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This volume showcases, but also interrogates, the value of Atlantic World approaches to the histories and cultures of the American South. Challenging the traditional chronological focus of most Atlantic history on the Early Modern period, the volume ranges from colonial times to the modern era, while thematically it embraces a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to topics such as economics, migration, religion, revolution, law, slavery, race relations, emancipation, gender, literature, performance, visual culture, memoir, ethnography, empires, nations, and historiography. Geographically, the chapters focus mainly on the southern region of the North American continent and the lands in and around the Atlantic Ocean-although the physical location of a putative “Atlantic World” and, for that matter, of something we can call an “American South” are among the definitional issues with which the volume wrestles. Ultimately, the value of any grand concept such as Atlantic History, or Atlantic Studies, or the Black Atlantic depends on its capacity to explain past or present social realities. The cumulative effect of the mix of case studies and state-of-the-field essays gathered in this volume is to affirm that there is much to be learned about both the American South and the Atlantic World by considering them together and from diverse disciplinary perspectives. In so doing, the volume makes a valuable contribution to the fields of American, southern, and Atlantic Studies.

Black Art in Brazil explores the work of five artists from different regions of Brazil—Abdias do Nascimento, Ronaldo Rego, Eustáquio Neves, Ayrson Heráclito, and Rosana Paulino—against the wider backdrop of socio—historical and political developments taking place at the national and popular levels in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book traces the history of national and international interest in black art in Brazil, changes in the related terminology, and development of the discourse. Excerpts from interviews with artists and curators illustrate how different individuals understand and relate to the increasingly popular label “Afro—Brazilian art.” The publication also expands upon current scholarship by introducing its readers to a variety of paintings, prints, photographs, installations, sculptures, and performance pieces produced outside the Afro—Brazilian religious communities for secular audiences. The book’s in-depth analysis of different works demonstrates how some Brazilian art conveys “blackness” through visual vocabulary and how the markers of black art and culture have continued to diversify. In comparing modern (post-1920) and contemporary (post-1985) production, the book reveals that as the discourse on race, ethnicity, and black art began to change in the 1970s, so too did artists shift the creative focus from exploring their African cultural heritage to producing work that confronts current race—related social challenges in Brazil.

This book explores how an eclectic range of narratives and images of the American South have been created and consumed—indeed, often created for consumption. The thirteen essays orient our attention to the ways in which ideas and stories about “the South” and “southernness” have social and material effects that register on various local, regional, national, and transnational scales. Like the two previously published volumes in this series, Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South and The American South and the Atlantic World (both 2013), Creating and Consuming the American South brings southern historians into dialogue with literary and cultural studies colleagues associated with the New Southern Studies. However, this collection also includes scholars who do not identify as “southernists,” and who approach the subject from a variety of other disciplinary perspectives, including American studies, performance studies, jazz studies, and queer studies. The book is organized into three parts. Part one showcases three wide-ranging conceptual essays by leading scholars in southern history and the New Southern Studies. Part two of the book features five innovative case studies of the South’s creation and consumption, from blues festivals and jazz venues to sites of sexuality and the creative economy of post-New Orleans. The five essays in Part three consider the transnational routes through which the South has been circulated, (re)created, and consumed, including Vietnamese immigration, William Faulkner’s State Department travels, and British cinematic and musical productions.

From battlegrounds to birthplaces and sites in between, heritage tourism has always been part of how the South attracts visitors—and defines itself—yet such sites are often understudied in the scholarly literature. The contributors to this volume explore the narrative of southern history and how it is often complicated by race, influenced by local politics, and shaped by competing memories. Destination Dixie reveals that heritage tourism in the South is about more than just marketing destinations and filling hotel rooms; it cuts to the heart of how southerners seek to shape their identity and image for a broader touring public—now often made up of northerners and southerners alike.

This book positions the Dirty Harry film series as a key agent and index of the American conservative backlash against 1960s liberalism. The San Francisco–based series cemented Clint Eastwood and his character, Harry Callahan, as central figures in 1970s and 1980s Hollywood cinema. This is the first study to identify the series as an important source for understanding the culture and politics of the post-1960s era. Through close readings of the films and the contemporary political climate, it demonstrates how the series interacts with, critiques, and refracts the legacy of postwar liberalism. It reveals that the films locate San Francisco as the symbolic battleground for the era’s political struggles and maintains that through referencing real events, ideas, and political arguments, the films themselves became participants in these struggles. Particular attention is paid to the films’ representation of crime, family and community, sexuality, and race. The book evaluates Callahan’s long afterlife in American political discourse, cinema, pop culture, and Eastwood’s later political and cinematic career. This lively, thought-provoking and rigorous book will encourage readers to reconsider the conservative backlash in new light and return to the Dirty Harry films with a new appreciation of their political, historical, and cultural significance.

