Kwanzaa 2016/ Umoja Notes

KWANZAA 2016/UMOJA NOTES

Based on his reading of John Edgar Wideman's Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File (New York: Scribner, 2016), the philosophical novelist Charles Johnson might choose one day to enlighten us about race and being and some infernal functions of narrative.  He might choose to expand ideas  he presented in "The End of the Black American Narrative" (The American Scholar, Summer 2008, 32-42).  There he suggested that "the old black American narrative has outlived its usefulness as a tool of interpretation" and that in the 21st century we need "new and better stories…with the understanding that each is, at best, a provisional reading of reality" (42).  The identities of "we" and "need" are still mysterious in 2016; they dance with other sub-atomic particles.  We who need epistemological comfort recognize the old white American narrative is a fragile, rusty tool.  It has utility neither in a Donald Trump world nor in a Bob Dylan one.  The vexed, bogus, ancient primal colors of race ---brown, yellow, white, red --- need attention the splinters of narrative emotion on Twitter are incapable of providing.  Johnson is philosophically honest.  He warrants our philosophical trust.

Stories are true lies; lies, true stories.  It is universally acknowledged that actuality demands the publication of reality lies for its completion.  Wideman is an accomplished writer of fictions as well as the factions appropriate for confessional autobiography.  Just reread his novels The Lynchers, Reuben, The Cattle Killing, Philadelphia Fire, and Fanon and his nonfictional anatomies of the heart Brothers and Keepers: A Memoir and Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society.  Should these works fail to evoke your sympathy, know that you are as post-human as Trump and his fascist soulmates.  So be it.  Don't worry.  Be happy.

In a Christmas Eve letter to a former student, I recommended that he read Writing to Save a Life. He wrote in a letter, dated Dec. 18, 2016:

I did read the two books you reviewed last year, "The Education of Kevin Powell" and "Between the World and Me." I found the Powell book to be well worth the read, but was disappointed in the Coates work after all the favorable comments in the mainstream media.  I found that neither rose to the level of "Black Boy," the complete version which I read earlier this year, and a reminder of my esteem for Wright.  There are so much variety in the lives and histories of black folk in this country, and yet it seems race as a chief character is usually present, having an influence that is unmistakable. Is that how we are most defined even today, by our skin color?

………

Race certainly seems to be the central force in the books by Powell and Coates.  I am not sure whether I should simply accept that as reality, should regret that two contemporary black writers have that as their reality  even today, or should consider that this race thing is taken too seriously by some black folk.

I recommended the Wideman book, so that his trepidation might be confirmed. My former student and I have not transcended Richard Wright or, as native Mississippians,  the legacies of Louis Till and his son Emmett, or as American citizens the Medusa-headed phenomenon that is taken too seriously by some  provisionally white, brown, yellow, and red folk who have no mirrors for their faces. Writing to Save a Life is an aesthetic model of literature that all of us need and deserve.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            December 26, 2016

poem at Christmas

AMERICAN CHRISTMAS AFTER CHINA 2016

 The lights                                           vile

                                                                evil

                                                                live

        Iurid lights                                  veil

        delights                                       transcend over hills and everywhere

mountains of people

seas of people

season to oblivion

         reason

         incense

         gold

         in sense

        neatly advertised unto them

        a son was born, a son was given

        love                         in

                                      night

                                      so they say

                                                         yes  so smoothly easy yearly

                                                         this carnival of consuming

                                                         the gifts so necessary           so vile  so evil

                                                                                                                veil  a riot/

                                                                                                                live a riot/ lights

                                                                                                                lurid original delights

tradition dis(re)members

as mountains tell

as seas revile

yes so smoothly easy yearly

this promise of salvation

gets swaddled and sung in a comedy of profit

                                                                                                and lost

                                                                                                as mountains consume

                                                                                                as seas reveal in tragedy

                                                                                                the gifts unnecessary

                                                                                                in lurid lights, in consumptive carnivals

                                                                                                where a son was never born

                                                                                                where a son was never given

                                                                                                but truly dis(re)membered.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.   25 December 2016

.

a busy year

 Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Professional Activities 2016

January 21---Interviewed by Attorney Cleophus Thomas, Jr. at Loloya University; videotaped by Justin Nystrom

January 21---Premiere of "#______Lives Matter," Irvin Mayfield and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra,

