12th August 2024: digital purchasing is currently unavailable on Cambridge Core. Due to recent technical disruption affecting our publishing operation, we are experiencing some delays to publication. We are working hard to restore services as soon as possible and apologise for the inconvenience. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2019
In 2016, racist, patriarchal rhetoric dominated the political landscape of the United States. As a response, activist artist Richard Lou of Memphis, Tennessee created a video piece as part of his series ReCovering Memphis titled ReContexting Bodies. In the artwork, Lou performs whiteness by re-creating photographs and reciting words of historic Civil War leaders Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest and President of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis. With his racialized body, Lou confronts the foundations of white supremacy in the United States American South. ReContexting Bodies examines how two historic identities of southern masculinity shape contemporary biases.
1 Guisela Latorre, “The Art of Disruption: Chicana/o Art's Politicized Strategies for Aesthetic Innovation,” 2017, unpublished.
2 Rose, Stephany, Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to HipHop: Crises in Whiteness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 31Google Scholar.
3 Bohannan, Paul, How Culture Works (New York: Free Press, 1995), 70–75Google Scholar.
4 States that fought for the Confederate Army during the Civil War in order of succession from the Union are South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
5 McPherson, James, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 12Google Scholar.
6 For a more in-depth history see Bynum, Victoria E., Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Faust, Drew Gilpin, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,” Journal of American History, 76, 4 (March 1990), 1200–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Dyer, Richard, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 29Google Scholar.
8 Foster, Gaines M., Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 24–31Google Scholar.
9 For the purposes of this paper “Old South” refers to the antebellum period following the War of 1812 and before the start of the Civil War.
10 Kimmel, Michael, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (New York: Nation Books, 2013), 51Google Scholar.
11 Miller, William D., Memphis during the Progressive Era: 1900–1917 (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1957), 6–20Google Scholar. Lovett, Bobby L., “Memphis Riots: White Reaction to Blacks in Memphis, May 1865–1866,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 38, 1 (Spring 1979), 9–33Google Scholar.
12 See Wrenn, Lyneette Bonye, Crisis and Commission Government in Memphis: Elite Rule in a Gilded Age City (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Rushing, Wanda, Memphis and the Paradox of Place: Globalization in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 13–17Google Scholar.
13 Carney, Court, “The Contested Image of Nathan Bedford Forrest,” Journal of Southern History, 67, 3 (Aug. 2001), 601–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 N. B. Forrest Monument Association, Minutes Book, at http://memphislibrary.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p13039coll5/id/1523, accessed 2 March 2015. Quoted source in Rushing, 40.
15 For a detailed account of Forrest's slave trading activities see Hurst, Jack, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 36–52Google Scholar.
16 Dennis Showalter, “Fear!”, Military History, Jan. 2012), 41–43.
17 Ward, Andrew, River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War (New York: Penguin Books, 2005)Google Scholar.
18 Blight, David W., Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 142Google Scholar. Quote in Showalter, 43.
19 Matthew, Gary, Basil Wilson Duke, CSA: The Right Man in the Right Place (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2005), 223Google Scholar.
20 “The Fourth,” Memphis Daily Appeal, 6 July 1875, 1.
21 “The Dead Chieftain,” Memphis Evening Herald, 31 Oct. 1877, n.p.
22 One of the first appearances of Forrest being heralded as a “genius” emerges from Virginia Senator John W. Daniel in 1892. During his address recorded as “The Oration of Senator Daniel” in the Minutes of the Third Annual Meeting and Reunion of the United Confederate Veterans held 8–9 April 1892, the senator remarks on General Forrest, “Oh, what genius was in that wonderful man! … He was not taught at West Point, but he gave lessons to West Point.” The minutes are available from Stanford Library and are on Google Books. Further, there are multiple sources demonstrating the British Lord Garnet Wolseley's admiration for Forrest's military tactics, including page 18 of the Times-Picayune published in New Orleans one day following Senator Daniel's speech. The notion of genius continued, picked up in Wyeth's biography of Forrest and iterated in the work of noted Civil War author Shelby Foote. Forrest's identity as a military genius was made even more popular when Foote used the descriptor in the Ken Burns award-winning PBS documentary The Civil War. Forrest's genius is also an underlying theme in Lytle, Andrew Nelson, Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company (New York: G. Putnam's Sons, 1931; reprinted Nashville: J. S. Sanders and Company, 1984)Google Scholar.
23 Court Carney, “The Contested Image of Nathan Bedford Forrest,” 615–16.
24 Crist, Lynda Lasswell, ed., The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume XIII, 1871–1879 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1983)Google Scholar.
25 Davis, William C., Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992)Google Scholar
26 Tate, Allen, Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (Nashville: J. S. Sanders & Co., 1998), 11Google Scholar. “Hypomasculinity” is a term used by Michael Kimmel to describe men who are perceived as “weak, effeminate, irresponsible, and dependent” in Angry White Men, 51.