Excavating Memory explores memory as contested social practice in the present rather than as a passive recollection of the past. Through a diverse set of material and discursive strategies, memory is seen as a complex process that involves remembering and forgetting, erasure and inscription, absence and presence. It is from the folds between remembering and forgetting that sites of memory emerge. Taking a cue from archaeology, the collection of essays in this volume parses the multiple layers of meaning and tenuous lines of power that memory work produces. Offering a variety of approaches to the study of memory—from anthropology and archaeology to sociology, history, philosophy, literature, and archival studies—the authors explore such diverse arenas as public protests, memorials and art installations, archaeological objects, human remains, colonial landscapes, testimonies, and digital space as sites of memory.

Film noir, which flourished in the 1940s and 50s, reflected the struggles and sentiments of post-war America. This book contends that the genre, with its emphasis on dark subject matter, paralleled the class conflict in labor and union movements that dominated the period. By following the evolution of film noir during the years following World War II, the author illustrates how the noir figure represents labor as a whole. In the 1940s, both radicalized union members and protagonists of noir films were hunted and pursued by the law. Later, as labor unions achieved broad acceptance and respectability, the central noir figure shifted from fugitive criminal to law-abiding cop. Expanding his investigation into the Cold War and post 9/11 America, the author extends his analysis of the ways film noir is intimately connected to labor history.

Youngtown, Arizona, opened in 1954 and was the first development community to have a minimum age requirement (then 65) and to ban underage children as permanent residents. Developer Del Webb unveiled Sun City six years later. Adjacent to Youngtown, it offered modest homes abutting a golf course. In the ensuing decades, active adult communities have proliferated, including Harold Schwartz's “The Villages” in central Florida, today the nation's single largest retirement community. For nearly 60 years, the success of these and similar communities have changed the image of retirees from frail, impoverished old people to energetic, well-off adults enjoying a resort-like lifestyle. While some experts predicted these communities would fail or undermine the obligations between generations, they are now firmly embedded as one possible extension of the American dream. This is a book-length history of the “active adult” lifestyle. Examining the origins, development, failures, and challenges facing these communities as the baby boomer population continues to age, the book offers a truly original defense of a sometimes controversial aspect of American life.

La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence aims to facilitate an interdisciplinary understanding of the complex Trans-Atlantic connections between Spain, Africa and the Americas that influenced Florida’s past; the demands that Florida faces in its present as a crossroad of cultures and peoples; and the ensuing challenges that will continue to shape its future as one of the most diverse states in the nation. Prefaced by an anchor piece and structured in two parts framing Florida as a Spanish territory and as a state of the Union, the thirteen essays of the volume engage in significant episodes in Florida’s history that evince its global imprint since Ponce de León’s landfall, to the current influence of Hispanic politics in the peninsula and onto the national scene. Each piece in the book is fully independent from the others. But by virtue of the chronological order in which they are all presented, their interdisciplinary topics, perspectives and contexts produce a web of connections that give temporal consistency, balance and continuity to the volume. The book plan offers the reader both a panoramic view and unique focal interdisciplinary perspectives on the ways Florida’s Spanish legacies took root and how they keep running deep.

This book focuses upon Disney World in Florida as the project in which Walt became most invested, personally and financially, before his death. It examines primary themes in the history of the built environment and human creativity that persist at Disney World. These themes include: the need for community, the desire to intensify experiences, and the impulse to enhance existence beyond the everyday. These themes are extended through traditional historical forms to, perhaps the least expected one, a theme park. The book’s structure adopts that of Disney World’s Magic Kingdom park, with the preface and conclusion serving as an entry gate and an exit respectively. The first chapter operates much like the Magic Kingdom’s “lands” by offering a series of thematic investigations. Disney World is considered as a pilgrimage center, a utopia, a fantasy city, and a technological and global microcosm. Several readings of Disney World are interrelated in the book’s studies of its reach of power and function as a sort of paradise. Through this approach, Disney World emerges as a nuanced and even contradictory place that heightens the frictions of social life between the public and private spheres, consumption and contemplation, enthusiastic celebrations, and nagging doubts.