabama, singers Roma Rice and Margaret Keeton, and the Carrolton, Georgia, Sacred Harp Museum, suggest that this Winston County-centered publication was the precursor to today’s “Big Minutes”; continuities in printer, editor, and singings between a set of 1930s and early 1940s minutes pamphlets for a group of singing conventions centered in Winston County, Alabama, and pamphlets published beginning in 1945 titled Minutes of the Alabama-Tennessee Sacred Harp Singing Conventions, and, after 1954, titled Minutes: Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee Sacred Harp Singings, indicate a shared lineage.
• 6. To access this database or order a print copy of the contemporary "Big Minutes," see Judy Caudle, et al., eds., "Minutes and Directory of Sacred Harp Singings,"Fasola.org, http://fasola.org/minutes/.
• 7. On the FaSoLa Minutes app, see Clarissa Fetrow, "There's an App for That: A Review of the 'FaSoLa Minutes' App,"Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter 3, no. 2 (November 12, 2014), http://originalsacredharp.com/2014/11/12/theres-an-app-for-that-a-review-of-the-fasola-minutes-app/.
• 8. Mark T. Godfrey created this dataset for the FaSoLa Minutes app and with Jesse P. Karlsberg supported Robert A. W. Dunn's research augmenting the data with precise locations. Godfrey's original dataset features enhancements to the SHMHA data and excludes 740 singings using other Sacred Harp editions and related shape-note books. These singings were initially excluded to ensure that page numbers included in the minutes reliably indexed specific songs in The Sacred Harp. The exclusions also improve the representativeness of the minutes, which feature nearly all annual singings from The Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition, but relatively few singings from other tunebooks, which typically disseminate their minutes through other publications.
• 9. Most secretaries include the names of buildings where singings are held, but others give names of larger institutions or campuses with multiple potential venues. A handful of singing minutes feature no specific location, instead providing just a city or town and county. Other minutes include a city or town but no county, or a county but no municipality.
• 10. On the social context of the increasing number of singings from the 1991 Edition in Texas since the 1990s, see Karlsberg, "Folklore's Filter," 118–24.
• 11. The South Georgia Convention, a network of a dozen singings from the 1991 Edition centered around Macon and extending south to Cordele, Georgia, continues to publish an annual minutes pamphlet, even as its sponsored singings increasingly submit minutes to the "Big Minutes."
• 12. For more on this process and a collection of research drawing on the expanding Sacred Harp minutes database, see "Sacred Harp Minutes: Querying Sacred Harp's Sonic Past through the Minutes of Sacred Harp Singings, 1945–2016," 2017, http://fasolaminutes.org/.

Introduction

At present, the people of Appalachia continue to endure the contraction and retreat of extractive industry with little more than big-box retail for employment. They work for local hospitals and county governments at a time when both depend on a withering tax base. Many residents hunt, fish, and garden to make up the shortfall in their household incomes. The Appalachian Regional Commission has not come up with a solution; neither has the leadership of the United States. It seems unlikely, though I would not say impossible, that corporations will show up in southern West Virginia or eastern Kentucky and open factories and offices. I wrote the Commons Communities Act after months of thinking about how the people of the southern mountains might find work with dignity, working for themselves and their families without owing their existences to corporations. I thought that government could help to solve this problem and do what it should do: stand between citizens and the power of capital.

Excerpt

It is difficult to find anything Appalachians have gained by voting for Republicans. Yet a majority in every county in West Virginia voted for Donald Trump in 2016. His promise to revitalize the coal industry lacks a footing in reality. Sensing this, one voter gave him a desperate endorsement, saying, "He's the only shot we got." If Trump studies West Virginia's congressional delegation, he might conclude that he doesn't need to do very much. But the people can do better than that. They can make their representatives justify the trust placed in them. They can demand more of their government. They can assert a right to land and livelihood and reparations from the corporations that used and abused them for so long. Maybe that can be the basis for a positive political identity.1