The Peoples Health New Orleans Jazz Market; contributed "#For Whom Does New Orleans Matter?" for program book

March 17---"Excellence in the Delta," speech for 2016 Honors Convocation, Mississippi Valley State University, Itta Bena, MS

April 2 ----  Panelist, "Terror and Survival in Life and Literature," 2016 Tennessee Williams Festival, Hotel Monteleone , New Orleans, LA

September 8 ---Discussion of Black Arts Movement conference, 9-11 Sep 16, with Quo Vadis Gex Breaux and Kim McMillon.  "Community Bulletin Board," WBOK-AM, New Orleans, LA

September 10 ---Black Arts Movement Conference: Southern Influences

Dillard University, New Orleans, LA

Joint Keynote Address ---Askia M. Toure and Jerry W. Ward, Jr

Panelist, Black Studies Roundtable

Moderator,  Southern Writers Roundtable [Quo Vadis Gex Breaux, Chakula Cha Jua, Mona Lisa Saloy, Kalamu ya Salaam, C. Liegh McInnis]

September 11 --Black Arts Movement Conference: Southern Influences

Dillard University, New Orleans, LA

Videotaped interview with Arnold Bourgeois, interviewer

October 19-21 ---Festival of "Conch-Us-nest," East St. Louis, MO

October 19 ---Master's Workshop and Panel,  ESUSIUE Higher Education Campus,

                          601 J. R. Thompson Drive, East St. Louis

October 20 ---"Talk with Students," East St. Louis Senior High School

                            EBR Writers Club 26th Annual "Break Word with the World,"

                           ESUSIUE Higher Education Campus

October 25 ---Interviewed by David Benedetto, WRBH Radio, New Orleans, LA

October 21  ---Tour and Commentary, E. B. Redmond Collection & Learning Center,

                           Lovejoy Library, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

                            " A Familistic Literary and Cultural Arts Celebration,"

                            Sunshine's Cultural Arts Center,  630 N 59th Street, East St. Louis

November 3 ---Reading and Book Launch for FRACTAL SONG, Crescent City Books/New Orleans

                              Museum of Music and the Cultural Arts

November 8 -- Taped interview with Susan Larsen for THE READING LIFE, WWNO,

                                University of New Orleans

November 11-13 ---5th Convention of the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics,

                                   Los Angeles, CA

November 11 ---Poetry Reading

November 13 --Moderator, Panel 3: Ethnicity and Poetry

November 13 --"The Discipline of the Kwansaba"

November 18---Lecture: "African American Autobiography: Voices from the South."

                                Minzu University (Beijing, China)

November 23 ---Lecture: "Carolyn Rodgers and Vernacular Theorizing" --Central China Normal University                          (CCNU)

November 25 --Lecture:  "African American Autobiography: Voices from the South."  Nanjing University                                             of Posts and Telecommunications (NUPT)

                                Lecture:  "Films by Spike Lee"  ---NUPT

November 28 ---Lecture:  "Tom Dent and the Imperatives of History" --CCNU

November 29 ---Lecture:  "Kevin Powell and Ta'Nehisi Coates" ---CCNU

November 30-December 1---Hubei Institute for Nationalities, Enshi, Hubei 445000

November 30 -----Lecture: "African American Autobiography"

                                    Lecture: "Tom Dent and the Imperatives of History"

December 1 ---     Lecture:  "The Discipline of the Kwansaba"

December 2-4 --Ethnic Literature and the African Focus: The 3rd International Symposium on Ethnic                                     Literature, Hangzhou, China

December 2 ----"The Discipline of the Kwansaba"

December  5-6 ---The 2nd Forum for Modern and Contemporary English Literature, Central China                                           Normal  University (Wuhan)

December 6 ---"Digital Humanities and Graduate Education in a Future"

December 7 ---Lecture: "The Blues and Blues_Jazz of Sterling D. Plumpp ---CCNU

December 8 ---Open Talk with English teachers at Taizhou University

                                Lecture:  "Why and How to Study Literature," Taizhou University

December 14 ---Lecture: "Richard Wright and Adaptation"---CCNU

                                Lecture:  "The Discipline of the Kwansaba" ---CCNU

Publications

"Footnote 666." Resisting Arrest: poems to stretch the sky. Ed. Tony Medina.  Durham, NC: Jacar Press, 2016: 141.

