Kate Cochran | University of Southern Mississippi (original) (raw)

Papers by Kate Cochran

Given Thomas Wolfe's famous sentiment "you can't go home again," it's impressive how many Souther... more Given Thomas Wolfe's famous sentiment "you can't go home again," it's impressive how many Southerners elect to leave home in the first place, much less stay away from the South. According to James N. Gregory, in his 1995 article "The Southern Diaspora and the Urban Dispossessed," the Great Migration of African Americans from the 1920s through the 1950s was accompanied by an even larger white migration out of the South. Robert Coles, in his three-volume series The South Goes North, documented how white and black expatriates from the South were largely disappointed in their hopes for a better, more prosperous life in the urban North. Today, Southerners of all races and ethnicities continue to leave: in January 2018, U.S. News & World Report indicated the main reason was a lack of job opportunities. But from the earliest so-called "Southern expatriates" like Frederick Douglass to more recent examples like

The purpose of the panel was to analyze the discourse surrounding Hurricane Katrina, interrogatin... more The purpose of the panel was to analyze the discourse surrounding Hurricane Katrina, interrogating the rhetorical operations that foregrounded some aspects of the tragedies involved, pulling in old stereotypes to take the place of concrete material analysis and relying on a dialectic of hypervisibility (New Orleans) and invisibility (other affected populations, for example, victims in Mississippi) in order to contain the disaster within known and comfortable, even if racist and classist, discursive boundaries. An analysis of the rhetorics involved in the shaping of the Katrina narrative informs us equally about media coverage and cultural identity, and can be utilized to not only encourage analytical competence and cultural literacy in the English classroom, but also to foster a sense of social responsibility and engagement in students. * * * Long before Katrina, the South functioned in the social imaginary to contain racism and poverty, and the Mason-Dixon acts then in the national imagination as a buffer to safeguard the nation from the taint of such undemocratic realities. With the advent of the Reagan era, neoliberal (paradoxically, neoconservative in U.S. parlance) ideologies, which dovetailed neatly with racism and classism, took firm hold and began to shape the dominant discourse, public policy, and the national imaginary. A sort of perversion of social liberalism by neoliberal ideologies operating in the social realm, social neoliberalism is a way of packaging the economic principles of free market turbo-capitalism in a wrapping of "personal responsibility," which is attractive across the political spectrum and translates best through vocabularies of accountability and meritocracy, often leaning heavily toward a rhetoric of victim-blaming. Seen through such a frame, the poor are blamed for living in dangerous neighborhoods and for failing to evacuate them when ordered to do so. Writing in 1999 in Ecclesia in America, Pope John Paul II defined the hold that neoliberalism was gaining on the cultural imagination of the Americas, particularly North America, and its social consequences:

Remapping southern literature: contemporary southern writers and the West

Choice Reviews Online, 2000

Brinkmeyer, Jr., Robert H. 2000. Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and... more Brinkmeyer, Jr., Robert H. 2000. Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West Athens: University of Georgia Press. xvii + 130 pp. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.'s most recent publication, Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West, was originally delivered as part of the Lamar Lecture Series at Mercer University. Reworked into three substantial chapters and a brief appendix, the text comprehensively examines of southern writers' changing conception of the American West. Although other critics have also begun to notice this relationship, Brinkmeyer was instrumental in sparking the current critical interest in the field of southern - western studies. Brinkmeyer uses place (region) in order to place (delineate) both contemporary southern writers and the trajectory of southern literature. His text is structured chronologically and spatially, awarding his analysis a dual depth and allowing him to prove how region holds a powerful "place" in the southern literary imagination. The first section, "Embracing Place," examines the traditional characteristics of southern literature, emphasizing the works of the Nashville agrarians and writers of the Southern Renaissance. Brinkmeyer skillfully illustrates how authors from these two groups established what is generally understood as the traditional characteristics of southern literature's relationship to place. By remaining rooted, carefully observing land, inhabitants, and customs, and thereby constructing an intricate bond with a place, southern writers created texts which based identity inextricably within region. Of Welty's "Place in Fiction," Brinkmeyer writes:"Standing still, staying put, putting down roots: such are the means to participate and to draw from the mystery of place" (14). In this way, these writers created the imaginary place, or place of the imagination, in which the consciousness of region is as important as the region itself. In contrast to that rootedness, Brinkmeyer explains the general ethic of the frontier, pioneer, and westward move, noting that some post-Renaissance southern writers become interested in the West as a characteristic of the contemporary diversity within southern literature. In "Bleeding Westward," Brinkmeyer moves temporally and spatially, including James Dickey, Cormac McCarthy, Madison Smartt Bell, Barry Hannah, and Clyde Edgerton in his analysis of southern postmodernists intrigued by the West. He notes that the cultural work of the southern "Western" connects more with the plight of the Native Americans than with the pioneering cowboys and therefore effectively questions national culture. These writers, he argues, tend to view the legendary move West as deleteriously progressivist "[due to] a perspective grounded in the Southern experience of poverty and defeat that stands diametrically opposed to the American legend of unlimited progress and success" (31). …

Note: This essay derives from our panel at the 2007 CEA Conference in New Orleans. The purpose of... more Note: This essay derives from our panel at the 2007 CEA Conference in New Orleans. The purpose of the panel was to analyze the discourse surrounding Hurricane Katrina, interrogating the rhetorical operations that foregrounded some aspects of the tragedies involved, pulling in old stereotypes to take the place of concrete material analysis and relying on a dialectic of hypervisibility (New Orleans) and invisibility (other affected populations, for example, victims in Mississippi) in order to contain the disaster within known and comfortable, even if racist and classist, discursive boundaries. An analysis of the rhetorics involved in the shaping of the Katrina narrative informs us equally about media coverage and cultural identity, and can be utilized to not only encourage analytical competence and cultural literacy in the English classroom, but also to foster a sense of social responsibility and engagement in students.

When the Lessons Hurt": The Third Life of Grange Copeland as Joban Allegory

The Southern Literary Journal, 2001

Alice Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, recounts three different ... more Alice Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, recounts three different experiences of racial and economic oppression in the South. In detailing the stories of Brownfield, Grange, and Ruth, Walker not only illustrates her own theories of the importance of ...

The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative

New Hibernia Review, 2001

Critics of Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements--gender i... more Critics of Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements--gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony--or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some ...