I favor democratic socialism and a reinvention of the nation-state as a conduit for meeting human needs rather than for accumulating capital. I also favor a realm of democratic autonomy, and that might have more political traction. If Congress and the president can cooperate, such a realm can exist as a function of the United States itself. But it can also exist outside of centralized government, sponsored by West Virginia or Kentucky or Tennessee. Or people can do it themselves, by squatting on abandoned land and defending their right to the commons.2

There is talk and some action regarding returning land. Various organizations have held public meetings to elicit policies directly from citizens. Even Congress is thinking along these lines. In 2016, Representative Harold Rogers, a Kentucky Republican, introduced the Reclaim Act. The law would empower the Department of the Interior to distribute funds to states and Indian nations aimed at developing land in communities "adversely affected by coal mining." I would push this thinking toward creating a reconstituted commons. What if people who wished to do so lived by hunting and gardening as part of a social project that encouraged political participation? What if citizens possessed use-rights over a sustaining landscape?

Historians don't often write legislation. My attempt is consistent with the argument of this book. Consider it more a thought experiment than a ready-made policy. Any actual solution would require the knowledge of people who live in the mountains and the sponsorship of organizations and activists working on these questions. The following owes something to the New Deal economist Milburn Wilson, the geographer J. Russell Smith, the historian Lewis Cecil Gray, the Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Berry, and also to Mahatma Gandhi, Lewis Mumford, and E. F. Schumacher.3 I call it . . .

THE COMMONS COMMUNITIES ACT

Whereas coal mining is diminishing in the southern mountains, leaving thousands unemployed, and whereas coal contributes to climate change and the disruption of human societies all over the world; whereas a rural policy should incorporate ecological principles with food production on a small scale, and whereas the United States once included millions of households engaged in production for subsistence and exchange; whereas when people take care of landscapes, landscapes take care of them,

SECTION 1. The United States shall create a series of commons communities, each designed to include a specified number of households within a larger landscape that will be managed by them, the residents. This landscape will provide the ecological base for hunting and gathering, cattle grazing, timber harvesting, vegetable gardening, and farming. The ecological base will be owned as a conservation easement or land trust under the authority of the states and/or counties where each community resides.

SECTION 2. Commons communities would be organized according to the design principles developed by the economist Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009 for her work on the economic governance of common resources. Each community shall include well-defined boundaries and members. Each will devise rules for appropriation suitable to the environment, along with sanctions and penalties for those who violate the rules and take too much or otherwise abuse the resource. Each must establish a means of conflict resolution and governance. In the event that residents need to sue the community or other residents, they would use the county, state, or federal courts.4

SECTION 3. Commons communities will not be limited to Appalachia but could be established anywhere a sufficient ecological base exists, including the outskirts of cities and suburbs. This law must not be construed to favor one location or ethnic group.

SECTION 4. Social services and education will be paid for by an income tax on the top one percent of household incomes in the United States and an Industrial Abandonment Tax, attached to any corporation that closed its operations in any city or region of the United States within the last twenty years of the date of this Act and moved elsewhere, leaving behind toxic waste and poverty.

SECTION 5. Resident households with incomes under $50,000 a year will pay no federal income tax. Residents will own their own homes, paying for them with low-interest mortgages and a $1.00 down payment.

SECTION 6. No nonresident, trust, or corporation is permitted to purchase property in a commons community.

SECTION 7. The organization of commons communities will proceed through the Department of Agriculture. The Department will initiate the identification of suitable lands for condemnation by eminent domain or land already owned by counties, states, or the United States. The Department will determine how much land is needed to sustain a given number of residents.

SECTION 8. Allied Programs.

SUB-SECTION A. Income tax incentives will encourage teachers and medical doctors to live in commons communities and work in the schools and nearby hospitals.

SUB-SECTION B. College-age members of any commons household may apply for free tuition at their state university. Tuition shall be paid for by the Industrial Abandonment Tax.