Review of  African American Haiku: Cultural Visions, ed. John Zheng.  Southern Quarterly 53.3-4( 2016): 225-227.

"Online Acts of (Re)discovery: A Hypertext Note." CLAJ 59.3 (2016): 225-231.

"Sterling D. Plumpp: A Son of the Blues." Conversations with Sterling Plumpp. Ed. John Zheng. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016: 11-35.

FRACTAL SONG: POEMS.  Boston: Black Widow Press, 2016.

Review of The Storied South by William Ferris. Valley Voices 16.2 (2016): 19-21.

Online publications

January 4, 2016--"Concussion"  BK Nation

http://bknation.org/2016/0/concussion

January 13, 2016----"2016: Topics for Cultural Memory"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

January 17, 2016--"George Yancy's 2015 Jeremiad." ARTS-TODAY 2.11: 44-45.

February 7, 2016 --"DNA and Deferred Dreams"

http://bknation.org/2016/02/dna-and-deferred-dreams

February 29, 2016 ---"Our Bones, Our Ashes, Our Minds" ARTS-TODAY 2.12: 108-109

March 3, 2016 --"To trump or not to trump," BK Nation

http://bknation.org/2016/03/to-trump-or-not-to-trump

March 7, 2016--"To trump or not to trump"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

March 14, 2016 --"History 2216"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

March 15, 2016 --"Writers and Politicians"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

March 17, 2016 --"A Woman Brave and Brilliant" ARTS-TODAY 3.1: 38-41

April 4, 2016 --"Poetry Month 2016"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

April 11, 2016 --"Strong Readers Reading the Difficult Long Poem"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com/2016/04/strong-readers-reading-difficult-long.html#more

April 20, 2016 --"Eugene Redmond's Drumvoices Then and Now" ARTS-TODAY 3.2: 42-45

https://issuu.com/artstodayezine/docs/arts_vol_3.2

April 26, 2016 --"Rereading Poems from Prison"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

May 2, 2016 ---"Good Omens for Scholarship"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

May 12, 2016----"Discovery and Discipline in East St. Louis" ARTS-TODAY 3.3: 222-223.

https://issuu.com/artstodayezine/docs/arts_vol_3.3

May 16, 2016 ---"Callaloo #1 to #7"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

May 23, 2016 --"Music/Painting/Poetry: Outroducing Expectations"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

June 1, 2016 ---"Our Bones/Our Ashes/Our Minds"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

June 17, 2016-------"Small Advantages of the Private Intellectual", ARTS-TODAY 3.4: 30-31

https://issuu.com/artstodayezine/docs/arts_vol_3.4

June 20, 2016----"Requiem for Human Dreams"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

July 6, 2016 ----"Political Pornography"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

July 22, 2016 ------"Political Pornography" ARTS-TODAY 3.5: 10-11.

https://issuu.com/artstodayezine/docs/arts_vol_3.5

August 11, 2016 ----"The Black Caucasian," BK Nation

http://bknation.org/2016/08/the-black-caucasian

August 22, 2016 ----"One Is Real. The Other is Made-up." ARTS-TODAY 3.6:10-11.

https://issuu.com/artstodayezine/docs/arts_vol_3.6a

September 22, 2016 ---"aesthetic spins of poetry and protest." ARTS-TODAY 3.7: 137.

https://issuu.com/artstodayezine/docs/arts_vol_3.7

October 19, 2016 ---"Margaret Walker and Contemporary Education." ARTS-TODAY 3.8: 48-50.

https://issuu.com/artstodayezine/docs/arts_vol_3.8

November 10, 2016 --"Book Review --The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists, William Ferris."

