Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Countercultural South

The Countercultural South

Kirby, Jack Temple

Hardcover

Series: Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures, Book 38

AnthropologyGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 0820317233
ISBN13: 9780820317236
Publisher: Univ Of Georgia Pr
Published: Oct 1 1995
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.83
Height: 0.81 Width: 5.84 Depth: 9.35
Language: English

At once upholding and refuting the South's conservative image, The Countercultural South explores the politically divergent cultures of resistance created by poor white and working-class black southern men. With humor and insight, Jack Temple Kirby traces these racially and politically opposed cultures back to the antebellum encounter between the anti-capitalistic South and the capitalist individualism identified with the North.

In a wide-ranging discussion encompassing the blues, sharecropping, and contemporary black intellectuals, Kirby shows how the needful practice of black labor bargaining in the South resulted in a progressive black tradition of verbal negotiation. The conservative separatism and retro-resistance of rural whites, Kirby argues, is embedded in an inherited and adversarial frontier ethos valuing self-sufficiency and access to wilderness. With the southern landscape imaginatively as well as factually linked to social class, crime--particularly forest arson--becomes the most important form of southern white countercultural expression.

Kirby continues his look at white resistance in a review of redneck discourse, examining the public reputation of southern whites through a range of cultural phenomena, from literature to country music to the computer network known as BUBBA-L. Original, personal, and artfully written, The Countercultural South offers fresh reflections on southern exceptionalism in American political life and culture.

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