SUB-SECTION C. Commons communities will receive special programs intended to link them to the Internet. Cooperation between communities will incorporate schools, artists and writers in residence, and scientists engaged in the study of the environment. This Act provides funds for the publication of a journal or magazine of commons life to be written and published by the residents of the various communities.

SUB-SECTION D. Another program will link gardeners with markets for their produce, including grocery stores and restaurants. Proceeds from this Market Garden Initiative will not be subject to state or federal income tax.

SUB-SECTION E. University experiment stations in every state where commons communities exist will send representatives to teach the latest methods of garden production, with the approval and consent of residents.

SECTION 9. If the members of a commons community no longer wish to be associated with the federal government, they may become independent at any time with a majority vote consisting of two-thirds of adult residents, at which time all federal programs associated with this Act will cease. Ownership of the commons would not change and residents would keep their homes.

The act might look like Arthurdale and the Division of Subsistence Homesteads all over again. But it has no factory, no originating debt, and no presumption that people must subsist entirely from gardens. It emphasizes scientific conservation, cultural expression, entrepreneurship, and democracy. It would not prevent any resident from earning money in any job or profession. Some within Appalachia might object to the participation of the federal government. But government can do things that communities cannot by themselves, like purchase land, relieve taxes on citizens and levy them on corporations, advance citizen participation, and pay for college. Government can help the residents of commons communities remain connected to the wider world of economic opportunity and political participation. But the act allows for its own dissolution. Residents would have the authority to end the government's participation and keep their gains.5

The act seeks to preserve and encourage a makeshift economy that has been practiced for two centuries among mountain farmers, as well as among people in other parts of the United States. Readers in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles might not appreciate the extent to which rural Americans depend on forests and other environments for food and cash. In the 1980s, Timothy Lee Barnwell photographed and interviewed Appalachians who practiced agrarian economy. Charlie Thomas of Bush Creek, North Carolina, said, "Even when I was growing up we raised almost everything we ate. You'd buy a little coffee if you wanted it, but we never drank it, and buy or trade for what sugar you needed, and we used honey for that. We've always kept bees for our own honey." A series of interviews conducted in southern West Virginia during the 1990s is now part of the Library of Congress. "People around here . . . on Coal River, just about every one of them does the same thing," explained Dave Bailey. "They pick the grains, they pick the black berries, they fish, they hunt . . . they get the molly moochers [the morchella or morel mushroom] . . . They do that, their kids is going to do it, their grandkids is going to do it, and that's the way it is on Coal River."Others interviewed detailed their extensive knowledge of trees and plants. None of these West Virginians need the Commons Communities Act to continue living as they always have, from whatever forested commons they can still find. The act is meant to promote this social ecology. By combining land and livelihood—by fostering possession against a history of dispossession—it would reconnect communities and landscapes in a structure for sustaining both.6

The political economy of the act combines private and communal property. Residents may buy and sell their homes, pass them to the next generation, and do anything else with them permitted by local law. They would act differently in their role as managers of common woods and waters. Economists have rarely understood the logic of collective use. The most common argument says that every user has an incentive to cut every last tree, shoot every last large-bodied mammal, and let his cattle graze every last acre of wild meadow, leaving nothing for anyone else. The forest is reduced to stumps; the high meadow is overrun with thistle. This is the misleading parable of the "Tragedy of the Commons," most famously described by the biologist Garrett Hardin in 1968.7

Hardin based his model on a self-serving conception of human nature. His essay has nothing to do with how actual people govern actual shared resources, cases that Hardin seems to have known little about. His first mistake was to think that a commons is a free-for-all. No such set of resources is open to everyone, but only to members, defined in various ways. Consider the forests of New England in the nineteenth century. Colonial towns owned them and controlled access, allowing some to cut trees and others to hunt and fish with permission. Lobster fishermen in Maine operate according to their own rules and institutions, with little government involvement, resulting in one of the most successful fisheries in the world. But they decide who can and cannot benefit. Thus everyone who depends on common property has an incentive to maintain it. This is not to say that everyone is always satisfied. Community management requires governance to mediate disagreement and limit the consequences of conflict. The point is that it's simply not true that common property always degenerates into scarcity.8