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

 Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Professional Activities 2016

January 21---Interviewed by Attorney Cleophus Thomas, Jr. at Loloya University; videotaped by Justin Nystrom

January 21---Premiere of "#______Lives Matter," Irvin Mayfield and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra,

The Peoples Health New Orleans Jazz Market; contributed "#For Whom Does New Orleans Matter?" for program book

March 17---"Excellence in the Delta," speech for 2016 Honors Convocation, Mississippi Valley State University, Itta Bena, MS

April 2 ----  Panelist, "Terror and Survival in Life and Literature," 2016 Tennessee Williams Festival, Hotel Monteleone , New Orleans, LA

September 8 ---Discussion of Black Arts Movement conference, 9-11 Sep 16, with Quo Vadis Gex Breaux and Kim McMillon.  "Community Bulletin Board," WBOK-AM, New Orleans, LA

September 10 ---Black Arts Movement Conference: Southern Influences

Dillard University, New Orleans, LA

Joint Keynote Address ---Askia M. Toure and Jerry W. Ward, Jr

Panelist, Black Studies Roundtable

Moderator,  Southern Writers Roundtable [Quo Vadis Gex Breaux, Chakula Cha Jua, Mona Lisa Saloy, Kalamu ya Salaam, C. Liegh McInnis]

September 11 --Black Arts Movement Conference: Southern Influences

Dillard University, New Orleans, LA

Videotaped interview with Arnold Bourgeois, interviewer

October 19-21 ---Festival of "Conch-Us-nest," East St. Louis, MO

October 19 ---Master's Workshop and Panel,  ESUSIUE Higher Education Campus,

                          601 J. R. Thompson Drive, East St. Louis

October 20 ---"Talk with Students," East St. Louis Senior High School

                            EBR Writers Club 26th Annual "Break Word with the World,"

                           ESUSIUE Higher Education Campus

October 25 ---Interviewed by David Benedetto, WRBH Radio, New Orleans, LA

October 21  ---Tour and Commentary, E. B. Redmond Collection & Learning Center,

                           Lovejoy Library, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

                            " A Familistic Literary and Cultural Arts Celebration,"

                            Sunshine's Cultural Arts Center,  630 N 59th Street, East St. Louis

November 3 ---Reading and Book Launch for FRACTAL SONG, Crescent City Books/New Orleans

                              Museum of Music and the Cultural Arts

November 8 -- Taped interview with Susan Larsen for THE READING LIFE, WWNO,

                                University of New Orleans

November 11-13 ---5th Convention of the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics,

                                   Los Angeles, CA

November 11 ---Poetry Reading

November 13 --Moderator, Panel 3: Ethnicity and Poetry

November 13 --"The Discipline of the Kwansaba"

November 18---Lecture: "African American Autobiography: Voices from the South."

                                Minzu University (Beijing, China)

November 23 ---Lecture: "Carolyn Rodgers and Vernacular Theorizing" --Central China Normal University                          (CCNU)

November 25 --Lecture:  "African American Autobiography: Voices from the South."  Nanjing University                                             of Posts and Telecommunications (NUPT)

                                Lecture:  "Films by Spike Lee"  ---NUPT

November 28 ---Lecture:  "Tom Dent and the Imperatives of History" --CCNU

November 29 ---Lecture:  "Kevin Powell and Ta'Nehisi Coates" ---CCNU

November 30-December 1---Hubei Institute for Nationalities, Enshi, Hubei 445000

November 30 -----Lecture: "African American Autobiography"

                                    Lecture: "Tom Dent and the Imperatives of History"

December 1 ---     Lecture:  "The Discipline of the Kwansaba"

December 2-4 --Ethnic Literature and the African Focus: The 3rd International Symposium on Ethnic                                     Literature, Hangzhou, China

December 2 ----"The Discipline of the Kwansaba"

December  5-6 ---The 2nd Forum for Modern and Contemporary English Literature, Central China                                           Normal  University (Wuhan)

December 6 ---"Digital Humanities and Graduate Education in a Future"

December 7 ---Lecture: "The Blues and Blues_Jazz of Sterling D. Plumpp ---CCNU

December 8 ---Open Talk with English teachers at Taizhou University

                                Lecture:  "Why and How to Study Literature," Taizhou University

December 14 ---Lecture: "Richard Wright and Adaptation"---CCNU

                                Lecture:  "The Discipline of the Kwansaba" ---CCNU

Publications

"Footnote 666." Resisting Arrest: poems to stretch the sky. Ed. Tony Medina.  Durham, NC: Jacar Press, 2016: 141.

Review of  African American Haiku: Cultural Visions, ed. John Zheng.  Southern Quarterly 53.3-4( 2016): 225-227.

"Online Acts of (Re)discovery: A Hypertext Note." CLAJ 59.3 (2016): 225-231.

