Southern Pictures
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Dr. Bordelon's The Short Story: On Campus | |||
Southern Pictures Introduction Technically, this would probably be considered a short novel, so I'm stretching things a bit, but to be honest, the term "short story" is pretty elastic. For instance, you can find Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis classified as a short story (as in our collection) or as a short novel. And so it will be with Stuck Rubber Baby (and I am one of the legion of readers who wish Cruse would have chosen a different title -- I'll use SRB for short). The medium -- known variously as graphic narrative, graphic novel, comix, comics -- was once relegated to the land of popular literature and kept out of the academy. But after Art Speigelman's Maus (1986-1991), which garnared wide critical acclaim and won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award in 1992, graphic texts became accepted as "legitimate" works of art. For instance, the venerable Norton Anthology of American Literature now features an excerpt from Maus in its volume covering works from 1945 to today. Reading a graphic narrative obviously involves paying attention to images as well as words. Many of the skills you've learned in this class, paying attention to repetition, noticing small, telling details, will come into play. One central element in graphic texts is the panel -- and the role of time. Moving from panel to panel is the author's way of moving you through time, either a split-second . . . or decades. For graphic artist/writers, the space between each panel acts as a visual punctuation mark, the pictorial equivalent of a dash, comma, period, paragraph break, etc. The following terms from Robert Harvey may help you explain your ideas about the story: “ narrative breakdown – the division of the story into panel units; composition – the arrangement of pictorial elements within a panel; layout – the arrangement of panels on a page and their relative size and shape” (9). Consider these as well: close up, medium shot, establishing shot, tracking, panning, splash page, gutter. While I've featured at least one graphic story over the past few years, I've selected Cruse's SRB because you'll get a chance to meet the author this semester: he's appearing as part of our Visiting Writers series on October 8th (details to follow). The novel/story itself is, as the title to this assignment, set in the South -- specifically the pre civil-rights South. This time period was marked by great changes and change's unfortunate companion: violence. The narrative propelling the novel is a bildungsroman, tracing the growth of the narrator, Toland Polk, to adulthood. And finally, Cruse has set up a fine site that provides a detailed look at the process of writing and background information on the novel. Historical Dates to Know John F. Kennedy elected November 8, 1960 Historical Terms to Know Episode four of Eyes on the Prize , the PBS series documenting the Civil Rights movement provides a fine historical context for this novel. The series is available in most libraries. Ku Klux Klan : the most notorious of terrorist groups that arose in the Reconstruction Era to uphold white supremacy and Democratic party rule in the South . Founded as a social club (kuklos, the Greek word for circle, inspired the name) by six Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 , the Klan soon became a powerful and frightening vehicle of vigilante violence and lawlessness. Racial terrorists from all walks of life adopted the Klan's white hoods and secret rituals to protect their identities and lend an aura of legitimacy to their activities. Their aim was to punish anyone perceived as threatening white supremacy, including assertive black workers, black or white teachers in black schools, and those who violated interracial sexual taboos. The overwhelming focus of Klan violence and intimidation, however, was Republican party politicians, black and white, and black voters. During the election year of 1868 , in Louisiana alone, the Klan and other terrorist groups murdered between eight hundred and one thousand people, the vast majority of whom were Republican leaders, political candidates, and others challenging white, Democratic rule. Similar murderous waves across the South kept countless black voters away from the polls. A congressional investigation and anti-Klan state and federal legislation diminished the Klan's influence after 1871 , but the movement left a powerful legacy. Later, historians, novelists, and filmmakers offered racist apologies for the Reconstruction Klan. The most notorious of these, D.W. Griffith 's film Birth of a Nation (1915), based on Thomas Dixon 's 1905 novel The Clansman , inspired a second Klan movement. This revived Klan, founded at Stone Mountain, Georgia, by William J. Simmons and later taken over by the Texan Hiram W. Evans, differed markedly from the first. It attracted millions of male and female