Angie Mosier
in conversation with Mary Beth Lasseter

Throughout service, while the chefs, prep, pastry, and front of house workers play solos and make harmony together, a backbeat player keeps them in step, working at a low drone that gives stability to the composition. That player is the dishwasher.

Most of these folks work multiple jobs in another restaurant or profession. Many times they work other positions in the same restaurant. Some are fresh-faced aspiring chefs, working to prove that they can labor long, soggy hours before moving on to prep work.  Some drive their own cars. Others rely on three or four different modes of transportation to get to their dish pits. All have stories to tell about labor in the modern South.

Angie Mosier is a writer, photographer, stylist, and cook.  She has contributed to the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and her work has been featured in Garden & Gun, The New York Times, Southern Living, and Food and Wine. She has collaborated with cookbook and craft authors such as John T. Edge, Matt Lee and Ted Lee, Virginia Willis, Natalie Chanin, and the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA). She is a member of Les Dames d’Escoffier, the James Beard Foundation, and the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Mary Beth Lasseter is the SFA’s associate director. She earned an MA in Southern Studies and an MBA from the University of Mississippi, and holds a BA from the University of Notre Dame. She became involved with the SFA as a symposium volunteer in 2000, but now writes grants, oversees budgets, and assists with general planning and management. Mary Beth hails from South Georgia, but now calls Mississippi home.

“Dish Pit Panorama” will be exhibited in the Gammill Gallery inside Barnard Observatory October 1–31, 2019. Visit southernfoodways.org to learn more about the Southern Foodways Alliance and their upcoming Southern Foodways Symposium (Oct 24-26) in Oxford, Mississippi.

Sophia Nahli Allison, visiting documentarian, filmmaker:
“Radical Reimaginings in Documentary Filmmaking”

Sophia Nahli Allison will screen her short hybrid documentary, A Love Song for Latasha, as well as a few shorter documentary works. The evening’s discussion will center on reimagining documentary and the archives, finding one’s style and voice, and the utilization of experimental methods within film.

Sophia Nahli Allison is an experimental documentary filmmaker, photographer + dreamer born and raised in South Central LA. She disrupts conventional documentary methods by reimagining the archives and excavating hidden truths. She conjures ancestral memories to explore the intersection of fiction and nonfiction storytelling. Her film A Love Song for Latasha premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. She was a 2018 Sundance Institute New Frontier Lab Programs Fellow and a recipient of a 2018 Glassbreaker Films Catalyst Grant. She will be a summer 2019 artist-in-residence with POV Spark’s African Interactive Art Residency and a 2019 interdisciplinary arts fellow at the MacDowell Colony. Past residencies include the Center for Photography at Woodstock and a 3Arts Residency Fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. Sophia received a 2018 Getty Bursary Creative Grant, was named the 2017 Student Video Photographer of the Year by the White House Photographers Association, and is the recipient of a 2014 Chicago 3Arts Award. She was a co-coordinator and facilitator for the 2018 Allied Media Conference’s Magic as Resistance Track, which focused on community healing and the art of reclaiming ancestral magic for QTPOC (Queer and Trans People of Color) participants. She holds an MA in visual communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BA in photojournalism from Columbia College Chicago.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) exploring the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted, and is free and open to the public.

Anne Lewis, filmmaker

A Strike and an Uprising (in Texas)

A Strike and an Uprising (in Texas) is an experimental documentary film based on two events: the San Antonio pecan shellers’ strike of 1938, which was led by Emma Tenayuca, and the Jobs with Justice march, led by Nacogdoches cafeteria workers, groundskeepers, and housekeepers in 1987.

Anne Lewis is a documentary filmmaker whose films include On Our Own Land, Fast Food Women, Justice in the Coalfields, and Morristown: In the Air and Sun, a film about factory job loss and the rights of immigrants. Lewis serves on the executive board of the Texas State Employees Union TSEU-CWA 6186 and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) exploring the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted, and is free and open to the public.

Mikaëla M. Adams:

“‘The Positive Duty to Aid Them’: Segregated Health, Federal Responsibility, and the Mississippi Choctaws during the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic”

After ignoring the Mississippi Choctaws for decades, Congress finally established an agency for them in 1918. This effort came none too soon: within months a deadly new strain of influenza struck. Yet, finding medical help for the Choctaws in segregated Mississippi proved difficult, and 61 out of 1,253 Choctaws ultimately died in the outbreak. The pandemic reinforced the need for a federal presence in the segregated South and, in the years that followed, the Choctaws marshaled that federal-tribal relationship to rebuild their land base and restore their sovereignty.

Mikaëla M. Adams is an associate professor of Native American history at the University of Mississippi. Her first book, Who Belongs? Race, Resources, and Tribal Citizenship in the Native South, explored themes of Indigenous identity, citizenship, and sovereignty in the Jim Crow South. Her current work examines the influenza pandemic of 1918–20 in Indian country.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) exploring the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted, and is free and open to the public.

Josh Parshall: “Jewish Radicals in New South Cities: The Southern District of the Workmen’s Circle”

From 1908 until after World War II, small groups of East European Jewish immigrants operated branches of the Workmen’s Circle (Arbeter Ring) in more than fifteen southern cities. These local branches of the national fraternal organization promoted secular Yiddish culture, participated in mutual aid, contributed to left-wing politics and local labor movements, and organized themselves on a regional basis. This presentation, cosponsored by the Jewish Federation of Oxford, will examine these activities in relation to the New South settings in which they took place and explore the meanings and legacies of the Workmen’s Circle in the South.

Josh Parshall is the director of the history department at the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, based in Jackson, Mississippi. His academic interests include American Jewish identity and politics, Yiddish language and culture, and Jewish history in the South. Parshall holds a PhD from the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) exploring the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted, and is free and open to the public.