# Reviews
##### Better Living by Their Own Boot-
straps: Black Women’s Activism in
Rural Arkansas, 1914-1965. Che-
risse Jones-Branch. (Fayetteville, Ar-
kansas: The University of Arkansas
Press, 2021. Pp. vii + 227, acknowl-
edgments, introduction, conclusion,
notes, bibliography, index. $39.95,
paperback)
Historically, African American women in
the United States have had two barriers to over-
come, the social constructs of race and gender.
When scholars in the past have examined the ex-
periences of Black women, they have described
either the enslaved or those who left the South,
both important areas of scholarship. But what
about the Black women who remained in the
South? Cherisse Jones-Branch’s most recent
monograph, Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps:
Black Women’s Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1913–
1965, provides agency for Arkansas’s rural Black
women. Jones-Branch is the Dean of the Gradu-
ate School and a professor of history at Arkansas
State University where she researches the experi-
ences of rural African American women. In ad-
dition to several peer-reviewed articles, in 2018
she also co-edited Arkansas Women: Their Lives and
Times.
Using a plethora of primary sources, includ-
ing oral history, personal papers, the University
of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Records, and
newspapers, Jones-Branch’s well-grounded re-
search thoroughly documents how rural Black
women in Arkansas made positive differences in
their lives, as well as the lives of their family,
friends, and community. As Jones-Branch states
in her introduction, she
wanted to explore “the
many ways they individ-
ually, collectively, and
diligently augmented
African Americans’
quality of life in rural
Arkansas” (p. 4). Jones-
Branch adds to the his-
toriography of rural
Black women, which is
an area of history that
needs more attention from scholars. Whether
they were club women, agricultural laborers,
Home Demonstration Agents, or Jeanes
Teachers, Jones-Branch persuasively argues that
they sought to improve their respective commu-
nities despite the challenges they faced. The ana-
lytical framework of Jones-Branch’s study adds to
the historiography of African American, rural,
and women’s history.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786476602300.png)
Jones-Branch’s book is divided chronologi-
cally into twelve chapters, with each one explor-
ing a different aspect and/or era of rural
Arkansas Black women’s activism. Chapter one
explores the role of Arkansas Jeanes Supervising
Industrial Teachers. These women used their role
in the community to educate residents in “basic
education skills” and public health, as well as in
political activism (p. 10). Jones-Branch’s research
on African American Home Demonstration
Agents is exceptional. In chapters two, three,
four, and five, Jones-Branch details how they
were able to carefully advance their agenda of up-
lifting their community without “offending”
southern whites. During World War One, Ar-
kansas’s African American Home Demonstra-
tion agents assisted local women in conserving
food (food security), while at the same time ai-
ding their own families. Home Demonstration
Agents became imperative to the Black commu-
nity during the Mississippi River Flood of 1927
by providing nutritious meals which helped ad-
dress the health disparities that plagued rural
Blacks. The information the Home Demonstra-
tion Agents provided to the community during
the Great Flood proved to be invaluable once the
Great Depression began in 1929. Arkansas’s Af-
rican American Home Demonstration Agents
also had Home Demonstration Clubs which
“created all female spaces for rural women to ask
questions and to discuss health, family, and child-
care concerns” (p. 65). In addition to describing
the contributions of Arkansas’s African Ameri-
can Home Demonstration Agents, Jones-Branch
documents the contributions of the Arkansas As-
sociation of Colored Women. The author’s tone
is earnest, without the self-importance that can
plague histories.
By examining the work of the Arkansas As-
sociation of Colored Women in chapter six,
Jones-Branch adds to scholarship on the Na-
tional Association of Colored Women, since
most scholarship on the organization focuses on
their urban efforts, while their rural work is less
documented. As club women they wanted to up-
lift their community, and the Arkansas Associa-
tion of Colored Women focused their efforts on
establishing a facility that assisted “young Black
women who had been sent to adult prisons for
criminal activity” (p. 75). Their goal came to fruit-
ion shortly after the end of the Second World
War, in 1949, when the Arkansas state legislature
allocated funding for the Fargo Negro Girls
Training School. The author took much the
same approach in her first book, Crossing the Line:
Women’s Interracial Activism in South Carolina Dur-
ing and After World War Two.
Chapter seven addresses the contributions
of rural African American women to Arkansas
during the Second World War. As in World War
One, rural Black women helped the United
States Department of Agriculture meet its food
production goals, thanks especially to the efforts
of the Jeanes Supervising Industrial Teachers,
Home Demonstration Agents, and club women.
Although it was a challenging environment, the
rural African American women tried their best,
for all hoped their effort would lead their ability
to exercise their Constitutional rights. Ad-
ditionally, they focused their efforts on youth rec-
reational activities as well as improving home life,
since many parents were working in various ca-
pacities to assist the United States during the
war. In chapter eight, Jones-Branch delves into
the little-researched Arkansas Farm Bureau Fed-
eration Negro Division and the Spirit of Cotton
Pageant. Jones-Branch asserts that both organiza-
tions led to the economic education of rural
black women, especially on egg marketing laws
and on attempts to commodify their bodies
through the Cotton Pageant.
Jones Branch’s final three chapters examine
post-World War Two activism among these coun-
try women. As the modern civil rights movement
emerged, Arkansas’s rural African American pop-
ulation took notice. News of the Smith v. Allwright
case led Home Demonstration Agents and club
women to meet on the importance of voting.
While better health and nutrition remained a
constant theme, other areas of interest among
these rural Black women included the modern
conveniences of telephones and electricity, which
helped benefit their families financially. Chapter
nine profiles Ethel B. Dawson and her work with
the National Council of Churches of Christ
Home Missions Division. Dawson used “Chris-
tian principles and US law” as motivation to as-
sist African Americans fighting for their civil
rights. Issues important to Dawson included
mother and infant high mortality rates, lack of
respect for Black womanhood, and unemploy-
ment. The National Negro Home Demonstra-
tion Agents’ Association, the Black counterpart
to the all-white National Home Demonstration
Agents’ Association, was established in 1957. In
this organization, farmers of Arkansas held prom-
inent roles. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 led to
the desegregation of the United States Depart-
ment of Agriculture, thus ending the National
## Negro Home Demonstration Agents’ Associa-
tion. However, rural Black women in Arkansas
still fought for equality. The modern civil rights
movement led to the appointment of Annie Za-
chary Pike to the Arkansas Welfare Board. De-
spite the challenges she faced, she prevailed and
became a prominent Republican. In 1972 Pike
ran for the state senate. Although not victorious
at the polls she demonstrated what all a rural
Black woman from Arkansas can do, according
to Jones-Branch.
Cherisse Jones-Branch’s study of rural Afri-
can American women in Arkansas is essential for
studying African American, rural, and women’s
history and should be used as a framework for
exploring the lives of rural African American
women in other southern states.