members from throughout the nation, especially in the Midwest and West , enriching paid recruiters (called Kleagles) as well as Simmons, Evans, and other leaders at the national headquarters in Atlanta. It was racist, but in an era when the institutions of white supremacy faced no serious challenge, race was not the exclusive focus. The second Klan's central message was that white Protestant hegemony was threatened by Roman Catholics, Jews, African Americans, immigrants, Prohibition violation, gambling and other crimes, political corruption, sexual immorality, materialism, and the erosion of religion and traditional family values. This Klan sometimes used intimidation and violence, but most frequently targeted fellow white Protestants who violated traditional morality. Political mobilization, parades, and social events were the Klan chapters' primary activities. By the mid-1920s, the Klan elected its candidates to local office in many communities, dominated politics in Indiana, Colorado, Oregon, Oklahoma, Alabama, and other states, and exerted a strong national influence within both major parties. A motion to condemn the Klan bitterly divided the 1924 Democratic party convention. The second Klan declined dramatically after 1925 as a result of bitter divisions among Klan leaders, the imprisonment of Indiana “Grand Dragon” D.C. Stephenson on rape and manslaughter charges, and declining faith that the Klan could accomplish its goals. In the following decades, pockets of support lingered, and racial vigilantes continued to invoke the Klan's name and regalia. During the era of the civil rights movement , a variety of Klan organizations surfaced with newfound support and, like their predecessors of the Reconstruction Era, attacked and terrorized African Americans and racial reformers. As the twentieth century ended, isolated Klan groups, while generally discredited, continued to perpetuate an occasionally violent right-wing subculture. Bibliography Leonard J. Moore. "Ku Klux Klan." The Oxford Companion to United States History . Ed. Paul S. Boyer, ed. Oxford University Press 2001. Oxford Reference Online . Web. 5 September 2009. Jim Crow Laws/Segregation While C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow ( 1955 ) launched a debate over the origins and nature of racial segregation in the South, comparative studies of segregation in South Africa and the American South by John W. Cell and George Frederickson linked the phenomenon to a broader white-supremacist ideology and demonstrated its variation over space and time. In America, restrictive customs and practices designed to separate the races were first devised by whites of the antebellum North in the 1840s. As historian Leon Litwack has noted, many abolitionist newspapers used the term “segregation” to describe separate facilities for blacks and whites in northern cities. Segregation Imposed. Many historians hold that Jim Crow was already so firmly entrenched by custom that the rise of de jure segregation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries merely ratified the prevailing situation. Historian Howard Rabinowitz , for example, has found that Baton Rouge , Atlanta , Charlotte, Birmingham, and other southern cities excluded free blacks from militias, education, and welfare services in the antebellum and immediate post–Civil War eras. While radical legislators, Reconstruction officials, and black political leaders favored racially integrated facilities, fears of further antagonizing white southerners inhibited their efforts, and neither Republicans nor black legislatures proposed constitutional or legislative measures for achieving that goal. Indeed, as black churches, fraternal organizations, and mutual-aid societies proliferated, patterns of voluntary racial separation arose. Government, political, and judicial bodies were often the only integrated institutions in the Reconstruction South. By the 1880s, however, railroads and streetcars, involving close contact between black and white passengers, became the focus of challenges to segregation. Amid growing racial tensions, exacerbated by urbanization and industrialization , southern state legislatures enacted railroad separate-car laws that reshaped the region's social and political landscape. Blacks vigorously resisted. Prominent African-American business and professional leaders staged boycotts and sued railroads, insisting on equal access, but to little avail. After the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883 sharply restricted the 1875 Civil Rights Act (see Civil Rights Cases ) and sanctioned the separate-but-equal doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, a torrent of segregation laws increasingly regulated all black-white contact throughout the South, banning or sharply restricting black access to public and private facilities including schools, theaters, hotels, parks, libraries, and the like. Simultaneously, employers and labor leaders blocked blacks' access to skilled