But Hardin cannot be dismissed altogether. His fable reasonably describes resources that no group can manage, like the open ocean and the atmosphere. And not all collective uses of land have succeeded. (In fact, we know very little about how the functional forest commons fared in West Virginia, how well users governed themselves.) Without regulations and penalties, without clear borders and firm institutions, they can result in devastation. This is why Elinor Ostrom studied them—to figure out why some failed and others thrived.9

We all live in communities. In a sense, no one really lives in the United States but in neighborhoods, towns, and counties. Strengthening those bonds within environments that allow for economic autonomy seems like a way of creating space between people and the nation-state. It might also offer a way to endure during times of climate disruption, when the United States might not be capable of compensating for any number of possible disasters. The Commons Communities Act proposes land reform and collective governance. It proposes nothing new, but rather something very old, a sense of ownership without the enclosure and the abuse of power characteristic of private property.10

And yet, I have my own objections to the Commons Communities Act. Small-scale development programs appeared decades ago, with mixed results. The same reformers and intellectuals who rediscovered the small town and the Indian pueblo during the New Deal urged communitarian approaches all over the world. But these schemes harbored certain false assumptions, well described by the historian Daniel Immerwahr. Development agencies believed that the members of a village acted from shared principles and that local elites would fairly apportion money entrusted to them. But villages in the Philippines and India turned out to be more complicated—and divided—than the sanguine Americans had thought. Immerwahr suggests another problem. When a nation-state invests in a community, where does its influence end? What role would the United States play in a commons community?11

The act might also be criticized for shunting the problem of industrial abandonment onto the poor, just like the Division of Subsistence Homesteads. In this way, it seems like a neoliberal policy intended to reduce the cost of state services and lower taxes on the rich. And while under the act the corporations that caused so much human and ecological ruin would be required to pay for houses and schools, this doesn't change or challenge a political economy in which humans and environments serve as inputs in the circulation of capital. For corporations, compensating for social destruction is merely part of the cost of doing business. Eliminating these contradictions so that citizens benefit would require a government and a set of laws dedicated to human welfare.

The act includes scholarships so that the children of Appalachian households might attend college, but it does not come close to addressing the larger cultural problem of why high school kids in Appalachia often don't apply. In Hillbilly Elegy (2016), J. D. Vance eloquently explains why it's so difficult for Appalachians to find a way out of unemployment and improve the quality of their lives. Some see themselves as different from those outside their families or counties. People in other parts of the country view them harshly, with many of the same racialized stereotypes present a century ago. All of this makes geographic and social mobility difficult. Vance's own story suggests that a strong mentor with the capacity to see beyond limited local opportunities can overcome self-defeat. Vance's mentor was his grandmother. "She didn't just preach and cuss and demand. She showed me what was possible . . . and made sure I knew how to get there." Her home provided Vance stability and peace, "not just a short-term haven but also hope for a better life."

Vance got out. He graduated from Ohio State University, the Marines, and Yale Law School before joining a Silicon Valley investment firm. But his very success implies the depth of the problem he confronted. The most unsettling currents in Hillbilly Elegy lie in the necessity of leaving and in its emphasis on a strong and uncompromising grandmother. If meaningful work and a decent occupation only exist elsewhere, then most Appalachians will be abandoned. If escape depends on someone who rises above despair and abuse, then most will be stuck. The role of public policy and a political solution to poverty is to attempt to help everyone in the same situation rather than rely on extraordinary circumstance and plain luck to produce successful individuals. Vance's book is inspiring as a memoir, but it might be construed as saying that the tragedy of Appalachia is the sum of its individual failings or the insularity of its families.12 Domestic violence, drug abuse, and hopelessness on such a scale have social causes. They require solutions that do not place the burden on the sufferers themselves to transcend their circumstances.

