South Talks

“Making ‘Actual Freedom’: The Civil War and Enslaved People’s Legal Consciousness”

Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern Cultural History presented by Thavolia Glymph 

A now large and robust body of literature has enriched our understanding of the flight of enslaved people to Union lines during the Civil War. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the role enslaved people’s understanding of the law played in the decision to flee in pursuit of freedom. In this year’s Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern Cultural History, Thavolia Glymph explores enslaved people’s legal consciousness—their knowledge and understanding of US and Confederate law—and how it guided the decision to flee and the arguments they made in defense of this decision.

Thavolia Glymph holds the Peabody Family Distinguished Professorship in History, and is Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Faculty Research Scholar at the Duke Population Research Institute, and president of the American Historical Association.

We Birthed a Movement

Jenny Labalme

Jenny Labalme, who was a student-photographer during the 1982 protests against a PCB landfill in Warren County, North Carolina, will discuss the exhibit We Birthed a Movement, which showcases a largely Black, rural, North Carolina community’s fight to block a toxic waste landfill that culminated in six weeks civil disobedience. Labalme has numerous photos in the exhibit, which is located in the Gammill Gallery in Barnard Observatory, and served on a history subcommittee that advised the University of North Carolina archivists and curators on assembling relevant materials for the exhibit.

Jenny Labalme spent almost two decades working first as a photojournalist and later as a journalist for publications in North Carolina, Alabama, Mexico City, and Indianapolis. Her protest photos have appeared in the Washington Post, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, and the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, as well as in numerous books, scholarly articles, and the documentary film Our Movement Starts Here, produced by the University of Mississippi’s Southern Documentary Project.

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.

“Country Queers: Lessons from a Decade of Documenting Rural LGBTQIA2S+ Histories”

presented by Rae Garringer

In 2013, frustrated by the lack of easily accessible rural queer stories, Rae Garringer bought an audio recorder for $200 and started recording oral history interviews with rural queer and trans friends in central Appalachia. They had no formal training in oral history or audio recording, and no idea what they were doing. Since then, the project has grown to include a collection of more than ninety oral histories, a traveling gallery exhibit, a podcast, and a book. In this presentation, Garringer will share photos made along the way, audio excerpts from oral history interviews, and read from their forthcoming book, Country Queers: A Love Letter.

Rae Garringer is a writer, oral historian, and audio producer who grew up on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia and now lives a few counties away on S’atsoyaha (Yuchi) and šaawanwaki (Shawnee) lands. They are the founder of Country Queers, a multimedia oral history project and podcast documenting rural and small-town LGBTQIA2S+ experiences since 2013, the author of Country Queers: A Love Letter, and the editor of the forthcoming To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers. When not working with stories, Rae spends a lot of time failing at keeping goats in fences, swimming in the river, and two-stepping around their trailer.

“Vibe of the South: Ordinary Blackness/Carceral Intimacies”

presented by Corey J. Miles

In this SouthTalk, Corey J. Miles will journey to the inner lives of southern trap rappers to explore how both frustration and care for the region refuse traditional explanation. Miles is an ethnographer of the Black South and an assistant professor of sociology and Africana studies at Tulane University. His book, Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South, investigates the ways Black people have built the South while being simultaneously excluded from it.

In his work, Miles captures the complexity of Black life and death in the American South. His work has been published in the Journal of Hip-Hop Studies, Cultural Studies, the Howard Journal of Communication, Humanity and Society, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Wednesday, October 30, at 6 p.m.

South Oxford Campus (SOC) 2301 S. Lamar Blvd., Stage 1

Film Screening of “Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power” + Q&A with Director

Sam Pollard, Fall 2024 Visiting Documentarian

The Center for the Study of Southern Culture and instructors affiliated with the MFA in Documentary Expression host a visiting documentarian once per semester. The invited documentarian spends two days on campus meeting with students one-on-one and participates in a public screening of their work followed by  Q&A. This series provides opportunities for students to enhance their professional development and allows the university and the larger LOU community to engage with renowned documentarians.

This fall, Sam Pollard is the Center’s Visiting Documentarian. Pollard is an accomplished feature film and television video editor and documentary producer/director. 2022 and 2023 were very productive years for Pollard. In December 2022, Peacock began streaming Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, a film Pollard co-directed with Gandbhir, which tells the story of the courageous campaign of citizens and activists who faced violence and oppression in the struggle for the right to vote. Pollard also co-directed South to Black Power, inspired by New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s book, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto; it premiered on HBO in Fall 2023.

“Revolutionary Verticality? The Black Panther Party as Media Company”

presented by Rich Purcell 

At the height of its influence, the Black Panther Party was one of the most important and controversial political parties in the United States. It was well known for confronting anti-Black racism, police brutality, and the carceral state, as well as for establishing community-based mutual-aid programs. Lesser known was the party’s establishment of Stronghold Consolidated Productions, Inc., a business entity that the Black Panther Party incorporated in 1970 to manage its finances, print The Black Panther newspaper, and to negotiate various book, music, film projects.

In this SouthTalk, Rich Purcell, the Hubert H. McAlexander Chair of English at the University of Mississippi, will draw from material about Stronghold Consolidated Productions, Inc. from Huey P. Newton and Black Panther Party archives to reveal the party’s cinematic aspirations and its attempts to control the party’s intellectual property. Purcell will illuminate how the Black Panther Party’s intensely capitalistic relationship to intellectual property vis-à-vis Strongarm Consolidated Productions, Inc. both connects with and clashes with its own and other left-progressive theories of media, revolutionary cinema, and finance capitalism in the 1970s.

Friday, December 6, at 6:00 p.m.

Barnard Observatory

Fall Documentary Showcase

The Fall Documentary Showcase is a celebration of the work of Southern Studies documentary students. Each artist presents their work, followed by a Q&A session.