--Dawn Herd-Clark
##### The Mama Chronicles: A Memoir.
By Teresa Nicholas. (Jackson, Missis-
sippi: University Press of Mississippi,
2021 Pp. 243, acknowledgments.
$25.00, hardcover)
The stories of mothers and daughters echo
through history because these relationships often
define who we are, even
if we resist those defini-
tions because of a
fraught relationship
with our mothers. In
this memoir, Teresa
Nicholas shares her
devoted, contentious,
painful, and beloved
relationship with her
mother, Florence Hood
Nicholas. Most of the
memoir takes place as
Florence enters the final years of her life, al-
though there are significant flashbacks to family
history. The author’s relationship with her
mother mirrors, in many ways, the complexity of
the author’s relationship with her hometown of
Yazoo City, located in the Mississippi Delta, and
her relationship with Mississippi as a quintessen-
tially Deep South state. Nicholas’ mother experi-
ences multiple heath crises, including strokes,
pernicious infections, recurrent pneumonia, and
broken bones throughout the book. Indeed, a
cursory reading of the text could give the reader
the impression that “Mama’s” final years were
filled with only pain and that the author felt only
disdain and shame at her home state and its his-
tory of racism. But life, like this memoir, remains
more complex than simple surface impressions.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786477287625.png)
Although Nicholas lays bare her grief and
confusion over the declining health of her
mother, Florence herself often meets these ex-
periences with equanimity. One of her catch-
phrases is “Ain’t nothing I can do about it” (p.
121). She often uses this phrase in response to
medical diagnoses that would terrify most
people. Nicholas credits her mother’s composure
to her early life in the Mississippi Delta when her
own mother, the author’s grandmother, survived
early widowhood in the 1930s by sharecropping
cotton—a brutal existence. It was so miserable
that Florence answers Teresa’s queries about
Hood family history with the tersely repeated
phrase, “Don’t nobody want to hear nothing
about that mess” (p. 151). Yet Teresa has mem-
ories from childhood of the Hood family “re-
main[ing] for hours, hooting and hollering over
their former hardships” (p. 22). The disconnect
between her mother’s withholding responses to
her questions in her eighties and Teresa’s own
childhood memories of her mother’s laughter
about those very same misfortunes drives Teresa’s
search for her own identity.
While Florence may offer the reader a char-
acter of stoicism in the face of adversity—indeed,
in the face of death itself—Teresa’s portrayal of
herself provides an unstinting look into a woman
who yearns for a place to belong. This memoir
offers little respite to the reader, as the Hoods
and the Nicholas families had many tragic events
framing their family histories, and these past in-
cidents pepper the already-poignant narrative
wherein Nicholas describes her leaving the Deep
South, first for college in Pennsylvania, and then
moving to New York City and upstate New York
for much of her adult life. Nicholas may have left
the South, but she describes her husband Gerry
as a “Yankee” early in the text (p. 9), a signal to
readers that her loyalties might be more complex
than even Nicholas realizes.
Nicholas admits that she felt shame at her
mother’s poverty-class past and her own lower-
middle-class upbringing in a semi-converted du-
plex in Yazoo City. Nicholas’ father figure is an
absent presence in this book, often referred to as
having left a legacy of useless bits of hardware he
claimed he collected to fix-up the duplex; Nich-
olas reminds us at regular intervals that the du-
plex was never truly renovated by her father,
which deepened her embarrassment of it as the
family home. Despite the title of this memoir, I
wondered at the absence of her father in the
narrative, only to discover, thirty-five percent into
the book, that ten years before The Mama Chron-
icles, Nicholas wrote a memoir about her father.
That memoir is titled Buryin’ Daddy: Putting My
Lebanese, Catholic, Southern Baptist Childhood to
Rest (University Press of Mississippi). Clearly,
from the existence of The Mama Chronicles, her
project to put her childhood to rest remained un-
finished.
Perhaps wounds such as making peace with
our relatives who have died can never be wholly
healed, and the fact that Florence has her last,
massive stroke, just as she has finally agreed to
answer questions about her past by allowing
Teresa to interview her, deals an emotional blow
to the reader. Yet when Teresa and Gerry move
their belongings from their New York storage
unit, she discovers an archive of letters written to
her from Florence during Teresa’s college years.
These letters are warm and reveal many details
about Florence’s quotidian experiences; they rep-
resent, at long last, a measure of peace for Teresa
about the love her mother obviously felt for her—
despite the many hardboiled layers of Florence’s
personality.
A discovered cache of letters can be tied up
neatly with a ribbon and held to our hearts.
Memoirs, like life, are messier. Despite some rest-
fulness at the end of the book, Nicholas still has
not found lasting peace in her relationship to
herself and with her sense of where she belongs.
And while the richness of the language Nicholas
uses to replicate her mother’s Delta dialect,
evokes strong memories in this reader (I am from
Kentucky, but I have spent much of my adult life
in Alabama and Georgia), there are also trou-
bling elements to this memoir. The most overtly
problematic aspect is Teresa’s and Gerry’s deci-
sion to move to Mexico, a country they had
frequently visited on vacations. Their naivete
about the process, which replicates many ele-
ments of settler colonialism and Ugly American-
ism, permeates many of her descriptions of their
lives in Mexico. She gives rich detail about the
complexity their semi-ex-patriot existence adds to
her life shuttling between San Miguel and Yazoo
City—and to the limits it puts on spending time
with her mother in her last years, which adds very
real tension to the narrative.
This memoir may not be the best choice for
someone who has recently experienced end-of-
life caregiving of a loved one. Despite negative
elements, this story brings alive the shared past
of those of us who love the South, but who also
feel shame at its past, whether we mean our col-
lective past or our familial histories. These stories
are worth preserving, even if they bring us pain,
so that we can learn from that painful past and
move into a more hopeful future. Nicholas, in
sharing Florence with the world, reminds us of
the flawed but beautiful humanity within so
many of our mothers.
--Kristen Ruccio
##### Sustaining Support for Intangible
Cultural Heritage. Edited by Shi-
han de Silva Jayasuriya, Mariana
Pinto Leitão Pereira, and Gregory
Hansen. (Newcastle upon Tyne, Eng-
land: Cambridge Scholars Publish-
ing. Pp. vii +168, list of illustrations,
acknowledgments, biographies of
contributing authors, introduction,
commentary, index. $36.22, paper)
This edited volume of eight articles presents
case studies for thinking about the critical rela-
tionship between intangible cultural heritage
(ICH) and sustainable development (SD).
Though the contributors bring a variety of per-
spectives and method-
ologies, it should be
noted from the start
that most are working
from the specific defini-
tional context of ICH
and SD as defined by
the 2003 UNESCO
Convention for the
Safeguarding of Intan-
gible Cultural Heritage
and the 70th session of
the UN General Assembly’s adoption of “Sus-
tainable Development Goals” (2015). This defi-
nitional context is important, and this is perhaps
my central critique: A lack of basic description
surrounding the origins of the convention and
the ways this policy is generally mobilized (or
not—the US is not a signatory on the 2003 Con-
vention) serves as an initial barrier to readers
looking for an entry-level discussion on ICH. A
broad, approachable look at defining ICH comes
only at the end of the volume in Gregory
Hansen’s commentary titled, “Resources for Re-
siliency within Intangible Cultural Heritage.”
