With characteristic originality and insight, Trudier Harris-Lopez offers a new and challenging approach to the work of African American writers in these twelve previously unpublished essays. Collectively, the essays show the vibrancy of African American literary creation across several decades of the twentieth century. But Harris-Lopez's readings of the various texts deliberately diverge from traditional ways of viewing traditional topics. South of Tradition focuses not only on well-known writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, but also on up-and-coming writers such as Randall Kenan and less-known writers such as Brent Wade and Henry Dumas. Harris-Lopez addresses themes of sexual and racial identity, reconceptualizations of and transcendence of Christianity, analyses of African American folk and cultural traditions, and issues of racial justice. Many of her subjects argue that geography shapes identity, whether that geography is the European territory many blacks escaped to from the oppressive South, or the South itself, where generations of African Americans have had to come to grips with their relationship to the land and its history. For Harris-Lopez, "south of tradition" refers both to geography and to readings of texts that are not in keeping with expected responses to the works. She explains her point of departure for the essays as "a slant, an angle, or a jolt below the line of what would be considered the norm for usual responses to African American literature." The scope of Harris-Lopez's work is tremendous. From her coverage of noncanonical writers to her analysis of humor in the best-selling The Color Purple, she provides essential material that should inform all future readings of African American literature.

In The Human Tradition in the New South, historian James C. Klotter brings together twelve biographical essays that explore the region's political, economic, and social development since the Civil War. Like all books in this series, these essays chronicle the lives of ordinary Americans whose lives and contributions help to highlight the great transformations that occurred in the South. With profiles ranging from Winnie Davis to Dizzy Dean, from Ralph David Abernathy to Harland Sanders, The Human Tradition in the New South brings to life this dynamic and vibrant region and is an excellent resource for courses in Southern history, race relations, social history, and the American history survey.

Table of contents

Written in the twelfth century, the Naisadhiyacarita (The Adventures of Nala, King of Nisadha) is a seminal Sanskrit poem beloved by South Asian literary communities for nearly a millennium. This volume introduces readers to the poem’s author, his reading communities, the modes through which the poem has been read and used, the contexts through which it became canonical, its literary offspring, and the emotional power it still holds for the culture that values it. The study privileges the intellectual, affective, and social forms of cultural practice informing a region’s people and institutions. It treats literary texts as traditions in their own right and draws attention to the critical genres and actors involved in their reception.

Over the years, the phrase “southern oratory” has become laden with myth; its mere invocation conjures up powerful images of grandiloquent antebellum patriarchs, enthusiastic New South hucksters, and raving wild-eyed demagogue politicians. In these essays, Waldo Braden strips away the myths to expose how the South’s orators achieved their rhetorical effects and manipulated their audiences. The Oral Tradition in the South begins with two essays that trace the roots of the South’s particular identification with oratory. In “The Emergence of the Concept of Southern Oratory, 1850–1950,” Braden suggests that it was through the influence of southern scholars that southern oratory gained its renown. The second essay, “The Oral Tradition in the Old South,” focuses on antebellum times to reveal the several factors that combined to make the region a fertile ground for oratory. Braden further explores the antebellum oratorical tradition in “The 1860 Election Campaign in Western Tennessee,” analyzing speeches made in Memphis by such national figures as William L. Yancey, Andrew Johnson, and Stephen A. Douglas, and revealing the nature of political canvassing in that era. Shifting his discussion to the years that followed the Civil War, Braden examines. in “Myths in a Rhetorical Context,” how such speakers as General John B. Gordon and Henry Grady worked to restore the shattered self-esteem of the region by spinning myths of the Old South and the Lost Cause and by proclaiming the hopeful era of the New South. The fifth essay, “The Rhetoric of Exploitation,” probes the rhetorical strategies of the demagogue politicians of the twentieth century-strategies such as “plain folks” appeals and race-baiting. In the final essay, “The Rhetoric of a Closed Society.” Braden analyzes the movement opposing racial integration in Mississippi. Showing how the White Citizens’ Council, Governor Ross Barnett, and other leaders manipulated the public to make the state a closed society from 1954 to 1964. Although he takes pains to establish the historical context in each of these essays, Braden’s emphasis as a rhetorical critic is always on the speeches themselves. He pays close attention to the kinds of appeals found in the words of the speeches and to the individual speaker’s use of images and phrases to evoke particular myths. But Braden looks beyond the texts of the speeches to take into account the full context of the event. “What the reader finds in the printed version of the text,” he explains, “might be only a small part of the myth, a tiny hint of what grinds inside frustrated listeners. Sometimes the trigger for the myth does not even appear in the printed version, because face-to-face the listeners and the speaker, feeling a oneness, evoke the myth without verbal expression.” To account for this nonverbal dimension of oratory, these essays assess the impact of the location and atmosphere of the gathering, the audience’s expectations, and the speaker’s use of ritual, symbolic gestures, and props. During the nearly forty years of his career, Waldo Braden has been a pioneer in the serious study of oratory. A landmark work, The Oral Tradition in the South is the capstone to a distinguished career, a comprehensive and authoritative study of the subject Braden has so innovatively researched.

This book captures community voices in matters relating to their relationship with specific archaeological heritage sites and landscapes in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. Focusing on the stonewalled archaeological heritage associated with Venda speakers and the reburial in 2008 of human remains excavated by the University of Pretoria from the cultural landscape of Mapungubwe, the book attempts to establish why archaeology and cultural heritage conservation struggle for relevance in South Africa today. In articulating the relevance of archaeology in South Africa in particular and southern Africa in general and in the context of public or community-based archaeology, the book explores how communities and the public interact, use and negotiate with their pasts. The research critiques the notion of archaeological heritage conservation and attempts to understand cultural heritage conservation from the perspectives of descendant communities. The book further exposes the conflict between cultural heritage protection efforts and modern development and questions the role of such efforts, given the challenges of unemployment, social inequality and poverty in democratic South Africa. The book is also about community engagement in archaeology, specifically in matters relating to access to cultural heritage resources. This study suggests that there is scope for community archaeology to take centre stage and drive future directions in archaeology if archaeologists change their approach in dealing with communities. Researchers are challenged in this study to rethink the notion of heritage, to debate the objectives behind cultural heritage conservation and to critically reexamine the relevance of archaeology today. This study suggests that the conflicting positions between heritage managers, archaeologists and descendant communities may be resolved through sharing of 'tradition' with the 'present'.