Gender and the Southern Body Politic. (Book Reviews).Gender and the Southern Body Politic BODY POLITIC, government, corporations. When applied to the government this phrase signifies the state. 2. As to the persons who compose the body politic, they take collectively the name, of people, or nation; and individually they are citizens, when considered . Edited by Nancy Bercaw. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi The University Press of Mississippi, founded in 1970, is a publisher that is sponsored by the eight state universities in Mississippi:
abbr. International Standard Book Number ISBN International Standard Book Number ISBN n abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m 1-57806-257-8.) Scholars and students are well served by this collection of essays, which originated as papers presented at the 1997 Porter L. Fortune Chancellor's Symposium in Southern History, held annually at the University of Mississippi The University of Mississippi, also known as Ole Miss, is a public, coeducational research university located in Oxford, Mississippi. Founded in 1848, the school is composed of the main campus in Oxford and three branch campuses located in Booneville, Tupelo, and Southaven. . Destroying any lingering notion that the study of "gender" is synonymous with synonymous with adjective equivalent to, the same as, identical to, similar to, identified with, equal to, tantamount to, interchangeable with, one and the same as that of women, these essays analyze not only southern women, but also men, war, racism, and cultural/class conflicts throughout the course of U.S. southern history. Editor Nancy Bercaw provides readers with cutting-edge scholarship, beginning with Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's superb 1998 essay, "`You Must Remember This': Autobiography as Social Critique." Hall's essay is followed by those of Kathleen M. Brown, Laura F. Edwards, Stephanie McCurry, Bryant Simon, and Nancy MacLean. Each essay is accompanied by comments from, respectively, Winthrop D. Jordan, Peter Bardaglio, Tera W. Hunter, Louise M. Newman, and Chana Kai Lee. Hall's evocative essay implores historians to consider more carefully the importance of memory and personal narrative for understanding both the past and the present. Using the example of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, an apostate of Lost Cause history who analyzed her own memories to critique those that underlay the Lost Cause, Hall urges historians to transcend the notion that subjective memory and objective historical fact are the enemies of one another. Rather, she urges historians to recognize the "unspoken hierarchies" that invade their own "historical sense" (p. 27) and make artful use of both memory and documentable fact. Certainly, when one considers the petty politics in which otherwise erudite er·u·dite adj. Characterized by erudition; learned. See Synonyms at learned. [Middle English erudit, from Latin historians frequently engage, it appears that they, no less than other writers, are captives of the "unfinished business of [their] own lives and times" (p. 3). For the most part, the authors of this volume respectfully build on the works of others even when disagreeing with them. In so doing, Brown, Edwards, and Simon provide creative analyses of masculinity in topics ranging from Bacon's Rebellion to antebellum domestic violence to the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), established in 1933 by the U.S. Congress as a measure of the New Deal program. The CCC provided work and vocational training for unemployed single young men through conserving and developing the country's natural resources. (CCC CCC A very speculative grade assigned to a debt obligation by a rating agency. Such a rating indicates default or considerable doubt that interest will be paid or principal repaid. Also called Caa. ) program. In words reminiscent of LeeAnn Whites (The Civil War As a Crisis in Gender [Athens, Ga., 1995], pp. 7-8), Brown addresses some scholars' fear that this new focus on masculinity and whiteness spells a return to the study of white men at the expense of women and people of color Noun 1. people of color - a race with skin pigmentation different from the white race (especially Blacks) people of colour, colour, color race - people who are believed to belong to the same genetic stock; "some biologists doubt that there are important . Despite this risk, she writes, unless historians apply theories of gender and race to the experiences of white males, "white male historical subjects retain their exclusive claim to an unqualified humanity" (p. 35); that is, they remain devoid of gender and race, the markers of those defined as "other." These authors demonstrate that theories of gender, like those of class and race, enable ever greater understanding of how systems of power are constructed and maintained. All six essayists The following is an abbreviated list of essayists, arranged alphabetically by last name (years of birth and death, if applicable, and country of birth, are noted in parentheses). Note: An individual's country of birth is not always indicative of his or her nationality. analyze the interactive effects of race, gender, and class on people's lives in terms of both national policy and personal struggles. MacLean, for example, examines racial conflicts in a 1975 textile mill to argue that affirmative action affirmative action, in the United States, programs to overcome the effects of past societal discrimination by allocating jobs and resources to members of specific groups, such as minorities and women. victories emerged from widespread local struggles waged by workers themselves rather than representing, as conservative critics often suggest, "an abstraction concocted by federal bureaucrats in Washington, D.C." (p. 163). She further argues that a gendered sense of economic desperation among Cannon Mills' "overwhelmingly unskilled and heavily female" workforce (p. 182) led white women to accept an integrated workplace more easily than did white men in skilled trades, despite their firm commitment to racial segregation elsewhere. This brief review cannot do justice to the fine scholarship and innovative methodology presented in these essays and the commentaries that follow. Bercaw's collection will elicit lively discussions in graduate courses and, one hopes, stimulate a new generation of scholars to indulge a passion for history that, as Hall writes, "troubles the boundaries between poetics and politics ..." (p. 28). VICTORIA BYNUM Southwest Texas State University |
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