While the volume is directed for readers well-
versed in UNESCO policy and practice, I do not
discourage readers looking for more founda-
tional concepts, especially as it relates to heritage
in the United States. I would suggest, though,
that these readers begin at the end with Hansen’s
succinct overview.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786477987513.png)
Mariana Pinto Leitão Pereira opens the vol-
ume with her introduction, “Situating Intangible
Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development:
A Challenging Partnership?” wherein she contex-
tualizes the thematic areas and essays as a contin-
uation of a conversation started at the 2020
conference, “Intangible Cultural Heritage and
Sustainable Development,” hosted by the Uni-
versity of London. The parameters of this con-
tinuing conversation are made clear by the three
major thematic sections of the work: “Intangible
Cultural Heritage and the COVID Pandemic,”
“Intangible Cultural Heritage in/as Perform-
ance,” and “Decolonising Intangible Cultural
Heritage and Sustainable Development.” In
introducing and weaving the three major areas
together, Pereira’s introduction is a dense but
provoking call to frame heritage as inextricable
from sustainability.
The first thematic portion focuses specifi-
cally on the COVID pandemic and is arguably
the more tenuous of the three thematic areas.
Lena Dominelli’s “Protecting our Environment:
Learning Lessons from Covid-19,” centers on the
role of social workers—and particularly what she
terms green social workers—in fighting global
pandemics by engaging with communities and
individuals on the ground. Specific reference to
ICH is limited; the article focuses pointedly on
the relationship between environmental degrada-
tion and global pandemics. In contrast, Bilinda
D. Nandadeva’s chapter, “Living Culture and
Sustainable Development: Impact of the Pan-
demic on Intangible Cultural Heritage in Sri
Lanka” (the second and final of this section) fo-
cuses specifically on ICH. The article features a
sweeping look at several instances of Sri Lankan
ICH impacted by, and in many cases altered to
address, the realities of life during lockdown as a
means of providing examples of and suggestions
for how ICH might be encouraged to adapt to
changing global realities.
The second thematic portion of this volume
is the most robust of the three, focusing on ICH
“in/as Performance.” In “Safeguarding Afro-Sri
## Lankan Intangible Cultural Heritage,” Shihan
de Silva Jayasuriya looks at the manja perform-
ance of an Afro-Sri Lankan community, her anal-
yses emphasizing ICH’s influence on identity
and one’s sense of belonging, particularly within
the Sirambiyadiya community with African and
Portuguese dual heritage. Beheroze Shroff’s “In-
tangible Cultural Heritage of Sidis of Gujarat,
India” focuses on individual and community ini-
tiatives to sustain Sidi heritage, particularly
sacred and spiritual practices such as the
goma/dhammal dance and jikkar songs. Shroff in-
troduces key complicating factors for analysis: the
economic and social marginalization of Sidis, as
well as the diverging inter-generational aspira-
tions within the community for preserving and
recording traditions. Chapane Mutiua’s article
that follows, “Local Knowledge as Intangible Cul-
tural Heritage: The Case of Omba and Majini in
Northern Mozambique,” also focuses on spiritual
practice, in this case the Islamic rituals of omba
and majini. Mutiua argues that top-down dis-
course from the modern State and more main-
stream religious movements in Mozambique
deemphasizes local knowledge and “undermines
the efforts for the preservation of intangible cul-
tural heritage such as omba and majini . . . And
by doing so, local ideas and practice about the
protection of nature (for instance, forests and
mangroves) and of maintenance of social order
are challenged” (pp. 85-86). Gregory Hansen
rounds off this section with his piece, “KASU
FM 91.9’s ‘Bluegrass Monday’: Performing Intan-
gible Cultural Heritage and Fostering Historic
Preservation in Arkansas, USA.” This piece is a
photo essay highlighting KASU’s “Bluegrass
Monday,” held weekly at the Collin’s Theatre in
Paragould. Hansen points to the United States’
historical focus on bricks-and-mortar approach
to historic preservation and concludes that intan-
gible practice (music performance in this case)
can be economically sustained in a way that also
sustains the built environment within which
these events are held. Of note, Hansen gives an
overview of the concept of cultural conservation
—an intellectual and policy-minded movement in
the United States that predates ICH in thinking
about ways that ICH might be sustained along-
side the preservation of the built environment.
The final thematic portion, a focus on decol-
onizing ICH and SD, begins with Ritu Sethi’s
chapter, “The Many Shades of Safeguarding In-
tangible Cultural Heritage and its Sustainable
Development in India” which presents micro
case studies of ICH and SD in India. Sethi’s
chapter aims to illuminate the vulnerabilities of
ICH practitioners, especially as revealed by the
COVID-19 pandemic, and concludes with policy
recommendations to “ensure a sustainable future
for ICH in these paradigm-altering times and
beyond” (p. 118). Cheryl Toman concludes the
final section with “Nadia Origo’s Aurore’s Journey:
A Novel About Sustainable Development by a
Gabonese Geographer.” This piece is an interest-
ing essay that feels initially out of place, but
Toman makes the case for the importance of
bringing the study of literature—particularly liter-
ature that takes its source from oral tradition—
into a broader heritage discourse. Toman notes,
“Oral tales often tell about the power of nature
and the sacrifices humans must make to preserve
and protect it and thus provide a certain ‘user’s
manual’ of sorts” (p. 146).
As previously mentioned, Gregory Hansen
closes the volume with a commentary, “Re-
sources for Resiliency within Intangible Cultural
Heritage.” Here, Hansen provides a broad-based
history of ICH policy while pointing to major
thematic undercurrents throughout the book. I
would summarize the final takeaways of this sec-
tion and the entire volume as this: Tangible ma-
terial culture relies on (and is often given
meaning by) the intangibles of belief, knowledge,
and skill; likewise, the intangible is often made
manifest and/or engaged through the tangible,
such as craft, musical instrumentation, or dress.
No greater example of this interdependence can
be found than the dependence that human ac-
tivity has on the environment within which our
cultural heritage is practiced. To sustain our
ICH, we need to give equal and urgent attention
to the sustainability of the physical and natural
environment within which we live and create.
This volume demonstrates that this includes an
attention to indigenous and traditional ways of
knowing and caring for place, as well as a macro
focus on supporting the health, wellbeing, and
livelihoods of bearers of ICH.
--Virginia Siegel
##### Marginalized: Southern Women
Playwrights Confront Race, Re-
gion, and Gender. By Casey Kayser.
(Jackson: University Press of Missis-
sippi, 2021. Pp. 205, acknowledg-
ments, notes, bibliography, index.
$30.00, paper)
Casey Kayser’s Marginalized: Southern Women
Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender, ex-
amines Southern women’s marginalization and
the geographical, ideological, interpretive, and
genre-based obstacles they have endured as they
perform their craft (p. 5). The author probes the
silences surrounding women, African Americans,
and the LGBTQ community and their strategies
to carve out spaces for themselves as playwrights
from historically excluded backgrounds. Kayser
addresses women writers “in a significant genre,
through its assertion and recovery,” and aspires
to have them understood as a group. She further
queries the positionality
of identity, specifically
that informed by
gender, race, sexuality,
and region, enlivens our
understanding of the
complex representations
of the American South
in theatre.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786478320838.png)
Southern writers
like William Faulkner,
Flannery O’Connor, Eu-
dora Welty, and Richard Wright had been her-
alded heretofore. However, this has not been the
case for southern women playwrights. Kayser
considers plays and playwrights that are more in-
clusive in their coverage of the post southern
South and the global and diverse South. Some
of the playwrights she chronicles, like Pearl
Cleage for instance, did not grow up in the
South, but her play Chain “evokes the South in
nonsouthern settings” (p. 8).
