Each day, countless southerners pass symbols and monuments dedicated to white supremacy and the “Old South”: statues, cemeteries, plantations, downtown squares, and even regional theatre stages. Some may only glance at them, ignorant to their history, while others recall the physical and psychological trauma embedded by generations of enslavement.
Through the eyes of actors and everyday people, Southern Stages offers an engaging new model for interrogating the performance of southernness, as well as how memory and imagination intersect in spaces that have shaped hundreds of years of American history. Chandra Owenby Hopkins employs cultural memory and lived realities of Black and white communities to examine the earliest and most enduring southern stages: the playhouse and the public square.
“Southern Stages adds a much-needed new perspective of the US South through the lenses of performance and memory. Hopkins’s work opens the door for a fresh intersectional and interdisciplinary discussion about the American South that fits the current sociopolitical moment in the United States.”—Evan Howard Ashford, author, Mississippi Zion: The Struggle for Liberation in Attala County, 1865–1915
“Hopkins offers a sophisticated exploration of the ways in which the American South as an idea imprints itself on places, objects, and people. As the focus shifts from the plantation, the whip, Confederate ‘daughters’ sanitizing the legacies of their ancestors, to activist-artists striving to monumentalize past horrors to prevent their forgetting, the dynamic interplay of race, memory, history and performance is compellingly revealed.”—Harvey Young, author, Embodying Black Experience