"Sterling D. Plumpp: A Son of the Blues." Conversations with Sterling Plumpp. Ed. John Zheng. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016: 11-35.

FRACTAL SONG: POEMS.  Boston: Black Widow Press, 2016.

Review of The Storied South by William Ferris. Valley Voices 16.2 (2016): 19-21.

Online publications

January 4, 2016--"Concussion"  BK Nation

http://bknation.org/2016/0/concussion

January 13, 2016----"2016: Topics for Cultural Memory"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

January 17, 2016--"George Yancy's 2015 Jeremiad." ARTS-TODAY 2.11: 44-45.

February 7, 2016 --"DNA and Deferred Dreams"

http://bknation.org/2016/02/dna-and-deferred-dreams

February 29, 2016 ---"Our Bones, Our Ashes, Our Minds" ARTS-TODAY 2.12: 108-109

March 3, 2016 --"To trump or not to trump," BK Nation

http://bknation.org/2016/03/to-trump-or-not-to-trump

March 7, 2016--"To trump or not to trump"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

March 14, 2016 --"History 2216"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

March 15, 2016 --"Writers and Politicians"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

March 17, 2016 --"A Woman Brave and Brilliant" ARTS-TODAY 3.1: 38-41

April 4, 2016 --"Poetry Month 2016"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

April 11, 2016 --"Strong Readers Reading the Difficult Long Poem"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com/2016/04/strong-readers-reading-difficult-long.html#more

April 20, 2016 --"Eugene Redmond's Drumvoices Then and Now" ARTS-TODAY 3.2: 42-45

https://issuu.com/artstodayezine/docs/arts_vol_3.2

April 26, 2016 --"Rereading Poems from Prison"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

May 2, 2016 ---"Good Omens for Scholarship"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

May 12, 2016----"Discovery and Discipline in East St. Louis" ARTS-TODAY 3.3: 222-223.

https://issuu.com/artstodayezine/docs/arts_vol_3.3

May 16, 2016 ---"Callaloo #1 to #7"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

May 23, 2016 --"Music/Painting/Poetry: Outroducing Expectations"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

June 1, 2016 ---"Our Bones/Our Ashes/Our Minds"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

June 17, 2016-------"Small Advantages of the Private Intellectual", ARTS-TODAY 3.4: 30-31

https://issuu.com/artstodayezine/docs/arts_vol_3.4

June 20, 2016----"Requiem for Human Dreams"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

July 6, 2016 ----"Political Pornography"

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

July 22, 2016 ------"Political Pornography" ARTS-TODAY 3.5: 10-11.

https://issuu.com/artstodayezine/docs/arts_vol_3.5

August 11, 2016 ----"The Black Caucasian," BK Nation

http://bknation.org/2016/08/the-black-caucasian

August 22, 2016 ----"One Is Real. The Other is Made-up." ARTS-TODAY 3.6:10-11.

https://issuu.com/artstodayezine/docs/arts_vol_3.6a

September 22, 2016 ---"aesthetic spins of poetry and protest." ARTS-TODAY 3.7: 137.

https://issuu.com/artstodayezine/docs/arts_vol_3.7

October 19, 2016 ---"Margaret Walker and Contemporary Education." ARTS-TODAY 3.8: 48-50.

https://issuu.com/artstodayezine/docs/arts_vol_3.8

November 10, 2016 --"Book Review --The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists, William Ferris."

http://projecthbw.blogspot.com

The Storied South

v

Ferris, William. The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists.  Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 2013.  $ 35.00    ISBN  978-1-4696-0754-2

            Fred Hobson suggested in Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (1983) that Southerners have, or may be possessed by, a compulsion to explain, to apologize for, to defend, or to celebrate the history of a region which non-Southerners "have long been fascinated with…as spectacle, as land of extremes in the most innocent part of America in one respect and the guiltiest in another…."(9).  Hobson's speculation cuts both ways.  While many Southerners do have a gift for drawling in ways that fascinate, a significant number of them can be as taciturn as stereotyped New Englanders.  Hobson's hyperbole confirmed the very oddity he intended to place in an objective perspective regarding habits.  He exercised due diligence in borrowing his main title from William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! as he explored selected works by people who were neither novelists nor scholars.  He also used predictable Southern diligence in excluding black writers  (notably Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison) on the grounds that "it would be impossible to do them justice" (13) in the scope of his study.  Thus, Hobson self-fashioned himself as a quintessential Southern apologist.

