The Center for the Study of Southern Culture Publications

Latino Orlando
Suburban Transformation and Racial Conflict

From the publisher

Latino Orlando portrays the experiences of first- and second-generation immigrants who have come to the Orlando metropolitan area from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and other Latin American countries. While much research on immigration focuses on urban destinations, Simone Delerme delves into a middle- and upper-class suburban context, highlighting the profound demographic and cultural transformation of an overlooked immigrant hub.

The House at the End of the Road
The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South

From the publisher:

A powerful story about race and identity told through the lives of one American family across three generations

Ever Is a Long Time
A Journey Into Mississippi's Dark Past A Memoir

From the publisher:

Like the renowned classics Praying for Sheetrock and North Toward Home, Ever Is a Long Time captures the spirit and feel of a small Southern town divided by racism and violence in the midst of the Civil Rights era.

A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape

From the publisher:

The South has produced some of America’s most celebrated authors, and no state more so than Mississippi. Names as diverse as Faulkner, Welty, and Ward have created a literary legacy spanning decades and stretching across lines of class, gender, and race. One thing binds together these wide- ranging perspectives—the land itself. In A Place Like Mississippi, W. Ralph Eubanks explores those ties and the ways in which the Magnolia State has fostered such a bounty of expression.

Southern Religion, Southern Culture
Essays: Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson

From the publisher:

From the steeple to the stable to the goal posts and dinner table, a homily on southern religiosity

The Blessings of Business
How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity

From the publisher:

The Book of Matthew cautions readers that "Ye cannot serve God and mammon." But for at least a century conservative American Protestants have been trying to prove that adage wrong. In The Blessings of Business, Darren E. Grem argues that while preachers, activists, and politicians have all helped spread the gospel, American evangelicalism owes its enduring strength in a large part to private enterprise.

The Business Turn in American Religious History

From the publisher:

• A holistic treatment of the influence of American business practice on religion
• Examines business in relation to a diverse spread of religions in America
• Offers a wide variety of essays on different aspects of business practices surrounding religious discourse

More about Darren Grem

My Family and I: A Mississippi Memoir

From the publisher

An inspiring memoir about the author’s lifelong quest for racial reconciliation, the love that sustains his interracial family in contemporary Mississippi, and the “Yes we can!” hope for American renewal that fades after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the despair-driven rise of Black Lives Matter.

Parchman Blues: A Teacher Becomes the Student in the Prison-to-College Pipeline Program
The Southern Register. (Fall 2023): 22-25.

Adam Gussow shares his experience with the prison-to-college pipeline program.

Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition

From the publisher:

The devil is the most charismatic and important figure in the blues tradition. He's not just the music's namesake ("the devil's music"), but a shadowy presence who haunts an imagined Mississippi crossroads where, it is claimed, Delta bluesman Robert Johnson traded away his soul in exchange for extraordinary prowess on the guitar. Yet, as scholar and musician Adam Gussow argues, there is much more to the story of the devil and the blues than these clichéd understandings.

Journeyman’s Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner’s Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York

From the Google Books:

Journeyman's Road offers a bold new vision of where the blues have been in the course of the twentieth century and what they have become at the dawn of the new millennium: a world music rippling with postmodern contradictions. Author Adam Gussow brings a unique perspective to this exploration. Not just an award-winning scholar and memoirist, he is an accomplished blues harmonica player, a Handy award nominee and veteran of the international club and festival circuit. With this unusual depth of experience, Gussow skillfully places blues literature in dialogue with the music that provokes it, vibrantly articulating a vital American tradition.

Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir

From Goodreads:

Mister Satan’s Apprentice is the history of one of music’s most fascinating collaborations, between Adam Gussow, a young graduate school dropout and harmonica player, and Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee, a guitarist and underground blues legend who had originally made his name as “Five Fingers Magee.”

Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition

From the publisher:

Seems Like Murder Here offers a revealing new account of the blues tradition. Far from mere laments about lost loves and hard times, the blues emerge in this provocative study as vital responses to spectacle lynchings and the violent realities of African American life in the Jim Crow South. With brilliant interpretations of both classic songs and literary works, from the autobiographies of W. C. Handy, David Honeyboy Edwards, and B. B. King to the poetry of Langston Hughes and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Seems Like Murder Here will transform our understanding of the blues and its enduring power.

Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music

From the publisher:

Mamie Smith’s pathbreaking 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues" set the pop music world on fire, inaugurating a new African American market for "race records." Not long after, such records also brought black blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not everybody is happy about that. If there's "No black. No white. Just the blues," as one familiar meme suggests, why do some blues people hear such pronouncements as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and an erasure of traumatic histories that lie deep in the heart of the music? Then again, if "blues is black music," as some performers and critics insist, what should we make of the vibrant global blues scene, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities?

In Whose Blues?, award-winning blues scholar and performer Adam Gussow confronts these challenging questions head-on. Using blues literature and history as a cultural anchor, Gussow defines, interprets, and makes sense of the blues for the new millennium. Drawing on the blues tradition’s major writers including W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka, and grounded in his first-person knowledge of the blues performance scene, Gussow’s thought-provoking book kickstarts a long overdue conversation.

More about Adam Gussow

Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South

From the publisher:

Kathryn B. McKee’s Reading Reconstruction situates Mississippi writer Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849–1883) as an astute cultural observer throughout the 1870s and 1880s who portrayed the discord and uneasiness of the Reconstruction era in her fiction and nonfiction works. McKee reveals conflicts in Bonner’s writing as her newfound feminism clashes with her resurgent racism, two forces widely prevalent and persistently oppositional throughout the late nineteenth century

American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary

From the publisher:

Employing innovations in media studies, southern cultural studies, and approaches to the global South, this collection of essays examines aspects of the southern imaginary in American cinema and offers fresh insight into the evolving field of southern film studies.

Global Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies

From the publisher:

American Literature has been regarded since its inception as the preeminent periodical in its field. Each issue contains articles covering the works of several American authors—from colonial to contemporary.

More about Kathryn McKee

Navigating Souths

From the publisher

The work of considering, imagining, and theorizing the U.S. South in regional, national, and global contexts is an intellectual project that has been going on for some time. Scholars in history, literature, and other disciplines have developed an ad­vanced understanding of the historical, social, and cultural forces that have helped to shape the U.S. South. However, most of the debates on these subjects have taken place within specific academic disciplines, with few attempts to cross-engage.

Behind the Big House

When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slave owners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people. Behind the Big House gives readers a candid, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper’s eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture.

More about Jodi Skipper

Science & Medicine

From the publisher:

Science and medicine have been critical to southern history and the formation of southern culture. For three centuries, scientists in the South have documented the lush natural world around them and set a lasting tradition of inquiry. The medical history of the region, however, has been at times tragic. Disease, death, and generations of poor health have been the legacy of slavery, the plantation economy, rural life, and poorly planned cities. The essays in this volume explore this legacy as well as recent developments in technology, research, and medicine in the South.

Conversations with Barry Hannah

From the publisher:

Thirty years of interviews with one of the most important modern American writers, who is often praised for his unflinching use of language, rich metaphors, and tragically damaged characters.

The Southern Quarterly - Special Issue on Governor William Winter

This issue considers the life, accomplishments, and legacy of Governor Winter.

Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas

From the publisher:

The dynamic interplay between the work of the Nobel laureate and Black writers.

Faulkner and History

From the publisher:

A stimulating treatment of the intersection between history and literature in the Nobel Laureate's work.

Faulkner and Print Culture

From the publisher:

A fascinating survey of Faulkner's publishing history with periodicals and publishing houses.

Faulkner and the Native South

From the publisher:

An exploration of the Nobel laureate's engagement with Native Americans and the ways in which Native American writing illuminates Faulkner.

Faulkner and Money

From the publisher:

A thorough assay of the Nobel Laureate through the lens of lucre.

Faulkner and Slavery

From the publisher:

A long-awaited assessment of the Nobel laureate's work in relation to America's cosmic sin.

Faulkner, Welty, Wright
A Mississippi Confluence

From the publisher:

An engaging, diverse collection that considers together a trio of Mississippi literary giants.

Faulkner's Famililes

From the publisher:

A new and fascinating volume that explores the theme of family in the works by the great Mississippi writer.

The Mississippi Encyclopedia

From the publisher:

An A-to-Z compendium of people, places, and events in Mississippi from prehistoric times to today.

Southern Religion, Southern Culture:
Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson

From the publisher:

From the steeple to the stable to the goal posts and dinner table, a homily on southern religiosity.

More about James G. Thomas, Jr.