27 Tate, Jefferson Davis, 80.
28 Davis, Jefferson Davis, 435–48.
29 Young, Elizabeth, Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 183Google Scholar.
30 John Branson, “A Short History of the Jefferson Davis Statue in Confederate Park,” Memphis Flyer, 2 Aug. 2013, at www.memphisflyer.com/CityBeatBlog/archives/2013/02/08/a-short-history-of-the-jefferson-davis-statue-in-confederate-park, accessed 12 March 2017.
31 For a more complete timeline of Civil Rights events in Tennessee during the 1950s and 1960s see David Risser, ed. “October 1960: The Untold Story of Jackson's Civil Rights Movement,” Jackson Sun (2004), at http://orig.jacksonsun.com/civilrights/sec2_tn_timeline.shtml, accessed 2 Dec. 2017.
32 Richard A. Lou, biography, Department of Art, University of Memphis, at www.memphis.edu/art/people/rlou.php, accessed 10 June 2018.
33 For a more in-depth reading about this artwork see Stokes-Casey, Jody, “Richard Lou's ReCovering Memphis: Conceptual Iconoclasm of the Nathan Bedford Forrest Monument,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 75, 4 (2016), 322–47Google Scholar; and Latorre, Guisela, “Border Consciousness and Artivist Aesthetics: Richard Lou's Performance and Multimedia Artwork,” American Studies Journal, 57 (2012), DOI: 10.18422/57-05Google Scholar.
34 Nathan Bedford Forrest Lieutenant General, Farewell Address to the Troops from Headquarters in Gainesville, Alabama on May 9, 1865, appears in Foote, Shelby, The Civil War: A Narrative: Red River to Appomattox (New York: Random House, 1974), 1001–2Google Scholar.
35 Original advertisements appear in the Commercial Appeal, 14 Jan. 1860, 3. Bancroft, Frederic, Slave-Trading in the Old South (Baltimore: J. H. Furst Company, 1931), 263Google Scholar.
36 Davis, Jefferson, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume II (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1958), 192–93Google Scholar.
37 The monuments were removed by the city in December of 2017. There is ongoing debate about the removal.
38 James Hamblin, “Trump Is a Climax of American Masculinity: The Error in Equating Aggression with Competence,” The Atlantic, 8 Aug. 2016, at www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/08/trump-masculinity-problem/494582, accessed 3 Dec. 2017.
39 Phone interview between the author and Richard Lou, Bloomington, Illinois/Memphis, Tennessee, 28 Sept. 2017.
40 Latorre, “The Art of Disruption,” with quote from phone interview between Latorre and Lou, Columbus, Ohio/Memphis, Tennessee, 11 July 2016.
41 Ibid.
42 Michael McLaughlin, “The Dynamic History of #BlackLivesMatter Explained: How a Hashtag Transformed into a Movement,” Huffington Post, 29 Feb. 2016, at www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/history-black-lives-matter_us_56d0a3b0e4b0871f60eb4af5, accessed 5 Dec. 2017.
43 “Herstory,” BlackLivesMatter.Com, at https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/herstory, accessed 5 Dec. 2017.
44 Tim Hains, “#BlackLivesMatter Protests Trump in Alabama, Trump Responds: ‘All Lives Matter’,” Real Clear Politics.Com, posted 28 Feb. 2016, at www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/02/28/blacklivesmatter_protests_trump_in_alabama_trump_responds_all_lives_matter.html, accessed 5 Dec. 2017.
45 Rose, Abolishing White Masculinity, 35.
46 Phone interview between the author and Richard Lou, Bloomington, Illinois/Memphis, Tennessee, 28 Sept. 2017.
47 Latorre, “Art of Disruption.”
48 Phone interview between the author and Richard Lou, Bloomington, Illinois/Memphis, Tennessee, 28 Sept. 2017.
49 Ibid.
50 Foote, The Civil War, 1001–2.
51 Laver, Harry S., “Refuge of Manhood: Masculinity and the Militia Experience in Kentucky,” in Friend, Craig Thompson, Glover, Lorri, eds., Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 1–21, 1–2Google Scholar.
52 Kimmel, Michael S., Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 24–25Google Scholar.
53 Ibid, 95.
54 Aja Romano, “How the Alt-Right's Sexism Lures Men into White Supremacy,” Vox, 14 Dec. 2016, at www.vox.com/culture/2016/12/14/13576192/alt-right-sexism-recruitment, accessed 12 Dec. 2017.
55 See EndTheBacklog.Com for news, media, and updates on the untested rape kits in Memphis at www.endthebacklog.org/memphis, accessed 12 Dec. 2017.
56 Jones, Amelia, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 10–16Google Scholar.
57 Phone interview between the author and Richard Lou, Bloomington, Illinois/Memphis, Tennessee 28 September 2017.
58 Ibid. His reference to Charlottesville refers to an Alt-Right/Unite the Right rally at the University of Virginia that resulted in violence and three deaths (one civilian killed by a car plowing into the crowd of counterprotestors and two officers from a police-monitoring-helicopter crash) the next day. A timeline of the protest was published by Joe Heim, “Recounting a Day of Rage, Hate, Violence, and Death,” Washington Post, 14 Aug. 2017, at www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville-timeline/?utm_term=.e20698fcf2c4, accessed 12 Dec 2017.
Please note a has been issued for this article.