Kayser’s focus on the modern and contem-
porary periods is essential because women
playwrights, in most cases, did not see their plays
“staged or critically recognized until the mid-
twentieth century, especially in the South” (p. 9).
Organized into five chapters. Marginalized focuses
on southern women playwrights’ utilization of
“place, displace, and re-place” and how they de-
fined myriad conceptualizations of the South.
Chapter one “Southern Drama and Geo-
pathology,” explores southern women
playwrights’ marginalized status through the in-
equities in American theatre that were promul-
gated by overwhelmingly white, male critics.
Kayser problematizes the sway they held over how
plays were received by their audiences. The sec-
ond chapter, titled “Lillian Hellman’s South” ex-
amines three playwrights’ works that satirize’
perceptions of the region through a feminist per-
spective.
In the third through the fifth chapters
playwrights “place,” “displace” and “e-place” the
South in ways that deconstruct myths, bridge
gaps between the northern and southern United
States, and productively complicate generalized
perceptions of the region by emphasizing its di-
versity and multiculturalism. For Kayser, Sandra
Deer and Elizabeth Dewberry’s work is situated
in a “familiar southern milieu” with the intent
to challenge and dismantle myths. However, that
effort is lost in translation because audiences
overlook the satire in favor of the exacerbation
of long-held southern stereotypes and images.
By shifting to the work of Paula Vogel and
Pearl Cleage, Kayser analyzes how women
playwrights used their craft to interrogate the dis-
placed South. Leveraging such plays as Cleage’s
Chain and Vogel’s The Oldest Professional, Kayser
hones in on the nostalgia for the South that in-
forms the experiences of those who migrated to
northern cities like New York. Their works en-
courage the audience to explore similarities as
well as dissimilarities in the making and shaping
of perceptions of the North and the South and
the ways they reveal themselves in migrants’ lives
in both spaces.
The final chapter highlights playwrights
whose works “re-place traditional conceptions”
of the South. By attending to Shay Youngblood
and Sharon Bridgeforth’s plays, Kayser presents
the creativity of two African-descended, lesbian
playwrights who portray the South as a space
where LGQTIA lives have long been a part of the
cultural fabric. Bridgforth’s loveconjure/blues and
Youngblood’s Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery offer
more fluidity in their analyses of how marginal-
ized groups perceived the South. They, in
Kayser’s analysis, provided a vision of a more in-
clusive South.
Marginalized is a well-executed and much
needed message to readers about southern
women playwrights’ struggles and their successes
in American drama and theatre due to their mul-
tiple and interconnected identities. Their success
resides in the fact that some of them very keenly
and creatively deployed strategies to critically ex-
amine and satirize traditional southern ideology
for their audiences. That, as Kayser explains, is
the act of placing the South. Other playwrights
displace the South in an effort to encourage their
northern and southern audiences to draw con-
nections between the two regions. Still yet are the
playwrights who replace the South by honing in
on those who had long existed in the region but
did not neatly fit into normative and easily di-
gestible categories. Yet, they were still deeply en-
meshed in the fabric of Southern life.
Kayser has provided an important road map
that well directs readers to contemplate southern
women playwrights and positionality and inter-
sectionality in American drama. We would do
well to follow her lead.
--Cherisse Jones-Branch
##### Joan of Arkansas. By Emma Wip-
permann. (Brooklyn, New York:
Ugly Duckling Press, 2023. Pp. 160.
$20.00, paperback)
“The orange sky was no longer sky but a
dark and fiery plume as tall as it was wide. The
forest floor was fire, each tree a lit match toward
heaven” (p. 156).
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786478625649.png)
If ever a book had a perfectly timed release,
it was Joan of Arkansas, which came out in a year
when smoke from wildfires choked cities in the
northern United States, while a multi-month
heatwave saw regular tri-
ple-digit highs in the
South. Combine that
with the ongoing moral
panics about how cer-
tain people present
their gender in dress
and appearance, along-
side a political system
that remains paralyzed
before a civilization-end-
ing threat, and Emma Wippermann’s Joan of Ar-
kansas feels downright prophetic.
The book is something of a mixed-media mé-
lange of poetry, drama, and prose that relates the
story of Joan, an “awkward teen” who “rly needs
to feel / God’s Hot Gaze” (p. 17) living in Dom-
remy, Arkansas, not far from Petit Jean State
Park, a park named after another cross-dressing
French girl, who, according to legend, followed
her beloved to the New World disguised as a boy
before dying of some unspecified illness. Joan is
a social media darling, with millions of followers,
given to visions about Charles VII, the governor
of Arkansas who just announced his candidacy
for the presidency. Namely, God, through Joan,
demands that “Governor Charles VII / will ac-
cept the past, / present, and ongoing / crisis of
the planet and / act accordingly in regards / to
the Warmth, escalating / devastation, genocidal
/ domestic and foreign / policies, and the Heat-
/ driven migration of those / whom this country
has / systemically displaced” (p. 55).
Charles VII at first balks, but Joan ends up
passing muster with the local priest and then
works the miracle of producing internet access
out in the sticks, and he embraces her (and all
her followers). But once elected, he reneges on
every promise, adhering instead to the Republi-
can agenda of closed borders, burning fossil
fuels, and vision of family values that excludes
the cross-dressing Joan and the God to whom she
refers by plural pronouns. We leave Joan as she
is being readied for a mental hospital and turn
the page into a section containing excerpts from
W. P. Barrett’s 1932 English translation of the
transcripts from Joan of Arc’s trial, rendered as
poetry. The last section, “The Dove,” consists of
a prose narrative provided by a young woman
named Adrienne (recalling Adrienne Dumont,
the purported real name of Petit Jean) who is a
student at the local Catholic high school. She re-
counts Joan’s return after a year’s absence, as well
as their growing friendship and physical relation-
ship, both of which soon end with Joan’s deci-
sion to join the Forest Service and fight the
ever-present fires. Adrienne, who has longed to
hear God’s voice herself—being told that God re-
sponds to silence, she says, “I had attempted si-
lence in every form I could fathom but even my
attempts felt loud” (p. 143)—has a vision of Joan
being consumed by the flames she goes to com-
bat.
Joan of Arkansas expresses a progressive set of
politics, sure, but the book itself is something of
a progressive experience, evolving by the page. In
the beginning, every character acts the caricature.
In his campaign announcement, Charles VII pro-
claims: “Washington’s after / your jobs! your
guns! your God-given rights!” (p. 21). Likewise,
Joan is every teenager driven by conviction, the
parish priest is pedestrian in his concerns, Joan’s
mom is simultaneously indulgent and aloof, the
reporter is interested only in the horse race of
politics and has no time for the reality of the pres-
ent crisis, and so on. And people go through the
medieval motions of being scandalized that this
modern female influencer wears boy’s clothes.
The story seems to have no surprises to offer us.