About the Author

Steven Stoll is a professor of history at Fordham University and the author of The Great Delusion (Hill and Wang, 2008) and Larding the Lean Earth (Hill and Wang, 2002). His writing has appeared in Harper's Magazine, Lapham's Quarterly, and the New Haven Review.

• 1. For an argument in favor of collective identities in the service of an ethical politics, see Critchley, Infinitely Demanding. I have especially learned from David Whisnant's "Developments in the Appalachian Identity Movement," which though published in 1980 still resonates. "At its worst . . . regional identification is an isolationist impulse." He deconstructs an essentialist mountain identity. And yet, "The political value of regional identity lies in its usefulness as a basis for broad solidarity and coalition." Whisnant, David. "Developments in the Appalachian Identity Movement: All is Process."Appalachian Journal 8, no. 1 (1980): 41–47.
• 2. In the words of two historians, "Making visible activities that neoliberalism renders invisible expands the range of ideas for producing social livelihoods and economic development." Amanda Fickey and Michael Samers, "Developing Appalachia: The Impact of Limited Economic Imagination," in Studying Appalachian Studies: Making the Path by Walking, ed. Chad Berry, Phillip J. Obermiller, and Shaunna L. Scott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 123.
• 3. Appalachian Voices is one such organization. The Reclaim Act is H.R. 4456, 114th Congress. Introduced in the House in February 2016.
• 4. Ostrom (1933–2012) shared the Nobel Prize with Oliver E. Williamson. The act would rely on Ostrom's Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For design principles, see pages 90–101.
• 5. On corporate subsidies, Niraj Chokshi, "The United States of Subsidies,"Washington Post, March 18, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/03/17/the-united-states-of-subsidies-the-biggest-corporate-winners-in-each-state/?utm_term​=.314361798972.
• 6. Tim Barnwell, The Face of Appalachia: Portraits from the Mountain Farm (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 121, 122, 126. The project is Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia in cooperation with the Coal River Folklife Project and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Dave Bailey interviewed by Mary Hufford on April 12, 1996 (AFC 1999/008), http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/afccmns.104007; Virgil Jarrell interviewed by Mary Hufford on May 23, 1996 (AFC 1999/008), http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/afccmns.117004.
• 7. Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons,"Science 162 (December 13, 1968): 1243–48.
• 8. According to Richard Judd, "These local common resource regimes established two central principles for the emerging New England conservation tradition: communities bore collective responsibility for managing their resources in a productive fashion, and they were to allocate these resources equitably." Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7–8, 41–45; James Acheson, Capturing the Commons: Devising Institutions to Manage the MaineLobster Industry (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2003), 206; Allan Greer, "Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America,"American Historical Review 117, no. 2 (April 2012): 365–86.
• 9. Kathryn Newfont, Blue Ridge Commons: Environmental Activism and Forest History inWestern North Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 276.
• 10. Ibid.
• 11. Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
• 12. J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper Collins, 2016): 148–49, 206.

Southern Spaces announces Educational Resources, a new feature of our website developed for educators, students, and researchers. Southern Spaces educational resources collect the journal's publications into several fields of knowledge across multiple disciplines. Presenting well-crafted articles, videos, reviews, interviews, and digital projects, these collections of open access materials offer valuable resources for teaching, learning, and research, and reinforce our ongoing commitment to open access.

Open Educational Resource (OER) is the name given by proponents of open access to educational material—including course content, assignments, syllabi, and more—freely available to copy and distribute. Increasing the availability of high-quality educational content through OERs is part of a broader movement of open access that disseminates research and critical analysis, reduces barriers to the discovery of scholarship, and enhances education and research initiatives.1

A spirit of accessibility and collaboration underpins the creation of OERs. Southern Spaces joins several resources available online for instructors and students interested in incorporating OERs into their teaching and learning, or creating and disseminating their own classroom materials. Open Washington has created a self-paced online workshop that "cover[s] the fundamental aspects of OER including open licensing and public domain" and "provid[es] practical guidance in locating and applying openly available resources."2 The website features OER collections that include videos, images, course materials, and textbooks. Other popular OER repositories include OER Commons, an online public library of OERs, and MIT OpenCourseWare, a "web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content."3 We hope our own OERs will be useful to Southern Spaces readers as they create syllabi, study guides, and assignments for courses, as well as engage in research projects and conversations about real and imagined spaces.

