Michael P. Bibler - Böcker

Just Below South is the first book to examine the U.S. South and the Caribbean as a ""regional interculture"" shaped by performance - as a space defined not so much by a shared set of geographical boundaries or by a single, common culture as by the weave of performances and identities moving across and throughout it. By offering fresh ways for thinking about region, language, and performance, the volume helps to reimagine the possibilities for American Studies. It advances beyond current analyses of historical or literary commonalities between the South and the Caribbean to explore startling and significant connections between a range of performances, including Trinidadian carnival, Civil War reenactments, the Martinican dance form kalenda, dramatic adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin, rituals of spirit possession, the teaching of Haitian Kreyol, the translation of Louisiana Creole, and the imaginative ""travels"" of southern and Caribbean writers. While generating textual conversations among scholars of Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone literature and culture and forging innovative ties between cultural studies, performance studies, linguistics, literary analysis, and studies of the African diaspora, these essays raise provocative new questions about race, ethnicity, gender, class, and nationality.

Finally breaking through heterosexual cliches of flirtatious belles and cavaliers, sinister black rapists and lusty 'Jezebels', ""Cotton's Queer Relations"" exposes the queer dynamics embedded in myths of the southern plantation. Focusing on works by Ernest J. Gaines, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, Margaret Walker, William Styron, and Arna Bontemps, Michael P. Bibler shows how each one uses figures of same-sex intimacy to suggest a more progressive alternative to the pervasive inequalities tied historically and symbolically to the South's most iconic institution. Bibler looks specifically at relationships between white men of the planter class, between plantation mistresses and black maids, and between black men, arguing that while the texts portray the plantation as a rigid hierarchy of differences, these queer relations privilege a notion of sexual sameness that joins the individuals as equals in a system where equality is rare indeed. Bibler reveals how these models of queer egalitarianism attempt to reconcile the plantation's regional legacies with national debates about equality and democracy, particularly during the eras of the New Deal, World War II, and the civil rights movement. ""Cotton's Queer Relations"" charts bold new territory in southern studies and queer studies alike, bringing together history and cultural theory to offer innovative readings of classic southern texts.