            Thirty-three years later, it is instructive to contrast Tell About the South with William Ferris's The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists, which incorporates self-fashioning with minimal apology  Ferris acknowledges that Hobson and many other of his University of North Carolina colleagues gave him encouragement in every step of writing this book, a worthy companion to his earlier Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues (2009).  One might argue that Hobson's work was a prelude to Ferris's explaining increasingly complex functions of narrative in the South.  Less an overt apologist than Hobson, Ferris tells us about his own "intellectual and artistic growth through friendships with" seven writers, five scholars, two musicians, three photographers, and nine painters. Ferris relies primarily on interviews to create a species of oral history. The absence of question and answer markers, however,  foregrounds shared authority in the making of historical explanation.  By exercising his autobiographical voice in prefaces for the stories the writers and artists tell, Ferris demonstrates that subjective artistry can enliven scholarship which focuses on difference in a region of the United States.

             To be sure, his method of presentation enables selected voices to expose or to demythologize  problems of credibility that arise in contemporary studies of geographical  regions. By virtue of  its celebratory, non-defensive aura , The Storied South  alerts readers to aspects of a story always untold in interdisciplinary investigations of Southern cultures. In that sense, the book has an inevitable relationship to a provocative series of manifestos about the future of Southern Studies in PMLA 131.1 (2016).  That relationship is defined, in part, by Ferris's rationale and folkloric methodological choices, items crucial for understanding the rewards of Southern storytelling.  This book is a remarkable self-portrait of Ferris as a white, male scholar who is a native son of Mississippi, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.  It is simultaneously a documentation of how twentieth-century Southern writers, musicians, photographers, scholars, and painters "created a body of work that defined both their regions and their nation"(2).  Ferris's manipulation of interviews exposes how oral traditions give compelling forms to "the contested memory of black and white southerners who offer opposing views of the region's history" (3).

            The adequacy of this kind of binary narration (spinning of tales)  and history-making is itself contestable and open to passionate, rigorous scrutiny by a new generation of scholars who embrace motives and values quite unlike those espoused by Hobson and Ferris.  Younger scholars may believe, as does Jay Watson, that "we need the combined conceptual resources of southern and environmental studies to unpack the thick layers of meaning that accrue when southerners write ecologically and environmental thinkers write about the South" (PMLA 131.1: 159).  Just as Ferris refines Hobson's penchant for the rage to tell, recent developments in southern studies help us to identify the charming limitations of Ferris's traditional approach to the implications of story without diminishing the considerable value of how Ferris seeks to recuperate time past and to display it to its best advantage.  His intervention is a Faulknerian reminder that some Southern imperatives defy being wished into oblivion. They haunt the South and our entire nation; if they cannot be resolved, they can be addressed in ways that serve the commonweal.  Indeed, the rage of younger scholars to theorize the multiple facets of the South, to tell a new story, only amplifies the humanistic civility of Ferris's work.

            As an esteemed scholar of all things Southern, Ferris is keenly aware that the spatial and temporal dimensions of a Southern story must assume combative configurations in the Zeitgeist of now.  Our history-laden ideas about  Old South and  New South cultures are being rapidly relocated in scholarship by new fields of interpretation which draw attention to the dramatic clashes  of remembering and forgetting the centrality of story.  Meaning and significance are recast in discussions of the global South; the deep, down, and dirty South; the South as a racially and ecologically challenged locus of cognition and imagination.  The voices of the South retrofit themselves in concert with revisionist historiographies, emerging digital humanities and revitalized empiricism  Thus, Ferris wisely includes a generous and timely selected bibliography, discography, and filmography in The Storied South and appends CD (interview sound recordings) and DVD (archival films) companion discs as special resources or paratextual supplements.

From the vantage of a probable future, The Storied South is an excellent, authoritative record of how William Ferris at once mediates and  meditates on Southern exceptionalism.  It is a valuable foundational text for American and international scholars who are existentially obligated to tell explanatory stories which supersede regional boundedness.  If their stories prove to be as principled and good as the one Ferris tells, we shall indeed be fortunate and better prepared to avoid delusions that disguise themselves as contributions to knowledge.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.