The Educational Resources section of our website—navigable by clicking the open-book icon on the Southern Spaces navigation bar, selecting "Educational Resource" in the menu that appears at the left, then clicking "More"—currently features eight curated educational resources, with more collections forthcoming as the journal continues to innovate in critical regional studies, digital scholarship, and open access publishing.

Educational resources currently available include:

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• Queer Souths
• Reading and Writing Souths
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• Social Memory and Memorialization
• Southern Screens

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Using Southern Spaces Educational Resources

Southern Spaces seeks to make scholarship accessible and available to a wide audience of researchers and teachers, students in and out of classrooms, library patrons, and general readers. Accordingly, we have created these educational resources for use at multiple educational levels and in various learning situations.

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Our educational resources also emphasize interdisciplinary approaches in the study of southern regions and their global connections. "Reading and Writing Souths," for instance, adapts spatial theory and cultural geography to the study of written expression and literature. Our scholarship on canonical author Flannery O'Connor embodies this approach. Students can examine a photo essay of Andalusia (the farm near Milledgeville, Georgia, where O'Connor spent the last thirteen years of her life), an article that traces the landscapes and characters of her life as they emerge in her letters, a discussion of her importance to novelist Alice Walker in a reconsideration of the "Southern Renaissance," and a visit by poet Sean Hill to the segregated cemetery where she is buried. These sources explore Andalusia and Milledgeville as lived spaces alongside the imagined geographies that O'Connor created. A 2014 blog post, too, presents the many afterlives of the author as they emerge in "Scale Highly Eccentric: A Zine of Portraits of Flannery O'Connor."

We encourage the use of Southern Spaces educational resources in composition and writing classrooms. Our curated collections feature publications that approach a similar theme or subject across multiple genres, creating ways to examine constraints and opportunities unique to each. Studying the rhetorical situation of writing about memory and place collected in "Social Memory and Memorialization," for example, uncovers compelling differences in audience, purpose, tone, style, register, claims, structures, and arguments across the genres we publish. What does poetry offer for Natasha Trethewey's meditations on geography and place compared to a recorded interview or public address? Similarly, studying reviews of films, monographs, photography and art installations, and digital projects create opportunities for teaching the types of analyses, evidence, and organization that scholars use to make critical assessments. The "Southern Screens" and "African American Art and Aesthetic Experiences" educational resources offer robust collections of reviews well-suited for studying composition.

Southern Spaces educational resources also create possibilities for investigating intersections between images and texts. As a digital journal, Southern Spaces delivers audio, video, images, text, and data to facilitate new ways of presenting and interpreting content. "African American Art and Aesthetic Experiences" organizes examples of how visual materials—photographs of homes in Atlanta's Collier Heights neighborhood, the epic quilts of Gwendolyn Ann Magee, or portraits of Low Country Traveler car club members—convey moving narratives and incisive scholarship, as well as examples of how students might integrate media into their own multimodal projects.

Southern Spaces considers the creation and distribution of our educational resources an important part of our mission to make valuable knowledge and insightful critique openly and freely available. We hope these materials generate constructive opportunities for Southern Spaces readers to enhance teaching, learning, and research while reducing costs and barriers.

About the Author

Sophia Leonard is the assistant managing editor of Southern Spaces and a PhD student in English at Emory University.

• 1."Benefits of Open Access Journals," Public Library of Science, accessed November 17, 2017, https://www.plos.org/open-access/.
• 2."How to Use Open Educational Resources," Open Washington, last modified March 3, 2016, http://www.openwa.org/module-1/.
• 3."About OCW," MIT OpenCourseWare, accessed November 17, 2017, https://ocw.mit.edu/about/.