: Darlene O'Dell
: Sites of Southern Memory The Autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray
: University of Virginia Press
: 9780813921983
: 1
: CHF 33.30
:
: Belletristik
: English
In southern graveyards through the first decades of the twentieth century, theConfederate South was commemorated by tombstones and memorials, in Confederate flags, and inMemorial Day speeches and burial rituals. Cemeteries spoke the language of southern memory, andidentity was displayed in ritualistic form-inscribed on tombs, in texts, and in bodilymemories and messages. Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray wove sites ofregional memory, particularly Confederate burial sites, into their autobiographies as a way ofemphasizing how segregation divided more than just southern landscapes andpeople.Darlene O'Dell here considers the southern graveyard as one of three sitesof memory-the other two being the southern body and southern memoir-upon which theregion's catastrophic race relations are inscribed. O'Dell shows how Lumpkin, Smith, and Murray, allwitnesses to commemorations of the Confederacy and efforts to maintain the social order of the NewSouth, contended through their autobiographies against Lost Cause versions of southern identity. Sites of Southern Memory elucidates the ways in which these three writers joined in the dialogue onregional memory by placing the dead southern body as a site of memory within theirtexts. In this unique study of three women whose literary andpersonal lives were vitally concerned with southern race relations and the struggle for socialjustice, O'Dell provides a telling portrait of the troubled intellectual, literary, cultural, andsocial history of the American South.