[This past
weekend, I had the opportunity to attend my first Southern Historical Association
annual conference, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Thanks to a We’re History piece of mine, I was invited by Elaine Frantz
Parsons to take part in a wonderful panel on the Reconstruction-era KKK. In
this series I’ll follow up both that panel and other takeaways from this great
conference!]
A few takeaways
from my impressive fellow panelists and the excellent conversation that
followed our talks.
1)
Professor
Kidada Williams, with whom I’ve been Twitter friends for a long time
but whom it was just as inspiring to hear in person as I would have predicted, presented
a paper from her book in progress on the effects of night riding and KKK
attacks on African American lives, families, homes, communities, and more. Her
connections of trauma studies and postcolonial theory to these historical and
cultural subjects promise to be as innovative and important as is her first book,
and I was particularly struck by both her close readings of African American
testimonies before the Congressional hearings
on the KKK and her broader, interdisciplinary analyses of these acts of
testimony and witnessing of violent events and histories. Can’t wait to read
that next book!
2)
Graduate
student Katie Lennard, whom I’ve just followed on Twitter while writing
this blog post, presented a paper drawn from her dissertation on the evolution
and meanings of the KKK’s uniforms. This project brings together material
culture, cultural and social histories, economic and political histories, and
American Studies lenses in ways that are of course deeply inspiring to this
AmericanStudier. I was especially impressed by her ability to weave together
close readings of literary and cultural works (such as 21 pre-Thomas Dixon
novels that feature the KKK, most of which I knew nothing about), material and
visual culture analyses of college fraternity images and materials from the
late 19th century, and historical moments such as William
Joseph Simmons’ 1915 reconstitution of the KKK. Her dissertation promises
to contribute significantly to our collective conversations and memories!
3)
The remainder of our time included commentary
from both Bruce Baker and Michael Fitzgerald,
important additions from Elaine (based in part on her forthcoming
book on the Klan), and a number of helpful questions and ideas from our
very good-sized (especially for the conference’s final session) audience. Of
the many ideas I could highlight from those great conversations, I’ll focus
here on one: Bruce’s thought, in response to my description of various literary
and cultural texts as presenting conversions to the Southern perspective, that
it might be possible to describe these as racist conversion narratives,
alluding to both anti-racist such narratives from white abolitionists and the
long-standing American genre of the
Puritan conversion narrative. As with so many ideas from this evocative and
provocative panel, I’ll be thinking about this a lot as my work moves forward!
Next SHA follow
up tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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