But a change overtakes the reader with the
excerpts of the trial transcript of Joan of Arc.
This Joan was described by her inquisitors as
“not afraid to perform speak and / disseminate
/ many things” (p. 107), a crime with which many
women are still charged in this allegedly more en-
lightened era. We see in snippets how the
Church authorities worked to break down her
will, focusing less upon her message and more
upon her form of dress, until finally it is written
of her that “she had no further hope / in the life
of this world” (p. 134). And this relates to the
final section narrated by Adrienne, who ex-
presses eloquently the feeling of how even the
simplest acts, those necessary for sustaining life,
are, thanks to our current economic system, in-
herently tied to the destruction of all that sus-
tains life: “And Mom left our wooden house in
her car with rubber tires and went to the grocery
store with the big asphalt parking lot to get things
for dinner, foods that were shipped there over
oiled roads, vegetables picked and planted by
people fleeing bad Warmth and bad govern-
ments, governments my own had ruined.” No
wonder that she describes herself as a cowbird, a
parasitic bird that, like the cuckoo, demands
more and more from the songbird parents upon
whom it has been imposed: “I was a cowbird. My
town was built by cowbirds. We would die in
barren trees in a dead forest on fire” (p. 146).
Reactionaries often insist that the world is
actually simple, and that if it appears complex,
well, that is the fault of leftists and modern-day
heretics who imagine colors when really there is
only black and white. But the left is prone to its
own anti-political solutions to political problems,
its own proclamations that all we need do is elect
this one person, or find just the right combina-
tion of words and concepts that will somehow fix
the regressive worldview of our reactionary bre-
thren. And when those schemes fail, the disillu-
sioned often give up hope about political
participation and try to find salvation in dull
practicalities, such as picking up trash or, in
Joan’s case, going to fight fires one by one, be-
cause the need “to do something,” the need to
see immediate effects of one’s efforts, is so
strong—never mind that so much of the damage
to our world has resulted from efforts to save it
from one thing or another. As Adrienne says of
Joan at their tearful departure, “They loved me,
they promised. They loved me so much. They
would come back, they needed me, but they had
to try to save something. They couldn’t save us
but maybe they could save something” (p. 156).
This hits hard. This makes Joan of Arkansas
so much more than the modern morality play it
appears at first blush. Wippermann is not merely
retelling the story of Joan of Arc for today’s au-
dience—she is fundamentally interrogating our
history-long yearning for salvation, a word that
might be defined as a solution that restores ev-
erything to those prelapsarian factory settings
and thus alleviates one of responsibility for the
world from this moment onward. Interestingly,
although they appear similar in English, the
words salvation and salve do not descend from the
same root word, with the former stemming from
a root that means “to save,” while the latter has
its origin in a word meaning “fat” or “oil.” The
Baptists like to say, “Once saved, always saved,”
but salvation is no substitute for a salve, which
has to be applied regularly until the wound is
healed. And as Joan tells us: “The Angels said /
this world is / God’s own / narcissistic wound /
but I think they were joking / about the trauma
of Creation” (p. 60).
There is no escape from the trauma of Crea-
tion. This is the heartbreaking truth at the heart
of Joan of Arkansas. This is also the hope Wipper-
mann offers for healing and living.
--Guy Lancaster
##### Necropolis: Disease, Power, and
Capitalism in the Cotton King-
dom. By Kathryn Olivarius. (Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 2022. Pp. ix + 336,
author’s note, introduction, abbrevi-
ations, notes, acknowledgments,
index. $35.00, hardcover)
Kathryn Oliviarius’ monograph is thor-
oughly researched and presented in an anecdote-
rich style that should appeal to undergraduate
students and general audiences. The book’s focus
is on New Orleans—the Necropolis of the title—
but Olivarius never allows the reader to lose sight
of its regional and broader context. New Orleans
was sustained by its identity as a hub of the
American South’s cotton kingdom and of the
transatlantic trade in both cotton and those en-
slaved, bought, and sold to sustain its produc-
tion. Its civic politics and civic culture, as
Olivarius demonstrates, were also distinctively in-
fluenced by the vulner-
ability of the Mississippi
Delta and its inhabi-
tants to yellow fever.
Necropolis traces the re-
gional history of yellow
fever and responses to it
from the Louisiana Pur-
chase to Reconstruc-
tion. Each chapter also
has a thematic focus, in-
vestigating disease and
disease identities in the newly American city; the
health industry and individual coping strategies;
immunocapital; disease and public health policy;
links between proslavery ideologies and disease
denialism; and the decline of immunocapital in
the face of new political realities and patterns of
migration.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786478994270.png)
While this is primarily a social history of dis-
ease, it is also a history of the Delta’s place in the
Atlantic economy, its dependence on slavery, and
the United States’ investment in maintaining
parity with the imperial powers of Europe. The
Louisiana Purchase itself and Louisiana’s devel-
opment as an American possession would be af-
fected both by yellow fever and by differential
immunity to it, as discussed in Chapter 1. Yellow
fever contributed both to debates about the
healthfulness of Louisiana in the fledgling na-
tion, and to the careers of the white men who
migrated from the northeast to staff the new po-
litical and clerical posts of New Orleans. There
was scarcely a facet of the city’s collective life that
was not shaped by the ubiquity of yellow fever.
Chapter 2 focuses on how responses to the dis-
ease were shaped by class, by profession, and of
course, by race. Race, particularly, affected how
doctors practiced, whom they treated, and what
they prescribed for yellow fever. Throughout, Oli-
varius includes contemporary Black perspectives,
and acknowledges Black expertise in recognizing
and treating yellow fever. The orthodoxy that the
Black people who made up the majority of New
Orleans’ enslaved and free workforce enjoyed
natural immunity was maintained in the face of
available medical knowledge in order to support
the racial hierarchy and the cotton economy. As
Chapter 3 demonstrates, this argument, origi-
nally developed in the Caribbean, was elaborated
in the US in order to buttress the claim that slav-
ery was not only necessary, but natural.
The third chapter, “Immunocapital,” also
presents the most theoretically interesting con-
tribution of the book. Olivarius defines immu-
nocapital as “socially acknowledged lifelong
immunity to a highly lethal, incurable virus” (p.
115). Medically, such immunity was unprovable.
Socially, it was invaluable. Acclimation to yellow
fever was a key factor in how risks could be taken
and power wielded, particularly by the white pop-
ulation of New Orleans. It affected both the elite
marriage market and the prices at which the en-
slaved were bought and sold. And in the process
of acclimation itself, “taking on disease risk be-
came locally linked with white legitimacy” (p.
119). Chapter 4 demonstrates the distinctiveness
of New Orleans’ (non-) responses to disease out-
breaks. While other American cities—including
Baltimore and Savannah, as well as New York
and Philadelphia—increasingly embraced a range
of hygienic reforms, New Orleans did not. The
theory of immunocapital, and the ways in which
it undergirded the city’s racial and class hierar-
chies, contributed to widespread political and so-
cial resistance to the public health policies that
were typical of other nineteenth-century urban
centers. Moreover, the city council “actively
avoided discussing yellow fever even at the height
of epidemics” (p. 159). Philanthropy could only
go so far to provide the support that the city gov-
ernment refused to those affected by the disease.
