Title: Death and the American South ed. by Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover
Abstract: Reviewed by: Death and the American Southed. by Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover David Silkenat Death and the American South. Edited by Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover. Cambridge Studies on the American South. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 280. $95.00, ISBN 978-1-107-08420-9.) Based on a conference held at North Carolina State University in 2011, this intriguing edited collection highlights the centrality of death and deathways in the southern experience. The volume’s editors, Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (both of whom also contribute essays), argue that while the collection explores “the intimate relationship between death and southern history,” they have no intention of articulating a distinctly southern conception of death (p. 2). With eleven essays by contributors including both senior scholars and recent Ph.D.s (and everything in between), this collection ranges chronologically from the settlement of Jamestown to the 1990s and thematically from suicide to yellow fever epidemics and from scalping to [End Page 998]1930s condolence notes. In this unvaryingly excellent set of essays, the authors throughout highlight the political, social, and cultural uses of death in the American South. Although the essays in this collection do not speak to one another in any substantive way, several connecting themes emerge. Not unsurprisingly, many of the essays highlight the relationship between southern ideas about death and race. Craig Thompson Friend’s essay examines how peoples of Native American, European, and African descent in the colonial South used the mutilation of dead enemies to further political goals. Friend contrasts the use of scalping and beheading as tools of terror to establish racial dominance. In one of the collection’s most original essays, Jamie Warren examines the contested nature of enslaved people’s corpses. She argues that although slave owners claimed mastery over slaves’ living bodies, death transformed this relationship. Many slave owners, Warren argues, recognized the claim that enslaved African Americans had to the dead bodies of their kin. Other slave owners, however, believed that their control extended after death, consigning enslaved bodies to medical schools for anatomical research and dissection. The centrality of evangelical religion also features prominently in many of the essays. Peter N. Moore’s essay examines how colonial South Carolina evangelicals articulated ideas about the “good death” (p. 38). Moore clearly demonstrates that dying in the eighteenth-century South was overlaid with political, interpersonal, and spiritual dimensions. He argues that southern evangelicals proved surprisingly elastic in adapting idealized “evangelical endings” to particular local circumstances (p. 38). In the collection’s most idiosyncratic essay, Donald G. Mathews explores the 1910 suicide of a Georgia minister, the Reverend Lundy Howard Harris. Tormented throughout his life by alcohol abuse, religious doubt, and extramarital sex with black women, Harris struggled to reconcile the man he thought he ought to be with the man he was. A third theme that emerges is the use of death and mourning rituals in the creation of national identity. Lorri Glover’s essay explores how the death narratives of Virginians George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison helped “cement the historic reputation of these revolutionaries as southern gentlemen and American heroes” (p. 61). Jewel Spangler’s intriguing essay examines the national mourning after the attack on the Chesapeakein 1807 and the Richmond Theatre fire of 1811. She argues that the absence of significant regional differences in the response to these incidents provides evidence for “a sense of national connectedness” and “a distinctive form of national mourning” (p. 109). In a collection with such uniformly solid contributions, it is difficult to single out individual essays for praise or condemnation. The collection’s other essays by Andrew Denson, Diane Miller Sommerville, Kristine M. McCusker, Jeff Strickland, and Jason Morgan Ward are all welcome additions, broadening the volume’s scope. One issue that the collection could have done more to address is the extent to which some of the phenomena discussed were particularly southern and to what extent they reflected broader trends in American deathways. For instance, McCusker’s intriguing [End Page 999]essay on the development of condolence notes could have done more to situate them within a broader framework...
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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