10th SAAS CONFERENCE

“The Backyard of the U.S. Mansion: Critical readings of poverty and wealth in the United States”

Alcalá de Henares (Madrid).  April 14-16, 2011

 

6) Poverty and Wealth in the House of the South

Panel Chair: Constante Gónzalez
Institution: Universidade da Santiago de Compostela
E-mail: constante.gonzalez@usc.es; carmen.manuel@uv.es

In The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard described the house as the “felicitous space” which constitutes one of the truly great integrative forces in the life of the individual. Blindfolded by his privileges of gender and class, Bachelard did not include power or gender in his analysis, as if space were not always related to power relations. The house of the American South has not always been a home for those who did not conform to its suffocating traditions. Many southern women have traditionally found the family home to be a locus of oppression. Blacks had to wait centuries to be admitted into the house of the South, and many continue to complain with good reason that America is still not the home where they always feel welcome.

From the days of the plantation society, so many southerners have been bedevilled by poverty, disease, illiteracy and other forms of discrimination. The culture of segregation that dominated the South from the end of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement inhibited the natural expression of class division, as the much stereotyped poor whites were so avid for the invigorating drug of white supremacy that gave them an automatic superiority over African-Americans. In Lillian Hellman’s play The Autumn Garden a French girl explains the difference between French homes and families and those in the American South: “You have so many rooms and therefore more troubles.” We suggest some of the rooms, among others, that might be worth a visit

- Intersections of race, gender and class

- Representations of poor southern whites in literature and film

- The Agrarian movement: the identification of modernity and industrialism with spiritual poverty

- The South’s reincarnation as the Sunbelt

- The disappearance of the rural South and the new spaces and roles available to women

- The ecological and economic difficulties of areas like southern Appalachia

- The Tobacco Road South: portrayals of the underside of southern life and calls for social reform

- Immigration, globalization and the end of southern exceptionalism

- Post-Katrina reconstructions

- Children and poverty in the South

- Poverty and racism in southern music, photography, and the arts

 

10th INTERNATIONAL SAAS CONFERENCE
Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, 14-16 April 2011

THE BACKYARD OF THE U.S.A. MANSION: Critical Readings of Poverty and Wealth in the United States

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Please, complete this form and send it, in electronic format (via e-mail), to the Chair of your selected panel. Deadline for sending proposals is October 29, 2010.