Chapter 5 elucidates the link between “proslav-
ery thinking and disease denialism” (p. 205).
Both were ideologies that New Orleans not only
depended on but fostered. To espouse health re-
forms or to acknowledge the true costs of yellow
fever were, increasingly, seen as disloyal to the city
and to the South.
The end of these ideological and economic
systems was neither sudden nor straightforward,
as Olivarius demonstrates in Chapter 6. When
New Orleans came under Union occupation in
1862, popular song and public prayer alike in-
voked the power of yellow fever against the US
Army. But while the deeply unpopular health
policies instituted by the military government
vastly reduced disease outbreaks, the rhetoric of
differential racial immunity endured. And when
Black migration rendered this less profitable,
New Orleans’ white elites sought to use the same
myths of acclimation against new immigrant pop-
ulations. But the decline of the cotton market,
together with the catastrophic epidemic of 1878,
permanently undermined the ways in which, for
most of the nineteenth century, the rhetoric and
reality of disease had been used to uphold sys-
tems of power.
Although Olivarius claims that Necropolis is
not a history of public health (p. 8), I would
argue that while it is not a straightforward history
of policies and institutions, it is very much a so-
cial history of medicine, and a rich history of
public health in its most expansive sense. It an-
swers core questions of the medical humanities
about how the cultural meanings of disease are
formed and, in some cases, enforced. Moreover,
it is written in such a way that it could be pro-
ductively used not only in courses on the history
of medicine, but in regional and topical courses
seeking to integrate this aspect of social history.
Those seeking thorough theoretical discussion of
the issues Oliviarius raises will have to look else-
where; though biopower and biopolitical labor
are central to the work and its argument, neither
term is used. Nevertheless, Necropolis participates
in—and should stimulate—rich scholarly conver-
sations about the history of epidemics and their
management. Olivarius’ choice to prioritize ac-
cessibility of style should make the book usable
for advanced undergraduate and graduate classes.
--Lucy C. Barnhouse
##### Port of No Return: Enemy Alien
Internment in World War II New
Orleans. By Marilyn Grace Miller.
(Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana
State University Press, 2021. Pp. v +
304, illustrations, preface, acknowl-
edgments, introduction, epilogue,
notes, selected bibliography, index.
$29.95, paperback)
The singer and writer Jimmy Buffett de-
scribed New Orleans, as “a gumbo, a melting pot
of food, mood, mud and blood, where the Ca-
ribbean begins or ends, depending on your point
of view.” New Orleans, the city at the end of the
Mississippi River, is often perceived as a gateway
to the larger world. Ho-
wever, Marilyn Grace
Miller’s book Port of No
Return: Enemy Alien In-
ternment in World War II
New Orleans, presents a
different view of the
city. During World War
II, New Orleans was the
site of Camp Algiers, an
internment facility that
played a crucial role in
detaining enemy aliens. Miller’s book sheds light
on this little-known aspect of the city’s history,
revealing how New Orleans was not just a port
to other opportunities, but also a place of con-
finement and detention.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786480021206.png)
It is commonly known that Japanese Ameri-
can citizens were detained during World War II,
but Miller suggests that not enough attention has
been given to the imprisonment of enemy aliens
of German and Italian origin under the US gov-
ernment’s Enemy Alien Control Program (p. 5).
This story originated from a radio segment about
the history of New Orleans, created to celebrate
the city’s 300th anniversary. The author, Miller,
uses the detention center located in the Algiers
neighborhood of the West Bank of the Missis-
sippi River, which is not far from the tourism
hub of the French Quarter, to narrate the story
of detentions during World War II and how they
continue to influence the detention of immi-
grants to this day. Miller divides her book into
six chapters that are bookended by a Preface that
describes the genesis of the book, an introduc-
tion that sets the stage for the detention of aliens
during the war, and an epilogue titled “A New
War on Aliens as Enemies” where she argues that
World War II detention practices have set the
stage for detention of noncitizen populations
today. Chapter 1 provides a history of the Algiers
detention facility and how it became the site for
the confinement of foreign aliens during World
War II. As a historic preservationist, I found it
very interesting that Miller described the efforts
to preserve the facility by it being listed on the
National Register of Historic Places in 2019.
Miller contended that “this designation will serve
as a prompt to preserve not only the buildings . .
. but also the little known history they contain”
## (p. 51).
Chapter 2 discusses the fluid system of clas-
sification for the aliens, especially the Germanic
Jews depicted in Chapter 3 that were detained by
US Allies in Latin America, but were determined
not a threat, and even provided a path to natu-
ralization. Chapters 4 and 5 highlight notable in-
dividuals and those of noble birth who were
interned at the camp. Miller argues that the term
“alien enemies” represented “a broad spectrum
of political tenets and actions . . . refugees, dis-
placed persons, . . . impoverished or [who] had
been separated from family members” and that
the term was fluid and could change depending
on the needs or desires of those making the deci-
sions (pp. 157-158). Chapter 6 discusses the aid
organizations, diplomats, and community groups
that intervened on behalf of the detainees to
help improve the conditions at the center or even
obtain their release.
Miller used the epilogue to frame the debate
on detention of undocumented aliens at the
southern border through the lens of World War
II-era detention. Miller explored the actions of
the Japanese-American community to bring at-
tention to the detention of Japanese-Americans
during the war and its acknowledgment by the
United States government. However, she also
argues that the type of detention practices at
Camp Algiers during the war serve as a model for
detention today. She chastises the government
for allowing “the manipulation of detention pol-
icy and detainee populations for political pur-
poses and economic gain” (p. 207).
--Edward Salo
##### Up South in the Ozarks: Dis-
patches from the Margins. By
Brooks Blevins. (Fayetteville, Arkan-
sas: The University of Arkansas Press,
2022 Pp. 260, introduction, notes.
$34.95, hardcover)
Brooks Blevins is an author and historian
who serves as the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozark
Studies at Missouri State University. He’s written
many books about the history of the Ozark
Mountain region including the trilogy A History
of the Ozarks, published by the University of Illi-
nois Press. His latest work is a collection of essays,
some previously published, about the various as-
pects of the Ozarks region from race relations to
popular culture to collections of folklore; this is
a book that considers the region and the South
in various ways.
In his first chapter, Blevins discusses the
Ozarks’ “southerness” by measuring the region
against multiple markers of the South including
weather patterns, Kudzu growth, and political af-
filiations. Blevins finds that the region fits some-
where between the South and the Midwest with
the region often divided in how it considers its
image (and other matters) along state lines be-
tween Arkansas and Missouri. Ultimately, Ble-
vins posits that southernness “depends on
conscious affiliation with some historical and cul-
tural notion of the South” (p. 23).
