Events Calendar
“‘Go Slow, Now’: The Free Southern Theater, Civil Rights, and the Racial Project of Black Patience” presented by Julius Fleming Jr.
This talk considers how theater was vital to the civil rights movement. It explores how Black artists and activists in the U.S. South, namely the Free Southern Theater, used theatrical performance to stage a radical challenge to a violent racial project that Fleming calls “Black patience”—a project that has historically insisted that Black people wait for freedom. Mounting and repurposing plays like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious, these cultural workers used theatre as a way to demand “freedom now.” Founded on the storied grounds of Mississippi—the United States’ most iconic geography of Black patience—this Black southern theatre transformed theatrical performance into a radical tool of civil rights protest. Taking the back porches of shacks, cotton fields, and even former plantations as their stages, they mounted insurgent embodied performances that unsettled modernity’s historical deferral of Black freedom, while transforming the racial meanings of Mississippi’s material geographies, much like those who were marching, sitting in, and transforming southern space in other ways.
Fleming is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he also serves as director of the English Honors Program. Specializing in Afro-Diasporic literatures and cultures, he has particular interests in performance studies and Black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. He is the author of Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation.
SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. Visit the Center’s website for current information about all Center events. During the 2023–24 academic year, the programming theme is “Creativity in the South.”
“Whiteness in Crisis?” presented by James M. Thomas
In The History of White People, historian Nell Painter wrote, “Being white these days isn’t what it used to be.” What, then, does it mean to be white today? Through in-depth interviews with white people living in the American South—a region where the nation’s color line has arguably been drawn brighter than anywhere else—this project examines how white people are making sense of both race and region in the 21st century. This event is cosponsored by the envisioned University of Mississippi Center for the Study of Race and Racism.
James M. Thomas (JT) is associate professor of sociology at the University of Mississippi, and coeditor of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. He is the author or coauthor of five books, and over thirty peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and invited essays on the causes and consequences of race and racism in America and abroad. His research has been funded by the American Sociological Association, the National Science Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation, and has been featured in popular media outlets like the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and Pacific Standard. Thomas is deeply dedicated to public scholarship, regularly writing for mainstream outlets like the Mississippi Free Press, serving on the boards of nonprofit organizations, and giving public lectures on race, racism, and inequality to academic and lay audiences alike.
This SouthTalk is cosponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. Visit the Center’s website for current information about all Center events. During the 2023–24 academic year, the programming theme is “Creativity in the South.”
“Southern Light, Southern Landscape” presented by William Dunlap and W. Ralph Eubanks
In his essay “The Power of Place in Art and Literature,” the artist William Dunlap writes, “The one constant in American art and life is the land.” In this talk, William Dunlap and Ralph Eubanks will discuss the connection between the landscape of the American South and the ways light and landscape connect with his art and literature.
William Dunlap is an artist, arts advocate, and writer. The American landscape, its flora and fauna, are essential elements in Dunlap’s art, as are certain iconic Old Masters, such as Rembrandt’s series of self-portraits, from which he quotes in paintings and constructions. In a career spanning more than half a century, Dunlap has exhibited internationally and appears in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Mississippi Museum of Art.
Ralph Eubanks is the Black Power at Ole Miss Faculty Fellow at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He is the author of A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape, as well as two other works of nonfiction.
This SouthTalk is cosponsored by the University Museum.
SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. Visit the Center’s website for current information about all Center events. During the 2023–24 academic year, the programming theme is “Creativity in the South.”
In the Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning presented Grace Elizabeth Hale
An award-winning scholar of white supremacy tackles her toughest research assignment yet: the unsolved murder of a Black man in rural Mississippi while her grandfather was the local sheriff—a cold case that sheds new light on the hidden legacy of racial terror in America. A story of obsession, injustice, and the ties that bind, In the Pines casts an unsparing eye over this intimate terrain, driven by a deep desire to set straight the historical record and to understand and subvert white racism, along with its structures, costs, and consequences—and the lies that sustain it.
Grace Elizabeth Hale is the Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia and an internationally recognized expert on modern American culture and the regional culture of the U.S. South. Her previous books include A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940, and Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture.
This event is cosponsored by Square Books.
SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. Visit the Center’s website for current information about all Center events. During the 2023–24 academic year, the programming theme is “Creativity in the South.”