Sharon Monteith

Gender and the civil rights movement

This book is a collection of nine essays that analyse the people, the protests and the incidents of the civil rights movement through the lens of gender. More than just a study of women, the book examines the ways in which assigned sexual roles and values shaped the strategy, tactics and ideology of the movement. The essays deal with topics ranging from the Montgomery bus boycott and Rhythm and Blues to gangsta rap and contemporary fiction, from the 1950s to the 1990s. Referring to groups such as the National Council of African American Men and events such as the Million Man March, the authors address male gender identity as much as female, arguing that slave/master relations carried over from before the Civil War continued to affect Black masculinity in the post-war battle for civil rights. Whereas feminism traditionally deals with issues of patriarchy and prescribed gender roles, this volume shows how race relations continue to complicate sex-based definitions within the civil rights movement.

The movie-made Movement

Film history cannibalises images, expropriates themes and techniques, and decants them into the contents of our collective memory. Movie memories are influenced by the (inter)textuality of media styles – Fredric Jameson has gone so far as to argue that such styles displace ‘real’ history. The Civil Rights Movement made real history but the Movement struggle was also a media event, played out as a teledrama in homes across the world in the 1950s and 1960s, and it is being replayed as a cinematic event. The interrelationship of popular memory and cinematic representations finds a telling case study in the civil rights era in the American South. This chapter assesses what films made after the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s express about the failure of the Movement to sustain and be sustained in its challenges to inequality and racist injustice. It argues that popular cultural currency relies on invoking images present in the sedimented layers of civil rights preoccupations but that in the 1980s and 1990s movies also tap into ‘structures of feeling’. Historical verisimilitude is bent to include what Tom Hayden called in 1962 ‘a reassertion of the personal’ as part of the political, but it is also bent to re-present the Movement as a communal struggle in which ordinary southern white people are much more significant actors in the personal and even the public space of civil rights politics than was actually the case. Historical facts as we retrieve and interpret them are only one facet of the movie-made Movement.

‘I second that emotion’: a case for using imaginative sources in writing civil rights history

ABSTRACT Imaginative sources are a rich archival store. Facts may be as slippery as the sources in which they are contained, but to limit the sources we use in building a civil rights historiography is to risk curtailing the reach and interdisciplinary scope of historical scholarship. We need to read imaginative and subjective sources as objects for the study, analysis and explanation of the Civil Rights Movement. In civil rights, as in other historical subjects, there is a privileging of an ‘objective’, detached approach to historiography in which ‘the knower’ is made distinct from what is known, and fact distinct from its imaginative representation. Monteiths essay argues that much can be gained by examining those sources in which the feeling of the movement is explored sensitively and intellectually—or even exploited. Organizers in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Freedom Summer volunteers chose to represent the movement in fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction, and found themselves represented in fiction films. Monteith argues that imagination and emotion should be more closely incorporated into civil rights history writing but attention needs to be paid to genre and style if generically unstable sources are not to be misread as unadorned fact.

Sally Hemings in Visual Culture: A Radical Act of the Imagination?

The scandalous suspicion that Thomas Jefferson had a sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, and was the father of slave children has persisted for more than two centuries. This article examines the ways in which their relationship, most particularly the image of Sally Hemings, has been represented in visual culture. It explores Hemings as dramatised in cinematic and television productions, but pays particular attention to her representation in art and sculpture and the extent to which the medium of expression may contribute to her conceptualisation as a avant-garde or radical subject whose meaning is much more than the sum of her parts.

Advancing Sisterhood? Interracial Friendships in Contemporary Southern Fiction

This study explores the relationships of black and white women in the context of contemporary southern fiction. It provides an overview of literary incarnations of friendship and examines how prevalent specific relationships have become in certain writers work.