South Talks

“Jonesland: A Legacy of Extraction and Survival” presented by Jazmin Miller and Anya Groner

Jonesland is one of many historic Black communities along the lower Mississippi River, and like many free towns, Jonesland’s future, and remarkable past, is at risk. Southeast Louisiana, sometimes called Cancer Alley, is home to a quarter of the nation’s petrochemical industries. As one resident puts it, “They took our air. They took our land. They’ve taken our water. We can’t even worship in the river.” Join filmmaker Jazmin Miller and reporter Anya Groner to learn about the history of extraction, the survival of an extended Black family, and the remarkable secret they kept for more than a century.

Groner is an award-winning journalist, fiction writer, and essayist, with work in Guernica, the New York Times,the Oxford American, Orion Magazine and the Atlantic. Her audio reporting is featured in Monument Lab’s podcast Plot of Land, which explores how land ownership and housing in the United States have been shaped by the entrenched interplay of power, public memory, and privatization. She lives in New Orleans and teaches creative writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Art and the New Orleans Writers Workshop.

Miller is a theatre artist, filmmaker, and the executive director of the non-profit Carpenter Art Garden. She is currently working on a forthcoming documentary film, Jonesland, and is also featured on two episodes of Monument Lab’s podcast Plot of Land. Miller lives in Memphis and is passionate about equity, youth development, and education and spends a majority of her time serving on nonprofit boards and other volunteer efforts.

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.”

“‘Jews, Heathens, and Other Dissenters’: New Perspectives on Race and Religion in the American South” presented by Shari Rabin

The 1669 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina anticipated the arrival of Jews alongside “heathens, and other dissenters from the purity of the Christian religion.” Meanwhile, the Code Noir, which governed French Louisiana, banned Jewish settlement altogether. Nevertheless, by the middle of the eighteenth-century Jews came to settle in both places, and by 1749 and 1828, respectively, they had formed Jewish congregations. This talk will explore how Jews fit into the complex power relations of the colonial South and the broader Atlantic world; what the extant evidence tells us about the religious lives they created; and why these histories are important for understanding broader dynamics of race and religion in the region.

Shari Rabin is associate professor of Jewish studies and religion and chair of Jewish studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America, which won the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies. She is currently at work on a history of Jews, religion, and race in the US South, from the seventeenth century to the present day.

This event is cosponsored by the Jewish Federation of Oxford.

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.”

“Introducing the Southern Music Research Center” presented by Burgin Mathews

Earlier this year, the nonprofit Southern Music Research Center (SMRC) launched its online archive: a searchable public repository of rare photos, rescued recordings, oral history interviews, and ephemera reflecting a deep diversity of music communities, expressions, and experiences across the American South. In this talk, SMRC director Burgin Mathews will offer a virtual tour of the archive’s initial holdings, exploring images from Birmingham, Alabama’s influential but unsung jazz history; lost-and-found tapes from Mississippi hymn singings; a cache of southern punk flyers; recordings, photos, and film from historic, music-rich Beech Mountain, North Carolina; and more. The talk will conclude with a preview of major projects and collections currently underway by the organization and details about how the broader public can get involved in documenting their own local music histories.

Burgin Mathews is founding director of the Southern Music Research Center, host of The Lost Child roots music radio show, and author of the forthcoming Magic City: How the Birmingham Jazz Tradition Shaped the Sound of America.

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.”

“Shalom Y’all: The History of Jews in Mississippi” presented by Stuart Rockoff

In the early 19th century, Jewish immigrants from Europe began to arrive in the Magnolia State, settling initially in towns along the Mississippi River. Concentrating in retail trade, these Jews became visible symbols of economic modernity and market capitalism in Mississippi. Throughout much of their history, Mississippi Jews have worked to lessen the cultural differences between themselves and their neighbors. In recent decades, due to regionwide economic and demographic trends, the Jewish population of Mississippi has declined and become concentrated in the state’s population centers.

Stuart Rockoff received his doctorate in U.S. history from the University of Texas at Austin with a special emphasis on race, immigration, and American Jewish history. He has taught courses in American and ethnic history at such schools as the University of Texas and Millsaps College and has published numerous articles and essays on southern Jewish history. For 11 years, he served as the historian at the Institute of Southern Life. In November 2013 he became the executive director of the Mississippi Humanities Council, one of the 56 state and territorial affiliates of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Jackson.

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.”

“Down in the Delta” presented by Vanessa Charlot

The complicated histories of Black life in the American South, ladened with cotton fields and the remnants of Jim Crow, has imprinted itself upon the hauntingly beautiful contemporary landscape of the Mississippi Delta. The project, Down in the Delta, is a visual archive of the lived experiences and legacy of Roosevelt Davenport (b. 1937), a former sharecropper, and his family, who all worked and now own a piece of the land on the Quito Plantation in Morgan City, where their ancestors were once kept as enslaved people. This project sheds light on Black American roots and those who chose to stay in the Delta and create family, home, and community.

Vanessa Charlot is an award-winning photographer, filmmaker, and an assistant professor of creative multimedia at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism and New Media. Her work focuses on the intersectionality of race, politics, culture, and sexual/gender expression in order to explore the collective human experience. The purpose of her work is to produce visual representations free of an oppressive gaze. Charlot seeks to humanize Black bodies through her photography, restoring the dignity and vitality of those often shot as subjects divorced from context, motives, and histories. Her work invites us all to question our relationship to what we think about when we see Black bodies as static images and in motion.

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.”

 Fall Documentary Showcase

The Fall Documentary Showcase is a celebration of the work by our documentary students. Each artist will present their work, followed by a Q&A session with questions from the audience.