Blevins continues his exploration of the Up
South region by considering pastimes of fire-
works celebrations in “Fireworking Down South”
and of cultural depictions in television of the
upland South from the Andy Griffith Show in
“The South According to Andy.” By considering
these and other elements of popular culture of
the South and the
Ozarks and how these
portrayals reflect our
ethos back to us as both
entertainment and life
lessons, Blevins is able
to show that there are
indeed many Souths in-
cluded in our society’s
vision of the larger re-
gion, and he also shows
how the Ozarks region
is a part of that story
through his own lived experiences. By first speak-
ing to his own experiences in a fireworks tent in
different parts of the South, Blevins puts himself
in the middle of popular culture through his
summer work as a young person. This section
also challenges the view of a homogenous South
full of romantic scenery with “the fireworks tent”
acting “as a great social leveler” (p. 42). He fol-
lows his chapter on fireworks with a chapter on
Andy. This show has had a particular staying
power and depicts a romantic version of the
upland South in many ways. Blevins argues that
the show does include a diversity of characters
and situations, especially mountaineer characters
and situations. Blevins argues that Andy con-
tinues to work as a series because “We trust Grif-
fith to be judicious, to never allow the stereotype
to overwhelm a character’s humility” (p. 55). Ble-
vins notes that the show depicts Griffith’s version
of the South and not the actual South and con-
tinues to be a cultural touchstone because of its
humor and fuller characterizations of common
tropes. These chapters work together to both
challenge and uphold many ideas about and re-
flections of the upland South and its inhabitants.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786480290560.png)
In his chapter titled “Rethinking the Scots-
Irish Ozarks: Diversity and Demographics in Re-
gional History” Blevins considers the common
idea that the Ozarks region is homogenous, pop-
ulated by mostly people of Scots-Irish ethnicity.
Blevins points to the region’s German and other
European settlers. He uses this information to
discuss the myths surrounding the Scots Irish
people, including the ways the term has been and
is often co-opted for nationalistic purposes. He
follows this up with a chapter on race relations
in Izard County, Arkansas, by looking closely at
the community of LaCrosse in “Revisiting Race
Relations in the Upland South: LaCrosse, Arkan-
sas.” This chapter tells of the African American
community which was formed by formerly en-
slaved people following the Civil War. This com-
munity thrived until the mid-1900s and is known
locally to have had peaceful interactions with the
nearby white communities, specifically with Mel-
bourne. Blevins points out that though there are
no records of violence between the segregated
communities, this seeming peacefulness is due to
the strict adherence to social norms by the Afri-
can Americans in Izard County and due to the
lack of in-migration to the area by other African
Americans. These two chapters offer a more com-
plete view of race and diversity in the Ozarks re-
gion.
In another chapter, Blevins discusses the col-
lectors of folklore in the Ozark Mountains.
Though he discusses many types of folklore, the
bulk of this chapter titled “Collectors of the
Ozarks: Folklore and Regional Image” discusses
ballad collecting. Blevins notes the different in-
fluences folklore collectors have had on the
image of the region and why they’re important
to the history and culture of the Ozarks. This
chapter includes many important details about
folklorists and collectors of folklore who have col-
ored and preserved the folklife of the Ozarks re-
gion. Blevins notes at the end of this chapter that
folklore is focused on the past, speaking particu-
larly about ballad collecting but making a broad
generalization about folklore in the process (p.
186). In many ways, this view of ballad collecting
and other collecting by Parler and Randolph is
correct, but folklore as a discipline is also firmly
rooted in the present, with contemporary field-
workers working to collect, honor, and uphold
current and emerging traditions as they exist
today.
He ends his book with a chapter that reveals
his own roots and puts forth his own “acute sense
of place” in the Ozark hills on his family farm.
He reflects here about the ways academic life and
farm life exist in harmony for those lucky enough
to have a boot (or loafer) in both worlds. By using
his own experience with the land to end this
work, Blevins leaves readers feeling nostalgia for
home and with a deeper understanding of the
ways one can connect with a particular piece of
earth. The experience of having a deep sense of
place is often discussed in literature and cultural
studies about the southern United States, and
ending a book about the region and the larger
South with reflections on home and hearth
makes sense. This is a work that could have many
uses for university students in humanities disci-
plines or similar research settings, a very thor-
ough and readable collection.
--Lauren Adams Willette
##### Going Up the Country: Adventures
in Blues Fieldwork in the 1960s.
By Marina Bokelman and David
Evans. (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2022. Pp. xxv + 299, fore-
word, preface, appendix, notes, bibli-
ography, discography, archival
materials, list of photographs, index,
$40, paperback)
In-depth writing on the experiences of field-
workers is a welcome feature in recent scholar-
ship in folklore and musicology. Biographical,
autobiographical, and memoir writing adds to
our understanding of the context of studies of
traditional expressive culture, and these accounts
also provide important
documentation of the
intellectual history of
folklore and related dis-
ciplines. Marina Bokel-
man and David Evans
bring their experiences
as nascent fieldworkers
into the forefront of
their engaging volume.
Both folklorists went on
to make important contributions in the field. Bo-
kelman moved away from an academic career as
she engaged with a range of professional and per-
sonal endeavors, including the coordination of
music education projects in libraries. Evans went
on to become one of the major authorities in
blues scholarship, publishing major scholarship
on a range of blues music and contributing to a
variety of media presentations of blues and other
forms of music. Bokelman and Evans’s book pri-
marily is a presentation of their field notes from
two major forays into the Delta and Deep South
as well as accounts of documenting blues musi-
cians in southern California during their time as
graduate students at UCLA. They give us pri-
mary source information that enhances our
knowledge of blues music in the Delta as well as
vivid and personal accounts of the human ele-
ment of doing field research.
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786480543052.png)
The trajectories of their own life histories
add to the story. Neither are natives to the Delta
region or even of the South. Rather, they were
northerners who were primarily influenced by
the 1950s and 60s blues and folk music revival.
Bokelman was part of New York City’s music
scene, and Evans was strongly influenced by
music scenes in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
They met when both began working on their
masters’ degrees at UCLA. Along the way, both
became friends with musicians who moved on to
prominence, including Robert Pete Williams,
John Fahey, Frank Zappa, Dr. Demento (born
Barry Hansen), and Al Wilson. The book takes
its title from a blues song that they documented.
“Going Up the Country” also became a major
hit after Wilson’s band, Canned Heat, recorded
it and performed at major music festivals, includ-
ing Monterey Pop and Woodstock. The tune has
become a theme song in many films and video
retrospects of the musical event at Max Yasgur’s
farm.
The book provides important background
information on their pre-fieldwork experiences,
technical elements of editing fieldnotes for pub-
lication, the technical details of photography,
and a general context for 1960s fieldwork.
Readers then have direct exposure to two major
sets of fieldwork. The first set spans fieldwork
from August 10, 1966 to September 16. The sec-
ond set picks up on their second trek that began
the next year on August 13 and lasted until Sep-
tember 19. In addition to these main two sec-
tions, we have tales from the field as they relate
to their encounters with musicians in southern
California. The book ends with accounts of their
professional experiences following these sessions,
and the book also provides excellent research ma-
terials for discovering how they both used their
experiences in the field to contribute to scholar-
ship in folklore and musicology.
The notes include daily chronologies of their
activities, including their trip from California to
Mississippi in a Volkswagen bug. They provide
useful ways to understand how they assembled
the book. A clear division of labor emerges. Bo-
kelman’s contributions focused mainly on 35mm
photographic documentation, note-taking, and
domestic tasks like cooking and cleaning. Evans
was the primary interviewer and logistic coordi-
nator, scouting out both musicians who could
contribute to his graduate student research on
Tommy Johnson as well as finding places to stay
while traveling into an unfamiliar region.
