Date of Award
8-1-2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in English
First Advisor
Judson Watson
Second Advisor
Adam Gussow
Third Advisor
Ian Whittington
School
University of Mississippi
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
Mississippi Modernism looks to the Mississippi River Valley of the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth century to analyze the ways individuals expressed and determined their experience in the changing world. By engaging with theories of modernity from Marshall Berman and the Black modernism of Houston A. Baker, Jr. this work proposes the Mississippi watershed as a region where individuals indulge in the processes of modernism remaking the environments, both urban and rural, surrounding them. By thinking about the “dry†and “wet†valleys envisioned by European settlers as Christopher Morris terms it, Mississippi Modernism reflects W. E. B. Du Bois’s exclusively African American of “double consciousness.†Additionally, this project utilizes Antonio BenÃtez-Rojo’s conception of the “repeating island†of the Caribbean archipelago to formulate a river that repeats in art and infrastructure. The analysis herein parses both the material and the cultural elements of the working-class and Black formations of the repeating river. Railroads, levees, and bridges receive special attention as they are the repeating rivers of Mississippi modernity and allow for a fuller understanding of the way Black subjects move in the river valley. Blues culture sits as a framework of this work; therefore, this project will deal in a wide range of media from literary analysis to a panoply oral and aural cultures. Via the exploration of musical figures W. C. Handy, Bessie Smith, and Gertrude “Ma†Rainey, Mississippi Modernism comes to know more fully the literary elements of writers Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright.
Recommended Citation
Palmer, William C., "Mississippi Modernism: The River Valley and Race in American Culture, 1892-1945" (2022). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2390.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2390