jobs, limiting them to unskilled, semi-skilled, or domestic occupations. The spread of segregation and deteriorating race relations in the 1890s arose from southern white fears of racial mixing and miscegnation and from a desire to curb black aspirations for education and property. It coincided with an epidemic of lynchings ; antiblack riots in Atlanta, New Orleans, East St. Louis, Tulsa, and other cities; discrimination against black soldiers, as in the Brownsville incident ; and the propagation of racist ideas by politicians like Benjamin Tillman , James K. Vardaman , and Thomas Watson , and writers such as Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon , whose 1905 novel The Clansman inspired D.W. Griffith 's racist movie The Birth of a Nation. The legal imposition of strict racial segregation was also paralleled by a campaign of black disfranchisement through intimidation and terror; state constitutional amendments (in Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia); and poll taxes, literacy tests, property and residency requirements, and other devices intended to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment . Segregation Challenged. Amid black migration northward, the growing importance of the black vote, and the rising political awareness of African peoples worldwide in the 1920s and 1930s, African Americans fashioned a viable critique of the South's white-supremacist and segregationist ideology. The international and domestic politics developed from this transformed perspective underlay the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools, and fueled the black freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. By 1965 racial segregation had been all but dismantled throughout the South. The promise of economic, social, and political equality in the region—and the nation—however, has yet to be fulfilled. Bibliography Robert F. Jefferson. "Segregation, Racial." The Oxford Companion to United States History . Ed. Paul S. Boyer, ed. Oxford University Press 2001. Oxford Reference Online . Web. 5 September 2009. Lynching : a form of illegal execution, usually of a person accused of a crime or some type of deviant behavior. Historically, most lynching victims in the United States have been African-American males. However, women, native-born white males, and members of other minority groups (including European immigrants, Chinese, and Hispanics), were also lynched, though in much smaller numbers. Although lynchings are often equated with hanging, other methods that have been used include shooting, burning, and drowning, sometimes followed by the mutilation and/or public display of the corpse. Some lynchings were carried out by large mobs, while others involved groups of only three or four members. White supremacist or nativist groups like the Ku Klux Klan perpetrated some lynchings, but the informal and spontaneous organization of citizens into lynch mobs was more common. Most lynch victims had been accused, but not convicted, of such serious crimes as murder, assault, or rape. Other victims were killed because of transgressions of racial codes such as insulting a white person or using inflammatory language. Follow link for remainder of essay Stewart E. Tolnay , E.M. Beck. "Lynching." The Oxford Companion to United States History . Ed. Paul S. Boyer, ed. Oxford University Press 2001. Oxford Reference Online . Web. 16 April 2009. Works Cited Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History . Jackson , Mississippi : UP of Mississippi , 1996. Questions to mull over as you interpret the story
Group Questions Question #1 Question #2 Question #3 Question #4 Group Questions #2 Question #1 Question #2 Question #3 Question #4 What the author/critics say ST: The style an artist uses not only makes a work theirs, but it also conveys a wealth of tone. Your style is clearly influenced by "comix". Why stay with this style and not something more photorealistic? (Was this a deliberate choice to also call up the restlessness and rebelliousness of the underground-comix scene?) HC: What??! You don't think I was drawing photorealistically??! Seriously, Katherine, the drawing style of Stuck Rubber Baby is about as close to photorealism as I'm capable of getting! Blame it on early exposure to Little Lulu. I'm temperamentally a "big-foot" cartoonist who's most comfortable drawing goofy characters slipping on banana peels. The tone and content of the SRB story forced me to stretch my style further toward realism than I would once have thought possible, but true realism it definitely ain't! Given my own limitations as an illustrator, the best I could do draw as evocative an approximation as I could of the world as I see it. The hope is that my reader's imaginations would help my cartoony people serve as reasonable stand-ins for human beings. Keller, Katherine. "Stuck on Howard Cruse." The Sequential Tart . n.d. Web. 21 March 2008. Images
© 2009 David Bordelon
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