Readers opening the book may first look at the
black & white photographs and ask “Why are
these photos fuzzy and grainy” followed by “Why
are these photographs so dark?” Bokelman and
(presumably) the editorial team anticipated these
questions as Bokelman writes of the challenges
she faced in her visual documentation. Her chap-
ter titled “How to Look at the Photographs” pro-
vides excellent commentary that relates to
approaches used in visual anthropology. She also
provides two major sections that explain her tech-
niques using two subheadings: “Why are these
photos fuzzy and grainy” and “Why are these
photographs so dark?” In short, she chose not to
use flash due to its staged look and she often had
to push the black and white film in the lab so
that the 400 ASA Tri-X film could be developed
at 1000+. The technical results made it possible
to shoot in low light interiors at the expense of
seeing higher grain in the prints. Her approach
results in an interesting visual record of 1960s
cultural scenes. This record also, in turn, can be
investigated on its own terms, as we see how her
sense of her own self as a documentarian has
been influenced by foundational work of social
realist photographers of the 1930s—notably
Walker Evans—and the work of early visual an-
thropologists as discussed by writers such as John
Collier Jr., Malcolm Collier, Edward Hall, Sarah
Pink, and other writers within visual ethnogra-
phy movements.
Readers will enjoy the range and depth of
writing within the many entries from their field-
notes. The writing evokes a vibrant sense of time
and place, and both Bokelman and Evans share
vivid encounters with blues musicians who either
were well-known performers of earlier eras or
who subsequently forged rich careers as blues
musicians during the 1960s blues revival and its
resurgence in later decades. By necessity, field-
work is a highly subjective enterprise, grounded
in value judgments that can yield positive or neg-
ative consequences. On one hand, readers will
enjoy learning of their direct exposure and the
relationships that they shared with blues players
such as Mississippi Fred McDowell, Mager
Johnson, Houston Stackhouse, and others. The
intimate contextual information from fieldwork
provides invaluable context for understanding
the social history of these blues musicians. On
the other hand, the highly selective elements of
fieldwork also are shaped by interests of research-
ers and the era of their research. In the 1960s,
the major approaches emphasized preservation
of specific cultural traditions with some focuses
on individual and social context. A new para-
digm emerged by the early 1970s that expands
contextualism to include performance-centered
theory and methods. Reading their accounts
through this new lens adds to our overall under-
standing of the book. For example, Evans men-
tions that Jack Owens ran a juke joint in
Bentonia, but Evans provides no documentation
to disclose whether or not he visited the juke to
see performances in situ. Subsequent research re-
vealed a distinctive regional style of blues in Ben-
tonia. The book only hints at its possible
existence. Faced with the limited time available
in fieldwork, this kind of omission is understand-
able, but it exemplifies a missed opportunity. The
same selectivity is also clearly evident in way that
Black fiddling traditions are only minimally doc-
umented. They note the presence of fiddles in
the homes of various musicians, and a portrait
of Mott Williams shows him posed with his fid-
dle, but emphasis is primarily on the guitar play-
ing. Researchers are gaining more insight into
the play of fiddling in Black communities, but
there is a major dearth of first-hand documenta-
tion of fiddling outside of these kinds of inciden-
tal mentions. With 20/20 hindsight, these kinds
of oversights become more understandable as
Evans needed to focus on a specific project.
These and numerous other elements within this
excellent presentation of fieldwork provide us
with highly engaging accounts that enrich our
understanding of blues scholarship.
--Gregory Hansen
##### Resistance in the Bluegrass: Em-
powering the Commonwealth. By
Farrah Alexander. (Lexington, Ken-
tucky: University Press of Kentucky,
2022 Pp. xiv + 250, foreword, intro-
duction, acknowledgments, source
notes, suggested reading, index.
$14.95, paperback)
In her follow up to Raising the Resistance: A
Mother’s Guide to Practical Activism, Kentucky au-
thor Farrah Alexander brings us Resistance in the
Bluegrass: Empowering the Commonwealth. Examin-
ing activism in Kentucky over many decades, this
work presents vignettes of individuals and organ-
izations that have made meaningful changes to
communities and conditions for Kentuckians.
Individual chapters are dedicated to Poverty,
Environment, Religion, Education, Political Rep-
resentation, Racial Justice, LGBTQ+ Rights, Im-
migration, and Feminism and Reproductive
Rights. In addition to highlighting the work of
well-known organizations such as Kentuckians
for the Commonwealth and the Kentucky
Health Justice Network, Alexander also brings at-
tention to the work of everyday people doing the
work in their communities to address local chal-
lenges.
Written in accessible language, this book
would be appropriate for young adults, book
clubs, and others in the general public. Each
chapter ends with tips and advice for those who
are inspired to engage in community activism.
Each tip connects to individuals and organiza-
tions highlighted in the chapter and offers plain-
language advice for getting involved and taking
action. For example, in the chapter on Racial Jus-
tice, the author includes “Help like Breonna. She
dedicated her career to helping others in their
worst days, saving gunshot victims, and treating
medical crises” (p. 166). The death of Breonna
Taylor at the hands of police officers is just one
of many examples of everyday heroes in service
to the commonwealth.
While there is no way to present a compre-
hensive work of community activists and activist
organizations in the state in a single volume, gaps
such as the omission of AIDS Volunteers of Lex-
ington, made it feel incomplete. That said, this
work is a good lay-person’s introduction to how
average people can make significant changes in
their communities by stepping up, taking a
chance, and engaging in action to address in-
equities where they find them.
--Lisa Perry
[](https://kb.astate.edu/uploads/images/gallery/2026-08/image-1786482828662.png)
##### Contributors
Lucy C. Barnhouse received her PhD from Fordham
University in 2017, and has been Assistant Professor
of History at Arkansas State University since Fall
2020, having held visiting positions at the College of
Wooster and Wartburg College. Her recent work in-
cludes Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval
Rhineland: Houses of God, Places for the Sick, and, co-
edited with Winston Black, Beyond Cadfael: Medieval
Medicine and Medical Medievalisms.
Patricia L. Griffen, PhD is founder and CEO of Clin-
ical Psychology Services, Inc. of Little Rock where she
maintains a private practice providing clinical services
to an adult population. Dr. Griffen is one of the
charter members of the Arkansas Association of Black
Psychology Professionals and previously served as the
organization’s president.
Jennifer Hadlock, MSW/JD is a community organ-
izer, genealogist, and movement lawyer. She learned
about the Elaine Massacre of 1919 as a Board member
of the Fund for Reparations Now!! and was sub-
sequently invited by the Elaine Legacy Center to re-
search land ownership and theft in Phillips County,
Arkansas, and to document the oral histories of Black
descendants of the Elaine Massacre.
Gregory Hansen is Professor of Folklore and English
at Arkansas State University, where he also teaches in
the Heritage Studies PhD Program. He is the author
of A Florida Fiddler: The Life and Times of Richard Sea-
man, and his publications focus on roots music, folk-