The Bohemian South

Creating Countercultures, from Poe to Punk

Shawn Chandler Bingham, Lindsey A. Freeman, Shawn Chandler Bingham, Lindsey A. Freeman

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781469631677, 9781469631660
• eBook ISBN: 9781469631684
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

From the southern influence on nineteenth-century New York to the musical legacy of late-twentieth-century Athens, Georgia, to the cutting-edge cuisines of twenty-first-century Asheville, North Carolina, the bohemian South has long contested traditional views of the region. Yet, even as the fruits of this creative South have famously been celebrated, exported, and expropriated, the region long was labeled a cultural backwater. This timely and illuminating collection uses bohemia as a novel lens for reconsidering more traditional views of the South. Exploring wide-ranging locales, such as Athens, Austin, Black Mountain College, Knoxville, Memphis, New Orleans, and North Carolina’s Research Triangle, each essay challenges popular interpretations of the South, while highlighting important bohemian sub- and countercultures. The Bohemian South provides an important perspective in the New South as an epicenter for progress, innovation, and experimentation.

Contributors include Scott Barretta, Shawn Chandler Bingham, Jaime Cantrell, Jon Horne Carter, Alex Sayf Cummings, Lindsey A. Freeman, Grace E. Hale, Joanna Levin, Joshua Long, Daniel S. Margolies, Chris Offutt, Zandria F. Robinson, Allen Shelton, Daniel Cross Turner, Zackary Vernon, and Edward Whitley.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers indicate illustrations.

AAUP. See American Association of University Professors

Abernethy, Milton “Ab,” 245

Acculturation, Rough South in, 149

Adamic, Louis, 59

Adams, Shelby Lee, 271, 275–76

Advertising: in Garden and Gun, 264, 266, 267, 268–69, 277; in Oxford American, 264–65, 274, 277, 278–79

African Americans. See Black Americans

Afrobooks (Memphis), 240 (n. 9)

Afropunk, 226, 229, 232

Afropunk festival (Brooklyn), 232

Agee, James, 73–84; death of, 84 (n. 1); on Fantastic Art exhibition, 76; in Fortune magazine, 78–79; Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 76, 77–81, 86 (nn. 15–16); New York apartments of, 84, 86 (n. 16), 87 (n. 35); as Southern superrealist, 77–84, 307; as surrealist, 76, 78; in transition magazine, 76, 85 (n. 8); Wolfe’s influence on, 1. See also Death in the Family

Albers, Annie, 56–57

Albers, Josef, 56, 61, 65, 66

Alibar, Lucy, 158

Alienation, 12

Allen, Richard “Dick,” 169–70

Allen, Tony, 225

Allison, Dorothy, 110–15, 120–23; as bohemian vs. hipster, 306; on comfort food, 111–12, 120–23; davenport’s critique of feminism and, 118; “Dumpling Child,” 110–12; on food as memory, 107; “I Chose This Ground,” 110; “A Lesbian Appetite,” 120–23; Lesbian Sex Mafia of, 125 (n. 35); “Sex Writing, the Importance and the Difficulty,” 117; Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature, 110; “Tomato Song,” 110, 112–14, 124 (n. 29); “the women who hate me” (poem), 110; The Women Who Hate Me (collection), 110–15

Amateurism, in Athens music scene, 184, 185, 188, 191, 194

American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 54, 55

American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary (Barker and McKee), 149–50

American Mercury (Mencken), 266

Americ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Bohemian Groves in Southern Soil
• The Southern Origins of Bohemian New York: Edward Howland, Ada Clare, and Edgar Allan Poe
• The Double Dealers in Bohemian New Orleans
• A Community Far Afield: Black Mountain College and the Southern Estrangement of the Avant-Garde
• James Agee and the Southern Superreal
• Countercultural Structures of Contemporary Global South Poetry
• Down Home and Out: Southern Lesbian Writers and the Sex Life of Food
• Trash Food
• My Yankee Traitor Heart
• Southern Cinematic Slumming: The Rough South Turn in Post-South Film
• Southern Expressions of the Blues Revival
• Acting Out: The Athens, Georgia, Music Scene and the Emergence of a Bohemian Diaspora
• Reimagined Old-Time Music Cultures in the Trainhopping Punk Rock South
• Space, Time, and Race in Dirty South Bohemia
• We Think a Lot: From Square to Hip in North Carolina’s Research Triangle
• Bohemian Groves, Grooves, Gardens, and Guns: The Hybrid Worlds of Bohemian and Bourgeoisie Southern Magazines
• Liminality and the Search for the New Austin Bohemianism
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index