Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Rachel Kirby
Meeting time: Monday, 12:45-2:45 pm
The South is a physical place with debated boundaries, populated by a diverse set of people who navigate and enliven the region. Simultaneously, “the South” is a layered cultural category that has been imagined and evoked over time in ways that are dynamic, evolving, and contradictory. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to our study of moments, ideas, places, and events that illuminate various aspects of the region, we will question what types of social and political work are carried out by the category of “southern” as employed by people both in and outside of the region. Each week, the class will explore a different cultural or historical manifestation of “the South” – plantation South, migrating South, and Disney South, for example. In so doing, we will attend to the ways that race, class, and gender are intertwined with histories and imaginings of the region. Bringing together art, popular culture, and politics, our conversations will resist efforts to define a singular South, instead challenging our own existing conceptions of the region to develop frameworks for understanding the rich complexity of the South(s). Recognizing that this course is not encyclopedic, your final projects will ask you to identify and examine a South that is not included on the syllabus. Course readings and topics include Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors, William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” artworks by Romare Bearden, cultural icon Dolly Parton, and Outkast’s Southernplaylisticadillacmuzik.